Puig, Manuel (1932-1990)


Homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Manuel Puig's
eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman,
homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

This is the sixty first post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
peopletelling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Puig was born in General Villegas, an isolated town in Buenos Aires
Province, Argentina, on December 28, 1932. As a child, bored by the
provincialism of his surroundings, the young Puig would go to the local
moviehouse five nights a week to be entertained by the glamour of
Hollywood movies.


After completing his elementary education, Puig was sent to boarding
school in Buenos Aires. In 1950, he entered the University of Buenos
Aires, first studying philosophy then architecture, but never obtained a
degree.
In 1956, he was awarded a scholarship to study film at the Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia and from 1956 to 1962 he moved back and
forth between Rome, London, and Argentina, attempting, unsuccessfully,
to get his film career off the ground.

Puig's First Novel
In 1963, abandoning hope of a career in cinema, he moved to New York
City where he began to work on his first novel, La traición de Rita
Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth). The novel was published in
Argentina in 1968 but not after first running into censorship problems
as a result of the portrayal of the protagonist Toto as effeminate and
sexually ambivalent.
In 1969, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard issued the French
translation of La traición de Rita Hayworth, and in June of that year
the work was selected by Le Monde as one of the best novels of
1968-1969. After this recognition, Puig became one of the most admired
and popular authors in Latin America.

Puig's Post-Modernism
Although Puig also published plays and film scripts, he is most
recognized in Latin-American letters today for the innovative techniques
of his novels. The Argentine writer can perhaps be classified as one of
Latin America's first post-modern authors. He is responsible for
breaking through to a post-modern, unpretentious literary space where
so-called low-brow culture is considered as valid an indicator of
personal and collective truths as high-brow art.
His use of popular mass culture (for example, Hollywood movie stars,
tragic plot lines, popular radio serials, sentimental and commercialized
melodramas) made such an impact on Latin-American letters that soon
other writers--Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso,
among others--began to write novels and plays based on
mass-entertainment products.


El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
In 1973, while living in Greenwich Village, Puig began to write his
fourth novel, the story of two cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison during
Argentina's military dictatorship of the 1970s. Luis Alberto Molina, an
aging homosexual convicted of "corrupting minors," is a modern-day
Scheherazade who recounts and recreates filmed stories to seduce a young
Marxist political activist, Valentín Arregui Paz.
The novel is the now classic El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the
Spider Woman), which was made into a commercially successful Hollywood
film in 1985, and has also been adapted for the stage, both as a drama
(in Spanish and in English) and as a Tony Award-winning musical.
Although homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of
Puig's novels, in El beso de la mujer araña explicit homosexual desire
is central to the fiction.
The text unfolds chronologically as a dialogue between the two prisoners
who share a small cell. In this reduced space, movies, recounted by the
effeminate homosexual Molina, provide a temporary escape from the
narrow spatial (and psychological) limits imposed by imprisonment.
The movies that Molina retells are far from realistic; they are
melodramatic stories of love and self-sacrifice. Through Molina's
nostalgic retelling and Valentín's comments, the reader discerns the
gradual changes and transformations that begin to take place in each
character.



Eventually, each changes (that is, seduces) the other. Through his talks
with Valentín, the apolitical and frivolous Molina begins to care about
the problems of the socially outcast and in the end sacrifices his life
for Valentín's political cause. In turn, the doctrinaire marxist
guerrilla Valentín learns from Molina that fantasies can also be
liberating, even revolutionary.
As their relationship deepens, Valentín agrees to have sex with Molina.
While their love making conforms to the stereotypical passive and active
roles found in traditional Hispanic society, and Molina sees himself as
a woman trapped in a male body who wants to have sex with a "real" man,
sex is nevertheless presented as an oasis outside history and politics
where individuals can find a liberating space for intimate communion.



In El beso de la mujer araña, the reader hears the words of the two
protagonists without intervention from a third-person narrator. The only
authorial intervention is a series of eight erudite footnotes dispersed
throughout the chapters whose purpose is primarily to inform the
(Hispanic) reader about various theories concerning the origins and
nature of homosexuality.

When it first appeared, the open portrayal of homosexuality in El beso
de la mujer araña was unsettling for many members of the Hispanic
literary establishment who found it difficult to accept an openly gay
novel. Yet, though it was considered a flop with intellectuals and
critics, the novel, nonetheless, gained popularity and eventually became
a best-seller.
By portraying the gay Molina as sympathetically complex, Puig
counteracted the Hispanic world's intolerance toward homosexuality. In
the end, El beso de la mujer araña is perhaps the most popular
politically incorrect gay love story ever written. Despite its
stereotypical notions of femininity and traditional passive-active sex
roles, El beso de la mujer araña clearly articulates the triumph of the
redemptive forces of love.

Puig's Death
When Manuel Puig died in 1990 at the age of fifty-seven, the New York
Times obituary claimed that he had suffered cardiac arrest following a
routine gall bladder operation. What was most puzzling, however, was
that the obituary mentioned Puig's two "sons," thus making him appear to
have been heterosexual.
In 1993, the Colombian writer Jaime Manrique wrote an excellent article
for Christopher Street ("Manuel Puig: The Writer as Diva"), in which he
recounts a number of personal encounters with Puig, whom he describes as
openly homosexual.
Manrique's article reads like a detective story in which he searches for
answers concerning the "mysterious" death of the Argentine writer.
Manrique reveals certain details that lead him to believe that Puig died
of AIDS. If this was so, why then the cover-up? Manrique suggests:
"After all, if homosexuality is the greatest taboo in Hispanic culture,
AIDS is the unspeakable."


Francisco Soto

List of works
Novels
1968: La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth)
1969: Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango)
1973: The Buenos Aires Affair (The Buenos Aires Affair)
1976: El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
1979: Pubis angelical (Pubis Angelical)
1980: Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages)
1982: Sangre de amor correspondido (Blood of Requited Love)
1988: Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling)
Plays and screenplays
1983: Bajo un manto de estrellas (Under a Mantle of Stars)
1983: El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman)
1985: La cara del villano
1985: Recuerdo de Tijuana
1991: Vivaldi: A Screenplay (in Review of Contemporary Fiction â„–3)
1997: El misterio del ramo de rosas (1987) (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet)
1997: La tajada; Gardel, uma lembranca
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