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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2023
Manuel Puig was born, as he loved to say, ‘in a little town in the pampas’. This was true, but he was born again in a moviehouse where the little town disappeared, engulfed in a pampas of dreams. Those public dreams he made private. He spent more time dreaming in a movie than living the life of the town.
Guillermo Cabrera InfanteNew Horizons
If many of Onetti's novels and stories are set in the fictional hinterland of Santa María, imagined, and more important as a symbolic structure than as an actual place, Puig's first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth is set in a much more concrete reality. This is Coronel Vallejos, clearly based on the town in the Province of Buenos Aires where Puig was brought up, General Villegas. And if Onetti was to effect a radical shift in literature from this region, then Puig was to do the same though in a very different way. To quote one of the foremost Argentine contemporary writers and critics, Ricardo Piglia (2004): ‘Puig fue más allá de la vanguardia; demostró que la renovación técnica y la experimentación no son contradictorias con las formas populares’ [Puig went further than the vanguard; he showed that technical transformation and experimentation are not contradictory to popular forms].
Puig was to conjure up a very different mood. Returning to Piglia: ‘El gran tema de Puig es el bovarismo. El modo en que la cultura de masas educa los sentimientos’ [Puig's great theme is bovarism. The way in which mass culture teaches feelings]. The parallel with Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which depicts the world of a small town petit bourgeois wife who colours her drab, boring life with the images from romantic novels, is well drawn, and if Flaubert famously declared ‘Madame, Bovary, c’est moi’, although this is clearly contentious, Puig can more honestly say that the characters in this novel are himself and othersfrom his early years. Staying with the French master, this is L’education sentimentale of these people, now no longer constrained by the limits of the novel, but much more influenced by cinema, and radio and newspaper serials.
In his obituary on Puig, Alfred MacAdam (1990: 66) maintains that the most important innovation that Puig brought to the Latin American novel is his frequent use of the unseen narrator.
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