Kiss of the Spider Woman
Kiss of the Spider Woman
by Manuel Puig
THE LITERARY WORK
A Novel Set in an Argentine Prison in 1975; published in Spanish (as El beso de la mujer araña) in 1976, in English in Î97B,
SYNOPSIS
A gay male and a political revolutionary become friends while sharing an Argentine prison cell during a period of domestic military violence.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Born December 28, 1932, in General Villegas, a town in the province of Buenos Aires, Manuel Puig Delledonne developed an early love of storytelling when his mother began taking him to the movies at the age of four. Twenty years later, after attending the school of architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, Puig was awarded a scholarship to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Discovering that he was not temperamentally suited for the occupation, Puig began to write film scripts while dividing his time between Europe and New York. He moved back to Argentina in 1967 and turned some of these screenwriting attempts into his initial pieces of literary fiction. In 1968 he published his first novel, The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth, which launched him onto the international literary scene. Betrayal was followed by Heartbreak Tango, The Buenos Aires Affair, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, the novel that established him as a major Latin American writer. During the 1970s and 1980s Puig continued to write novels while living in Mexico, New York, and Brazil; he died July 22, 1990, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
The decline of Argentina: an overview
After World War II Argentina struggled to regain its economic position as the most productive Latin American nation. It had slipped to third place behind Brazil and Mexico by the 1970s, and was fighting massive inflation. Society became polarized between the wealthy elite, whose assets were safely in foreign banks, and an increasingly impoverished mafority. The nation’s steady economic decline toppled regime after regime—Argentina had 13 different governments between 1944 and 1976—spawning violence in the streets and halls of power. It was a rapid, embarrassing descent into chaos for a nation aspiring to European sophistication and international repute.
Kiss of the Spider Woman takes place against the violent backdrop of mid-1970s Argentina, but the terror and unrest of the period had its roots in the earlier government of Juan Domingo Perón (1946-55). Perón rose to power in the aftermath of World War II and during a period of economic crisis, when much of the country, especially its working class, had still not recovered from the Great Depression. Together with his charismatic second wife, Maria Eva Duarte, or “Evita,” Perón empowered Argentina’s urban
Doctrine of National Security
To understand the long-standing and strident opposition of Ongania and the Argentine military in general to left-wing “subversive”’ politics and Marxist union activity, it is necessary to recognize the influence of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War (the competition between the United States and Soviet Union for world leadership). The United States saw global politics as a battle between capitalist democracy and communism, and took care to train and assist military personnel in Latin American countries, including Argentina, in battling Marxist “subversion. Argentine military leaders, anxious to prove themselves loyal to powerful U.S. interests, believed that vigilance against communism excused leaders from observing democratic procedure. This became known as the “Doctrine of National Security.” The Doctrine of National Security justified the imprisonment of leftists by the military throughout post-World War II Argentina; it would also excuse the torture and murder of thousands of Argentines during the “Dirty War” that was to engulf the nation by the mid-1970s.
labor interests—increasing wages, enforcing labor legislation, supporting and creating unions—at the expense of the nation’s aristocratic and industrialist classes. His government also nationalized many important industries and services. Perón accomplished much in his years as president, allowing the underprivileged a chance to prosper in ways they never had before. At the same time, however, his generosity towards the country’s poorer classes not only alienated the country’s wealthy, but also sparked the worst inflation in decades and, some claimed, led to a shattered economy. Furthermore, in the eyes of his many detractors, Perón was a fascist dictator who resorted to force to quiet opposition; many of his opponents suffered exile, imprisonment, and torture. Once his regime began to lose control of the economy, increased class strife followed. A confrontation with the powerful Catholic Church as well as the death of the popular Evita also contributed to Perón’s fall. In 1955 he resigned from office rather than face an inevitable coup or civil war, leaving workers vulnerable to concerted military efforts to eradicate their recent political and economic gains. Despite his exile in Madrid, Perón’s voice was heard for the next 14 years, as Argentines wrestled with his legacy, and as he prepared to return.
Military oppression and guerrilla terrorism
In 1966 the right-wing General Juan Carlos Ongania took control of Argentina as the result of a military coup that deposed Arturo Illia, Argentina’s fifth president in the years following Perón’s resignation and exile. Unlike his predecessors, whose governments had been provisional, Ongania initiated a heavy-handed program of reform and proclaimed the arrival of “The Argentine Revolution.” He closed Congress, suspended legal guarantees, routed the universities of his ideological opponents, suppressed political parties, got rid of his political enemies, and made aggressive overtures to foreign capital. Most of all, he tried to stifle Argentina’s troublesome labor movement, the bastion of Peronism, a vaguely defined philosophy of social democracy and workers’ rights that looked nostalgically to the reign of the former president. In 1967 Ongania instituted a two-year wage freeze.
Ongania’s attempts to stifle all leftist movements, in the vociferous unions and elsewhere, may have contributed to the rise of guerrilla terrorism in the country. Deprived of a legitimate political outlet to express its discontent, the Left struck back against government violence with violence of its own. By early 1970 a Peronist guerrilla group, the Montoneros, was gaining strength in the Buenos Aires area; their first mafor act of terrorism was to kidnap and assassinate former president Pedro Aramburu on May 29, 1970—debate is ongoing about whether the government itself killed Aramburu to frame the Left, and whether the Montonero leaders were in reality government agents in the first place. Whoever actually committed the crime, this assassination spelled the end of Ongania’s presidency. More importantly, however, it marked the beginning of the increasing political violence and terrorism that would characterize 1970s Argentina:
It was not only the labor opposition that doomed Ongania’s regime. There was also a shocking rise in political violence, such as clandestine torture and execution by the military government and kidnapping and assassination by the revolutionary left. … A deadly toxin had entered the Argentine body politic. There was now a revolutionary left, committed to traumatizing the nation by violence against those they identified as the oppressors: the military and the police, along with their collaborators, the well-tailored executives of the multinationals. And the government struck back with violence of its own. Civil war had broken out.
(Skidmore and Smith, p. 99)
Automotive union unrest
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, Valentin is arrested in 1972 for “promoting disturbances with strikers at two automotive assembly plants” (Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman, p. 148). Valentin’s imprisonment makes little sense without the knowledge that the Argentine automotive unions were hotbeds of civic unrest and Marxist agitation, and that the Argentine government saw these unions as distinct threats. It seems clear that many of the lowerclass workers were not Marxists—Marxist ideas were brought to the movement by middle-class leaders, radical Catholic priests, and serious revolutionaries. In Puig’s novel, the middle-class student Valentin fits the mold of an actual dangerous political agitator rather well.
While 1972, the year of Valentin’s arrest, saw no mafor labor unrest in Argentina’s automotive industry, the years immediately prior to it had; at the city of Córdoba, strikes by disgruntled auto workers drew the attention of the entire nation. The Argentine automotive industry began its mafor growth in 1954 at Córdoba when the company Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA) started to manufacture automobiles rather than just assemble them. Four years later another Argentine company, SIAM Di Telia, a large steel manufacturer, also began to produce cars. The 1958 election of Argentine president Arturo Frondizi brought to the nation the new policy of encouraging foreign investment, and the two automakers were quickly joined by a host of European and U.S. manufacturers, including Citroen, FIAT, and Ford. Over the years, the automobile workers’ unions grew more and more militant and powerful, and waged at times what amounted to economic war against the nation’s industrial and multinational business elite.
The first strike at Córdoba occurred at the IKA plant in 1959 over pay raises. This was followed by another in 1963, in which workers protesting layoffs took some of the administrative staff hostage and seized control of the factory. IKA’s U.S.-born president acceded instantly to the strikers’ demands to rehire those laid off, and the hostages were released; he then retaliated immediately by locking the workers out for ten days and firing those responsible for the strike. A similar situation transpired at SIAM. SIAM automotive workers enjoyed good working conditions and were extremely well paid by Argentine standards, but the workers protested when SIAM tried to pay them in company bonds during the 1962-63 recession. Attempts at meeting some sort of agreement failed—the Peronist-inspired workers refused to give way and at one point resorted to destroying factory equipment—and eventually the company let go half its workers and shut down many of its branch plants. In 1966, during a serious downturn in sales, there was more trouble at the IKA plant and once again the workers seized control in protest over staff reductions. Argentina was facing a recession at the time, and IKA was adamant about reducing the number of its employees. Some of those who were ultimately laid off set bombs and pelted the houses of IKA executives.
In 1969 a mafor labor dispute at Córdoba grew to national proportions. Including all the associated industries that sprang up around the manufacture of cars, buses, and railroad cars, the automotive industry in Córdoba employed around 50,000 people at the time of the cordobazo, as the unrest came to be known. That number was down significantly from what it might have been; at the beginning of the decade, Córdoba made half of all the cars produced in Argentina, but ten years later it made only one-fifth. Part of the reason for this shift was that union leaders and members in the city had a reputation for being aggressive Marxists manufacturers preferred to take their business elsewhere rather than deal with this element.
Many of the autoworkers were young and ambitious—especially the students working in the factories—and saw their jobs in the factories as stepping-stones to higher education and better prospects; when hard times hit, these workers tended to be resentful of their thwarted ambitions. Some were already unhappy about the foreign ownership of many of the factories and had their eyes on revolution.
The cordobazo began on May 19, 1969, as some 14,000 workers and students took to the streets. Ignited by specific policies, such as management’s decision to do away with the “English Saturday” (by which workers were paid for 48 hours of work but worked 44, staying only until noon on Saturday), the outbreak is usually seen more generally as the expression of a “restlessness and aggression nurtured by a generation of inflation and mistrust for government” (Rock, p. 350). For two days, rioters and military police battled in the streets, and 16 people died before order was more or less restored. These deaths were a discredit to the army, which was perceived as having acted too hastily in firing on the crowd. The federal government played up the unrest, calling Córdoba a city under siege and, in the eyes of certain Peronists, trying to scare the middle class with tales of potential civil war: “State-controlled television channels kept showing the same few burning buildings and exaggerated the reports of street clashes” (Lewis, p. 380). There were, however, some legitimate reasons for the military complaints—a number of autoworkers had been devising Molotov cocktails and other weapons in the plants, preparing for violent protest. The cordobazo frightened the government because it demonstrated, among other things, the power of the masses and the extent of their discontent. The fallout contributed to a mood that cost military strongman and president Juan Carlos Ongania his job.
For the labour movement it [the cordobazo] represented a culmination of a long history of popular insurrections in Argentina… . The police were forced to retreat in the face of mass violence, and had the arming of the masses been ensured, a revolutionary situation could have resulted. Within the popular camp the Cordobazo acted as a catalyst for radical transformations and the emergence of solid politico-military organizations. New forms of struggle were popularized and a democratic anti-bureaucratic consciousness became widespread. In short, it led to the formation of a new mass vanguard.
(Munck et al., p. 174)
A “second cordobazo” (known popularly as the “viborazo”) hit the city the following year on March 12. This time workers at the city’s five FIAT plants were the primary agitators, and were joined by the utilities union, whose members blacked out the city, adding greatly to the confusion. Heavily armed policemen were called in to stop the looting and violence in the darkened city, an act that again weakened support for the president. The uproar contributed to the fall of Ongania’s successor, General Roberto Levingston. General Alejandro Lanusse, the new president, called in the army to deal with the October 1971 unrest and took steps to suppress the troublesome unions. His government lasted only months and was replaced by that of the democratically elected Héctor Cámpora
UNREST IN ARGENTINA: THE MAJOR PLAYERS
Guerrilla Movements
Montoneros. Leftist/Peronist, until Perón threw them out in May 1974; derived support from urban centers in east Argentina, especially around the capital. After the split with Perón, attacked right-wing military and political figures, as well as leaders of the federally-authorized union (CGT, below), which diverged from its constituent labor movements; in some circles, held to have been controlled by Argentine intelligence forces.
ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army). Non-Peronist, based in Córdoba; derived support from workers, students, and peasants from interior of country; kidnapped FIAT’s director in 1971 and demanded that $1 million in food and clothing be given to Cordoba’s poor and unemployed in return for his release.
Military Organizations
AAA (Argentine Anti communist Alliance). Right-wing; indirectly supported by federal police; responsible for disproportionately large number of killings and disappearances
Mano (Hand). Right-wing, formed around 1970, allegedly by off-duty police; engaged in kidnappings and executions of diplomats and of Peronist and leftist-affiliated civilians.
Unions
CGT (General Worker’s Confederation). Labor organization established in 1930; by 1954 was the most powerful union in the country and the bureaucratic mainstay of Perón’s political authority; in 1970s closed ranks with Perón regime against left; weakened after death of Perón in 1974, the CGT was abolished after the military coup of 1976 but was reinstated in 1981.
SITRAC-SITRAM. Largest radical, non-Peronist alliance of autoworkers based in Córdoba.
CGE (General Economic Confederation). Federally established organization of employers convened to bargain collectively with the CGT; established as sole representation for employers and consolidated under Peronist authority in 1951; later closed ranks with Perón and CGT in 1974 purging of left.
who made it clear that he would serve as a stand-in until Juan Perón was ready to run for president. Perón was elected in 1973, to the delight of the unions.
Perón’s swan song
Between 1970 and 1975, during which period the events in Kiss of the Spider Woman take place, Perón regained his influence in Argentine politics, at first through his ideological sponsorship of left-wing union, student, and other protest movements, and then through the office of president, which he held from 1973 to 1974. In 1970 the still-exiled Perón told the French magazine Africasia that he had authorized his followers to begin a violent revolution in Argentina: “Violence already reigns and only more violence can destroy it” (Perón in So-bel, p. 13). Many of the various guerrilla movements that sprang to life in the 1970s called themselves “Peronist,” and the former leader openly sponsored several of them. Perón’s 1973 return to power only escalated the level of violence in Argentina. In an attempt to “purify” the movement, right-wing and left-wing Peronists assassinated one another in rapid succession and wreaked havoc throughout the country with their bombs and kidnappings. Perón tried to put an end to this with an anti-terrorism bill, passed on January 25, 1974, that “virtually doubled prison sentences for convicted kidnappers, conspirators and armed extremists, and turned over internal security functions to the federal police rather than local law enforcement officers” (Sobel, p. 103). He also outlawed several prominent guerrilla movements and sponsored crackdowns on left-wing organizations and publications. After his death in 1974, when his wife and vice-president, María Estela (Isabel) Martínez Perón, became president, guerrilla warfare on both sides grew so pervasive that she declared a state of siege. She was ousted in 1976 by armed forces whose military regime would prove one of the cruelest in the world.
Descent into hell: 1976
The ouster of Isabel Perón in 1976—the year in which Kiss of the Spider Woman was published—signaled the beginning of what came to be known as Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Under General Jorge Rafael Videla, the military tortured and killed at least 9,000 people, though many sources say that the real total is easily three times that number. Most of these people simply “disappeared,” and their fates remain unknown to this day. Discoveries of mass graves and underwater burials, and tales of both living and dead people being thrown out of airplanes into the ocean testify to the horror of the time. Puig’s tale of two prisoners—one tortured, the other fatally betrayed—during the early stages of this reign of terror gives individual expression to likely victims of this dirty war.
Prison life
The novel’s prisoners, Molina and Valentin, share a tiny cell, survive on miserable food, sleep on cardboard mattresses, and must be taken to the bathroom. Because their chance of survival was greater, they were fortunate compared to those imprisoned after the 1976 coup. For many post-coup prisoners in the pozos (pits) or jails of Argentina, life became an unbearable horror, relieved only by death.
The experience typically began when the captives, kidnapped from their homes or workplaces by groups of heavily armed federal agents, entered the prison wearing hoods over their heads. These hoods would remain in place for the duration of the incarceration, a condition known as being “walled-up” (Argentine National Commission, p. 56). Confused, terrified, and vulnerable to attack at all times, the hooded prisoners suffered psychological torture every bit as rending as the physical torture that they endured:
The psychological torture of the “hood” was as bad or worse than the physical, although the two cannot be compared since whereas the latter attempts to reach the limits of pain, the hood causes despair, anxiety and madness… .
(Cubas in Argentine National Commission, p. 57)
Prisoners were often handcuffed or chained around their feet; they were attached to one another, to the walls, floors, or, sometimes, to the beams of their prisons. Identified only by number, they were fed un-nourishing and sometimes utterly unhealthy foods (like uncooked offal meats). They slept on infested mattresses soaked through with bodily fluids—their own and those of former prisoners—and suffered from such pestilence as maggots and lice.
Most prisoners were tortured at some point during their incarceration. Typically, they were tied to metal beds and given electrical jolts. Women reported multiple rapes; pregnant women were sometimes tortured until they miscarried, or given Caesarean sections, after which their children were spirited away forever. Beatings were a matter of course; Valentin’s sorry condition at the end of the novel—beaten and delirious—was shared by most prisoners. One cannot say with certainty how many people were tortured to death as opposed to “merely” killed outright, but the condition of the many corpses that turned up—at the bottom of rivers, in the ocean, and in mass graves—indicate that even those slated to die were tortured.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
Kiss of the Spider Woman synthesizes several narrative elements: conversations between two prisoners, Luis Alberto Molina and Valentin Arregui Paz; interrogations of Molina by the warden; scholarly footnotes with citations from various psychoanalysts and intellectuals; a report on Molina’s fate; and a closing stream-of-consciousness passage from Valentin’s perspective after he has been tortured in prison. The story unfolds through dialog without surrounding description. Molina is an apolitical gay window dresser jailed on a “corruption of minors” charge; Valentin is a heterosexual socialist engaged in the revolutionary struggle against the Argentine government of the mid-1970s. As the novel opens, Molina is recounting Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 film, Cat People.
Initially scornful of Molina’s love of campy melodramas and erotic horror films, Valentin, listening to Molina recount the films, soon finds himself engaged by their suspense and eager to hear how they end. Nevertheless, he repeatedly attempts to establish his commitment to revolutionary ideals, ideals that in his mind exclude any enjoyment of sensual pleasure or decadence. When Molina presses him to “live for the moment,” Valentin responds:
There’s no way I can live for the moment, because my life is dedicated to political struggle, or, you know, political action, let’s call it. Follow me? I can put up with everything in here, which is quite a lot… . But it’s nothing if you think about torture … because you have no idea what that’s like… . Anyway, I put up with all of it … because there’s a purpose behind it. Social revolution, that’s what’s important, and gratifying the senses is only secondary.
(Spider Woman, pp. 27-28)
Hurt by Valentin’s strident rejection of his attempts to make their imprisonment more bearable, Molina counters that “if men acted like women there wouldn’t be any more torturers” (Spider Woman, p. 29). From this early conversation, the two men infer that despite their physical (and, later, emotional) closeness, their political and social outlooks divide them. This distance reveals itself in the contradictory identifications each man feels with different characters in the films. For instance, in the first film Molina recites, Valentin identifies with the macho psychiatrist and is attracted to the male protagonist’s female co-worker, while Molina identifies with the elegant and sensitive heroine and is attracted to her gentle architect husband.
Until now, Valentin has treated Molina with varying degrees of condescension and suspicion, but Molina’s acute sensitivity to Valentin’s arguments gradually seems to win the other man’s respect. Valentin reveals that, despite his identification with the underclass, he pines for his ex-girlfriend, who comes from a bourgeois family.
At this point Molina launches into another film recitation (of a Nazi propaganda film about a love affair between a German soldier and a French singer in occupied France), which Valentin interrupts to criticize Molina for his escapist enjoyment of Nazi propaganda, and for his identification with the privileged heroine and
STUCK BY MISTAKE
Like Molina, Puig himself turned to the movies to escape from life’s harsh realities. Growing up in a small pampas town, early on he began to identify with the heroes of Hollywood films of the 1930s and ‘40s: “Little by little I changed the terms: that which was reality changed into a class Z movie in which I had been stuck by mistake. Reality … was what happened in the movies, not what happened in town… “(Puig in Matuz, p. 263).
the implicit ethics of Nazism. Provoked to tears, Molina discloses his love for a married heterosexual waiter. The object of his affection grew up in Buenos Aires, a good student who was forced for economic reasons to quit school and work in a factory. When workers without connections to organized crime or to the government started getting laid off, Molina’s friend tried to help them get their jobs back. The union bosses told him to leave it alone or risk getting fired. Instead, he quit in protest of union favoritism. After months of unemployment he finally found work as a waiter, a position lower-paying than the factory job and far below his youthful ambitions. Molina explains that he was incredibly attracted to an individual who would go to such lengths on principle alone.
Valentin identifies with Molina’s friend and begins a passionate tirade about the importance of free schooling in a liberated society. He argues that the social elite locks Argentine workers into believing that they do not deserve an education, and makes an analogy with the small, cramped cell that he and Molina share: “reality … isn’t restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of, do you understand what I’m saying?” (Spider Woman, p. 78).
A later film summary picks up these threads of loyalties and elitist escapism. The film plot focuses on a young car-racing fanatic from a wealthy Latin American family who enters a race in Le Mans, France. An unjust disqualification and the destruction of his car trigger a crisis of conscience, and he must decide whether to indulge his dream of racing in Europe or return to his country and take an active part in a revolution for economic justice. The novel shifts mid-scene from this story to Valentin’s thoughts:
a European woman, a bright woman … a woman with a knowledge of Marxism … a woman who understands the problems of Latin America, a European woman who admires a Latin American revolutionary … a fellow who hates the colonialists in his country, a fellow ready to sacrifice his life in defense of principles, a fellow who cannot comprehend the exploitation of the workers … a fellow with an unshakable faith in the precepts of Marxism, a fellow with his mind made up to enter in contact with guerrilla organizations, a fellow who from up in the sky observes the mountains certain of his forthcoming meeting with the liberators of his country, a fellow who’s afraid of being taken for an oligarch.
(Spider Woman, pp. 124-26)
This sequence suggests that Molina’s story has triggered a similar crisis of conscience in Valentin, as he seems to be repressing both his privileged background and his love for a girl from his former social circle. Molina wakes Valentin and tells him that he had cried out in his sleep. After some hesitation, Valentin explains that he has been thinking about a different woman, not his current girlfriend. When he receives a letter the next day from the current girlfriend, who is a fellow revolutionary, he is wracked with guilt.
Molina falls ill, complaining of stomach cramps, and a day or so later, Valentin also becomes violently ill. For the next few days, Molina takes care of his cellmate, wiping up Valentin’s vomit and diarrhea, putting cool washcloths on his forehead, and preparing teas and elixirs. During this time the men become increasingly attached to one another; Molina constantly recites stories from films, and Valentin opens up bit by bit about his fears and desires.
Molina soon begins receiving visits from his mother. After seeing her, he always returns to the cell with two brown bags of goods that he shares with a grateful Valentin. What the reader knows, unlike Valentin, is that Molina’s “visits” are actually meetings with the prison warden, who has promised Molina an early release in exchange for any information he can extract from Valentin regarding the actions and whereabouts of his fellow militants. The illness that plagued them both proves to have been food poisoning; the warden is trying to break Valentin’s defenses by making him sick, and Molina fell victim by eating the food, too. Small acts of generosity on Molina’s part, such as sharing his provisions or cooking their meals, induce Valentin to become less guarded and more likely to share information with his cellmate. As weeks pass, however, Molina seems more ambivalent about his task, asking the warden to give him more time.
Molina’s sexual orientation and Valentin’s radicalism are placed in a sociopolitical context through a footnote that falls between an emotionally charged scene in the cell and Molina’s second interview with the prison warden. Here, the novel reproduces a long passage by the scholar J. C. Flugel:
In … Man, Morals and Society,[Flügel] claims with respect to those who during infancy have strongly identified themselves with paternal or maternal figures of a particularly stern disposition, that as they grow up they will embrace conservative causes and will be fascinated by authoritarian regimes… . On the other hand, those who in infancy somehow reject—on an unconscious, emotional or rational level—such rules of parental conduct will favor radical causes, repudiate distinctions of class and treat understandingly those who exhibit any unconventional inclinations: homosexual, for example. (Spider Woman, p. 195)
The novel goes on to cite the work of social theorist Herbert Marcuse, who argued that the social function of the homosexual is analogous to that of the critical philosopher, since the homosexual’s presence is a continual reminder of the repressed elements in society. Homosexuals, states the footnote, have been placed on the sidelines of movements for class liberation and political action. These theories complement the dynamics of Molina and Valentin’s relationship, and aspects of their personalities, but at the same time these dynamics defy the clinical explanations offered in the footnote.
When Molina learns that he may be moved or released, he nearly reveals his growing concern for Valentin to the warden. When he returns to the cell, he expresses his mixed feelings about being pardoned and leaving the cell, as well as his fears for Valentin’s welfare. His kindness and his sadness move Valentin, and they begin to caress each other tenderly. They make love that evening, and again on several other nights. The police soon release Molina under close surveillance. Valentin has persuaded Molina to take a message to his comrades, assuring him that he will definitely not get caught.
The novel switches to the surveillance log being written on Molina—the government has tapped his phone and watches his every move. When he waits at a street corner for a suspicious length of time, he is approached by two police agents, who begin to arrest him, but he is shot by an unidentified person from a passing car before they can finish the arrest. In the final scene of the novel, Valentin has been tortured and, in a drugged haze, he engages in an imaginary dialogue with his ex-lover Marta, in which he describes an erotic encounter with an island “native” on a deserted beach. In addition to other images, the “man’s shirt” tied across the native’s chest suggests that Valentin is recalling his sexual intimacy with Molina, and that the “island” represents their cell. Just as Molina claimed that he had felt himself become Valentin after making love with him, Valentin here takes on Molina’s role as storyteller for his imaginary listener, Marta. His final description is of a “spider woman” with threads emerging from her waist that he claims disgust him, and he pities her for being trapped in her own web. While he characterizes “the island” as a beautiful place, Valentin ends by expressing his desire to leave the place once he is strong enough, to join his comrades again.
Censorship of film and literature in Argentina
Puig’s use of film narratives in Kiss of the Spider Woman illustrates his knowledge of and appreciation for the medium, as well as the significant role that film has had in Argentina’s socio-cultural evolution. Argentine popular culture of the 1970s was an amalgam of many influences: European, U.S., and other Latin American film, music, and television competed for Argentine audiences. In the novel, Molina’s film tastes include an international repertoire of Hollywood and other “B” movies, and a penchant for decidedly anti-intellectual escapism. In contrast, Argentine film of the time set its creative sights on the nation’s immediate social and political situation. For Argentina, the period from the late 1950s to the early 1960s was a time of artistic and intellectual experimentation following the ousting of Juan Perón. Fernando Birri, for example, who founded the country’s first film school, made a documentary in 1958, Tire die (Throw Us a Dime), that explored unpleasant Argentine realities, such as shanty town youngsters begging for coins.
Under the military governments of 1966-73, some filmmakers fled the country, while others remained and struggled against the government in cultural pursuits. Expressions like the “Third World” and “the people” took on a positive, Latin American spin, with the help of films such as Octavo Getino’s and Fernando Solanas’s La hora de los homos (The Hour of the Furnaces), a four hour documentary conveying the idea that conditions in Argentina sprang from past dependency on Europe. Completed in 1968, by which time censorship was a fact of everyday life in Argentina, the film was screened secretly in businesses and homes.
Perón’s return to power in 1973 brought a liberalization of censorship in film, which led to increased production (54 films in the first year of his term in office alone) and audience attendance (up by some 40 percent that same year). The most successful films—such as La Patagonia, Rebelde (Rebellion in Patagonia), Quebracho, Juan Moreira, La tregua (The Truce), and La Raulito (Tomboy Paula)—were anti-imperialist. This liberalization quickly ended, however, with the death of Perón in 1974. In the terror-filled political vacuum that followed, filmmakers like Solanas received death threats and were eventually forced into exile. After the 1976 military coup, the quality and quantity of cinema as well as other arts in Argentina rapidly declined. The military attempted to create a sanctioned, conservative, anticommunist culture, founded on Christian and family values. To this end, it would terrorize and blacklist journalists, teachers, and other uncooperative professionals.
There were public burnings of writings by Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Argentina’s own Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and even early letters by a radical Perón, and in their place arose fascist-sounding publications like The SS in Action and Maybe Hitler Was Right. Radio, television, and newspapers were shut down or purged of any content deemed offensive to the military’s political and moral sensibilities. Publishing houses and bookstores were looted and shut down as well, authors were banned, and theaters were closed indefinitely. Cinema especially came under fire by censors, who had to approve a project before it could receive funding and who screened each finished film before it was released to the public. The military’s Censorship Board hired film reviewers to weed out any material with even remotely subversive content. In 1976 and 1977 no fewer than 180 titles were banned, including, for example, Argentine (The Hour of the Furnaces), Italian (Silence the Witness), and U.S. motion pictures (Ode to Billy Joe, Breaking Point) whose plot lines were objectionable because they resembled events in Argentina.
Homosexuality and dictatorships in Latin America
According to one observer, “the military governments that came to power in Latin America beginning in the mid-1960s were committed, among other things, to a moral cleansing of the body politic that included a reform of sexual mores, most specifically the homosexual presence” (Foster, p. 77). These military dictatorships made persecution of gay males by gangs of thugs an integral part of absolute social control.
Literature of the Southern Cone responded to this tyrannical agenda by creating characters whose “quest for gay liberation [was] not only the generalized struggle against a variety of self-serving intolerances, but also … an effort to counter forms of political repression.” (Foster, p. 74). During and after the experiences of dictatorship, Latin American writers produced daring works that challenged the authority of the military state, such as David Viñas’s Los hombres de a caballo (Men on Horseback, 1967), Carlos Ar-cidiácono’s Ay de mí Jonathan (Woe Is Me, Jonathan, 1976), and Oscar Hermes Villordo’s Con la brasa en la mano (With the Burning Coal in His Hand, 1984). Their stories both criticized the rise in military authority and supported the gay experience in a newly redemocratized, post-military dictatorship Argentina. The stories held political as well as social oppression up to scrutiny, the belief of the authors being that sexual liberation equaled political liberation, and that “any movement of political freedom that does not take into account the sexual rights of the individual cannot in good faith promise release from tyranny” (Foster, p. 76).
Sources and literary context
Puig himself always insisted that the mafor artistic influences upon him were cinematic and not literary: “I don’t have obvious literary models, because, I think, there are no great literary influences in my life. This space is filled by the influence of the movies” (Puig in Matuz, p. 266). An aficionado of all forms of motion pictures, he unashamedly wrote stories that would simultaneously entertain the masses and succeed as critically acclaimed works of art. Interested in using popular culture to address traditionally taboo subjects, he did so with an eye for their commercial appeal. Kiss of the Spider Woman, for instance, concerns the taboo subject of sexual orientation and simultaneously incorporates storylines from films, drawing on a number of real-life Hollywood features, including Cat People (1942), Í Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Enchanted Cottage (1945).
With the novel’s emphasis on film, Puig helped inaugurate a new trend in Latin American literature—the post-Boom novel, which moved away from all-inclusive stories like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years ofSolitude (also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times). The post-Boom novel showed more direct concern for politics and social conditions of the moment and for mass media and popular culture. It furthermore sought to eliminate from its stories the narrative voice—with its particular authorial point-of-view—and to reach a widespread audience.
Reviews
Largely due to Puig’s ability to strike a balance between high art and pulp fiction, Kiss of the Spider Woman was well received by critics as well as by the general public in Latin America and elsewhere. The novel has been adapted into a play, a musical, and a film. In fact, Kiss of the Spider Woman received so much positive critical attention that many judge 1976—the year of its publication—to be the key moment in Puig’s career and in Latin American “post-Boom” literature.
Not surprisingly, critics focused on the novel’s treatment of Hollywood film and homosexuality. Not all of the reviews were complimentary. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Robert Coover complained about the contents: “Most of the book is a frail little love story that Mr. Puig’s fans will perhaps find thin and disappointing… . It is Mr. Puig’s fascination with old movies that largely provides substance and ultimately defines its plot, its shape” (Coover, pp. 15, 31). Others were more generous in their praise. An anonymous reviewer for Choice stated that the relationship between Valentin and Molina “manages to surmount the inherent clichés of sacrificial gay and self-doubting revolutionary; and in the end, what Molina and Valentin have established manages to triumph—for the book ends on a replacement of ugly reality with a satisfying and romantic movie fantasy” (Choice, p. 844). Writing in the Hudson Review, Clara Clairborne Park lauded Puig’s masterful use of pop culture: “In a paradoxical rebuke to all us snobs of culture, the tawdry, sentimental art is seen to have nourished not only the life of the imagination, but real affection, and, at length, heroic self sacrifice” (Park in Stine, p. 371).
—Emerson Spencer Olin and Victoria Sams
For More Information
Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.
Coover, Robert. “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue.” The New York Times Book Review, April 22, 1979, 15, 31.
Foster, David William. Sexual Textualities: Essays on Queering Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Lewis, Paul H. The Crìsis of Argentine Capitalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Matuz, Roger, ed. Contemporary Literary Cnticism. Vol. 65. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.
Munck, Ronaldo, Ricardo Falcon, and Bernardo Galitelli. Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism.Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855-1985. London:Zed Books, 1987.
Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Vantage International, 1991.
Review of Kiss of the Spider Woman. Choice 16 (Spring 1979): 844.
Rock, David. Argentina, 1516-1987. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987.
Skidmore, Thomas E., and Peter H. Smith. Modern Latin America. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Sobel, Lester, ed. Argentina & Peron, 1970-75. New York: Facts on File, 1975.
Stine, Jean C, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 28. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984.