Postmodernism ENG603 academic blog: Essay on The kiss of The Spider Woman is love interest. Aside from attracting attention to the effects of media on the middle and lower class society, Manuel Puig as the plot maker, uses this opportunity to create some sort of unifying force for the two otherwise disparate characters. Through their constructive conversation on films, Valentin and Molina have found a connection even though they experience different realities and express different views on it. 1 dialogical—of relating to, or characterized by dialogue (Merriam-Webster). To set the story straight, both characters are born with a complete set of male anatomical parts. Luis Molina is a middle-aged homosexual who is jailed for sexually corrupting a minor. Valentin Arregui, on the other hand, is a young activist who is jailed for publicly demonstrating his opposition on the current government of Argentina. Aside from individual public (or private) denouncement of male ego and lack thereof, both characters also have different worldly views. Molina is the male homosexual who feels he is a woman and along with that feeling comes a need for self-expression through his favorite films. Valentin is the heterosexual leftist who expresses himself in rhetoric of Marxist ideology. Meanwhile, Puig used the prison cell as the setting for Kiss of the Spider Woman because it reflects the oppression in Argentine culture and the duo’s powerlessness against it (Tuss 3). The moment Molina and Valentin were confined in this tiny cell, they are isolated from the other inmates and from the prying eyes of social scrutiny. Puig develops the idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject themselves with the film’s characters. In a way, the retelling of the movies has become a medium for exposing 2 somnambulism—an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed (Merriam-Webster). their selves to each other. To note, revealing their innermost feelings is something they would not do otherwise if they were not in that situation of isolation from the rest of the world. With this, Molina is seen as the heroine and Valentin as the male love interest. This identification process is mainly regarded through the readers’ point of view depending on the reader’s own identity. Barbara P. Fulks in the Reference Guide to World Literature (3rd Edition) accepts this notion and generalizes that the reader only sympathizes with the character he can understand clearly or someone whom he can relate to. Furthermore, that character elicits the reader’s sympathy mostly because of his or her gender and the reader’s ideology. But what if the reader is neither homosexual like Molina, nor heterosexual like Valentin? Would the reader still sympathize with any of the characters? The fact that Puig used a pair from the list of marginalized dichotomies as his protagonists creates the flaw in Fulks’ generalization. On Puig’s Style and Structure Robert Coover finds the way the novel is accomplished “not very innovative.” (Coover 15) Although the novel touches on the themes of repression and liberation, beauty versus goodness, strange or unusual women, somnambulism2, heroism, love, fear, change and “desire for Hollywood endings,” according to Coover, the homosexual is simply an old movie buff and that there is not much substance other than the film synopsis of Molina’s telling. Coover also criticizes the novel’s translation into English by Thomas Colchie. He finds the rendition fairly adequate yet seems stiff and hasty and, therefore, calls for a more relaxed revision seeing as Puig’s translated work fails to capture the author’s easy colloquial flow and the voices of the two very different protagonists are not distinguished. But based on a personal approach, Robert Coover is disagreeable on two accounts. The first is his denouncement of Puig’s employment of film in his subplots as “not very innovative.” The use of movies as a motif for his novels has become his trademark style and the very core of his fiction. Therefore the implementation of movies as the general theme is clearly distinct and something original. In the first chapter Coming Attractions, Jonathan Tittler analyzes how Puig changes his writing style from the traditional narrative of modern issues. Unlike Coover, he finds the use of mass-entertainment products as “innovative” since it eliminates the hierarchy of the narrative. This way, it also attacks the society and its power structures. Also, in chapter four titled Odd Coupling, Tittler contrasts homosexuality as a social practice and revolution as a political activity while film as a culture and writing itself. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman analyzes the use of text and ideas in the novel. Here Michael Dunne defines the basic plot situation as “undeniably dialogic” while highlighting the symbolism of seemingly ordinary objects in the novel (Dunne 1). In doing so, he reveals the literal and figurative meanings of the materials to promote the overall thematic of Manuel Puig’s drama. In light of Holquist’s remarks, the author Puig can be seen to dialogically engage in political power like his characters (qtd. in Dunne 1). The main stylistic strategies of the novel consist of: overcoming boundaries of both the socio-political and aesthetic, meeting the other person as subjectivity equal to one’s own. In a school review, Teresa Ana San Pedro of Montclair State College comments that Puig’s style allows his readers to respond in an intellectual and creative manner (San Pedro 74). This comment is not efficient since the level of response in readers vary indelibly. How the audiences react to the play is dependent on their capacity to take in what the characters talk about. For instance, if the readers cannot relate to the subject matter because their exposure to such is limited, their reactions toward the play cannot be considered intellectual or creative in nature. Furthermore, there might not be room for an intellectual or creative response (as San Pedro puts it) to take place since Puig’s manner of writing seems confusing to begin with. Indeed Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but Clara Claiborne Park reiterates that Kiss of the Spider Woman is no mere concoction. She points out that there is no exposition at all and that the dialogue must work hard not only to develop the characters but also to tell the story. On the overall plot of the story, Park concludes that “The relationship which has made Valentin more of a woman has made Molina more of a man, and we recognize both these changes as a gain” (Park 576). True, there is no exposition but Puig makes up for the details of an exposition by interweaving fabrics of Molina’s and Valentin’s identities into their conversations. The dialogue is efficient yet somewhat confusing still, especially if the reader is not familiar with the films that Molina mentions. This may be what Park refers to as she stresses that the dialogue needs improvement. Michael Wood shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is an example of Latin American fiction with a new stance, angle, tone, twist, and mode of narrative. “Movies are not true to its dreams of glamour it is usually associated with but to the emptiness and solitude the dreams are supposed to disguise” (Wood 43). Mr. Wood finds it a slightly more cheerful work compared to The Buenos Aires Affair because it concentrates more on the hidden truths rather than the acts of hiding that the main character in the other novel did. Puig is especially interested in the notion that homosexuals imitate the defects of heterosexuality. On another note, the plots are actually deeper than what they appear to be. As Valentin begins to appreciate the stories of the heroines and villains in the movies that Molina fabricate, he finds himself not only enjoying them as Molina does he gradually comes to see the rags of humanity in these tales—something that his extremist Marxism could not have taught him. In the end, after Molina and Valentin shares the kiss, Puig manages to reel away the story from becoming one of Molina’s romantic movies. The author avoids too much sentimentality by concocting something unpredictable and ends it that way. On Novel Content Raymond Williams finds a connection between Kiss of the Spider Woman and Manuel Puig’s other novel, Pubis Angelical, which is in both cases his characters deal with the sexuality of politics and the politics of sex (Williams 70). William Herrick exploits that Manuel Puig is a Marxist as he is Freudian: “Young people who embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity for any further exploration of their psyche” (Herrick 1). The values that Valentin has learned in Marxist ideology have somewhat encapsulated his thoughts. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men grappling with their suffering is “exceedingly moving” and “brilliantly done”. In a review Allen Josephs finds that Kiss of the Spider Woman as in the previous experiments that Manuel Puig made in his other novels, things are not as simple as they first seem. The mutual fantasies and dreams begin to create a subconscious bridge between the unlikely psychic castaways Mr. Ramirez and Larry in Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. This ability to connect polar personalities with a mutual means is also seen in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Josephs adds that Puig’s characteristic ‘virtuosity’ has not failed him and because of this, devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt appreciate his work (Josephs 9). However, the novels reliance on psychology and too much dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of the absurd than of his earlier passionately Latin ones. Like the characters in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, the fates that Valentin and Molina eventually met reveal the sad truth about life in Argentina. As Gilbert Sorrentino views it, Kiss of the Spider Woman is developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy3 between two unlikely companions. It is also a “structural failure,” very much like his previous novel, and pretty much for the same reason: the conclusion comments on and ‘explains’ the otherwise mysterious text. In doing, Sorrentino believes that Manuel Puig has sabotaged the richly ambivalent nature that the author has strung up until that point altogether dispersing the aura of distinction that had stirred up in the dialogical plot. It is as if, as Sorrentino puts it, Puig had lost his nerve and decided to serve his general audience what they have had before. In this case, he gives them a book that “before it is read by anyone…been read by everyone” (Sorrentino 1). This critique also admits that “it’s too bad” since Puig does have something to show and tell from his wonderful sense that the essential element of life is its serious “things.” But most of these are already considered as impartial ingredients of the daily forms of drama such as soap opera, sitcoms, and B-movies. Thus, his novels fail because Puig holds his content or the core substance of his stories simply as it were, a set of ideas. Eroticism and its Environment In A Last Interview with Manuel Puig, Ronald Christ assimilates one of the main topics of the novel which is: “Can people change their eroticism after a certain age?” Manuel Puig believes it is impossible, saying “those sexual fantasies have crystallized during our adolescence and imprison you forever.” (Christ 850). In that cell, there are two men but Christ finds that it “is just a plaque on the surface.” What the characters are, therefore, are two men and two women. Quoting Theodore Roszack, “the woman most desperately in need of liberation is the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.” This applies greatly to the stoic Valentin who at first does not feel comfortable with the idea of a discourse on his sexual identity. Molina, on the other hand, uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him by the new times. He takes the opportunity to become the underground heroine in real life. Molina’s homosexuality is a product of the revolutionary. It is during this new age that everything feels more liberated but still confined, though subtly, within social norms and expectations. The general regard on sexuality is greatly influenced by social gender than biological sex. The first one is viewed as the way people see it as a daily norm that guides how males and females should particularly act or behave as opposed to the latter where they are just given what they are naturally born with. In other words a man is a man because he acts like one and not that he is born with a physical anatomy of a man. But gender is not simply the natural consequence of anatomy as nature planned. It is a large social construction of patterns “we adopt, scripts we read, movie roles we imitate” (Zimmerman 3). Shari Zimmerman shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is something that invites us to imagine identity in a new perspective, to ‘escape the web of gender.’ Great Latin American literature enlists Manuel Puig along the pages with José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although Puig’s fiction is greatly simulated by political and social tensions in Latin America, he and his contemporaries show commonalities: experimentation with the literary form, concern with unconscious and irrational forces of human life and lastly, portraying the lower classes of Latin America. Manuel Puig’s works are mostly narrative but some of his contemporary works reveal a dialogic medium. This tactic allows individuals to supplant emotions with their film counterparts, providing the room for readers to relate with the characters in retail fiction. However bold his ideas are, Puig’s plots (as in Kiss of the Spider Woman) cannot help but resemble clichéd serials and detective stories. On one hand, most critics do find Puig’s treatment of complex issues like politics, sexual power, homosexuality, and violence as superficial. But generally, his works are regarded as insightful and moving (CLC: Vol. XXVIII 369). Character Dichotomies Kiss of the Spider Woman creatively illustrates the ways in which the customs of authority and the socially-induced modes of thinking shape and inhibit individual experiences. In this novel, the author Puig focuses on the restricted psychosexual identities of the two men. Shari Zimmerman of Hofstra University incorporates the scripted piece as a means through which the two men, Molina and Valentin, “read each other, reveal themselves, become friends, and finally lovers.” (Zimmerman 3) Aside from this, Zimmerman considers the work as an exploration of traditional male behavior and customs. The novel also provides a critique of male and female patterns that challenge biological sex and gender issues. Critics David Bost and Jonathan Tittler concluded that Puig’s purpose in creating his most famous work Kiss of the Spider Woman is to give voice and mainstream for the acceptance of the previously marginalized groups (Drozdo 1). Despite the fact that Manuel Puig particularly chose a homosexual and a political revolutionary as his main protagonists, his goal is much more universal. Puig simply uses the two as representatives of the other unprivileged groups. The most prevalent dichotomies of Western civilization: man/woman, good/evil, heterosexual/homosexual etc. One half of the dichotomy necessarily relies in the other for its definition. According to Derrida, “they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.” Therefore, there is no difference between the signified and the signifier (Derrida 23). According to critics Maria Mercedes Velasco, Elias Miguel Muñoz, and Fernando Reati, there is a strong binary system incorporated in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Drozdo 1). Both characters, Molina and Valentin, have different ideologies that they developed individually. With this in mind, Maria Mercedes Velasco argues that the characters of Molina and Valentin show a “projection of Marianism and masculinity” (Velasco) by directing their identities through stereotyping Woman. She proposes the existence of a dichotomy of man and woman within the novel. She believes that the acceptance of this binary system, wherein masculinity and femininity is defined and entwined, provides a sense of wholeness or completeness within the novel. Meanwhile, Elias Miguel Muñoz proposes that Manuel Puig entertains the idea of dual-centered ideology: “by the end of the novel, Valentin has liberated the ‘woman’ whom he carries inside of him.” This ideology presents the possibility of Puig’s Utopian liberation wherein the possibility of a new sexual being is entertained. However, Steffany Drozdo disagrees with these two critics saying, “it is precisely these two binary ideological structures that Puig destroys in Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The two critics say that Puig uses the dichotomies to create a totality that harmonizes, incorporates, and equalizes both parties. However, in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Steffany Drozdo argues that it is precisely this structure that Puig destroys in his novel. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, both Molina and Valentin accept the ‘inadequate’ meaning of the other’s ideology. Valentin, a heterosexual, enters into a homosexual union with Molina without ‘becoming’ a homosexual. Molina, although uninterested in political subversion, agrees to take part in Valentin’s political activity without actually subscribing to his particular ideology. This is one ambiguity present with regard to all violent hierarchies: the actions of both men contradict their personal identities and beliefs. (Drozdo 6) Homosexuality and heterosexuality, being a popular and prevalent dichotomy in society, both depend on each other for their definition. Generally, one is defined by using the other. This is similar to the character Valentin as he reveals his inner self in order present a sexual identity that contrasts that of Molina’s. In a sense, it is by defining Molina’s homosexuality that Valentin’s heterosexuality is contrasted and then revealed. The analysis of social dichotomies is where the aforementioned Freudian views on sexuality are blurred. In a sense, the characterization of man defines the woman and consequently, the homosexual to the heterosexual. Puig did not implement a specific date for the setting of Kiss of the Spider Woman because this way allows the reader to expound on the “universality” of the novel—that it can happen anywhere or any time since it also reflects similar events and situations worldwide. It also creates an atmosphere of a possibility of it happening to people outside Argentina (Drozdo 4). “In fact, the ultimate coupling of Molina and Valentin and the aftermath of their union symbolically destroy each of these dichotomies” (Drozdo 4). Their unity and oneness in the end is the catalyst that Puig used in order to “destroy” the limitations conditioned by each of their social norms. This very act of defiance is the main basis that Steffany Drozdo expounded on for her argument in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures. Valentin and Molina represent different hierarchies that their individual environments have formed them to take part in. Ultimately, their union is an act of defiance to the society that shaped what they were before the aftermath of the kiss. “In the end it is impossible to discern not only that which is homosexual or heterosexual, but also that which is masculine and feminine, as gender becomes confused and as the merger of Molina and Marta (the woman) creates a new sexual being” (Drozdo 6). This is very much connected to the aforementioned thesis statement: the Freudian view on sexuality is so roughly described that no definition can fully capture the essence of the new sexuality that has merged. ) Furthermore, reality and fantasy become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to delineate and, consequently, define either one. The film or movie aspect that Puig implemented in his writing style resurfaces in the ending as Valentin had a dream of Molina carrying Marta inside him (qtd. in World Literature 798). “Puig proposes that the irrational state is a closer approximation of reality than the rational state, because binary systems falsely perpetuate oppressive dichotomies. Ambiguity…enables the reader to find and consider a new dialectic” (Drozdo 7). It is not by placing one half of the dichotomy to a position of superiority and the other half below it, rather by deconstructing each of the elements of the dichotomy. In doing so, Puig dissects the inner substance of an unprivileged, marginalized group to help the reader redefine the group. Consequently, the identity that the group has taken place is not affiliated with the dichotomy it is arranged with as Velasco argues. Norman Lavers (1988) attests that Puig’s greatest artistic achievement in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shown in the structure of the novel and that the conversations between the two protagonists contain much of the bulk of the narrative (Tuss 1). The vagueness of the stand on homosexuality contributes to the inability of most to define and differentiate it with other sexes. Furthermore, the lovemaking scene is the part where they “exchange” selves. The scene also paves the way for the characters’ transcendence into what Valentin describes as an “existence without oppression” (qtd. in World Literature 775). This becomes another act of social defiance to achieve liberation from their individual identity. In a sense, to fully understand the multi-faceted characters in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, one must involve in a deconstruction of their identities. Essentially, Manuel Puig has a desire to deconstruct the culture that enforces its conceptions on everything from political dissent to sexual conduct to conventional gender roles. In doing so, he manages to displace the identities of his characters rather than ratify them in the binary system of dichotomies that the critic Velasco presents. Finally, this desire was accomplished with the aid of his writing styles in a non-narrative form with dialogical content and the allegorical reference to Hollywood movies into his plot—a stratagem which he ultimately sealed with a kiss. WORKS CITED An Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2000: 69-71 Encyclopedia of Latin American History. NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.1968: 22-25, 260-263 New Encyclopedia Britannica Vol.9:791 Allen, Bruce. The Hudson Review Vol. XXVII, No. 1. The Hudson Review, Inc. Spring, 1974. Alter, Robert. The New York Times Book Review. New York Times Company. 5 September 1976. Christ, Ronald. A Last Interview With Manuel Puig (1991). Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 846-849. —-. Fact and Fiction. Review 73. Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc. 1972. Fall, 1973: 49-54. Common Complaint. The Times Literary Supplement. USA: The Times Newspaper Ltd. 31 Aug. 1973: 1007. Clemons, Walter. Rev. of Kiss of the Spider Woman, by Manuel Puig. Newsweek, Inc., 1971. 25 Oct. 1971 Coover, Robert. Old, New, Borrowed, Blue. New York Times Book Review. April 22, 1979: 15-31. De Feo, Ronald. Laying the Evidence. National Review. NY: National Review, Inc. Vol. XXVII, No. 41. 29 October 1976: 1194-1195. Drozdo, Steffany. The Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. University of Kent. Dunne, Michael. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 1995). South Atlantic Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:16 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304 >. Fulks, Barbara P. Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña) Novel by Manuel Puig, 1976. Reference Guide to World Literature Vol. 2. USA: Thomson and Gale 2003: 1341. Gallagher, David P. in Modern Latin American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. —-. New York Times Book Review. NY: New York Times Book Review, 1973. 16 Dec 1973: 14-15. Herrick, William. Alienated Within and Without. The New Leader © 1982 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs Inc., Vol. LXV, No. 13. June 28, 1982: 19-20. Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Among the Stars (Exit Laughing) (1991). A Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 856. Mendelson, Phyllis Carmel and Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 5. Michigan: Gale Research CO., 1976: 354-356. Merrim, Stephanie. For a New (Psychological) Novel in the Works of Manuel Puig. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 12 No. 2 (Winter, 1984) pp. 141-157. Novel Corp., Brown University. 08/01/2009 21:22 . Mirsky, Mark Jay. Three to Tango. Book World—the Washington Post. 25 November 1973: 1. Park, Sarah Claiborne. A Review of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in the Hudson Review Vol. XXXII No. 4. NY: Hudson Review, Inc. (Winter 1979-1980): 575-577. Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 407-408. San Pedro, Teresa Ana. On Manuel Puig by Jonathan Tittler. Hispania Vol. 77 No.1 (March 1994): 74-75. Sorrentino, Gilbert. South American Fantasy, Obsession, and Soap Opera: ‘Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages’. Book World: The Washington Post, August 1989. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. pp. 1-2. 08/01/2009 21:24 . Tuss, Alex. Deconstructing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Men’s Studies Press. 22 March 2000 01/2009 . Williams, Raymond L. PUIG, Manuel. Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century Vol. 3: L-R. St. James Press, 1999: 610-611. Williams, Raymond L. A Review of “Pubis Angelical”. World Literature Today Vol. 55 No.1, Winter 1981: 70. Wood, Michael. “The Claims of Mischief”. The New York Review of Books Vol. XXVI Nos. 21 and 22. January 24, 2009: 43-47. Zimmerman, Shari. Kiss of the Spider Woman and the Web of Gender. Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 23 No. ½ (Nov. 1988). Pacific Coast Ancient and Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:19 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316690>. WORKS CONSULTED Borinsky, Alicia. Castration: Artifices, Notes on the Writing of Manuel Pug. The Georgia Review. ( ©1975 University of Georgia) Spring, 1975: 95-114. Byfonski, Dedria., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 10. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 420. Filer, Malva. Manuel Puig: Cae la Noche Tropical. Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 2. 1990: a Selection of Book Reviews, 1977-2001. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 1599. Krisman, Claire, ed. Contemporary Authors Volumes 45-48. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1974. 435. Stine, Jean ,. Gale Res

Saturday 14 January 2012

Essay on The kiss of The Spider Woman is love interest. Aside from attracting attention to the effects of media on the middle and lower class society, Manuel Puig as the plot maker, uses this opportunity to create some sort of unifying force for the two otherwise disparate characters. Through their constructive conversation on films, Valentin and Molina have found a connection even though they experience different realities and express different views on it. 1 dialogical—of relating to, or characterized by dialogue (Merriam-Webster). To set the story straight, both characters are born with a complete set of male anatomical parts. Luis Molina is a middle-aged homosexual who is jailed for sexually corrupting a minor. Valentin Arregui, on the other hand, is a young activist who is jailed for publicly demonstrating his opposition on the current government of Argentina. Aside from individual public (or private) denouncement of male ego and lack thereof, both characters also have different worldly views. Molina is the male homosexual who feels he is a woman and along with that feeling comes a need for self-expression through his favorite films. Valentin is the heterosexual leftist who expresses himself in rhetoric of Marxist ideology. Meanwhile, Puig used the prison cell as the setting for Kiss of the Spider Woman because it reflects the oppression in Argentine culture and the duo’s powerlessness against it (Tuss 3). The moment Molina and Valentin were confined in this tiny cell, they are isolated from the other inmates and from the prying eyes of social scrutiny. Puig develops the idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject themselves with the film’s characters. In a way, the retelling of the movies has become a medium for exposing 2 somnambulism—an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed (Merriam-Webster). their selves to each other. To note, revealing their innermost feelings is something they would not do otherwise if they were not in that situation of isolation from the rest of the world. With this, Molina is seen as the heroine and Valentin as the male love interest. This identification process is mainly regarded through the readers’ point of view depending on the reader’s own identity. Barbara P. Fulks in the Reference Guide to World Literature (3rd Edition) accepts this notion and generalizes that the reader only sympathizes with the character he can understand clearly or someone whom he can relate to. Furthermore, that character elicits the reader’s sympathy mostly because of his or her gender and the reader’s ideology. But what if the reader is neither homosexual like Molina, nor heterosexual like Valentin? Would the reader still sympathize with any of the characters? The fact that Puig used a pair from the list of marginalized dichotomies as his protagonists creates the flaw in Fulks’ generalization. On Puig’s Style and Structure Robert Coover finds the way the novel is accomplished “not very innovative.” (Coover 15) Although the novel touches on the themes of repression and liberation, beauty versus goodness, strange or unusual women, somnambulism2, heroism, love, fear, change and “desire for Hollywood endings,” according to Coover, the homosexual is simply an old movie buff and that there is not much substance other than the film synopsis of Molina’s telling. Coover also criticizes the novel’s translation into English by Thomas Colchie. He finds the rendition fairly adequate yet seems stiff and hasty and, therefore, calls for a more relaxed revision seeing as Puig’s translated work fails to capture the author’s easy colloquial flow and the voices of the two very different protagonists are not distinguished. But based on a personal approach, Robert Coover is disagreeable on two accounts. The first is his denouncement of Puig’s employment of film in his subplots as “not very innovative.” The use of movies as a motif for his novels has become his trademark style and the very core of his fiction. Therefore the implementation of movies as the general theme is clearly distinct and something original. In the first chapter Coming Attractions, Jonathan Tittler analyzes how Puig changes his writing style from the traditional narrative of modern issues. Unlike Coover, he finds the use of mass-entertainment products as “innovative” since it eliminates the hierarchy of the narrative. This way, it also attacks the society and its power structures. Also, in chapter four titled Odd Coupling, Tittler contrasts homosexuality as a social practice and revolution as a political activity while film as a culture and writing itself. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman analyzes the use of text and ideas in the novel. Here Michael Dunne defines the basic plot situation as “undeniably dialogic” while highlighting the symbolism of seemingly ordinary objects in the novel (Dunne 1). In doing so, he reveals the literal and figurative meanings of the materials to promote the overall thematic of Manuel Puig’s drama. In light of Holquist’s remarks, the author Puig can be seen to dialogically engage in political power like his characters (qtd. in Dunne 1). The main stylistic strategies of the novel consist of: overcoming boundaries of both the socio-political and aesthetic, meeting the other person as subjectivity equal to one’s own. In a school review, Teresa Ana San Pedro of Montclair State College comments that Puig’s style allows his readers to respond in an intellectual and creative manner (San Pedro 74). This comment is not efficient since the level of response in readers vary indelibly. How the audiences react to the play is dependent on their capacity to take in what the characters talk about. For instance, if the readers cannot relate to the subject matter because their exposure to such is limited, their reactions toward the play cannot be considered intellectual or creative in nature. Furthermore, there might not be room for an intellectual or creative response (as San Pedro puts it) to take place since Puig’s manner of writing seems confusing to begin with. Indeed Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but Clara Claiborne Park reiterates that Kiss of the Spider Woman is no mere concoction. She points out that there is no exposition at all and that the dialogue must work hard not only to develop the characters but also to tell the story. On the overall plot of the story, Park concludes that “The relationship which has made Valentin more of a woman has made Molina more of a man, and we recognize both these changes as a gain” (Park 576). True, there is no exposition but Puig makes up for the details of an exposition by interweaving fabrics of Molina’s and Valentin’s identities into their conversations. The dialogue is efficient yet somewhat confusing still, especially if the reader is not familiar with the films that Molina mentions. This may be what Park refers to as she stresses that the dialogue needs improvement. Michael Wood shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is an example of Latin American fiction with a new stance, angle, tone, twist, and mode of narrative. “Movies are not true to its dreams of glamour it is usually associated with but to the emptiness and solitude the dreams are supposed to disguise” (Wood 43). Mr. Wood finds it a slightly more cheerful work compared to The Buenos Aires Affair because it concentrates more on the hidden truths rather than the acts of hiding that the main character in the other novel did. Puig is especially interested in the notion that homosexuals imitate the defects of heterosexuality. On another note, the plots are actually deeper than what they appear to be. As Valentin begins to appreciate the stories of the heroines and villains in the movies that Molina fabricate, he finds himself not only enjoying them as Molina does he gradually comes to see the rags of humanity in these tales—something that his extremist Marxism could not have taught him. In the end, after Molina and Valentin shares the kiss, Puig manages to reel away the story from becoming one of Molina’s romantic movies. The author avoids too much sentimentality by concocting something unpredictable and ends it that way. On Novel Content Raymond Williams finds a connection between Kiss of the Spider Woman and Manuel Puig’s other novel, Pubis Angelical, which is in both cases his characters deal with the sexuality of politics and the politics of sex (Williams 70). William Herrick exploits that Manuel Puig is a Marxist as he is Freudian: “Young people who embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity for any further exploration of their psyche” (Herrick 1). The values that Valentin has learned in Marxist ideology have somewhat encapsulated his thoughts. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men grappling with their suffering is “exceedingly moving” and “brilliantly done”. In a review Allen Josephs finds that Kiss of the Spider Woman as in the previous experiments that Manuel Puig made in his other novels, things are not as simple as they first seem. The mutual fantasies and dreams begin to create a subconscious bridge between the unlikely psychic castaways Mr. Ramirez and Larry in Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. This ability to connect polar personalities with a mutual means is also seen in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Josephs adds that Puig’s characteristic ‘virtuosity’ has not failed him and because of this, devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt appreciate his work (Josephs 9). However, the novels reliance on psychology and too much dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of the absurd than of his earlier passionately Latin ones. Like the characters in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, the fates that Valentin and Molina eventually met reveal the sad truth about life in Argentina. As Gilbert Sorrentino views it, Kiss of the Spider Woman is developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy3 between two unlikely companions. It is also a “structural failure,” very much like his previous novel, and pretty much for the same reason: the conclusion comments on and ‘explains’ the otherwise mysterious text. In doing, Sorrentino believes that Manuel Puig has sabotaged the richly ambivalent nature that the author has strung up until that point altogether dispersing the aura of distinction that had stirred up in the dialogical plot. It is as if, as Sorrentino puts it, Puig had lost his nerve and decided to serve his general audience what they have had before. In this case, he gives them a book that “before it is read by anyone…been read by everyone” (Sorrentino 1). This critique also admits that “it’s too bad” since Puig does have something to show and tell from his wonderful sense that the essential element of life is its serious “things.” But most of these are already considered as impartial ingredients of the daily forms of drama such as soap opera, sitcoms, and B-movies. Thus, his novels fail because Puig holds his content or the core substance of his stories simply as it were, a set of ideas. Eroticism and its Environment In A Last Interview with Manuel Puig, Ronald Christ assimilates one of the main topics of the novel which is: “Can people change their eroticism after a certain age?” Manuel Puig believes it is impossible, saying “those sexual fantasies have crystallized during our adolescence and imprison you forever.” (Christ 850). In that cell, there are two men but Christ finds that it “is just a plaque on the surface.” What the characters are, therefore, are two men and two women. Quoting Theodore Roszack, “the woman most desperately in need of liberation is the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.” This applies greatly to the stoic Valentin who at first does not feel comfortable with the idea of a discourse on his sexual identity. Molina, on the other hand, uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him by the new times. He takes the opportunity to become the underground heroine in real life. Molina’s homosexuality is a product of the revolutionary. It is during this new age that everything feels more liberated but still confined, though subtly, within social norms and expectations. The general regard on sexuality is greatly influenced by social gender than biological sex. The first one is viewed as the way people see it as a daily norm that guides how males and females should particularly act or behave as opposed to the latter where they are just given what they are naturally born with. In other words a man is a man because he acts like one and not that he is born with a physical anatomy of a man. But gender is not simply the natural consequence of anatomy as nature planned. It is a large social construction of patterns “we adopt, scripts we read, movie roles we imitate” (Zimmerman 3). Shari Zimmerman shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is something that invites us to imagine identity in a new perspective, to ‘escape the web of gender.’ Great Latin American literature enlists Manuel Puig along the pages with José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although Puig’s fiction is greatly simulated by political and social tensions in Latin America, he and his contemporaries show commonalities: experimentation with the literary form, concern with unconscious and irrational forces of human life and lastly, portraying the lower classes of Latin America. Manuel Puig’s works are mostly narrative but some of his contemporary works reveal a dialogic medium. This tactic allows individuals to supplant emotions with their film counterparts, providing the room for readers to relate with the characters in retail fiction. However bold his ideas are, Puig’s plots (as in Kiss of the Spider Woman) cannot help but resemble clichéd serials and detective stories. On one hand, most critics do find Puig’s treatment of complex issues like politics, sexual power, homosexuality, and violence as superficial. But generally, his works are regarded as insightful and moving (CLC: Vol. XXVIII 369). Character Dichotomies Kiss of the Spider Woman creatively illustrates the ways in which the customs of authority and the socially-induced modes of thinking shape and inhibit individual experiences. In this novel, the author Puig focuses on the restricted psychosexual identities of the two men. Shari Zimmerman of Hofstra University incorporates the scripted piece as a means through which the two men, Molina and Valentin, “read each other, reveal themselves, become friends, and finally lovers.” (Zimmerman 3) Aside from this, Zimmerman considers the work as an exploration of traditional male behavior and customs. The novel also provides a critique of male and female patterns that challenge biological sex and gender issues. Critics David Bost and Jonathan Tittler concluded that Puig’s purpose in creating his most famous work Kiss of the Spider Woman is to give voice and mainstream for the acceptance of the previously marginalized groups (Drozdo 1). Despite the fact that Manuel Puig particularly chose a homosexual and a political revolutionary as his main protagonists, his goal is much more universal. Puig simply uses the two as representatives of the other unprivileged groups. The most prevalent dichotomies of Western civilization: man/woman, good/evil, heterosexual/homosexual etc. One half of the dichotomy necessarily relies in the other for its definition. According to Derrida, “they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.” Therefore, there is no difference between the signified and the signifier (Derrida 23). According to critics Maria Mercedes Velasco, Elias Miguel Muñoz, and Fernando Reati, there is a strong binary system incorporated in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Drozdo 1). Both characters, Molina and Valentin, have different ideologies that they developed individually. With this in mind, Maria Mercedes Velasco argues that the characters of Molina and Valentin show a “projection of Marianism and masculinity” (Velasco) by directing their identities through stereotyping Woman. She proposes the existence of a dichotomy of man and woman within the novel. She believes that the acceptance of this binary system, wherein masculinity and femininity is defined and entwined, provides a sense of wholeness or completeness within the novel. Meanwhile, Elias Miguel Muñoz proposes that Manuel Puig entertains the idea of dual-centered ideology: “by the end of the novel, Valentin has liberated the ‘woman’ whom he carries inside of him.” This ideology presents the possibility of Puig’s Utopian liberation wherein the possibility of a new sexual being is entertained. However, Steffany Drozdo disagrees with these two critics saying, “it is precisely these two binary ideological structures that Puig destroys in Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The two critics say that Puig uses the dichotomies to create a totality that harmonizes, incorporates, and equalizes both parties. However, in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Steffany Drozdo argues that it is precisely this structure that Puig destroys in his novel. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, both Molina and Valentin accept the ‘inadequate’ meaning of the other’s ideology. Valentin, a heterosexual, enters into a homosexual union with Molina without ‘becoming’ a homosexual. Molina, although uninterested in political subversion, agrees to take part in Valentin’s political activity without actually subscribing to his particular ideology. This is one ambiguity present with regard to all violent hierarchies: the actions of both men contradict their personal identities and beliefs. (Drozdo 6) Homosexuality and heterosexuality, being a popular and prevalent dichotomy in society, both depend on each other for their definition. Generally, one is defined by using the other. This is similar to the character Valentin as he reveals his inner self in order present a sexual identity that contrasts that of Molina’s. In a sense, it is by defining Molina’s homosexuality that Valentin’s heterosexuality is contrasted and then revealed. The analysis of social dichotomies is where the aforementioned Freudian views on sexuality are blurred. In a sense, the characterization of man defines the woman and consequently, the homosexual to the heterosexual. Puig did not implement a specific date for the setting of Kiss of the Spider Woman because this way allows the reader to expound on the “universality” of the novel—that it can happen anywhere or any time since it also reflects similar events and situations worldwide. It also creates an atmosphere of a possibility of it happening to people outside Argentina (Drozdo 4). “In fact, the ultimate coupling of Molina and Valentin and the aftermath of their union symbolically destroy each of these dichotomies” (Drozdo 4). Their unity and oneness in the end is the catalyst that Puig used in order to “destroy” the limitations conditioned by each of their social norms. This very act of defiance is the main basis that Steffany Drozdo expounded on for her argument in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures. Valentin and Molina represent different hierarchies that their individual environments have formed them to take part in. Ultimately, their union is an act of defiance to the society that shaped what they were before the aftermath of the kiss. “In the end it is impossible to discern not only that which is homosexual or heterosexual, but also that which is masculine and feminine, as gender becomes confused and as the merger of Molina and Marta (the woman) creates a new sexual being” (Drozdo 6). This is very much connected to the aforementioned thesis statement: the Freudian view on sexuality is so roughly described that no definition can fully capture the essence of the new sexuality that has merged. ) Furthermore, reality and fantasy become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to delineate and, consequently, define either one. The film or movie aspect that Puig implemented in his writing style resurfaces in the ending as Valentin had a dream of Molina carrying Marta inside him (qtd. in World Literature 798). “Puig proposes that the irrational state is a closer approximation of reality than the rational state, because binary systems falsely perpetuate oppressive dichotomies. Ambiguity…enables the reader to find and consider a new dialectic” (Drozdo 7). It is not by placing one half of the dichotomy to a position of superiority and the other half below it, rather by deconstructing each of the elements of the dichotomy. In doing so, Puig dissects the inner substance of an unprivileged, marginalized group to help the reader redefine the group. Consequently, the identity that the group has taken place is not affiliated with the dichotomy it is arranged with as Velasco argues. Norman Lavers (1988) attests that Puig’s greatest artistic achievement in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shown in the structure of the novel and that the conversations between the two protagonists contain much of the bulk of the narrative (Tuss 1). The vagueness of the stand on homosexuality contributes to the inability of most to define and differentiate it with other sexes. Furthermore, the lovemaking scene is the part where they “exchange” selves. The scene also paves the way for the characters’ transcendence into what Valentin describes as an “existence without oppression” (qtd. in World Literature 775). This becomes another act of social defiance to achieve liberation from their individual identity. In a sense, to fully understand the multi-faceted characters in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, one must involve in a deconstruction of their identities. Essentially, Manuel Puig has a desire to deconstruct the culture that enforces its conceptions on everything from political dissent to sexual conduct to conventional gender roles. In doing so, he manages to displace the identities of his characters rather than ratify them in the binary system of dichotomies that the critic Velasco presents. Finally, this desire was accomplished with the aid of his writing styles in a non-narrative form with dialogical content and the allegorical reference to Hollywood movies into his plot—a stratagem which he ultimately sealed with a kiss. WORKS CITED An Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2000: 69-71 Encyclopedia of Latin American History. NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.1968: 22-25, 260-263 New Encyclopedia Britannica Vol.9:791 Allen, Bruce. The Hudson Review Vol. XXVII, No. 1. The Hudson Review, Inc. Spring, 1974. Alter, Robert. The New York Times Book Review. New York Times Company. 5 September 1976. Christ, Ronald. A Last Interview With Manuel Puig (1991). Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 846-849. —-. Fact and Fiction. Review 73. Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc. 1972. Fall, 1973: 49-54. Common Complaint. The Times Literary Supplement. USA: The Times Newspaper Ltd. 31 Aug. 1973: 1007. Clemons, Walter. Rev. of Kiss of the Spider Woman, by Manuel Puig. Newsweek, Inc., 1971. 25 Oct. 1971 Coover, Robert. Old, New, Borrowed, Blue. New York Times Book Review. April 22, 1979: 15-31. De Feo, Ronald. Laying the Evidence. National Review. NY: National Review, Inc. Vol. XXVII, No. 41. 29 October 1976: 1194-1195. Drozdo, Steffany. The Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. University of Kent. Dunne, Michael. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 1995). South Atlantic Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:16 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304 >. Fulks, Barbara P. Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña) Novel by Manuel Puig, 1976. Reference Guide to World Literature Vol. 2. USA: Thomson and Gale 2003: 1341. Gallagher, David P. in Modern Latin American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. —-. New York Times Book Review. NY: New York Times Book Review, 1973. 16 Dec 1973: 14-15. Herrick, William. Alienated Within and Without. The New Leader © 1982 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs Inc., Vol. LXV, No. 13. June 28, 1982: 19-20. Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Among the Stars (Exit Laughing) (1991). A Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 856. Mendelson, Phyllis Carmel and Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 5. Michigan: Gale Research CO., 1976: 354-356. Merrim, Stephanie. For a New (Psychological) Novel in the Works of Manuel Puig. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 12 No. 2 (Winter, 1984) pp. 141-157. Novel Corp., Brown University. 08/01/2009 21:22 . Mirsky, Mark Jay. Three to Tango. Book World—the Washington Post. 25 November 1973: 1. Park, Sarah Claiborne. A Review of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in the Hudson Review Vol. XXXII No. 4. NY: Hudson Review, Inc. (Winter 1979-1980): 575-577. Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 407-408. San Pedro, Teresa Ana. On Manuel Puig by Jonathan Tittler. Hispania Vol. 77 No.1 (March 1994): 74-75. Sorrentino, Gilbert. South American Fantasy, Obsession, and Soap Opera: ‘Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages’. Book World: The Washington Post, August 1989. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. pp. 1-2. 08/01/2009 21:24 . Tuss, Alex. Deconstructing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Men’s Studies Press. 22 March 2000 01/2009 . Williams, Raymond L. PUIG, Manuel. Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century Vol. 3: L-R. St. James Press, 1999: 610-611. Williams, Raymond L. A Review of “Pubis Angelical”. World Literature Today Vol. 55 No.1, Winter 1981: 70. Wood, Michael. “The Claims of Mischief”. The New York Review of Books Vol. XXVI Nos. 21 and 22. January 24, 2009: 43-47. Zimmerman, Shari. Kiss of the Spider Woman and the Web of Gender. Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 23 No. ½ (Nov. 1988). Pacific Coast Ancient and Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:19 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316690>. WORKS CONSULTED Borinsky, Alicia. Castration: Artifices, Notes on the Writing of Manuel Pug. The Georgia Review. ( ©1975 University of Georgia) Spring, 1975: 95-114. Byfonski, Dedria., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 10. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 420. Filer, Malva. Manuel Puig: Cae la Noche Tropical. Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 2. 1990: a Selection of Book Reviews, 1977-2001. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 1599. Krisman, Claire, ed. Contemporary Authors Volumes 45-48. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1974. 435. Stine, Jean ,. Gale Res

THE DISPLACEMENT OF IDENTITIES BY A KISS IN PUIG’S SPIDER WOMAN

By Leslie Marie G. Bayona, EN12 R17
Argumentative Research Paper No. 1, February 9, 2009

Manuel Puig showcases the dialogical¹conflict between Molina’s sexual tensions and Valentin’s political desires in Kiss of the Spider Woman to reflect the brutality of Argentine military regimes in that era in light of questions regarding homosexuality and the stand between individualism and the state.
The intrusion of films into Molina and Valentin’s conversations permeates through various literary levels. Firstly, it reflects Manuel Puig’s style of writing—he liberally sprinkles his plays with profuse references to mass entertainment products: these symbolize Molina’s obsession with fiction; his means of escaping the boredom of reality. Throughout the play, Molina shares his fantasy by narrating to Valentin the movie plots and describing the characters. In the process of doing so, his imagination flows freely, making up some of the details while adding his own characters. As they discuss the film, Molina envisions himself as the heroine in one of those cinemas and Valentin as his love interest. Aside from attracting attention to the effects of media on the middle and lower class society, Manuel Puig as the plot maker, uses this opportunity to create some sort of unifying force for the two otherwise disparate characters. Through their constructive conversation on films, Valentin and Molina have found a connection even though they experience different realities and express different views on it.

¹ dialogical—of relating to, or characterized by dialogue (Merriam-Webster).

To set the story straight, both characters are born with a complete set of male anatomical parts. Luis Molina is a middle-aged homosexual who is jailed for sexually corrupting a minor. Valentin Arregui, on the other hand, is a young activist who is jailed for publicly demonstrating his opposition on the current government of Argentina. Aside from individual public (or private) denouncement of male ego and lack thereof, both characters also have different worldly views. Molina is the male homosexual who feels he is a woman and along with that feeling comes a need for self-expression through his favorite films. Valentin is the heterosexual leftist who expresses himself in rhetoric of Marxist ideology. Meanwhile, Puig used the prison cell as the setting for Kiss of the Spider Woman because it reflects the oppression in Argentine culture and the duo’s powerlessness against it (Tuss 3). The moment Molina and Valentin were confined in this tiny cell, they are isolated from the other inmates and from the prying eyes of social scrutiny.
Puig develops the idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject themselves with the film’s characters. In a way, the retelling of the movies has become a medium for exposing

²somnambulism—an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed (Merriam-Webster).

their selves to each other. To note, revealing their innermost feelings is something they would not do otherwise if they were not in that situation of isolation from the rest of the world. With this, Molina is seen as the heroine and Valentin as the male love interest. This identification process is mainly regarded through the readers’ point of view depending on the reader’s own identity. Barbara P. Fulks in the Reference Guide to World Literature (3^rd Edition) accepts this notion and generalizes that the reader only sympathizes with the character he can understand clearly or someone whom he can relate to. Furthermore, that character elicits the reader’s sympathy mostly because of his or her gender and the reader’s ideology. But what if the reader is neither homosexual like Molina, nor heterosexual like Valentin? Would the reader still sympathize with any of the characters? The fact that Puig used a pair from the list of marginalized dichotomies as his protagonists creates the flaw in Fulks’ generalization.
On Puig’s Style and Structure
Robert Coover finds the way the novel is accomplished “not very innovative.” (Coover 15) Although the novel touches on the themes of repression and liberation, beauty versus goodness, strange or unusual women, somnambulism², heroism, love, fear, change and “desire for Hollywood endings,” according to Coover, the homosexual is simply an old movie buff and that there is not much substance other than the film synopsis of Molina’s telling. Coover also criticizes the novel’s translation into English by Thomas Colchie. He finds the rendition fairly adequate yet seems stiff and hasty and, therefore, calls for a more relaxed revision seeing as Puig’s translated work fails to capture the author’s easy colloquial flow and the voices of the two very different protagonists are not distinguished. But based on a personal approach, Robert Coover is disagreeable on two accounts. The first is his denouncement of Puig’s employment of film in his subplots as “not very innovative.” The use of movies as a motif for his novels has become his trademark style and the very core of his fiction. Therefore the implementation of movies as the general theme is clearly distinct and something original. In the first chapter Coming Attractions, Jonathan Tittler analyzes how Puig changes his writing style from the traditional narrative of modern issues. Unlike Coover, he finds the use of mass-entertainment products as “innovative” since it eliminates the hierarchy of the narrative. This way, it also attacks the society and its power structures. Also, in chapter four titled Odd Coupling, Tittler contrasts homosexuality as a social practice and revolution as a political activity while film as a culture and writing itself.
Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman analyzes the use of text and ideas in the novel. Here Michael Dunne defines the basic plot situation as “undeniably dialogic” while highlighting the symbolism of seemingly ordinary objects in the novel (Dunne 1). In doing so, he reveals the literal and figurative meanings of the materials to promote the overall thematic of Manuel Puig’s drama. In light of Holquist’s remarks, the author Puig can be seen to dialogically engage in political power like his characters (qtd. in Dunne 1). The main stylistic strategies of the novel consist of: overcoming boundaries of both the socio-political and aesthetic, meeting the other person as subjectivity equal to one’s own.
In a school review, Teresa Ana San Pedro of Montclair State College comments that Puig’s style allows his readers to respond in an intellectual and creative manner (San Pedro 74). This comment is not efficient since the level of response in readers vary indelibly. How the audiences react to the play is dependent on their capacity to take in what the characters talk about. For instance, if the readers cannot relate to the subject matter because their exposure to such is limited, their reactions toward the play cannot be considered intellectual or creative in nature. Furthermore, there might not be room for an intellectual or creative response (as San Pedro puts it) to take place since Puig’s manner of writing seems confusing to begin with.
Indeed Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but Clara Claiborne Park reiterates that Kiss of the Spider Woman is no mere concoction. She points out that there is no exposition at all and that the dialogue must work hard not only to develop the characters but also to tell the story. On the overall plot of the story, Park concludes that “The relationship which has made Valentin more of a woman has made Molina more of a man, and we recognize both these changes as a gain” (Park 576). True, there is no exposition but Puig makes up for the details of an exposition by interweaving fabrics of Molina’s and Valentin’s identities into their conversations. The dialogue is efficient yet somewhat confusing still, especially if the reader is not familiar with the films that Molina mentions. This may be what Park refers to as she stresses that the dialogue needs improvement.
Michael Wood shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is an example of Latin American fiction with a new stance, angle, tone, twist, and mode of narrative. “Movies are not true to its dreams of glamour it is usually associated with but to the emptiness and solitude the dreams are supposed to disguise” (Wood 43). Mr. Wood finds it a slightly more cheerful work compared to The Buenos Aires Affair because it concentrates more on the hidden truths rather than the acts of hiding that the main character in the other novel did. Puig is especially interested in the notion that homosexuals imitate the defects of heterosexuality. On another note, the plots are actually deeper than what they appear to be. As Valentin begins to appreciate the stories of the heroines and villains in the movies that Molina fabricate, he finds himself not only enjoying them as Molina does he gradually comes to see the rags of humanity in these tales—something that his extremist Marxism could not have taught him. In the end, after Molina and Valentin shares the kiss, Puig manages to reel away the story from becoming one of Molina’s romantic movies. The author avoids too much sentimentality by concocting something unpredictable and ends it that way.
On Novel Content
Raymond Williams finds a connection between Kiss of the Spider Woman and Manuel Puig’s other novel, Pubis Angelical, which is in both cases his characters deal with the sexuality of politics and the politics of sex (Williams 70). William Herrick exploits that Manuel Puig is a Marxist as he is Freudian: “Young people who embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity for any further exploration of their psyche” (Herrick 1). The values that Valentin has learned in Marxist ideology have somewhat encapsulated his thoughts. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men grappling with their suffering is “exceedingly moving” and “brilliantly done”.
In a review Allen Josephs finds that Kiss of the Spider Woman as in the previous experiments that Manuel Puig made in his other novels, things are not as simple as they first seem. The mutual fantasies and dreams begin to create a subconscious bridge between the unlikely psychic castaways Mr. Ramirez and Larry in Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. This ability to connect polar personalities with a mutual means is also seen in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Josephs adds that Puig’s characteristic ‘virtuosity’ has not failed him and because of this, devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt appreciate his work (Josephs 9). However, the novels reliance on psychology and too much dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of the absurd than of his earlier passionately Latin ones. Like the characters in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, the fates that Valentin and Molina eventually met reveal the sad truth about life in Argentina.
As Gilbert Sorrentino views it, Kiss of the Spider Woman is developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy³ between two unlikely companions. It is also a “structural failure,” very much like his previous novel, and pretty much for the same reason: the conclusion comments on and ‘explains’ the otherwise mysterious text. In doing, Sorrentino believes that Manuel Puig has sabotaged the richly ambivalent nature that the author has strung up until that point altogether dispersing the aura of distinction that had stirred up in the dialogical plot. It is as if, as Sorrentino puts it, Puig had lost his nerve and decided to serve his general audience what they have had before. In this case, he gives them a book that “before it is read by anyone…been read by everyone” (Sorrentino 1). This critique also admits that “it’s too bad” since Puig does have something to show and tell from his wonderful sense that the essential element of life is its serious “things.” But most of these are already considered as impartial ingredients of the daily forms of drama such as soap opera, sitcoms, and B-movies. Thus, his novels fail because Puig holds his content or the core substance of his stories simply as it were, a set of ideas.
Eroticism and its Environment
In A Last Interview with Manuel Puig, Ronald Christ assimilates one of the main topics of the novel which is: “Can people change their eroticism after a certain age?” Manuel Puig believes it is impossible, saying “those sexual fantasies have crystallized during our adolescence and imprison you forever.” (Christ 850). In that cell, there are two men but Christ finds that it “is just a plaque on the surface.” What the characters are, therefore, are two men and two women. Quoting Theodore Roszack, “the woman most desperately in need of liberation is the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.” This applies greatly to the stoic Valentin who at first does not feel comfortable with the idea of a discourse on his sexual identity. Molina, on the other hand, uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him by the new times. He takes the opportunity to become the underground heroine in real life. Molina’s homosexuality is a product of the revolutionary. It is during this new age that everything feels more liberated but still confined, though subtly, within social norms and expectations.
The general regard on sexuality is greatly influenced by social gender than biological sex. The first one is viewed as the way people see it as a daily norm that guides how males and females should particularly act or behave as opposed to the latter where they are just given what they are naturally born with. In other words a man is a man because he acts like one and not that he is born with a physical anatomy of a man. But gender is not simply the natural consequence of anatomy as nature planned. It is a large social construction of patterns “we adopt, scripts we read, movie roles we imitate” (Zimmerman 3). Shari Zimmerman shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is something that invites us to imagine identity in a new perspective, to ‘escape the web of gender.’
Great Latin American literature enlists Manuel Puig along the pages with José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although Puig’s fiction is greatly simulated by political and social tensions in Latin America, he and his contemporaries show commonalities: experimentation with the literary form, concern with unconscious and irrational forces of human life and lastly, portraying the lower classes of Latin America. Manuel Puig’s works are mostly narrative but some of his contemporary works reveal a dialogic medium. This tactic allows individuals to supplant emotions with their film counterparts, providing the room for readers to relate with the characters in retail fiction. However bold his ideas are, Puig’s plots (as in Kiss of the Spider Woman) cannot help but resemble clichéd serials and detective stories. On one hand, most critics do find Puig’s treatment of complex issues like politics, sexual power, homosexuality, and violence as superficial. But generally, his works are regarded as insightful and moving (CLC: Vol. XXVIII 369).
Character Dichotomies
Kiss of the Spider Woman creatively illustrates the ways in which the customs of authority and the socially-induced modes of thinking shape and inhibit individual experiences. In this novel, the author Puig focuses on the restricted psychosexual identities of the two men. Shari Zimmerman of Hofstra University incorporates the scripted piece as a means through which the two men, Molina and Valentin, “read each other, reveal themselves, become friends, and finally lovers.” (Zimmerman 3) Aside from this, Zimmerman considers the work as an exploration of traditional male behavior and customs. The novel also provides a critique of male and female patterns that challenge biological sex and gender issues.
Critics David Bost and Jonathan Tittler concluded that Puig’s purpose in creating his most famous work Kiss of the Spider Woman is to give voice and mainstream for the acceptance of the previously marginalized groups (Drozdo 1). Despite the fact that Manuel Puig particularly chose a homosexual and a political revolutionary as his main protagonists, his goal is much more universal. Puig simply uses the two as representatives of the other unprivileged groups. The most prevalent dichotomies of Western civilization: man/woman, good/evil, heterosexual/homosexual etc. One half of the dichotomy necessarily relies in the other for its definition. According to Derrida, “they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.” Therefore, there is no difference between the signified and the signifier (Derrida 23).
According to critics Maria Mercedes Velasco, Elias Miguel Muñoz, and Fernando Reati, there is a strong binary system incorporated in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Drozdo 1). Both characters, Molina and Valentin, have different ideologies that they developed individually. With this in mind, Maria Mercedes Velasco argues that the characters of Molina and Valentin show a “projection of Marianism and masculinity” (Velasco) by directing their identities through stereotyping Woman. She proposes the existence of a dichotomy of man and woman within the novel. She believes that the acceptance of this binary system, wherein masculinity and femininity is defined and entwined, provides a sense of wholeness or completeness within the novel.
Meanwhile, Elias Miguel Muñoz proposes that Manuel Puig entertains the idea of dual-centered ideology: “by the end of the novel, Valentin has liberated the ‘woman’ whom he carries inside of him.” This ideology presents the possibility of Puig’s Utopian liberation wherein the possibility of a new sexual being is entertained. However, Steffany Drozdo disagrees with these two critics saying, “it is precisely these two binary ideological structures that Puig destroys in Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
The two critics say that Puig uses the dichotomies to create a totality that harmonizes, incorporates, and equalizes both parties. However, in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Steffany Drozdo argues that it is precisely this structure that Puig destroys in his novel.
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, both Molina and Valentin accept the ‘inadequate’ meaning of the other’s ideology. Valentin, a heterosexual, enters into a homosexual union with Molina without ‘becoming’ a homosexual. Molina, although uninterested in political subversion, agrees to take part in Valentin’s political activity without actually subscribing to his particular ideology. This is one ambiguity present with regard to all violent hierarchies: the actions of both men contradict their personal identities and beliefs. (Drozdo 6)
Homosexuality and heterosexuality, being a popular and prevalent dichotomy in society, both depend on each other for their definition. Generally, one is defined by using the other. This is similar to the character Valentin as he reveals his inner self in order present a sexual identity that contrasts that of Molina’s. In a sense, it is by defining Molina’s homosexuality that Valentin’s heterosexuality is contrasted and then revealed. The analysis of social dichotomies is where the aforementioned Freudian views on sexuality are blurred. In a sense, the characterization of man defines the woman and consequently, the homosexual to the heterosexual.
Puig did not implement a specific date for the setting of Kiss of the Spider Woman because this way allows the reader to expound on the “universality” of the novel—that it can happen anywhere or any time since it also reflects similar events and situations worldwide. It also creates an atmosphere of a possibility of it happening to people outside Argentina (Drozdo 4). “In fact, the ultimate coupling of Molina and Valentin and the aftermath of their union symbolically destroy each of these dichotomies” (Drozdo 4). Their unity and oneness in the end is the catalyst that Puig used in order to “destroy” the limitations conditioned by each of their social norms. This very act of defiance is the main basis that Steffany Drozdo expounded on for her argument in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures.
Valentin and Molina represent different hierarchies that their individual environments have formed them to take part in. Ultimately, their union is an act of defiance to the society that shaped what they were before the aftermath of the kiss. “In the end it is impossible to discern not only that which is homosexual or heterosexual, but also that which is masculine and feminine, as gender becomes confused and as the merger of Molina and Marta (the woman) creates a new sexual being” (Drozdo 6). This is very much connected to the aforementioned thesis statement: the Freudian view on sexuality is so roughly described that no definition can fully capture the essence of the new sexuality that has merged. ) Furthermore, reality and fantasy become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to delineate and, consequently, define either one. The film or movie aspect that Puig implemented in his writing style resurfaces in the ending as Valentin had a dream of Molina carrying Marta inside him (qtd. in World Literature 798).
“Puig proposes that the irrational state is a closer approximation of reality than the rational state, because binary systems falsely perpetuate oppressive dichotomies. Ambiguity…enables the reader to find and consider a new dialectic” (Drozdo 7). It is not by placing one half of the dichotomy to a position of superiority and the other half below it, rather by deconstructing each of the elements of the dichotomy. In doing so, Puig dissects the inner substance of an unprivileged, marginalized group to help the reader redefine the group. Consequently, the identity that the group has taken place is not affiliated with the dichotomy it is arranged with as Velasco argues.
Norman Lavers (1988) attests that Puig’s greatest artistic achievement in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shown in the structure of the novel and that the conversations between the two protagonists contain much of the bulk of the narrative (Tuss 1). The vagueness of the stand on homosexuality contributes to the inability of most to define and differentiate it with other sexes. Furthermore, the lovemaking scene is the part where they “exchange” selves. The scene also paves the way for the characters’ transcendence into what Valentin describes as an “existence without oppression” (qtd. in World Literature 775). This becomes another act of social defiance to achieve liberation from their individual identity.
In a sense, to fully understand the multi-faceted characters in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, one must involve in a deconstruction of their identities. Essentially, Manuel Puig has a desire to deconstruct the culture that enforces its conceptions on everything from political dissent to sexual conduct to conventional gender roles. In doing so, he manages to displace the identities of his characters rather than ratify them in the binary system of dichotomies that the critic Velasco presents. Finally, this desire was accomplished with the aid of his writing styles in a non-narrative form with dialogical content and the allegorical reference to Hollywood movies into his plot—a stratagem which he ultimately sealed with a kiss.

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