EMIR RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL
49
words enunciated by the author. There is more omniscient description in
Heartbreak Tango,
and even more in
The Buenos Aires Affair
which parodies
the detective novel, but it is limited by a reticent discourse-in which
Puig mocks the pseudo-objectivity of the third-person narrator. In
Bet–
rayed by Rita Hayworth
only the ordering of the chapters, and their infor–
mative titles reveal the hand of the author.
With that bastard material, parodic already in the originals which he
parodies, Puig writes novels in which he saves for literature a scorned
genre, and introduces into the field of the Ii terary reader's experience, a
whole dimension of Latin American reality which so far had been confined
to the purgatory of subliterature or which had been the object of only
ironic attention on the part of refined writers. If we compare, for example,
what Borges and Bioy Casares do, or what Marechal and Cornuar do (the
latter especially in
The Winners),
with what Puig does, we notice precisely
in them that level of irony which is absent in Puig's work. Even though as
a writer he is capable of judging his characters, as a parodist he situates
himself on their same level and disguises his writing to follow the line of
his originals . The result is a doubly efficient parody because the author
doesn't cancel the reality of the material he treats through ironic distance,
but at the same time captures its very style through empathy. To a certain
point, and with another technique, Puig is carrying to its ultimate con–
sequences an approximation of certain areas of the Argentine linguistic
reality which had been attempted before, but with less luck, by Roberto
Arlt in a series of badly written, tough, sour novels. Puig's successful
integration of all levels of parody is worth noting. For the first time one
feels that a writer of quality is speaking about a majority which had so far
only found limited expression in the most commercial movies of Argen–
tina, in certain radio programs, in the whining lyrics of the tango . But
one must avoid thinking that those somewhat naive narrative structures
presented by Puig are only the work of a primitive.
To understand exactly how unique his work is, one need only
examine two of the most recent imitations which have been prompted by
the success of his novels. One,
La
ciudad de los suer
lOS
(The City of Dreams,
1971), is the work of Juan Jose
Hern~ndez,
a fine Argentine poet and
story writer. There he follows the career of a provincial boy who goes to
the capital, the city of his dreams , and who succeeds in triumphing in a
sophisticated atmosphere
to
discover that his triumph is illusory . As a
pessimistic transcription of what the sentimental novel does victoriously
each season, this novel tries honestly to pull the same strings as those of
Puig. But
Hern~ndez
misses the hardness which lies beneath the frustra–
tion of so many dreams and which Puig so brilliantly brings about .
