462
PARTISAN REVIEW
narrative by those characters who (to use ready-made phrases) "belong
to
History" or "will be absolved by her" was thus obliterated. The
novel become more novelistic. Published under the Spanish title of
Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers
in the English translation), it
was immediately recognized as one of the most relevant texts of the new
Latin American novel. There has been much speculation over the
motives the author might have had in eliminating the vignettes from
the 1967 novel.
In
an interview in 1968, he said that it was because he
now disagreed with their original political intention. He saw them as
the product of a historically determined situation: the moment in
which, with the revolution in power, Cuban writers felt it necessary to
write
about
the revolution ,
for
the revolution. These reasons of
political opportunity, noted Cabrera Infante, no longer existed in 1967.
Three Trapped Tigers
was thus a different book: eliminating the
vignettes not only reduced considerably the text but also shifted its axis.
Formerly, fiction and reality merged to create a further fictional.
dimension.
In
the original book , the text of the fiction and the
historical context were engaged in a constant dialogue. The obsessive
comings and goings of Silvestre and his friends in Havana by night,
were contrasted with the vignettes' tragic confrontations; the purely
verbal passion of those young tigers was sharply outlined against the
violent death, tortures, and betrayals of a permanent revolutionary
fight. While the vignettes were nothing but historical,
Three Trapped
Tigers
recognized no other reality than its own fiction.
Some readers had assumed that by excluding the vignettes from the
novel to which they had belonged, Cabrera Infante had condemned
them to death. The day he decided to publish them separately and as an
independent unity, a third book came into being. While editing them
out of
Three Trapped Tigers
and reediting them for the new book,
Cabrera Infante subjected the vignettes to a process known in film
language as montage.
In
the original 1964 book, the vignettes also reconstructed passages
of Cuban history or legend, but they were not chronologically dis–
played. They were inserted throughout the long text of the novel in
deliberate disorder. Furthermore, since neither the characters nor the
historical moment they evoked were ever clearly identified, it was
possible to telescope episodes from the revolutionary struggle against
Spain with episodes in the fight against Batista.
In
the synchronic
context of the original work (a few days and nights in 1958 Havana),
the vignettes referred
to
a single struggle.
When he put
View of Dawn in the Tropics
together for this (third)
