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Manuel Puig (1932-1990) |
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Argentine writer and motion-picture scriptwriter, who gained international fame with the publication of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), a dialogue of seduction and manipulation, which was also adapted into a movie and a musical. The story, set in a small cell in the Villa Devoto prison in Buenos Aires, depicts two prisoners – Valentin, a young political radical, and Molina, a middle-aged homosexual. At first they have nothing in common, but eventually they develop a strong relationship through retelling romantic plots of old movies. In total, Manuel Puig wrote eight novels. He died at the age of fifty-seven. "How they spoiled me too much as a kid, and that's why I'm the way I am, how I was tied to my mother's apron strings and now I'm this way, and how a person can always straighten out though, and what I really need is a woman, because woman is the best there is." (Kiss of the Spider Woman)by Manuel Puig, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Colchie, New York: Vintage Books, 1991, p. 19; originally published in Spain as El beso de la mujer araña, 1976) Juan Manuel Puig was born in General Villegas (fictionalized as Colonel Vallejos), in the remote
Argentine pampas, the first child of María Elena Delledonne and
Baldomero Puig. His father tried for success in the livestock and dairy
business but failed. However, he struggled hard to build up capital and
achieve middle-class status. His childhood Puig spent in Villegas and
received there his elementary education. As young boy he used films as
an escape from his environment – he liked to dress up as a girl and at
school he was assaulted. "I grew up on the pampa in a bad dream, or
rather a bad western," he once said. (Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions by Suzanne Jill Levine, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, p. x) Later in life Puig had a video library of some 3,000 films. In 1946 Puig moved to Buenos Aires, where he attended US boarding school; he had learned English from films. Puig first studied architecture and changed to philosophy in 1951 at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1955 Puig went to Rome after receiving a scholarship to study
film directing and film technique with Vittorio De Sica and Cesare
Zavattini at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After a period
he realized that film making at the commercial Cinecittà was not to his
tastes. Disappointed he traveled to Paris and London, earning his
living as a teacher, and dishwasher. In 1959 he lived in Stockholm and
then returned to his home country. From 1957 to 1961 Puig worked an assistant film director and translator of subtitles in Rome, Paris, and Buenos Aires. During this time he had begun to write film scripts. While working for Air France from 1963 to 1967, he moved to New York City to see Broadway musicals. Later he worked as a lecturer at Columbia University, New York. Puig returned to Buenos Aires in 1967. In 1973-75 Puig lived in Brazil, then in New York (1976-80). He did
not stay in Argentina many years. Never a Peronist and at odds with the
Latino tradition of machismo, he felt the atmosphere of his home
country oppressing. When Argentina's dictator Juan Perón died in office
in 1974, and was succeeded by his third wife Isabel Péron, Puig became
even more critical with the current policy. Due to Isabelita Perón's
personal intervention, he had received no royalties for the film of Heartbreak Tango, and his works were attacked in the press. In the 1980s Puig lived in New York and Rio de Janeiro. His play, El misterio del ramo de rosas
(1987, Mystery of the Rose Bouquet) was produced in a London theatre in
1987, but a fire in the theatre ended its performances. Toward the end of his life, Puig said that he had spent
it in
an unsuccessful search for a good husband. His ideal love was a
working-class heterosexual, but his longest affair was with a married
Anglo-Argentinian doctor, "who for variety's sake once presented
himself to Puig naked and on all fours. Puig was shocked at the man's
usurpation of his role." (Hidden: The Intimate Lives of Gay Men Past and Present by Clinton Elliott, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2014, p. 241) Eventually he settled in
1989 in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Manuel Puig died in Cuernavaca on July 22, 1990. His last novel was Cae la noche tropical
(1988, Tropical Night Falling), which takes place in Rio de Janeiro.
The story is centered around three women, their suffering and old
movies. Puig translated many of his works into English and also wrote in that language. His sevaral awards include the Curzio Malaparte Prize, which he received in 1966 and San Sebastian Festival Jury Prize in 1978. La traición de Rita Hayworth
(1968, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Puig's first novel, portrayed the realities of Argentine
life. Although there is no specific social message, this semi-autobiographical work is an indirect criticism of the years in which the Argentine
populist politician Juan Perón rose to power. The protagonist
is a young boy named Toto, Puig's alter ego, who escapes his boredom by fantasizing about the lives
of the stars he has seen in motion pictures. "At another level, Betrayed
is a record of the oral languages spoken by a very definite segment of
the Argentinean people during a period of the country's history. If the
emotional and even the imaginative alienation of the characters is
shown through their way of elaborating fables out of books or movies,
their everyday speech demonstrates how deep the roots of that
alienation have gone, because it is a tissue in which is imbedded the
contemporary language of serialized novels, popular biographies, soap
operas, movie subtitles, plus the rhetoric of the politicians and the
pseudo-intellectual utterances of journalists." ('Puig, Manuel,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1985, p. 608) Boquitas pintadas (1969, Heartbreak Tango) was also set in the fictive small town, Colonel Vallejos. The protagonist is a macho type, Juan Carlos, the characters are driven by their passions. Puig used the form of romance novels, added in letters, newspaper clippings, excerpts from diaries, police reports, and other things. Each chapter opens with tango lyrics. All the material is tied together with narrative tricks inspired by movies. Sangre de amor correspondido (1982, Blood of Requited Love) focused on the later experiences of two teenage lovers, Maria, a young woman, and Josemar, a construction worker. They spend one night together in a hotel, but Josemar doesn't tell Maria that he is going to abandon her that night. Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (1980, Eternal Curse on Readers of These Pages) was built on dialogue like Kiss of the Spider Woman. Two cultures and opposites meet: Mr. Ramirez, an Argentine invalid, and Larry, a writer who is paid to push his wheelchair in the streets of Greenwich Village. Ramirez is exiled to America, he lives in a nursing home. Larry is thirty-six-year-old, whose relationships with women have failed. In their search for a common language, Ramirez tells how he knows what nervous breakdown, depression, euphoria signify, but he doesn't know what these words mean. "I've read their definitions on the dictionary. But maybe I haven't experienced them lately, so I understand them only up to a point . . ." (Eternal Curse on Readers of These Pages, London: Arrow Books, 1985, p. 4) "Of all the writers I have known, the one who
seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig (1932-90)," Mario Vargas Llosa said.
"He never talked about authors or books, and when a literary topic came
up in conversation he would look bored and change the subject." ('Saved by Rita Hayworth,' The New York Times, August 13, 2000) Puig was a pessimistic observer of the human race – several of his characters die or live their lives totally disillusioned like Toto, or Molina, who is immersed in the fantasy world of the movies that he narrates to Valetin, and is killed by Valentin's friends. Puig's autobiographical indentification is clearly with Molina, who identifies himself with the heroines. Because
Puig's novels explored sexuality and he did not hide his sexual
orientation, in his own country he was much criticized for his
controversial stand. Puig had a number of relationships. He was
discreet about names, but he maintained that his homosexual
"conquests''
included the actors Stanley Baker and Yul Brynner. (Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions, p. 113) The Spanish actor Fernando Rey was Puig's friend. He acted in Leonard Schrader's erotic film Naked Tango (1990), inspired by Puig's unpublished manuscript. During his career Puig suffered many disappointments, among others the "massacre" of the off-Broadway musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Also the conservative film version, directed by Hector Babenco, starring William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga, failed to capture the spirit of the novel. According to some sources, Hurt's part was originally offered to Burt Lancaster, but he had to withdraw because of a heart operation. "La Hurt is so bad she probably will win an Oscar," Puig said of Hurt's performance. (Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me by Jaime Manrique, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, p. 46) To intervene with the narrative, Schrader and Babenco invented purely imaginary films. Hurt won a Best Actor Oscar. Puig started the book with the classic horror movie Cat People by Jacques Tourneur (1942), a poetical film about double life, sexuality, and an old curse. Simone Simon plays a woman who turns into a panther when sexually aroused. "Why couldn't I have the luck to get the panther woman's boyfriend to keep me company, instead of you?" (Ibid., p. 17) Molina is accused of an ugly crime – child molestation. The warden has offered Molina a reward if he can get his cellmate Valentin to reveal the secrets of his companions. Eventually the men make love. For further reading: 'Puig, Manuel,' in World Authors 1975-1980, ed. by Vineta Colby (1985); Suspended Fictions by Lucille Kert (1987); El Discurso utópico de la sexualided en Manuel Puig by Elías Muñoz (1987); The Necessary Dream by Pamela Bacarisse (1988); Impossible Choices by Pamela Bacarisse (1993); 'Manuel Puig' by Pamela Bacarisse, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. by Verity Smith (1997); Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me by Jaime Manrique (1999); Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions by Suzanne Jill Levine (2000); Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig and Luisa Valenzuela: Marginality and Gender by Linda Craig (2005); Sub-versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig's and Severo Sarduy's Alternative Identities by Carlos Riobó (2010); The Cinematic Novel and Postmodern Pop Fiction: The Case of Manuel Puig by Décio Torres Cruz (2019); Contar filmes: o cinema imaginário em Manuel Puig by Juan Ferreira Fiorini (2020); Psychoanalysis and Narrative: Literature, Film and Autobiography by Jorgelina Corbatta (2024) Selected works:
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