SOURCE: “Pubis Angelical: Where Puig Meets Lacan,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 1, Fall, 1997, pp. 65-77.

Manuel Puig: [C]an people change their eroticism after a certain age? I believe it's almost impossible. Those sexual fantasies have crystallized during adolescence and imprison you forever.

—Ronald Christ, “A Last Interview with Manuel Puig,” 572

Any time we talk about body types, scenarios, or fantasies, we're talking about linguistically structured entities. They may take the form of images in one's mind, but they are at least in part ordered by the signifier, and thus at least potentially signifying and meaningful.

—Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 12

On 17 April 1989, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Manuel Puig (1932–1990) gave a public reading from his sixth novel, Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. Following the reading, Puig took questions from the audience; they focused primarily on the still relatively recent film adaptation of his fourth novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman (which, in a few years' time, would be made into a Broadway musical). People wanted to know Puig's views of the film; indeed, audience members were wondering what the writer thought of the performances of Raul Julia and William Hurt. Having studied Puig for a couple of years, I already had a sense of the answers he would provide; after all, he had supplied them in a number of different interviews.

In truth, my own concerns were elsewhere: my questions (in this context, embarrassingly “academic” ones)—which I later would pose as Manuel Puig signed my program copy—focused not on the film version of Spider Woman but on the explicit references to Lacanian psychoanalysis appearing in the author's fifth novel, Pubis Angelical, the text that followed Spider Woman and preceded the work from which he had read that evening. As a teacher—scholar working at the intersections of literature and psychoanalysis, I had long wondered—indeed I had long wanted “to know” (as if I could)—whether the characters' exchanges about Lacan were “serious” (a question no doubt naive given the status of conscious intention in psychoanalysis). Perhaps tired by the reading he had just given, as well as the long line of people who, like myself, had waited for his autograph, Manuel Puig simply said “yes,” that “the exchanges were serious,” and that Lacan had made a “tremendous contribution to psychoanalysis.” Given the Argentine writer's long-standing preoccupation with the relationship between the cultural imaginary and the unconscious, a relationship that is evident in the very first novel Puig published, his remarks were not surprising.

Throughout his career, in fact, Puig focused consistently on the ways in which an individual subject—and an individual subject's desire—is structured “like a language,” constituted by and composed out of the authorized and authorizing categories of thought and speech of a given social order: its established rhetorical codes and social norms, its popular images and cultural stereotypes, its prevailing ideals and ideologies. In interview after interview, moreover, as I have elsewhere observed, Puig spoke regularly of the structures and systems of meaning that “authorize” our experience of the world, ourselves, and our desire, making it difficult to see differently or act otherwise—particularly in terms of gender. In an interview published in 1986, for example, he noted: “It's that society invents norms. At an age when no one really knows himself, it imposes a series of rules that make no sense. Cultural demands become a straitjacket that is imposed on a young person. … I believe the sex roles are learned” (Mujica 7; my emphasis). Elsewhere he remarked: “This is the awful thing: we are all so determined by our culture. Mainly because we learn to play roles. For me it starts with the very unnatural and hideous sexual roles” (Wheaton 142). And in comments that seem to sum up his lifelong views, Puig observed: “I identify with people who like me have suffered a lot because of a role that has been imposed upon them. … I identify with people who have struggled with a system that, in some way, has determined their destiny forever. By that I mean, I don't consider myself totally free.” (Roffé 15; my emphasis).

We may, I think, safely assume that this “system” is composed of the world of “Law,” of the imposing arbitrary rules, sanctions, prohibitions, and judgments that determine and control the movements of, say, Kafka's K. But for Puig (and for Puig's Kafka), this “world of Law” is also the world of the unconscious, some variety (in fact) of the Lacanian (and Freudian) unconscious, where the physical, the psychical, and the social meet. Consider, for example, Puig's digression on Kafka in an interview published in 1979, the publication date of Pubis Angelical, the novel that refers explicitly to Lacan. In terms to which he would return almost verbatim in “a last interview” with Ronald Christ, Puig asked: “What is [Kafka] interested in? Cobwebs, the world of the unconscious, the system that somehow manipulates us, the bars we're not aware of but that are there and don't let us act freely. … But it's extremely difficult to capture that invisible net of repression” (Christ [1979] 30; my emphasis). For Puig, who claims to have made the “[s]ensational discovery of Freud” in 1946 after viewing Hitchcock's Spellbound (Puig, “Growing up” 49), and whose novels refer regularly to psychoanalysis, the “system that somehow manipulates us” stands in direct apposition to the “world of the unconscious,” a “world” comprised not only of a subject's repressed individual history or Lacan's register of the Real, but also of a given social order—the Lacanian Symbolic—the “Other” that always has inscribed each subject's Imaginary, always has structured unconscious fantasies and gender-specific desires.

Thus, Pubis Angelical's references to Lacan do not, as one critic has claimed (in an attempt to account for mixed reviews of the novel), mark a “radical departure from Puig's earlier work” (Cheever 61); rather, they make explicit an analysis of the linguistically structured human subject implied by his earlier writings. In fact, in its consideration of the gaze, the unconscious, and the Other, Pubis Angelical points to an analysis of desire and subjectivity deployed even in Puig's first novel.

As Alicia Borinsky noted of the central character in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968): “The subconscious is not a space with its own language, it is absorbed by cliché. … The persona does not manifest itself as anterior to discourse” (102). The observation may be said to have a distinctly Lacanian cast, with application and implication for the voices and subjects that appear throughout Puig's work. The typical Puig subject, not unlike the Lacanian subject, “does not manifest itself as anterior to discourse.” To be sure, there is no subject (so to speak), and no unconscious, before the acquisition of language, before entry into a constellation of signifiers, a set of symbolic meaning that always has been there, always preceded the speaking being. And yet, it is precisely that which makes us subjects—that which allows us to speak—that also structures, gives voice to, and alienates our desire, erecting “the bars we're not aware of but which … don't let us act freely,” the “system that somehow manipulates us” (Christ [1991] 577)—perhaps most problematically from within.

Sustaining and perpetuating the horizon of meanings into which each subject is born, this “system” would include for Puig existing codes of love and passion, prevailing social patterns and models of romance, composite images of men and women that take their cues from popular, political, and religious ideologies, from intersecting and mutually reinforcing systems of signification, from what Lacan might call “the resonance in the communicating networks of discourse” (27).

There are, to be sure, considerable variations in the characters Puig presents; perhaps each of them provides an exposition of the individual's betrayal by those ideologies clustering around the matter of sexual difference. Be it his first novel or his later play Mystery of the Rose Bouquet, Puig's writing consistently investigates those voices that are inscribed by, articulate, and cannot escape normative patterns of desire—men who subscribe to the role of authoritarian male, women (or female-identified men like Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman) who see submission and instrumentality as the only way to achieve meaning and pleasure. Viewed not as unconscious sociocultural structures but as the dictates of Nature and of Truth, those ideologies are revealed to close off in advance alternate forms of conduct and practice as well as (and this more dangerously so) the imaginative possibilities of desire itself.

Whether one succeeds or fails to conform to the model does not matter; in Puig's writings, it is the very notion of a pattern—experienced (consciously and unconsciously) as fixed, immutable, or essential—that “straitjackets” (Mujica 7) the individual, “pigeonholes” (Roffé 15) his or her desire. That is not to say that Puig would have wished to do away with popular culture: as both his detractors and defenders have observed, Puig's texts celebrate—in almost polemical counterpoint to the style and language of high literary culture—the characters and concerns of dime-store novels, Hollywood movies (many of them B movies), popular clichés, the vernacular; nevertheless, Puig's texts also suggest that those chains of signification that organize meaning (and without which we could not live) also weave an “invisible net of repression” that limits the ability to act freely. Systems of signification that allow for social exchange can also tyrannize, perhaps most acutely, those who fail to see that these systems are artificial and arbitrary.

Puig's observations about the people of his childhood and the characters of his first novels underscore such a danger. Discussing the “misfits” (Roffé 14) on whom the characters of his first novel were apparently based, Puig noted: “In those days [the thirties and forties] not to fit into the pattern was a great source of anguish. We thought that the pattern was the only one, the pattern of Nature: girls had to be desirable objects and men had to be terribly strong without any hesitation” (Christ [1977] 52; my emphasis). And so at the end of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, for example, we learn that Berto's authoritarian behavior (as it is reported by others throughout the novel) masks a struggle to be “terribly strong” in the face of the terrible deal his brother has dealt him (see 217–22); and, like the undelivered letter Kafka writes to his own father, Berto's unsent letter (whose ending reads: “[t]his letter is going into the wastepaper basket. I wouldn't spend a cent on stamps for you” [222]) alternately attacks and defends its addressee, unable to assert the ideal of authority it longs to own. Clearly, the anguish of Berto's letter marks the struggle of a man who feels himself to be a misfit, a man who believes in, but fails to approximate, the prescribed masculine ideal, the image of manhood he has at some level internalized but that he has not been able to embody.

Even those who succeed at conforming—at approximating the ideal—may ultimately be said to fail. As Puig tells us, and as his novel bears out, the characters of Heartbreak Tango are based on those people of his childhood who believed in and successfully enacted the prevailing sexual models, people who “worked well within … the system of machismo, of oppression, that was the only system at that time” (Christ [1977] 52; my emphasis). According to Puig those people “had accepted the rules of the game and were triumphant” (Roffé 14)—but they were triumphant only temporarily. “Years later,” Puig once remarked, “these triumphant figures of twenty years ago … were by now all very, very disappointed with life. The system they had accepted hadn't been kind to them” (Christ [1977] 53; my emphasis). “Their ultimate failure,” Puig noted, “really touched me a lot and that is why I needed to write Heartbreak Tango”:

Years before I had admired these people, and I had feared them and rejected them at the same time—their strength, their use of authority was unpleasant to me. Meanwhile they had a certain shine, a self-assurance that was fascinating. The story was all about failure: the failure of people who had believed in all the lies of authority. And in the rhetoric of passion too. … As a matter of fact, they had betrayed their belief in passion by their conduct.

(Christ [1977] 54; my emphases)

Of significance here is not simply the question of initially failed or successful conformity to a model, a “system,” a “rhetoric of passion.” Also significant is the repression or control exerted by a given set of signifiers, an authorized system of social and linguistic structures believed somehow to be natural. One either conforms utterly and, like the ultimately tragic figures of Heartbreak Tango (or Gladys, for example, of The Buenos Aires Affair), one becomes alienated from one's self; one's passion; or, like the voices of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth—or Puig himself—one fails to conform, and, in that failure, in that experience of one's self as a “misfit,” one feels enormous anguish. For to believe oneself a “mis-fit” is to believe in the authority of the fit, the Truth of the gender category—and thus in one's own deviance. Apparently, it is just this “fit” that cost Puig himself—who “always rejected the role of authoritarian male”—“so much trouble,” precisely because he had all along considered such a role “Nature's decision” (Christ [1977] 61): “When I wrote Rita Hayworth (1967), I still believed in Clark Gable as a force of Nature. … Now I am convinced that Clark Gable is an historico-cultural product, not Nature's creature” (61; my emphasis).

Given, as Puig claims in that 1977 interview, that every novel develops for him a personal problem, “an obsession, a subject that haunts [him]” (52), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) and Pubis Angelical (1979) may very well mark the final undoing of the author's early belief in naturalized gender categories. That scripted sexual roles and the varieties of sexual desire are not the effects of natural forces but rather normative (as well as idiosyncratic) interpretations and definitions imposed on biological difference seems the very project of Puig's Spider Woman, a project that, in Pubis Angelical, takes an explicit and provocative turn toward Lacan. I say provocative because in its explicit theorizing of the problem of the unconscious, the problem (that is) of unconscious desire, Pubis Angelical suggests that the only way to modify or revise what Puig considered “imprisoning sexual fantasies” (see Christ [1991] 572) is to be aware that systems of meaning exist, that they—not Nature—constitute the subject's desire, and that the individual is always involved in his or her own subjection, always implicated in his or her own (conscious and unconscious) “betrayal.”

In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the unfolding relationship between the macho Valentin and the female-identified Molina would seem to revise—and in radical ways—the roles and rules of the traditional sex/gender system. Clearly, Molina's transsexualism denaturalizes the rigidly masculine script to which Valentin is so wedded. In the course of the novel, moreover, the heterosexually identified Valentin becomes more responsive to Molina, going so far as to become his lover. Freed (presumably) by the confines of the prison cell, Valentin becomes critical of those forces that had led him to mistreat and oppress his cellmate; in particular he becomes critical of the established forms of conduct that had made him uneasy with Molina's mothering, indeed, with Molina's stereotypically female desire. Toward the end of the novel, Valentin comes to believe that in their cell—or on their “desert island”—“there's no struggle, no fight to win” (202). But in his critique of the “outside world,” and the “enemy out there” (202), Valentin fails to recognize just how much power the discourse of the Other wields: for clearly, the two men are not, as Valentin envisions, on a “desert island … free to behave however [they] choose with respect to one another,” free to “make any damn thing out of [their relationship]” (202, my emphasis).

To be sure, the authorizing codes of desire and identity operating outside the prison are also operating within it, within the unconscious of two men who, despite all their talk, enact a rather traditional heterosexual relationship, complete with a “woman” who sacrifices herself for her male lover, and a man who, at the end of the novel, dreams of a nurturing spider woman, a role that Molina has enacted faithfully throughout the novel, a role that even a dreaming Valentin (despite his conscious claims otherwise [see 244]) seems to perceive as natural. It is all the more significant, then, that the outside world against which Valentin imagines he can position himself is, in Pubis Angelical, recognized by characters in the novel as being linked inextricably to the world within. Indeed, in Puig's fifth novel, “outside” and “inside” are woven seamlessly together by the ubiquitous operations of the gaze, the Other, and the unconscious, making the “enemy out there” rather more difficult to escape than an imprisoned Valentin would like to believe. In its theoretical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I would argue, Puig's Pubis Angelical picks up precisely where Spider Woman leaves off.

Pubis Angelical consists of three interwoven stories about three different women each of whom in one way or another is imprisoned by the culturally prescribed fantasy of a “superior man.” These three women include a famous Viennese actress from the 1930s who escapes both her repressive weapons manufacturer husband as well as the ultimately traitorous Theo, only to become enslaved by Hollywood; the 1970s Argentine expatriate Anita who (while recovering from cancer in a Mexican hospital) reflects not only on the gender codes she herself has always followed, the dogmatic feminism her friend Beatriz presents, or the Peronism that her ex-lover Pozzi would like her to endorse, but also on Lacanian insights about the gaze, the Other, and the unconscious that give rise to a wide-ranging critique of ideology (including the ideology of her own desire); and, finally, there is W218, a woman whose job in this futuristic, computerized, and apparently fascistic world is to provide sexual services for undesirable men, and who by chance meets and falls in love with the young LKJS, a man, not unlike Theo, who turns out to be a spy and a traitor, a man against whom W218 ably defends herself.

Each involved with some degree of political intrigue, and each searching for the “right” man, these women give voice to the culturally prescribed fantasies “out there” that constitute equally the “enemy” or desire operating within, the desire or “imprisoning” sexual fantasy that turns each of them into the “playthings of forces superior to [them]selves” (221). Such is the problem Puig staged repeatedly in his writing, the problem with which he tried to grapple in any number of his interviews: “can people change their eroticism after a certain age?” he asked. “I believe it's almost impossible. Those sexual fantasies have crystallized during adolescence and imprison you forever” (Christ [1991] 572; my emphasis).

“Almost impossible.” And yet, psychoanalysis, Anita's exchanges with Pozzi about Lacan and Anita's detailed diary entries reflecting on her life and her particular desire would seem to suggest otherwise. Anita comes to assert (at the very least) what the female-identified Molina (or the Viennese actress from the 1930s) cannot even begin to see: that the submissive female role is a model of desire that has been “put … in [her] head” (166); a set of received ideas, a cliché (in fact), that, intersecting with her personal history, has established itself as truth. Anita may not instantly rewrite the fantasies that imprison here, and she may not, following her friend Beatriz, suddenly become a “feminist,” but she comes to understand—and in ways that characters of previous novels do not—just how much power the discourse of the Other wields in the constituting of her own subjectivity. It is an understanding that seems, if not to issue out of, then at least to be linked to the Lacanian psychoanalysis that she has absorbed from her discussions with Pozzi, the analysis that Valentin (for example) does not (or is not made by Puig to) consider.

Recovering in a hospital bed in Mexico, Anita is visited by her neo-Peronist ex-lover Pozzi who has, in this world of fiction, taken seminars on Lacan. He tries to enlist Anita's aid for a political movement that she comes to believe is as blinded by the need for ideology as are her own fantasies of romance. In the midst of Pozzi's critique of the Argentine government, particularly the government's dismantling of “one of the most highly evolved, free psychiatric services in the world” (144), Anita tries to recall that “business with the mirror” (145) and the “matter of the baby living in anguish” (146), the details from the seminar Pozzi and Anita once shared. In this fictional mini-review of Lacan's exposition of the mirror stage and “the phantom of the disintegrated body” (146), Anita is reminded that the mirroring sight of others in which one sees oneself reflected “isn't always so objective.” Not only can others “shape you however they please,” as Pozzi more innocently observes; they can, Anita adds, “misshape you as they please.” That is what Anita, who often worries over the role she plays, “wanted to remember” (146).

Such is the misshaping, the meconnaisance, that Anita believes she has suffered because of the hands (or sight), and because of the desires of others—of the friends, lovers, and family members who have inscribed her with different scripts: daughter, wife, mother, lover. But of course, the gaze of the other may be altogether “independent of any individual look” (Silverman, Threshold 134); complicated by the Lacanian unconscious, moreover, the gaze is something we can never altogether escape. As Pozzi himself remarks within the pages of Puig's novel: the “unconscious is the other … [and] part of the Other, of the foreign, is really yours, although that part of you is actually foreign to you, because it's beyond your control. And at the same time, your entire view of the universe is filtered through the unconscious. And thus part of your self is foreign to you …” (147). Although inevitably simplifying matters, Pubis Angelical's references to Lacan foreground and effectively underscore the relationship between the “enemy out there” and the workings “in here.” The gaze of the Other also is always the gaze of the Unconscious, and so the misshaping Anita believes she has suffered at the hands of others is thus also her own—a misshaping structured by a cultural imaginary in which she consciously and unconsciously participates.

Appropriately enough (even if, a bit too easily, in this world of fiction), in the scene directly following this theoretical exchange with Pozzi, Anita energetically puts into question, as if for the first time, the assumptions, language, and operation of her own erotic desire, the meanings and clichés with which she has lived—at some level, has chosen to live—her entire life. Apparently intrigued by the problematic of the gaze and by the way in which one is always perceiving subject and perceived object, and (finally) by the way in which one's unconscious desire is always both familiar and foreign, Anita begins to examine not only her particular family history but also the effect of her position as spectator of popular images—the “mysterious languorous, stylized” (17) woman and the “noble sacrificed female” (167)—the dangerous clichés (Christ [1991] 578) that confer a kind of masochistic identity on the female or female-identified viewer. Unlike Molina, who embraces—to the end—a stereotype of womanhood, Anita comes to distinguish between the natural and the cultural, between an essential human nature and those internalized (often unconscious) fantasies that come from seeing those “actors, singers, musicians” live out “great moments” in the theater, “soap operas and love films” (165–66).

Significantly, I think, Anita's investigation of herself as spectator, a now defamiliarized position (“I'm embarrassed to be a spectator” [166]), coincides with an analysis of what Lacan might call the “other scene” (see Ragland-Sullivan 15), the alien discourse and radical Otherness of sexuality and pleasure. Here Anita likens the experience of “seeing what others do” when “the lights are out” to seeing herself not simply in “an orchestra seat,” but also “in bed making love … in the dark” (165). Commenting on the structure of a desire that seems now suddenly familiar and foreign, Anita says:

How beautiful it is to be a woman, how many agreeable options are presented to us, either to yield to one side or yield to the other. If we want to live as a couple with a man who will make us happy at night, not making us feel nothing. Such a lovely plan. Such justice. The brute who goes to sleep after having enjoyed himself as he wished, and the noble sacrificed female who goes to sleep with the satisfaction that she's been useful though she may have felt a virtuous nothing. (167; my emphases)

The critique of this script, this “lovely plan,” emerges from an examination of some of the individual terms and spectatorial structures that have determined the imaginative possibilities of Anita's very desire, desire she may here be said to begin to “subjectify.” To be sure, Anita's analysis leads her to consider the ways in which she is herself involved in the fantasies that imprison her, fantasies that have “straitjacketed” the conditions of her desire. Consider her questions about her “need” for romance and her need for the “right man”:

And I say that my life depends on finding a man, the right one. How crazy I am. How stupid. And the worst thing is that it's the truth. Without that fantasy I wouldn't care if I lived one minute more. Why am I so foolish? who has put that in my head? or is it in our nature to need romance? what romance, if nothing lasts? (166; emphases mine)

The passage is deceptive in its simplicity—for it is here we see Anita begin to implicate herself in her own desire, to realize her own “subjective involvement” in the fantasies “in [her] head,” and to gain some critical distance from the scenarios to which she has been so wedded: arguably, in fact, Anita as subject begins to “assume the place of the Other and of the Other's desire, no longer being subjugated thereby or fixated upon them” (Fink 70). Growing increasingly aware of the structures and language that had determined her eroticism, her need for romance, her need for the “right man,” Anita now comes to recognize her fantasies as those of an already constituted social order that has been defined by the discourse of the Other. Notably, she becomes estranged from her own word choices, her own metaphors, and thus comes to see even her use of language as the site of potential change: “‘looking for Prince Charming’,” she reflects, “already sound[s] a little better” than “waiting for Prince Charming” (165; my emphasis). Anita begins to “grasp the Other's Desire”—as one might say of a character intrigued by Lacanian psychoanalysis—and, in extracting herself from its “superimposed meanings,” she begins to find some “measure of freedom” (Ragland-Sullivan 300), albeit limitedly so, from the sexual fantasies that had “imprisoned” her.

Noteworthy, too, is Anita's critique of her “need” for romance—a need to build systems of meaning, a need for her own brand of ideology. According to Ragland-Sullivan, “Lacan attributed the very need for ideologies to the unconscious cornerstone of Desire. Whether a person defends a philosophy of capitalism or communism (or any other belief system), the totalizing drive toward building meaning systems is itself based on the structural lack in being” (272). Apolitical though Anita may be, she nevertheless comes to observe in her own terms the various manifestations of this “totalizing drive.” In fact, she comes to believe the romance she “needs” is not altogether different from the Peronism to which Pozzi is so wedded, going so far as to suggest that she and Pozzi are equally unable to evaluate the limits of their belief systems. Pozzi may argue that he is “incapable of turning a blind eye” (187), even while enlisting Anita's aid for the dangerous and deadly work to be done in the name of Peronism, but it is Anita who begins to see what Pozzi cannot: “What you are is a dupe,” she says, “a dreamer, who got mixed up in this whole mess because of I don't know what … because you're a romantic. Just as I got involved in that business of marrying a man whom I didn't really know. And you're also irresponsible, because you collaborate with people who resort to guns without knowing what they're doing. As irresponsible as me … so the two of us are the same, dreamers! Irresponsible people” (126). Reflecting elsewhere on Pozzi's Peronism, Anita notes: “Marxism appeals to me with the idea of equality, but later on in practice it seems to be trouble” (167). In a Lacanian scheme, the seamless ideologies embraced by Pozzi and Anita (or, for that matter, by the Marxist Valentin and the hopelessly romantic Molina in Spider Woman—not to mention the many other ideologues who grace the pages of Puig's work) are unified and unifying systems of meaning that, blind to their own limits, and “built on a structural lack in being,” seek to fend off “trouble,” chaos, lack.

In Pubis Angelical, the critique of ideology—and of the need for ideology—reflects in obvious ways on the Viennese actress from the 1930s whose films and life story help to sustain the horizon of meanings, indeed the clichés, into which Anita is born; but the critique (particularly the critique of the language Anita uses) resonates equally—and perhaps more subtly—with the tale of W218, the “sexual therapist” of the novel's future. Significantly, the work of W218 throws into sharp relief the established “rhetoric of passion” (see Christ [1977] 54) and the codified speeches of romance heard again and again in dime-store novels, in Puig's own Heartbreak Tango, in first- and second-rate Hollywood movies—and in life. That sexual desire, or the erotic, may be organized (for the individual subject) by a particular language or a given rhetorical structure is foregrounded by an essential part of W218's job: the articulation of certain words, phrases, and sentences that enact, evoke, and enable the satisfaction of desire. During one of her “therapeutic” encounters with men, for example. W218 is shown deciding which of the “established speeches” to use to help “her partner to achieve that much longed-for sexual satisfaction” (130–31). Some of these formulaic speeches “she considered absurd embellishments”; others “she did use with very good results—also suggested by regulation with the intent of establishing the mood of the mid-twentieth century” (131; my emphasis).

Clearly, the “work” of W218 may be said to comment on the desire of characters in Heartbreak Tango (or even Puig's Anita) who believe too well in, and are imprisoned by, a prescribed “rhetoric of passion,” fixated even on the “words of [love] songs” (see Christ [1977] 54). Thus, as Puig's texts broadly suggest, and as Lacanian psychoanalysis teaches, linguistic systems of meaning, established rhetorical codes, even specific phrasing can structure and organize the operation of sexuality itself. In fact, according to Bruce Fink: “[a]ny time we talk about body types, scenarios, or fantasies, we're talking about linguistically structured entities. They may take the form of images in one's mind, but they are at least in part ordered by the signifier, and thus at least potentially signifying and meaningful” (12).

Is it possible, then, in Puig's universe (or in psychoanalysis), to move beyond a vocabulary of imprisoning sexual fantasies, to escape those categories of thought that manage (as Puig observed in Spider Woman) “to suffocate our unconscious impulses and mask themselves in the consciousness as the only appropriate forms of conduct” (see 195–6n), to resist totalizing systems of meaning and discursive codes of erotic desire to which we, as subjects of lack, become so wedded? Clearly, those were central questions for Manuel Puig, a writer who began thinking about psychoanalysis in his teenage years and for whom “the very unnatural and hideous sexual roles” (Wheaton 142) were the source of so much anguish; clearly, those were the questions that Puig never entirely answered—although perhaps entertained most fully in Pubis Angelical.

As I've already indicated, the novel that turns to Lacan would seem to suggest that the smallest measure of freedom (which may be all that the subject of psychoanalysis can hope for) is contingent upon recognizing one's implication in one's desire, even one's implication in the language of one's desire. More fundamentally perhaps, the novel would seem to suggest the critical importance of seeing the body itself—and its attendant sexuality—as the effect not of Nature but of patterns of meaning imposed on biological difference, a matter foregrounded in the narrative that closes the futuristic tale of Pubis Angelical and that gives the novel its provocative title.

The story of W218 ends in prison (“Ices Everlasting”), where she has been sent for breaking the Law, for attempting to kill LKJS, her beloved “superior” man who, she comes to realize, has felt contempt for her “inferior” female body, and who has all along intended to kill her (just as Theo had intended to kill the Viennese actress and Pozzi had intended to use, even sacrifice, Anita for the cause of Peronism). While in prison, W218 learns the story of a woman (presumed mad) who once escaped in order to find her daughter. (This “mad-woman's” separation from and search for her daughter recalls the stories of Anita and the Viennese actress, both of whom are, in a sense, imprisoned and, in different ways, cut off from their daughters). We soon learn that this mad-woman is endowed with a “pubis … like that of the angels, without down and without sex, smooth” (231), an image that evidently has the power to stop conflict and battle. As the story goes (and we, along with W218, are its auditors), on entering her now war-torn country in search of her daughter, her nightdress blown aside by the wind to reveal sexless genitals, the madwoman's body is perceived by the fighting soldiers as a source of salvation and a “message of peace” (231).

More to the point, wherever this woman goes in search of her daughter the fighting ceases, fighting that apparently leaves in its wake “children of both sexes, all of them maimed by the war” (232). Arguably, the emphasis on maimed children who are also “gendered” children underscores the relationship central in Puig's writing between sexual difference and oppression. All the more significantly, then in Pubis Angelical, only the woman and her newly found daughter, who is also endowed with an angelic pubis, are able to escape the “maiming,” the “humiliation” by men (232) in which women themselves are in Puig's novels shown to participate, the humiliation that the very fantasy of the suffering heroine requires. Unlike W218, Anita, and the Viennese actress, the bodies of the madwoman and her daughter are neither enslaved nor repressed—“humiliated” neither by the “enemy out there” nor the “enemy” within. With no visible anatomical difference, it seems, the two women are not subject to the usual limits, meanings, and categories inscribed by the Symbolic; indeed, their bodies do not become appropriated—by themselves or by others—by the logic of conflict, opposition, or hierarchy. As Puig himself remarked about the ending of Pubis Angelical: “Once … you don't imagine [sex] as a problem. … Once you've eliminated sex as a means of superiority or inferiority, sex is of no meaning” (Wheaton 143)—and hence no cause for conflict.

Is Puig, then, fantasizing a nostalgic and impossible recovery of a preoedipal and prediscursive sexual identity, a kind of angelic subject that, in psychoanalytic terms, never existed? Is he fantasizing a world without gender? sexual specificity? sex? even signification? At some level, yes. But as Freud and Lacan indicate we can never transcend symbolic meaning, never move outside of a given constellation of signifiers, out of a system of signification that somehow structures the individual subject. We may reconfigure and reshuffle those meanings (as W218's speeches imply), but the human subject can never entirely escape the Symbolic. At the very least, then Puig's tale within a tale may be said simply to point to the fact that from the beginning signifying structures have existed, that they—not Nature—organize the experience of both gender and sexuality, and that meaning may be rigidly, sometimes violently, attached to sexual difference. At bottom, the drama (or the arresting of the drama) surrounding the fantasy of an angelic pubis may point to the fact that the bodily ego does indeed “read”—and that meaning is conferred by the images we see, the cultures we inhabit, the ideologies we follow. All of those provide narrative structures and symbolic tropes that live in (and that are variously assembled by) the subject's unconscious.

In Lacanian parlance, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real intersect: the “enemy out there” always has been the “enemy in here”; and the body itself is “always overwritten/overridden by language” (Fink 12). Short of erasing sexual difference, then, Puig may be calling (at best) for an ongoing critical engagement with and a transformation of those systems of meaning that mediate sexuality; or, as Kaja Silverman might more precisely suggest, a “transformation of the discursive conditions under which women live their corporeality” (Acoustic Mirror 146). A transformation, Puig might add, both global and individual, of the “linguistically structured entities” (Fink 12), indeed the very sexual fantasies, through which women and men live their desire, “children of both sexes, all of them maimed by the war.”

In the end, then, Puig's gestures toward Lacan in Pubis Angelical lead us to the structure of unconscious desire that his texts try everywhere to investigate, the invisible net of repression they try everywhere to capture, the sexual fantasies and imprisoning eroticism with which his characters are shown everywhere to struggle. Indeed, they lead us to an examination of the unconscious that Puig's own remarks may be said to direct, an examination in which Puig himself may be said to have the last word. In “a last interview” with Ronald Christ, conducted perhaps near the time of his 1989 public reading at the 92nd Street Y, Puig turns us once again to his preoccupation with the problem of the unconscious. His comments—about Freud and Lacan—speak for themselves:

Before Freud you thought a person's psychology was entirely contained in his conscious, with a little margin for those obscure things that were hardly talked about: the instincts! So the authors who thought they knew a character's conscious—what was there to be shown—felt really in command of the situation. … Then Freud comes along and reveals the whole back room! To which we have no direct access. … Anyhow, that's what interests me: to try to capture the unconscious of these characters. … I find the new French school of psychoanalysis very interesting. Very hard to follow, but interesting. Lacan and his disciples. … I have the impression that there's definitely something there. (576–77)

Puig's reflections on his craft—on the process of writing itself—go hand-in-hand with his abiding interest in psychoanalysis, his abiding interest in the “whole back room,” in the “bars that are there and that don't let us act freely,” in the “system that somehow manipulates us” (Christ 1991). To the very end of his career he is reframing and posing the central question of his life: “Because certain things you can change consciously,” Puig once said, “while others seem to be crystallized by the time you reach adolescence and are more difficult by then to change …” (Roffé 15).