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Manuel Puig and the Uses of NostalgiaAuthor(s): David William FosterSource: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall, 1972), pp. 79-81Published by: Latin American Literary Review

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MANUEL PUIG AND THE USES OF NOSTALGIA

Estern society is possessed, at the present moment, ofa sort of wave

of nostalgia, with particular focus on the pre-War years of the thirties.

Argentina, althoughthe War itself

providedmore of a subtle

pointof social

and economic demarcation (the rise of Peronism in the mid-fortieswas more

noticeably cataclysmic), has partaken of thiswave of nostalgia. Indeed, one

could undertake a revealing bibliographic survey of the publications duringthe last five years or so on the tango, or on Buenos Aires caf?-and bar

society of the period in question. Of course, that the presidency of JuanPer?n, provided

a watershed for Argentine society and culture has intensified

even more the sense of loss vis-?-vis the thirties and the early forties. Is not

the imminent resurgence of Peronism in Argentina, as the military government prepares for promised free and open elections in 1973, itself one facetof

nostalgia? Althoughit has not

widelybeen

noticed,even the Buenos

Aires of Julio Cort?zar's Hopscotch hasan antediluvian aura about it, includ

ing the colloquialism of the language, which some hasty critics wanted tosee merely as the Paris-based author's loss of touch with the Buenos Aires

slang of today.1 Sharing this preoccupation with a by-gone Buenos Aires,whose influence was felt throughout the country, is Manuel Puig, a youngnovelist whose talents have ranked him with Cort?zar.

Puig's first novel, La traici?n de Rita Hayworth [Betrayed by Rita

Hayworth] (1968),2 has been hailed by Rodriguez Monegal as one of themost important Latin-American novels of the sixties.3 Now the Argentine

has published a second novel, Bo quit as pintadas [Painted Little Mouths](I969).4 Despite its superficial catchiness, the novel represents an intriguingfollow-up of Puig's qualities

as a novelist demonstrated in the earlier work.

Subtitled a follet?n (i.e., pamphlet; the reference to the late-nineteenth cen

tury practice of publishinga novel serially, one chapter at a time), the

work as a whole reads like the all-too-familiar script of a serialized soap

w

1 Emir Rodr?guez Monegal mentions the deliberate presentation of a thirties andforties aura for the novel in his discussion of a novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante,

Estructura y significaci?n de Tres tristes tigres, Sur, No. 320 (1969), 38-51.2 Buenos Aires:Jorge Alvarez,

1968. TheEnglish translation,

doneby

Suzanne

Jill Levine, was published by Dutton in 1971.3See, for example, his comments in The New Latin American Novel, Books

Abroad, 44 (1970), 45-50; pp. 49-50 in particular.* Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. Four editions of the novel were publishedin 1969 alone, and two more had been published by April 1970.

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80 LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW

opera of the thirties and forties era. In addition, each chapter is headed bya

prominent quotefrom one of the

hoary tangos byAlfredo Le Pera associat

ed with that pop figure par excellence, Carlos Gardel (whose works, of

course, have also enjoyed a profitable nostalgic renaissance). Thus, thesur

face of the work?the narrative proper?is concerned with the gray anguishof the Argentine lower-middle classes, with the trivial emptiness of routine

existence, with the pitiful attempts by individuals to achievesome level of

emotional satisfaction. These are, to be sure, many of the dominant concerns

of the tangos of the period; hence the propriety of the Le Pera quotes.5 As

Puig affirms ina blurb, his novel is insistently popular, and in general one

can easily see it as accessible to a spectrum of readers beyond the sophisticates who can be the

onlyaudience of a

VargasLlosa.

However, if we examine more closely what Puig may be attempting to

do, we find that, beginning with the almost de riguer fragmentation ofnar

rative chronology, his focus is decidedly anti-psychological, anti-personalityautonomy, and anti-naturalistic (despite

a certain amount of verisimilitude

of tone and language). In the contemporary Latin-American novel, whetherone confronts the exuberant fantasies of Garc?a M?rquez

or the depressinglyhumorless mythographies of Vargas Llosa, he cannot escape the realization

of the new-novel dictum that individuals as such are insignificant, that

human personalityas an abstract generality must be the stuff of the novel

because it alone provides the opportunity to say?and to perceive?somethinguniversally valid concerning the subliminal, unknown human experience. Nor

mal human contemplation cannot provideaccess to such levels, and it is

just such an access which the anti-personalist novel is styled to provide (like,say, Julio Cort?zar's 62, modelo para armar [62, Model for Assembly]

(1968). In thecase of Puig's narrative, narrative chronology from the outset

confuses and blurs the lines of autonomy. The bleak uniformity of tone in

the portrayal of human emotions,no matter how they are dressed up super

ficially in terms of moral good and evil, contributes strikingly to the presence of an experience rather than the multiplicity of conflicting and comple

menting, interacting and growing personalities of a more naturalistic fiction.In one sense, Puig's novel is the'validation of a popular suspicion that

the scandalous successes of the soap opera derive, not from the baseness of

taste to which it appeals, but from the fundamental validity of a uniform

humanity upon which its scripts are predicated. Of course, Puig hassome way

to go in order to defend his novel against those guardians of the virtue of

the modern novel who would insist that it must be difficult and inaccessible

to all but the most intense of readers, that it must, in short, be self-consciouslya work of art in the best of the vanguard tradition (like Jos? Donoso's fas

cinatingly experimental,but in the end

monumentally boring,novel, El obs

5 See a recent sociological study of the themes of the tango by Dar?o Cant?n,El mundo de los tangos de Gar del (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Centrode Investigaciones Sociales, 1969) (Documento de Trabajo, no. 60). This was originally published in the Revista latinoamericana de sociolog?a, 68, 3 (1969).

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MANUEL PUIG AND THE USES OF NOSTALGIA 81

ceno p?jaro de la noche [The Obscene Bird of Night] (1970). On the other

hand, Puig'swork is

inescapably interesting.Like the

tango,it is unashamed

ly sentimental, but with a sentimentality that is presented from the cold,cruel point of view of one who knows that it is

a pathetic defense mechanism

against some basic human truths. For one example, the story of Orpheuswould have made a good tango,6 and in the focus of both the tango and

the soap opera, as seen in Boquitas pintadas, and inan interpretive recrea

tion of those basic human truths, it would be absurd to deny that we are

not in the presence of one modern manifestation of myth. Of course, any

putative simplicity about the novel is both deceptive and illusory. The complexnarrative line, a form of narrative parataxis which goes beyond the multiplebut facile narrative threads of the

sprawling soap operaor the novel of

panoramic realism, reinforces, to be sure, the sense of mythic proportionsthat go beyond the gray misery of individual destinies. But at the same time,

no matter how popular or proletarian the novel may appear to beon

the surface, the essential and significant inner complexity of Boquitas pintadas, like that of La traici?n de Rita Hayworth, bespeaks the true artistic

dimensions of Puig's novel.

Arizona State University

DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER

6 The Orpheus story has indeed recently been worked up into a novelette withinthe tango-like context of early twentieth-century northern Buenos Aires. See the title

story of Humberto Costantini, Hahlenme de Funes (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,1970).