“El beso de la mujer araña”

Abstract

Known best and in some quarters only for the film version of his 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, Argentine writer Manuel Puig left a unique and substantial body of work upon his unexpected death at 57 in 1990. In his eight novels, as well as several theatrical and film scripts and many short stories, Puig plumbed the complexities of Western popular culture and portrayed the social and psychological tensions afflicting the impressionable contemporary psyche.It is this overt fascination with pop culture - movie queens, soap operas, detective stories, science-fiction - that led many critics to dismiss the author as a contender for a place in the canon of distinguished Latin American writers. Despite a general acknowledgment of his innovative narrative technique, Puig was for many years "mistakenly viewed as either a parodist of vulgar, mass-produced cultural products or a victim and purveyor of bad taste," writes Jonathan Tittler in Manuel Puig. While Tittler refrains from putting Puig in the same circle as the critically acclaimed Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he does put him in the next orbit of gifted yet lesser-known Latin American writers.Much as certain critics have snubbed Puig for his inclination to return again and again to themes revolving around the lives of "ordinary" working-class men and women and their culture, Tittler acknowledges his profound and sympathetic understanding of these subjects. In both his choice of material and his stylistic approach to it - particularly his suppression of the familiar, all-knowing, often white male narrator - Puig gives life to voices rarely heard in literature: the young, the poor, the ill, the old, the female, the sexually ambivalent.In this first book on Puig to appear since his death, Tittler explores each of his novels and a selection of his work in other genres to illuminate the concerns at play below their sometimes garish surface: the roles of the unconscious and the mass media in individual and societal behavior, the insistent urge for erotic satisfaction, the pain of social and self-estrangement, the need for humor, the power of cliche, the complexity of everyday life. It is the only critical study to offer a sustained and methodical assessment of the four novels that followed Kiss of the Spider Woman.Drawing occasionally on critic Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of narrative discourse as well as on Freud's psychoanalytic theories - which profoundly influenced Puig's thinking even as he disassembled them in his novels - Tittler relies above all on his own close readings of Puig's works. Manuel Puig offers a sophisticated yet heartfelt assessment of an author who has heretofore not been given critical justice.