Male Characters in Manuel Puig's Novel Boquitas Pintadas - Essay Example

Farzeela Faisal Allwriting Standard Writer Dec- 9th- 2005 Portrayal of the male characters in Manuel Puig’s novel Boquitas Pintadas Puig’s novels are made up of voices that create reality. The characters evoke a world and situate the reader within their context by way of dialogues, letters, and monologues. Through the dialogues (which many times hide more than they reveal) the characters are linked with empirical reality: in their consciousness they project tensions, conflicts, and memories of the real world. The characters are represented and presented by their own communicational style and finished words within which they can build their own universe. They express themselves through the use of lyrics from tangos to film texts, and, curiously, such expression in turn creates them as characters. The novels are transformed into games of mirrors, and the narrator becomes impersonal or tends to disappear completely. The beauty of Puig’s work is in the narrator of the novels who being the mythical creator of the universe remains a shadow. He hides behind a game of masks tied to the myths of mass culture. The transformation of the story into myth increases the whole range of possibilities that did not otherwise exist, even while potentialities can still be activated by memory. Puig usually focus on the stories of a particular middle class, which is eager to climb socially. The characters he creates desire to violate social norms. Models (or masks) are proposed, and they fabricate their own myths by way of their readings of “an already given mythological sub universe.” (Bella Jozef, 1991) Boquitas Pintadas Translated as “Heartbreak Tango” Each chapter of “Heartbreak Tango” is headed by a quotation from a tango lyric, a movie or a radio commercial. Perhaps it is because of this reason; Puig has named it as “Heartbreak Tango”. The quotations deploy a charming culture with a simple blend of philosophy. A radio commercial for toothpaste puts it in a nutshell: “As long as you can smile, success can be yours.” The tango lyrics are more realistic, for their devotion to passion and success is frequently undermined by an act or insensitive uncertainty. The tangos revolve around one thing: “The pursuit of passion and glamour is man’s most natural and valid activity.” Its truth will be discussed in the upcoming paragraphs as the whole novel revolves around the story of a single male character portrayed by Puig. As one tango says: The shadows on the dance floor, this tango, bring sad memories to mind, let us dance and think no more while my satin dress shines like a tear. Heartbreak Tango demonstrates with relentless cruelty that “to dance and think no more” is not as easy as all it seems to be, for it’s as hard to live up to the ideals of the chapter headings as it is to abandon them. The novel charts, among others, the exemplary life of one Nelida Fernandez, whose “slim figure” and “stunning dignity” earned her the title of ‘Miss Spring’ in a small town in Argentina in 1936, and who by 1947 is married in Buenos Aires to a boring auctioneer, too poor to afford furniture, yet still incurably dreaming, amidst her household chores, of Juan Carlos Etchepare, the man with the “face with no flaws” she once loved, and who now has died of Tuber Colossus (TB). Life is not like the radio play “The Wounded Captain”, where a wounded French captain falls candidly in love with a peasant girl. No such knight sweeps Nelida to the altar, and she must make to live with her emotionless husband. Nor is life like the radio ad, for there is not a smile in the world that can disperse the dirty dishes and the screaming children. The gap between the dazzling world of the media and the reality of small-town mediocrity is unbridgeable. The inhabitants of the provincial town, which “Heartbreak Tango” depicts, are in a sense typical characters of popular romances. They identify with such magazines as Feminine World and Elegant Paris, with the tangos and the commercials, the radio-novels and the movies. Puig inverts the wish-fulfilling rules of his chosen genre by contrasting its assumptions with the mean reality of the small town. Puig has forced us to share and believe in the impossible passions of Nelida Fernandez and her friends. The depth of “Heartbreak Tango” is principally achieved through Puig’s sensitivity, his ability to identify with his characters yet keeping just the right controlled distance from them. It has been said that the book is a parody, but that underestimates the balance between distance and compassion that Puig achieves. His characters are camp, but they are not camped up, and their fundamental humanity cannot be denied. (David Gallagher, 1973) As Boquitas Pintadas, has been described as “a largely female-oriented novel” (Bacarisse), therefore it is a matter of difficulty and sensitivity to portray the domination of male protagonists over female ones. The only male character on which the whole novel is based upon is of Juan Carlos who is a self-styled ladies man; always fall in love with one after another woman. There are a total of four women in his life, a loving and caring mother, and a sister who always keep an eye on him, and the two loves of his life. Both are opposite of each other in moral as well as in character. One is innocent and the other seductive. The turning point occurs when Juan knew he is suffering from TB, and all the protagonists lament Juan’s cruel destiny to such an extent that they forget their own grieves and worries in front of him. The one and only male character, which is focused by Puig, is of Juan, who considers himself as a hero. Infact Puig has portrayed him as a cheapster of streets who is a playboy as well as a gambler, and has afforded to maintain two relationships at a time. That shows about the dual and complex personality of Juan, influenced by only women. Puig has portrayed him as a cheap and deceitful lad but at the same time handsome enough to opposite sex. Puig wanted his readers to realize the power of love in a middle class society, where there is reality bites everywhere instead of dreams, and building and maintaining two love affairs in such a society where there is hunger and poverty is a great thing. Actually Puig wanted his readers to understand the survival of life in slum environment. He has shown his protagonist Juan as a courageous young hero who despite of living in poverty and above all in sickness, not only successfully maintains his relationships, but also at the same time leaves an everlasting impression upon his loved ones. Puig has shown Juan’s life getting worst day by day and so as his illness. So, for a treatment when he leaves his town, he lacks even that much money to get hospitalized in a better hospital, furthermore he loses all the leftover money in gambling. Juan unable to recover from TB looses hope and dies in the end. Letters or intimate diaries are familial genres that can be considered extra literary. The exchange of letters among characters constitutes one of Manuel Puig’s favorite devices. It seems to be a direct way of giving life itself to the characters: each can tell his or her story, totally or partially, but is shown as he or she wishes to be seen, which is not as it always is in reality. The letters serve as a narrative device and are taken as the object of another language, as a form of ideological concretion. Heartbreak Tango makes use of letters that are directed to someone who does not read them and that are answered by yet someone else. The reader is totally engrossed in the scheme of the plot, in the fascination of the game, into which suspense is introduced: the rewriting of the letters of Juan Carlos’s mother that were not written by her. The enjoyment of the text is a result of that suspense, of the connected discovery of a secret. Puig in the form of Juan has shown passions that become diluted and dissipated in the hope for a Prince Charming. Only death will free them from limitations and from the vicious cycle. Facing death, they understand that they have lived heroically, that they have created a monumental existence among the artificial paradises created by society. We can say that in a paradoxical way, Puig portrayal through ‘Juan’ has created the mutable forms of the “mythic word” which demonstrates the impossibility of authentically living the myth (a world without restrictions) in the present, in a way in which those characters will never overcome the corrosion of time and cultural immobility, which is resented by a society directed by set notions regarding morality, religion, and sex. (Bella Jozef, 1991) In short Puig has represented a man who has his own perceptions of life and one thing that is important to him is ‘women’ in his life. Juan is such a man who bothers no body to care for him; he is not concerned if anyone does not acknowledge him as a hero. He is among those few who themselves acknowledges and appreciates their own capabilities. Such people consider themselves to be heroic in nature and possess a hero within them. Even in the worst circumstances people like Juan manage their best to survive till the end and so did Juan. The writer has actually established a particular environment predicting middle-lower and middle-middle class. All that Puig wants the readers to visualize is the courage and determination of Juan to survive and survive with all the best he can have, till the end. He is a true romantic person and along with a passionate dual personality he manages to live with his love affairs following a devastating health, which is getting him into trouble day by day, but he doesn’t bother it at all until his condition gets out of his control. We can provide some examples from Heartbreak Tango of elements endowed with mythic meaning: the day of the spring festival, when the entangled conflict between Nene and Cecilia developed and desire was established (Mabel and Nene versus Juan Carlos); the photo albums that emphasize a mythological behavior in modern man, whose trace is observed in the desire to secure the distant past and to reencounter the same intensity with which something is lived for the first time, the institutions of pleasure, the product of the society of abundance and of what Puig portrays his characters. (Bella Jozef, 1991) With Heartbreak Tango Manuel Puig has set new limits for the novel in Spanish, tracing a sector of its course in which the genre turns upon itself, places its object at a distance, and circumscribes it, escaping its image and pointing at it, revealing without abandoning it, but undermining with a tender smile the density of its convention of characters. (Severo Sarduy, 1991) Work Cited Bella Jozef, 1991, Manuel Puig: the Masks and the Myths, World Literature Today. Vol: 65, no. 4, p 647. Accessed from Questia Online Library. David Gallagher, 1973, a dreamer caught in the reality of small town mediocrity. Accessed from < http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/08/13/specials/puig-tango.html> Savero Sarduy, 1991, A Propos of Manuel Puig, World Literature Today Vol: 65, no. 4, p 625. Accessed from Questia Online Library. Read More