MANUEL PUIG: THE �SUBVERSIVE� WRITER
Angela B. Dellepiane*
The first thing I want to do is to congratulate INTAR, the director, the artists, scenographers, the people responsible for costumes and light and acoustic effects because I believe they have done a splendid job for which I, personaly, am very greatful. But of course, I would like also to see, in some near future, that INTAR will show this excellent play in its original Spanish, because, in my opinion, no matter how good a translation is, the original language gives words another dimension, their total power of suggestion.
I will proceed now with commentaries about certain points concerning the play that seem to me relevant:
-First, some information that, I think, could help better to locate this play within the whole trajectory of this writer.
Following the fame of his first two books, Manuel Puig, between 1980 and 1990 the year of his untimely death, wrote several screenplays, theater scripts, and other short pieces which have not attracted much attention from the critics or the public. And none of them were published in his native Argentina.
However, to remedy this situation, in December of last year, was launched the first of 7 volumes of mostly hitherto unpublished material(1). In the first volume, two plays appear: Bajo un manto de estrellas (Under the Mantle of Stars) and El misterio del ramo de rosas (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet)(2), the first written in 1980 and the second in 1981 or 84 or 87!!! (Would you believe that three different dates have been quoted in the literature?). But for me the date when the play was written is important in relation with the age of Manuel (who was born in 1932) which in turn, in my opinion, has a lot to do with the subject of this psychological play, with the psychological depth of its characters and with the absence of certain themes that had been the trademark of Puig�s texts. I'll return to this later.
Manuel Puig's first love was for the cinema. He himself recognized that his most important influences came from movie directors and films, and to a lesser extent, from literature, particularly the influence of Kakfa and, in part, of Joyce(3). But it is undeniable, as seen in some procedures used by Puig in his narrative as in his theater, the influence of film directors to whom I shall be referring.
For instance, the critics find that, in the extravagances of Von Sternberg, Puig learned that no matter how absurd the plots, through disguises, false identities and enigmatic figures, it was possible to delve into the complex dynamics of desire, of identity, of power, of sexual roles. Von Sternberg, as well Friedrich Murnau and Jacques Tourneur were, for Puig, the teachers of surreal atmospheres and visual fantasies.
Puig learned from Murnau's films, that he could use a simple plot and a simple locale to present unusual states of mind in an unforced manner. He also learned in this film maker�s work, a recurrent theme: the fact that individuals who cut themselves off from some form of primal innocence in order to delve into forbidden depths, by so doing, release dark, subterranean forces that threaten to destroy them. Which, it seems to me, is what we have just witnessed happening between The Patient and The Nurse(4).
Puig also shares Murnau's unique faculty for obliterating the boundaries between the real and the unreal. In the case of our play, between the actual situation and place, and hallucinations that, through the deus-ex-machina of the theater, become temporarily simultaneous with the real time and place.
Puig is very much indebted to another film director, Alfred Hitchcock. In Spellbound Puig not only discovered psychoanalysis, but also discovered that particular mixture of thriller and romance which is an underlying axiom in all his writings, and which Puig himself expressed with these words: �El inconsciente est� poblado por el follet�n� (�The unconscious is populated by the serialized novel�). This mixture we have also seen in Mystery.
With such a background, it is not surprising that, although by 1973 Puig was already an internationally known successful novelist, he returned to writing film scripts, doing an adaptation of his second novel, Heartbreak Tango (Boquitas pintadas) for the famous Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, then proceeding to write two film adaptations for the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein: one, El lugar sin l�mites (Hell has No Limits) by the great Chilean novelist, Jos� Donoso, the other El impostor (The Impostor), a short story by the exquisite Argentinian writer, Silvina Ocampo. He also began writing original scripts never filmed.
On the other hand, he began a similar trajectory towards the theater, first by adapting for the stage his own novel, El beso de la mujer ara�a (The Kiss of the Spider Woman), and then he continued with original pieces released in Valencia, R�o de Janeiro, London and also with comedies for the theater although never staged, and he went on to write six film scripts not yet filmed, four musicals not yet staged and participated in four unfinished film projects. Thus: there is much of Puig's material yet to be explored.
What I want to underline is that Puig seemed to feel that the theater now had for him an advantage over the novel, because it permitted him a literal mise-en-scene of something that always preoccupied him: how the Other sees you(5). But since in the movie industry all was not roses -mysterious or otherwise- for Manuel, it's not too surprising that after having been silent for six years, in 1988 he went back to the novel, the one fate destined to be his last fictional work: Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling)(6).
Let's focus now on Mystery of the Rose Bouquet. In Murnau�s film, Sunrise, his characters have no names -they are only 'The Man', 'The Wife' and 'The Woman from the City'. Puig did similarly in Under the Mantle of Stars (and also in some of his novels). In this way he de-personalized the characters, transforming them into �emblematic� or allegorical ones highly stylizing them.
Similarly in Mystery, the main characters never call the other by their names (although the name of the Nurse is given to us). But Puig does not permit de-personalization to happen in Mystery, primarily because of the fluidity and naturalness of their dialogs, something that can be considered a trade-mark of Puig, but also because of the human quality, of the humanity of their interaction and of their inner conflicts.
The two characters are very well conceived and constructed, easy for the public to empathize with them, easy to receive projections of people's feelings of being eaten-up by the same contradictory urges, by the same frustrations, by the same rages and other strong feelings.
At another level, one may speculate that Puig believed the stage to be specifically suited to dramatization of the pendular sway between reality and dream, drama and melodrama, reality and fantasy.
Here in Mystery we clearly see the pendulum swaying between the poles of truth and reality, and fantasy and dream. The Patient can be seen as an apparently extremely authoritarian, firmly opinionated matron, but is equally clearly seen as insecure, frustrated and conflicted in some basic respects. And: is the Nurse just an average professional doing her job?, or a very experienced psychiatric nurse solving the challenge of a difficult case? Does the Nurse really want to study medicine?, or is she only placating her patient as part of her duties? Their dialog appears like a duel in which the opponents try to demolish the well structured facade with which the other one confronts the world(7).
Truth appears, but in the form of hallucinations, in which each character assumes the role of a significant person in the other's life. Their frustrations, unfulfilled desires, unconfessed hostilities and guilts, are then unveiled in all their drama and human frailty.
They do everything possible to delay the revelation of truth: they exchange stories to win time, they play at being the owner of the other, they wander in and out of their hallucinations, they �vampirize� themselves and the other, they lie, and they even betray each other(8). This is Puig in his pure state, i.e.: a Douglas Sirk melodrama mixed with Hitchcock�s suspense. Mystery seems to me to have been worked by Puig with the patience of a miniaturist, giving us a little jewel of artistic elaboration of incidental duplicities; a light comedy, yes, but also a very pathetic, very human drama(9). At the end, a catharsis from which both of the two women seem to emerge being more authentic, brings a respite -to characters and public alike- of the tension that has been building up during the whole play.
Most of the works of Puig are highly erotic but such is not the case with our play. I attribute this evident a-sexuality of Mystery to Puig�s maturity; it is the result of a personality that success, fame and money has permitted to develop fully. It is also his age, whether 51, 52 or 56, but definitely a �cincuent�n�, a man in his fifties, a moment in the male's life (of 'andropausia') in which most sensitive human beings begin to think of age and death (and perhaps for these reasons, of running into nubile Monicas!!!...).
I don�t introduce this age factor gratuitously. Puig suffered quite a crisis when he saw that his film stars of the 30�s were aging, and that was for him �como la ca�da de los dioses� (�like the fall of the Gods�). I wonder, thus, if Manuel was himself feeling like a fallen God in 1987... I believe that in this play of Puig, there is something of these problems, particularly if we take into consideration that age, death (and God) are the subjects at the heart of his last novel, Tropical Night Falling(10).
Why the title: MYSTERY of the Rose Bouquet? This is not a thriller in any way, although there is a �search�, but into the human unconscious.
More concrete, of course, is the Nurse�s fantasy of love and happiness involving a bearded gentleman and two bouquets of roses from a mysterious sender. Appearing again at the end of the play, the Nurse's fantasy seems to unite the two women, both now sharing the happy presence of the fantasized gentleman as well as the symbolic roses; the Patient now stating that: �I want to be alone to remember the many times I received a rose bouquet�(11). True???
Does this explain the MYSTERY?
How about the many other ambiguities or contradictions -for instance, those involving the daughter?
My explanation, if I can call it that, is that Manuel Puig was preoccupied during his whole life with the basic existentialist questions of the human creature and nauseated with the hypocritical attitudes behind which all of us hide... exactly what The Patient and The Nurse did. And it is for us, the public, to observe and interpret all this mystifying data, this being most important, since Puig always had sought and needed the contribution of his reader or spectator.
Good luck in mulling over this play, because I'm sure it is worth it.
And thank you very much.
N O T E S
* Paper read at the Round-table discussion of the play by Manuel Puig: The Mystery of the Rose Bouquet at the INTAR theater in New York, Sunday March 29, 1998.
1. Manuel Puig. Bajo un manto de estrellas. El misterio del ramo de rosas. Vol. I. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997. �La edici�n de los siete vols. est� al cuidado de Julia Romero y Graciela Goldchluk que en los �ltimos a�os, dirigidas por Jos� Am�cola, recopilaron y clasificaron manuscritos y originales. Una vez m�s sorprende la audacia de la editorial rosarina Beatriz Viterbo que, epis�dicamente, cada 6 meses, develar� el misterio del Puig in�dito� (Speranza).
2. Released in London in 1987, and Los Angeles in 1989 and published in the English translation done by Allan Baker in 1988.
3. Puig has accepted, in a conversation with Ronald Christ, the great influence in him of Kafka works particularly in respect to the opression of society on the individual, in the interior jail that the human being carries in himself without realizing, in the network of repressions that we all have in ourselves.
4. Variations on this theme underlie such films as Murnaus�s Sunrise, Tabu and Faust.
5. For instance: �Bajo un manto de estrellas (Under the Mantle of the Stars), estrenada en R�o de Janeiro en 1982, transcurre en una lujosa casa de campo en un clima irreal de baile de m�scaras t�picamente sternbergiano. Reunidos por una pueril trama policial, los cinco personajes intercambian sus roles para demostrar sutilmente una verdad que Puig ha colocado en el centro de su mundo ficcional: la identidad es una m�scara, sujeta a la mirada del otro y a los espejismos del deseo.� (Speranza). Quotation of what Puig told his Italian publisher about the main subject of Under the Mantle of Stars: �...it is the look of the others. How one�s own identity could be defined, in certain circumstances, by the good or badly intencioned look of the others.� (�[El tema principal de Bajo...] es la mirada de los otros. C�mo la propia identidad puede ser definida, en determinadas circunstancias, por la mirada bien o mal intencionada de los otros.� (Apud Brasca).
6. Titler compara los personajes de Tropical Night Falling, �where motifs of aging and death receive a most elaborated treatment� (109) and where there is also �a question of religion, or more precisely faith in a divinity, addressed both directly and extendedly. The characters in Tropical..., despite their advanced age, express their doubts about and eventually their lack of faith in God. For the Patient in Mystery..., God �got it wrong� when he created the world. Later, when the collaborative search for the truth has successfully run its course, the two ponder whether it wasn�t God who finally �got it right� for a change. In a most telling exchange, the Patient says through tears of joy, �I think that today... the devil had a hand in it�, to which the Nurse responds, �No let�s just say it was the porter [who found barbiturates in the Nurse�s handbag, thus saving her from committing suicide] who helped� (50). God? The devil? The porter? The very least one can conclude is that in this inquiry the notion of a divinity, placed in competition with not only its lower-case adversary but also a humble agent at a health-care institution, is in this idealized world severely trivialized.� (109-10).
7. Both begin a relationship in which both end up by giving into the pressure of their more profound conflicts. Their dialog is a sort of acting within the acting, a duel in which each woman tries to demolish the well structured front with which each one confronts the world. They are engaged in a simulacra whose only objective is to puncture the vulnerable zones that each of them have but carefully hide.
8. Duplications, alucinatory mirror images, repetitions, exchanges, romantic episodes, people�s situations of a time already lived: all these �tricks� work in Mystery in a sort of nonchalant way, so nonchalant that the public -or reader- has to be very attentive to stop his/her attention on them.
9. Mystery evocs Manuel�s passion for the secret sentimental trifles but treated in a quiet way, in a minimalistic way. Puig was always fascinated by the unconscience, by dreams, by everything that inhibits or represses human beings due to social impositions. Here in Mystery the subject is again that of identity, but the accent, as I said before, is in the minutely construction of the characters.
10. It is a moment of life in which Puig, who always was trying to understand this existentialist conumdrum, wanted to search in depth the authenticity of his characters in order to reveal the game they had been playing urged by societal demands -sexual, cultural, economic, etc., etc.
11. Nevertheless, �the facts about [the Nurse]�s background are not [clear]. . . . [T]he Nurse spins a romantic tale in which she is young and being courted by a mysterious man who sends her roses. She awaits him �in a garden, languishing, sunset after sunset...� [In her story] which unfolds in a slow and calculated manner, . . . the Nurse manage to subvert the Other�s authority and convert her into a friend. . . . [T]he fantasy is violently rejected and ridiculed at first. But gradually . . . the Se�ora incorporate herself into the tale, becoming a character within it and a story teller as well. . . . The Nurse believes that �Maybe the forgotten things would be the really useful ones.� . . . . She approaches fantasy not as the ideal to be pursued, the key to happiness, but as a therapeutic way of dealing with adversity of pain. . . . [T]he Nurse wants �a different sort of life. Not a housewife�s life�. She is prepared to confront her opponent and tells her that �the ones who shout are really afraid,� that �No one has the right to abuse anybody.� (Mu�oz 254-5).
OBRAS CITADAS
Am�cola, Jos�, comp. Homenaje a Manuel Puig. La Plata (Argentina): Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educaci�n, 1994.
Brasca, Ra�l. �Componer la identidad. Dos piezas teatrales del autor de La Traici�n de Rita Hayword.� La Naci�n (Buenos Aires). Supl. Cult. (1-II-1998): 6.
Mu�oz, El�as Miguel. �Show and Tell: Notes on Puig�s Theater.� Review of Contemporary Fiction. 11.3 (1991): 252-7.
Puig, Manuel. Misterio del ramo de rosas. English. Mystery of the Rose Bouquet; translated by Allan Baker. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Speranza, Graciela. �El teatro de las palabras.� Clar�n -Cultura y Naci�n- (Buenos Aires), (18-XII-1997): 2.
Tittler, Jonathan. Manuel Puig. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
