MANUEL PUIG SIGNED AUTHOR ARGENTINE PUBIS ANGELICAL SOFTBACK RARE

Description: Author: Puig, Manuel; Brunet, Elena (translator) Title: Pubis Angelical Book Description: Paperback. Very Good. First Paperback Edition. Used. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Signed by author; gift inscription in ink. Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne (December 28, 1932 – July 22, 1990), commonly called Manuel Puig, was an Argentine author. Among his best-known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) which was adapted into the film released in 1985, directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and a Broadway musical in 1993. Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne (December 28, 1932 – July 22, 1990), commonly called Manuel Puig, was an Argentine author. Among his best-known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) which was adapted into the film released in 1985, directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and a Broadway musical in 1993. Early life, education and early career Puig was born in General Villegas, Buenos Aires Province. Since there was no high school in General Villegas, his parents sent him to Buenos Aires in 1946. Puig attended Colegio Ward in Villa Sarmiento (Morón County). This is when he began to read systematically, beginning with a collection of texts by Nobel Prize winners. A classmate named Horacio, in whose home Puig rented accommodation when he first moved to Buenos Aires City introduced him to readings from the school of psychoanalysis. The first novel that he read was The Pastoral Symphony by André Gide; he also read Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Thomas Mann. Horacio also introduced Puig to European cinema. After seeing Quai des Orfèvres (1947), he decided that he wanted to be a film director.[1] To prepare for his chosen career, he learned Italian, French, and German, which were considered "the new languages of cinema". He was advised to study engineering in order to specialize in sound-on-film but did not consider this to be the right choice. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture but only took classes for six months. In 1951, Puig switched to the School of Philosophy. He was a diligent student, although he struggled with subjects such as Latin. When he graduated, he was already working in film as an archivist and editor in Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. However, the world of Hollywood and the stars that had captivated him during his childhood now disappointed him; the exceptions were Marilyn Monroe and Gloria Swanson. A note in the magazine Radiolandia about the upcoming premiere of the film Deshonra prompted Puig to try and meet its director Daniel Tinayre, whose comedy La vendedora de fantasías he admired. Since the director denied him access to the set, he spoke to the actress Fanny Navarro, who played the main role, without Tinayre's permission. He felt no sympathy for her since she supported Juan Domingo Perón, who had prohibited the importation of American films into Argentina. Navarro sent him to another actress of the cast, Herminia Franco, who got him in. Shortly after, he began to work in Alex laboratories.[citation needed] In 1953, Puig did his obligatory military service in the area of Aeronautics, working as a translator. Writing career In the 1960s, Manuel Puig moved back to Buenos Aires, where he penned his first major novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth. Because he had leftist political tendencies and also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, Puig moved to Mexico in 1973, where he wrote his later works (including El beso de la mujer araña). Much of Puig's work can be seen as pop art.[citation needed] Perhaps due to his work in film and television, Puig managed to create a writing style that incorporated elements of these mediums, such as montage and the use of multiple points of view. He also made much use of popular culture (for example, soap opera) in his works. In Latin American literary histories, he is presented as a writer who belongs to the Postboom and Post-modernist schools. Death Puig lived in exile throughout most of his life. In 1989, Puig moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990. In the previous months, he had stopped smoking on his doctor's orders and took daily walks but did not feel well at the altitude of Mexico. He also made sure to receive his care in a clinic near his house so he would not be far away from his mother, but for economic reasons and availability of contacts, he had access to higher quality medical attention. In the official biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fiction, his close friend Suzanne Jill Levine writes that Puig had been in pain for a few days prior to being admitted to a hospital, where he was told what needed to be done. On Saturday July 21, 1990, he was checked into Las Palmas Surgical Center for risk of peritonitis. An emergency procedure was performed on his inflamed gallbladder, which was removed. While Puig was recovering after the surgery, he began to have respiratory problems; his lungs had filled with fluid, and he was becoming delirious. The medical team was unable to help Puig and they had to secure him to the bed. He died from acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) at 4:55 a.m. on July 22, 1990.[2] His death leaked quickly through the media. Although he had a background of cardiac problems, the first public assumption was that he had died from AIDS. It was soon ascertained that Manuel Puig did not have HIV. Nevertheless, the public had already contested that fact several times. Only six people attended his funeral service, including his mother, his friends Javier Labrada and Agustín Garcia Gil, and his colleague Tununa Mercado who happened to be on her way to Xalapa city in Veracruz. When Jorge Abelardo Ramos, the Argentine ambassador of Mexico was asked to speak to the media about the death of Manuel Puig, he responded by saying that he was not aware of the death of an Argentine with that name. Regardless, they had his body sent to the Federal District of Mexico for his funeral rites with the Writer's Society, and the ambassador arrived and gave a speech. Manuel Puig's bodily remains were sent to Argentina a few days later and were placed in the Puig family tomb in the cemetery of La Plata. The 2004 film Vereda Tropical (film), directed by Javier Torres, depicts the period during which Puig lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The writer's role is played by the actor Fabio Aste. Work Critics such as Pamela Bacarisse divide Puig's work into two groups: his early novels, which "attracted an enormous audience by weaving into his narratives the artistic 'sub-products' of mass culture"; and his later books, which have "lost their popular appeal" as they evidence "a depressing, even unpalatable, vision of life, no longer even superficially sweetened by palliatives as the mass-media elements are left behind".[3] Three translations of his work have been reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press: 2009: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth 2010: The Buenos Aires Affair 2010: Heartbreak Tango List of works Novels 1968: La traición de Rita Hayworth Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Translator Suzanne Jill Levine, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-56478-530-5 1969: Boquitas pintadas; Seix Barral, 2004, ISBN 978-950-731-430-8 Heartbreak Tango 1973: The Buenos Aires Affair (The Buenos Aires Affair) 1976: El beso de la mujer araña; José Amícola, Jorge Panesi, Editors, Fondo De Cultura Economica, 2002, ISBN 978-84-89666-45-0 Kiss of the Spider Woman, reprint Random House, Inc., 1991, ISBN 978-0-679-72449-0 1979: Pubis angelical (Pubis Angelical) Seix Barral, 1979, ISBN 978-84-322-1379-3 1980: Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages) 1982: Sangre de amor correspondido (Blood of Requited Love) 1988: Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling) Plays and screenplays [clarification needed] 1983: Bajo un manto de estrellas. Beatriz Viterbo Editora. 1997. ISBN 978-950-845-060-9. Under a Mantle of Stars: A Play in Two Acts, Lumen Books, 1985, ISBN 978-0-930829-00-1 1983: El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman) 1985: La cara del villano (The Face of the Villain) 1985: Recuerdo de Tijuana (Memories of Tijuana) 1991: Vivaldi: A Screenplay (in Review of Contemporary Fiction No.3) 1997: El misterio del ramo de rosas (1987) (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet) 1997: La tajada; Gardel, uma lembranca See also flagArgentina portal Biography portal LGBT studies portal iconNovels portal iconTheatre portal List of Argentine writers List of LGBT writers List of playwrights Latin American Literature References Levine, Suzanne Jill (2001). Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. Madison, WI & London: The University of Wisconsin Press. p. 61. Levine 2000, p. 377 Bacarisse 1988, p. 4 Sources Bacarisse, Pamela (1988). The Necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1011-3. Levine, Suzanne Jill (2000). Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-28190-8. Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. "Una lectura queer de Manuel Puig: Blood and Sand en La traición de Rita Hayworth". Revista Iberoamericana. Vol. LXXII, Nos. 215-6 (2006): 633–50. External links Readers of Argentine writer Manuel Puig have come to expect certain constants from this highly versatile novelist: innovative narrative techniques, dark comedy, and a preoccupation with the effects of popular culture, particularly film, on the human spirit. He was born in 1932 in General Villegas, a small town on the Argentine pampas, and began studying English at the age of ten in order to better understand the American movies he saw every afternoon with his mother. In 1946 he went to Buenos Aires to an American boarding school and then to the University of Buenos Aires, where his interests expanded to include literature, psychology, and philosophy. But his primary ambition was to direct films. In 1955 he went to film school in Italy on a scholarship. The school proved to be a disappointment; he left Italy and traveled to Paris and London, working on screenplays and supporting himself as a language teacher and dishwasher. Puig then returned to the Americas, going first to Buenos Aires and later to New York, and began writing fiction. His first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, an autobiographical account of his provincial childhood, was published in Buenos Aires in 1968. Over the next twenty years, Puig lived in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, New York and Rio de Janeiro and wrote seven more novels: Heartbreak Tango (1969); The Buenos Aires Affair(1973); The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976); Pubis Angelical (1979); Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1980); Blood of Requited Love (1982); and Cae la noche tropical(1988), which has not been published yet in English. Puig's early passion for the movies is evident both in his narrative style, which relies heavily on dialogue, and in the lives of his characters, where the glamorous and idealized world of films serves as a counterpoint to their own disappointments. Puig has lived very little of his adult life in Argentina, but all of his novels, with the exception of Blood of Required Love, are about Argentina or Argentines coping with exile. When we met in Puig's home in Rio de Janeiro, I was struck by his very Argentine manner: a grave courtesy and reserve that set him apart from the more free-wheeling Brazilians. He is slender, with a handsome, tanned face and expressive dark eyes. He doesn't care much for interviews, but he did agree to three meetings at six-month intervals. The first he agreed to on the condition that we confine it to a morning's conversation. The morning in question was a cool, rainy Saturday in May, 1988. We sat on comfortable sofas at one end of a pleasant living room with a polished tile floor, many plants, and a poster of Argentine tango idol Carlos Gardel on one whitewashed wall. The interview began somewhat formally in Spanish, and loosened up a bit when we switched to English. As we talked, I saw why it was that interviews exhausted him: he is attentive, thoroughly engaged, and careful about choosing precisely the word he wants, even in a foreign language. When he hits upon it, his face lights up. INTERVIEWER What is the difference between movie and book material? MANUEL PUIG In my experience, an epic story translates very well into film. Realistic novels—the kind made up of small details and constructed using a certain analytical approach—don't make good films. Films are synthesis. Everyday grayness, everyday realism is especially tough to translate to the screen. I remember discussing this once with a filmmaker, who said, “Yes, but look at the realistic films the Italians made, such as De Sica's Umberto D.” I disagreed. There's nothing of everyday grayness in Umberto D—it's about suicide, about deciding whether to kill yourself or not. It's an epic film disguised as an everyday realistic one. What I like to do in my novels is to show the complexity of everyday life; the subtexture of social tensions and the pressures behind each little act of ours. That's very difficult to put into film. I feel much more comfortable with films dealing with allegorical, larger-than-life characters and stylized situations. INTERVIEWER Is that why you liked American films of the 1940s? PUIG Sure. They were dreams, totally stylized—the perfect stuff of films because dreams allow you the possibility of a synthetic approach. INTERVIEWER Have you ever found that the dialogue of those 1940s films helped with fictional dialogue? PUIG I learned certain rules of storytelling from the films of that time. Mainly how to distribute the intrigue. But what interests me more about those films is examining the effect they had on people. INTERVIEWER On the people you grew up with? PUIG Well, yes—on my characters. My characters have all been affected by those cinematic dreams. In those days, movies were very important to people. They were their Mount Olympus. The stars were deities. INTERVIEWER Obviously you were intrigued by movies as a child. What about books? PUIG One of the very first books I read was André Gide's Pastoral Symphony. In 1947 he won the Nobel Prize. At the same time a film had been made of the novel, so he had come into the territory of my immediate interest, which was, of course, film. I read the novel and was immensely impressed. Soon after, I remember being impressed by Faulkner's The Wild Palms. Such contrasting authors—Gide all measure and economy, and Faulkner sprawling all over the place. INTERVIEWER Did you read The Wild Palms in English? PUIG No, I read Borges's Spanish translation, which is a beautiful work. I read Faulkner's other books in English. I never went back to The Wild Palms, but for me it's always an example of intuitive writing. INTERVIEWER So a writer's imagination is either calculated or intuitive? PUIG It goes from one extreme to the other. In between you have all these shadings. I have trouble reading fiction these days. So I've lost that immense realm of pleasure. Thank God I still enjoy movies and plays. INTERVIEWER You mean you don't read any fiction now? PUIG Writing has spoiled the pleasure of reading for me, because I can't read innocently. If you are an innocent reader, you accept the fantasy of others; you accept their style. These days another writer's problems of style immediately recall my own stylistic problems. If I read fiction, I'm working; I'm not relaxing. My only sector of interest now is biographies. Those I read with great relish, because the facts are real and there is no pretense of style. This interview with Manuel Puig took place during a weekend in September 1979, after he was part of a Congress of Hispanic-American Writers in Medellin, Colombia. Other participants in the event were Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Mexican short-story writer and novelist Juan Rulfo. JC: What role does the reader play in your work? Are you aware of a future reader when you write a novel? Has the reader's taste ever influenced the way you constructed a book? MP: Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader. I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer. That’s why I don’t request any special efforts in the act of reading. JC: But don’t you think that those sudden changes, the art of narrating two stories simultaneously, or the same story from different perspectives … MP: Indeed, I ask for reflection, but that is entirely another type of mental operation. What I find very difficult is to follow a certain prose that doesn’t have a plot line and reiterates the same idea every other page. JC: I still think that, although the basic elements in your stories are easy to understand, putting the pieces together is a complex act. Some examples: the internal monologues in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; the intertwined detective clues in The Buenos Aires Affair; the relationship between the films described and the characters’ fantasies in Kiss of the Spider Woman; or Ana’s double personality in Pubis Angelical I believe … MP: I don’t mean to say that I write for a stupid reader. Yet tardiness in literature can make me nervous. JC: Proust, for instance. MP: That’s not an adequate example. JC: Who then? MP: Well, a few early twentieth-century Spanish novels. Jose Maria de Pereda, for instance. Furthermore, I have written every single one of my novels to convince somebody of something. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth was written to convince a friend of something. And Heartbreak Tango, to convince an enemy of mine, an Argentine critic who thoroughly disliked the popular genres (detective fiction, romance literature, the folletin, etc.) that one could write … JC: Book reviewers, it is known, evidenced a similar kind of distaste for Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, didn’t they? MP: No, no. My first two novels came out almost simultaneously, because Betrayed by Rita Hayworth took a long time to be published. No. I felt that particular kind of rejection when I arrived in Argentina and sensed a certain pedantry, a taste very different from mine. That stimulated me. But going back to the question of the reader, you asked me if my reader’s taste has ever conditioned one of my novels. No, in no way. The book that was most greatly appreciated by my readership was Heartbreak Tango. And everybody expected that I would follow that same narrative line. Yet I changed because I was interested in another type of investigation, and that’s why I wrote The Buenos Aires Affair. The reception given to this book was comparatively mild, but I felt I had done something good. Even today, I don’t dislike the novel. On the contrary, in some way I would like to follow the path initiated by it. JC: And that path is … MP: And that path is a study of the Argentine mistake. JC: What kind of mistake? MP: A political mistake, a sexual mistake. JC: And what about the book reviewers? MP: Book reviews have never helped me. On the contrary, I believe most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time, that’s all. JC: But … do you read what they write? Do they interest you? MP: Yes, yes, of course. Nevertheless, I haven’t been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written. Only now some of them are beginning to emerge.* Unfortunately, the criticism that has appeared so far is of the kind included in literary supplements, newspapers—brief, opinionated texts written under a deadline. *Since the time this conversation took place, five academic books have appeared: Rend Alberto Campos’s El juego de espejos: La textura cinematica en "La tracion de Rita Hayworth "de Manuel Puig (Pliegos, 1983), Roberto Echavarren Welker’s Manuel Puig: montaje y alteriadad del sujeto (Instituto Profesional del Pacifico, 1986), Lucille Kerr’s Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (Univ. Of Illinois, 1987), Jorgelina Corbatta’s Mito personal y mitos colectivos en las novelas de Manuel Puig (Oasis, 1988), and Pamela Bacarisse’s The Necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig (Barnes & Noble, 1988). [Editor’s Note] JC: These book reviews, have they examined the psychoanalytical ingredient in your oeuvre? MP: I don’t know, I wouldn’t be able to say. But the reviewers have not helped me to clarify things. JC: And friends have? MP: Yes, very much. JC: It is known that Guillermo Cabrera Infante actively participated in the English and French translations of Three Trapped Tigers (although he fought against the French translator, who used to tell him, "Ca, c’est ne pas francais"). In general, the difficulties in translating a book are many, and I guess even more when it’s written in "Argentine" Spanish. MP: I do collaborate a lot with the translators of those languages I am familiar with—English, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Let me give you an example in which I had to do some necessary changes. A chapter in Heartbreak Tango is resolved in the Spanish original through a reading of tarot cards performed by a gypsy. Nevertheless, in France and Great Britain, this special type of Spanish cards is not known. So I had to rewrite the segment. I had to transform everything, to adapt the images to a poker game. It was a deliberate act of rewriting. And there are many more examples like this one. More than anywhere else, I had to rewrite a lot in Kiss of the Spider Woman. And as you well know, translating theater is a very difficult task. It’s not only a matter of changing words; you have to adapt the meaning from one language into another. That’s why in the United States people never say "This is a translation of the work of such and such playwright or dramaturge, " but "An English adaptation … or an English version, of the works of such and such playwright." A different thing happened with Italian, which is so similar to Spanish. French is less so, and English is very different, so I had much to change. The translator’s task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That’s hard! JC: I would like to know who has been a literary model for you. We know quite a bit about your passion for cinema, as well as for boleros and tangos, yet we know very little about your literary preferences. The Spanish poet Pere Gimpferrer, in an article published in 1976 in Plural, the Mexican magazine then edited by Octavio Paz, claimed that "without any doubt, Puig owes little, not only to his immediate literary precursors, but to any other literary tradition in general." What do you think? MP: I don’t have traceable literary models because I haven’t had great literary influences in my life. Instead, that space has been occupied by cinematographic influences. I believe that if you looked into it deeply, you could find an influence by Ernest Lubitch in a few of my structures, by Joseph von Sternberg in the need for a certain atmosphere. Also Alfred Hitchcock. Otherwise … I don’t know. Of the modern writers, I like William Faulkner and Franz Kafka very much. Yet that doesn’t mean I have read them in an exhaustive or passionate fashion. JC: And why do you like them? Because of their atmospheres? Because of their themes? Their technique? MP: I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all. JC: The monologues in As I Lay Dying, were they ever a model for you? MP: I never read the book. I had to open it this year because I was teaching a course at City College of New York and a young female student talked about it. JC: And Kafka? MP: Well, I think he truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. Also, he shows how the unconscious controls our lives. And he talks about the internal prisons we carry inside. But contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level. JC: There’s another aspect on which critics do not agree: Either you have a parodic voice, or you personally share the universe in which your characters live. What could you say in this respect? MP: I don’t have a parodic voice. Sometimes I use humor because otherwise my themes would be too bitter, too wretched. They would end up being dry. My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor, doesn’t it? And although it’s hard to believe it, Argentines are humorous too. I don’t think humor is forced upon my universe; it’s a part of it. And going back to the question of parody. For me, parody means mockery, and I don’t mock my characters. I share with them a number of things, among them their language and their taste. JC: In an imaginary report for Elle, Gladys, the protagonist of The Buenos Aires Affair, offers her own concept of art: "That night I felt lonelier than ever. Imprisoned by despair I returned to the cottage and, almost crazed, I had an inspiration. I couldn’t sleep. At five the dawn found me on the beach, for the first time picking up the debris that the surf had left on the sand. Flotsam, I only dared to love flotsam, anything else was too much to dare hope for. I returned home and began to talk—in a whisper so as not to wake up mama—with a discarded slipper, with a bathing cap in shreds, with a torn piece of newspaper, and I started to touch them and to listen to their voices. That was my work of art, to bring together scorned objects to share with them a moment of life, or life itself. That was my work." What do you think? MP: I totally share that attitude. I have the same approach to objects, and I can identify with her misery. JC: Let’s continue with The Buenos Aires Affair. I would like you to talk about the last chapter, in which you introduce that young couple with a small child. They are happy and satisfied. It seems that these characters are trying to balance the frustrations of the rest of the novel’s cast. A sort of happy ending, isn’t it? MP: All through her life, the protagonist has managed to survive by creating a set of different personal fantasies. And this set has now been demolished. She will try to commit suicide at a time when nothing can be sustained or redeemed in her life. And it’s in that moment when she has a new fantasy. She is awakened by that young couple with child who inhabits the apartment next door. Gladys, as you know, lives through mythical images. She needs those strange fantasies, and even more so during this critical moment, when she has to create new myths. JC: When I read the novel, I saw them as a set of "real" characters with which Gladys could initiate some kind of communication … MP: The most important thing is that she can recover from her trance. I give two versions about the couple: the first one is Gladys’s elaborate fantasy; the second, a real version, is the one the two members of the couple are sharing while trying to achieve a perfect sexual intercourse. The woman is not what Gladys imagines. She is not a creature suspended in a space of total pleasure. Instead, she is somebody with fears. And one of those fears is the possibility of losing something. I believe that people who don’t achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful. Gladys has nothing and that circumstance creates in her a deep anxiety. The woman next door is also anxious, but for other reasons. Mainly, because she is afraid of losing what she already has. I was interested in making my protagonist not give up. Even if she was a weak character full of insecurities and a lack of affection, I wanted her to resurrect. JC: You wanted to offer an optimistic tone. MP: Well, Gladys couldn’t be worse. If she could only overcome her trance, her redemption could take place. JC: What could you say about the inclusion of Esther and Cobito in your first novel? Putting aside the autobiographical element, is this a device by which you tried to incorporate all segments of the Argentine society? MP: Including Cobito and a Peronist girl in the novel was not an attempt to portray the whole Argentine society. It’s based on my own personal experience. For the first part of my life, I had been submerged in the reality of the first Peronist regime, and later on in that of the second and third. JC: You were talking about your work and the collective unconscious … MP: I always talk about my preoccupations with the contents of the collective unconscious. Of course I am also worried by the unconscious that is not shared with others, yet I suppose there’s a great part of my own unconscious that is collective. And if I can locate the contents of this collective heritage and write about it, I’ll be able to capture the reader’s attention, because he or she and I will share the same commonalities. But it’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade. I think that the author’s originality depends on how he or she can make the personal unconscious express itself … JC: Why do you think Carlos Fuentes, Luis Rafael Sanchez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Severo Sarduy all introduce elements from mass media in their oeuvres, just as you do? Do you share something with them? MP: I share with them certain preoccupations, true, yet my style is very different from Fuentes’s, and I don’t have anything in common with Sarduy, Cabrera Infante, or Sanchez. JC: With whom do you share a style? MP: Sorry, but I don’t know much about literature. JC: And in film? MP: In film I believe I have certain affinities with Dishonored by von Sternberg, made in 1932, with Marlene Dietrich. Whenever I see this movie, I think, "Wow, there’s a lot I share with it." JC: What kind of connection is there between your work and pop art, kitsch, and camp? MP: I am very interested in what has been called "bad taste." I believe that the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones, some of which are even beyond bad taste. I am very interested in those areas and I allow my intuition to lead my path toward them. For instance, in the gruesomeness of certain tangos I see the possibility of a different kind of poetry. I am also attracted to the excessive sentimentalism of a certain kind of cinema. I wonder, what’s beyond that? What kind of audience uses these products? What kind of intellectual or intuitive need is satisfied with this type of "culture"? Yes, I’m interested in exploring the different manifestations of bad taste. But of course, not with a cold approach. I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry. JC: Are you also interested in boleros? MP: Yes…. For instance, the kitsch of the boleros by Agustin Lara. They touch me deeply…. If we only laugh at them and we don’t take them seriously, I feel we’ve lost something. I think I’m satisfied by other kinds of needs than those that attract the intellectual elite. What are they? Do other people share them as well? Perhaps. We should try to understand these innermost needs. And we shouldn’t use irony to reduce their power. JC: We know a lot about how film helped you evade reality in your adolescent years. But what could you say about how some filmmaking techniques are used in your novels? MP: In The Buenos Aires Affair, there was a chapter, one that later on was eliminated, in which you could see the cinematic influences in a very clear fashion. It dealt with the protagonist’s mother, a demanding and indoctrinating woman who unconsciously wants her daughter to die and stop creating problems, stop suffering. Of course, she can’t make that authentic feeling conscious because it doesn’t go with her education. Yet when the daughter disappears, I wanted her to have an unconscious desire never to see her again. But it’s her daughter after all, and a mother like her can’t wish her daughter to die, can she? The woman couldn’t allow herself to feel such a horrible thing. In this chapter, I wanted to show the ambiguity of her feelings. I thought of doing so with the help of an omniscient, third-person narrator. It had to be a mischievous third-person narrator, not a subjective one. You see, only after remembering a certain camera angle used by Hitchcock, could I find the proper voice for my scene. It was in Psycho. The first scene, as you remember, has two secret lovers in a hotel room. It’s a small room and we see them always through the strange camera eye. Located in the closet or outside the window, it’s a camera that spies on them. Hitchcock makes it very clear to us that there’s nobody else in the room, only the two lovers. So it’s not a criminal or a spy who’s observing them but the strange, "spying" camera. Hence, there’s an objective and a subjective camera, like there’s a third- and a first-person narrator in literature. In my text, I had to deal with evil—the evil feelings felt by this mother, who’s unable to rationalize her own malevolent feelings and turns them into an occult element in her mind. I had to use a third- person narrator with a wretched voice, one that could find pleasure in the mother’s negative feelings. In that sense, the third-person narrator became a first-person narrator, a devil of sorts that, because of the book’s internal economy, never appears again. JC: Why have you abandoned your fictitious town, Coronel Vallejos? I’m asking you while thinking of other imaginary places, like Yoknapatawpha, Santa Maria Macondo .. MP: I felt I had talked about it enough. I lived there until I was fifteen and never returned again. If I had returned, things would have been different. JC: One of the constants in modern literature is the structural playfulness. Do you share … MP: Yes, I am interested in that but only to help me solve a certain mystery. I don’t feel attracted to it when the exercise is an end in itself. JC: What do you think about Severo Sarduy’s essay "Notes to the Notes to the Notes . . ."? [See World Literature Today 65.4 (Fall 1991).] MP: I don’t think it can help understand my work. It has charm but the piece tells more about its author than about me. JC: Why do you write novels? MP: I write novels because there is something I don’t understand in reality. What I do is locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That’s the genesis of all my work. Because of my unconscious defenses, I am incapable of facing the problem directly. There are obstacles that impede me from doing so. Yet I can do it through a literary character. It’s easier! And since all of my problems are rather complicated, I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It’s like a personal therapy. There is no freedom in that election. It’s not that I choose to do it, but that I’m forced to. It has to be a novel because I need a lot of space. It’s an analytical activity, not a synthetic one. JC: Do you support yourself from writing? MP: Yes, I’m not a best-seller but through translations, I’ve accumulated some money. I would very much like to become a best-selling author in order to tell everything about it later on. JC: But you don’t support yourself from any activity other than literature? MP: No. I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn’t have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue. It was a surprise because, after doing it, I found that I actually enjoyed it. What I did was teach a creative writing course, and since this course met only once a week, it was convenient. It doesn’t take too much time. It’s a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying. Writing film scripts, an activity I just began doing, distracts me as well. A novel can take two or three years in the making, so it’s convenient to put one’s mind in another project, especially in a film that can be written so quickly … JC: Tell me something about writing film scripts. MP: First, you have to think of a plot line that could be narrated in cinematic terms. If you’re adapting, then you have to summarize. There’s an interesting thing going on here. I’m not interested in a realistic cinema because I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution. Why does realistic cinema lose its effectiveness as years go by? Why does it age? And why does the Hollywood cinema of the thirties and forties still remain so vivid and young? I think there’s a reason. It was a cinema about dreams. The intention was to make it the opium of the masses. Dreams and summaries go together. What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don’t they? Modern American cinema seems to me superficial…. The intention is to understand a certain reality and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality. The best recent movie, in my eyes, with an artistic level, is Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. It’s a nightmare! It’s not in any sense realistic. I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It’s closer to our dreams. JC: Do you believe movies will ultimately replace novels? MP: Film has a certain narrative approach and the novel another. But one needs to better understand their differences. One performs a very different act when "reading" a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently. In cinema, your attention is centered on images and sounds. If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it. The act of "reading" a movie has to do with the act of looking at a picture and the act of reading a book; yet it’s neither one nor the other. It’s a combination. In film, you can’t really go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that. On the other hand, there are certain literary authors—Hemingway, for instance—who have a cinematic perception of reality…. JC: Rita Hayworth, Norma Shearer, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Lamour, and Bette Davis are movie stars that have had a decisive influence on you. But what about Argentine stars? I can only remember Mecha Ortiz mentioned in your novels. MP: It’s true. All the others were too close to me and I hated the things they did. But Mecha Ortiz was a femme fatale, a woman with a past, a superior woman, very self-confident, with a lot of experience in life. JC: Do you remember the enthusiastic reception of Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad in Argentina? It coincided with the rise of the French nouveau roman. When I read the first chapter of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, it seemed to me there were traces of the "flat voices" used by the authors of the nouveau roman, especially Nathalie Sarraute. MP: At that time people were talking about a new perception of reality and this literary movement was given credit for it. It was very well received and the first titles published by those authors had many followers. Today, the nouveau roman is almost gone. Their art was uniquely preoccupied with form. What these artists wanted was a formal revolution, a new formal perception of things. They committed a basic error: the content of their books depended on the formal structure. They were convinced that humankind had nothing else to tell, and that the only salvation was to tell stories from another point of view. This aesthetic approach, of course, is only conceivable in a country like France, so ancient; their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert? Fortunately, we in Hispanic America are safe in that respect; we don’t have giants, huge shadows on our backs. And the French were feeling that they didn’t have anything else to tell. For instance, I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a great French novel about the German occupation. It’s not that writers lack themes, because things are happening all the time. Nevertheless, the nouveau roman authors weren’t interested in telling that sort of thing. As a rule, one should never place form over content. In cinema a similar thing happened. Everybody went to see Last Year in Marienbad because we all had read Robbe-Grillet’s novel, or Nathalie Sarraute’s Golden Fruits. And since it was a subjective narrative, it left every interpretation to the viewers. People had confidence in that artistic approach to the world, so we went to see the movie with a positive attitude. But the piece is now ridiculous. I saw it again in the United States last year, and when the actress said "L’annee derniere . . ." everybody laughed. Returning to your question on the first chapter of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, while writing it I wasn’t thinking of any theoretical approach. My only goal was to reproduce a real event-the way my aunt and some other women in the family would speak. As you can see, it had another origin. JC: Going back to what you were saying on examining the Argentinian mistake-both political and sexual: Would it be different to approach the subject as an essayist rather than as a novelist? MP: Yes, there’s a difference. The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. He has to deal with a certain discipline. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective, of identifying himself or herself with what he’s writing about. If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, with the protagonist, if he or she is able to study his personal unconscious, then a few mysteries can be solved. But to achieve that you need total freedom. JC: Political freedom? MP: Yes, most of all political freedom. For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it’s essential to be free. It’s essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied. And I think one is better on the margin. Writers are not meant for action. Our only compromise is with the individual, personal truth. When the imagination is set free, it can point at the source of our problems, the source of repression. What’s better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other. And I think that the more we share our characters’ problems, the better we can understand them. JC: That means that the gap between action and literature, between art and politics … MP: I think writers are not very serious people…. We are serious when it comes to discipline, but we are impulsive—we have to be, otherwise . . . where is the writer’s temperament? We lack objectivity. The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn’t have a personal point of view, it’s impossible to be a creator. I don’t believe in an ideal objectivity. I think our impulsive spirit and subjectivity are necessary. That’s why I don’t trust many of my colleagues. On the other hand, I don’t think we can handle ourselves in action. JC: What kind of advice can you offer to young writers? MP: The other day, Juan Rulfo recommended that the best thing for young writers to do was to read a lot. I disagree! I do believe that reading can help you understand what you’re writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor. Why? Because if you’re overly conscious of what others are doing, you don’t give enough space to your own preoccupations. In fact, sometimes I think that forgetting what others do, being totally alienated from the world, can be very beneficial. It liberates you! Another piece of advice is never to put form over content. The important thing is to investigate a certain reality and find ways to change it. JC: Could you say something about your experience in the creative writing workshops in the United States? MP: I can tell you about my experience in the creative writing course at City College of New York. I’ve never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized that being a craftsman and wanting to experiment with narrative techniques is very difficult. The opposite thing happens in Latin America and in other countries of the world, for instance Spain. In the United States it’s very expensive to publish a book, and one cannot work underground or semi-professionally because the bookstores won’t stock your books. People are conditioned by advertisements. When a new novel by John Cheever is printed, it’s advertised all over as though it were the ultimate masterpiece, when in fact it’s far from one. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen in our countries. In Latin America, when a book is published, publicity plays a minor role. We have another way of approaching the event, in a manner more in accordance with the product. For instance, a friend may write a book review, or the reader may get advice from a bookseller. In the United States, on the other hand, people don’t go to bookstores to look around. Also, booksellers have no erudition whatsoever. You buy what’s been advertised! In Latin America, fighting censorship gives credibility to the writer. "I’m censored, therefore I am." It becomes a source of inspiration. In the United States there is no censorship. The system is so solid, so strong, the writer’s voice has no real power. JC: How have your novels been received by the feminist movement? MP: Until Pubis Angelical, the feminist movement had received my novels quite well. This particular one, nevertheless, since it deals very directly with a feminist problem, found opposition. The critics complained I used a weak woman as a feminine example. They complained that she wasn’t a good role model because she had a problem she was trying to resolve: she wanted to enjoy herself with men but didn’t know how to. The objection was that she wasn’t a very intelligent woman. Yet, I thought the reader could take care of the problem. In Spain a feminist group condemned the novel. In Mexico, on the other hand, the book sold very well, yet all the book reviews were terrible; ironically, they were all written by men; the Mexican feminists kept silent. JC: Tell me something about Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. MP: Well, after my third novel, I dealt with more recent problems: Buenos Aires, my exile in Mexico (I spent two years there), and also New York. This particular novel dealt with the years I spent in Manhattan, 1976 and 1977, which were truly disgusting. I arrived in the United States—where I had lived during the sixties—in January of 1976. 1 didn’t have an apartment. I was older and New York was less receptive than before. The country was empty of the hippie euphoria. The city was defeated. Add to all that the fact that I didn’t have my immigration papers. In that sense 1976 was a horrible year. And it was then when I had a violent encounter with a fascinating American man, a character of sorts. It was an encounter I experienced in English, and I wanted to write about it. I asked the character for permission. I wrote some two hundred pages of notes in English. As you know, until then Spanish had been my psychological and linguistic vehicle; but in this novel I had all the information I needed, yet I sensed I had to write it in English. The counterpart to the North American protagonist is my father. And the North American himself is a left-wing activist, one who rejects the entire system in which he lives, and later on he uses in his own personal relations all the repressive devices that he criticizes in his surroundings. Do you see what I mean? I couldn’t let this character slip through my fingers. It was so emblematic, so interesting. In the novel, my father arrives in New York as an exile and faces this guy, who is a sociologist and who, having been fired from every college and university, is now a teacher, a gardener, and a guardian of elders. When my father, in a sick state, arrives, this character takes care of him. My father’s English is deficient, of course. For the North American’s English, I thought of using a sort of Spanish-in-translation, an idiom a bit blooded, a bit fictitious. I know this was a crazy enterprise, yet … I was compelled to narrate it. JC: One last question: Why are the tropics so important in your work? MP: Perhaps because I’m always dealing with the absence of landscape in La Pampa. My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics. JC: A sort of paradise lost, isn’t it? MP: Yes, exactly. Manuel Puig (born December 28, 1932, General Villegas, Argentina—died July 22, 1990, Cuernavaca, Mexico) was an Argentine novelist and motion-picture scriptwriter who achieved international acclaim with his novel El beso de la mujer araña (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman, filmed 1985). Puig spent his childhood in a small village on the pampas, but moved at age 13 to Buenos Aires, where he pursued his high school and university studies. He had hoped that Buenos Aires would prove to be like life in the movies, but the city’s reality, with its repression and violence, disappointed his expectations. Puig learned English as a child by seeing every American film he could. He went to Rome in 1957 to study film directing and resided for a time in Stockholm and London. When he returned to Buenos Aires his film scripts were not well received, and he decided that the cinema was not to be his only career. Puig’s first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), is a semiautobiographical account of a boy who escapes the boredom of living on the pampas by fantasizing about the lives of the stars he has seen in motion pictures. The book was later described by Puig as a vehicle for dealing with the oppression of women and the development of a latent-homosexual child. Puig used shifting points of view, flashbacks, and interior monologue to portray the frustration and alienation of his characters, whose only escape is offered by the vacuous world of films and pop art. The style of his second novel, Boquitas pintadas (1969; “Painted Little Mouths”; Eng. trans. Heartbreak Tango), parodied the serialized novels that are popular in Argentina. The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) is a detective novel describing the psychopathic behaviour of characters who are sexually repressed. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel told in dialogues between a middle-aged homosexual and a younger revolutionary who are detained in the same jail cell. The book’s denunciation of sexual and political repression, treated poetically and with an uncommon degree of tenderness, contributed to its success. Puig’s later books include Pubis angelical (1979; Eng. trans. Pubis angelical) and Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (1980; Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages). The major novels were translated into more than a dozen languages, and several of his film scripts won awards. In the mid-1970s, unhappy with the Peróns’ regime in Argentina and perhaps still seeking a life that would resemble the movies, Puig left his native country. He lived in Mexico, New York, and Brazil, and then again in Mexico, where he died. This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Kiss of the Spider Woman Table of Contents Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics Images William Hurt as Molina in the 1985 film version of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Quizzes Textbook chalkboard and apple. Fruit of knowledge. Hompepage blog 2009, History and Society, school education students The Literary World (Famous Novels) Books. Reading. Publishing. Print. Literature. Literacy. Rows of used books for sale on a table. Name the Novelist Portrait of young thinking bearded man student with stack of books on the table before bookshelves in the library Famous Novels, First Lines Quiz Young woman with glasses reading a book, student Famous Novels, Last Lines Quiz Read Next Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Britannica's Book Bingo. Take our reading challenge! Books range form greatest, banned, and counterculture. Britannica’s Book Bingo Spanish poet and novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547 - 1616), the author of 'Don Quixote de la Mancha', ca. 1590. An artist's impression since there are no contemporary likenesses of Cervantes. The Afterlife of Miguel de Cervantes Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales. 10 Captivating Contemporary Novels Set in the British Isles Girl Reading On Turquoise Couch 9 American Countercultural Books Discover Monitor. Varanus salvadorii is a monitor lizard found in New Guinea can grows to 2.7 metres (9 ft.) aka Tree crocodile, Crocodile monitor, Salvadori's monitor, artellia, reptile 7 of the World’s Most Dangerous Lizards and Turtles Washington DC.,USA, April 26, 1989. Supporters for and against legal abortion face off during a protest outside the United States Supreme Court Building during Webster V Health Services Pro and Con: Abortion King Cobra snake in Malaysia. (reptile) 9 of the World’s Deadliest Snakes The Gateway Arch viewed from the surrounding park area in Gateway Arch National Park (formerly Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) in St. Louis, Missouri. Why Is Missouri Called the Show Me State? Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Adolf Hitler (Nazi, nazism, German leader). 9 Things You Might Not Know About Adolf Hitler Franklin D. Roosevelt, who formulated the Four Freedoms. 7 Alphabet Soup Agencies that Stuck Around Home Literature Novels & Short Stories Arts & Culture Kiss of the Spider Woman novel by Puig Also known as: “El beso de la mujer araña” Written and fact-checked by Article History William Hurt as Molina in the 1985 film version of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. William Hurt as Molina in the 1985 film version of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Kiss of the Spider Woman, novel by Manuel Puig, published in 1976 as El beso de la mujer araña. Mostly consisting of dialogue between two men in an Argentine jail cell, the novel traces the development of their unlikely friendship. Molina is a middle-aged lower-middle-class gay man who passes the long hours in prison by acting out scenes from his favourite movies. Valentín is a young upper-middle-class socialist revolutionary who initially berates Molina for his effeminacy and his lack of political conviction. Sharing the hardships of a six-month prison term, the two eventually forge a strong relationship that becomes sexual. In an ironic role reversal at the end of the novel, Molina dies as a result of his involvement in politics, while Valentín escapes the pain of torture by retreating into a dream world. This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth Table of Contents Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics Quizzes Textbook chalkboard and apple. Fruit of knowledge. Hompepage blog 2009, History and Society, school education students The Literary World (Famous Novels) Books. Reading. Publishing. Print. Literature. Literacy. Rows of used books for sale on a table. Name the Novelist Portrait of young thinking bearded man student with stack of books on the table before bookshelves in the library Famous Novels, First Lines Quiz Young woman with glasses reading a book, student Famous Novels, Last Lines Quiz Read Next Britannica's Book Bingo. Take our reading challenge! Books range form greatest, banned, and counterculture. Britannica’s Book Bingo Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales. 10 Captivating Contemporary Novels Set in the British Isles Spanish poet and novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547 - 1616), the author of 'Don Quixote de la Mancha', ca. 1590. An artist's impression since there are no contemporary likenesses of Cervantes. The Afterlife of Miguel de Cervantes Girl Reading On Turquoise Couch 9 American Countercultural Books Discover Person paying with a credit card using a credit card terminal. Cashless payment, credit card reader What Is a Cashless Society and How Does It Work? Washington DC.,USA, April 26, 1989. Supporters for and against legal abortion face off during a protest outside the United States Supreme Court Building during Webster V Health Services Pro and Con: Abortion Two domestic cats lying down with each other. Feline mammal snuggle whiskers Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia? Statue of Nostradamus Nostradamus and His Prophecies Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Figure 13: A Maxim machine gun, belt-fed and water-cooled, operated by German infantrymen, World War I. 7 Deadliest Weapons in History King Cobra snake in Malaysia. (reptile) 9 of the World’s Deadliest Snakes Home Literature Novels & Short Stories Arts & Culture Betrayed by Rita Hayworth novel by Puig Also known as: “La traición de Rita Hayworth” Written and fact-checked by Article History Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, first novel by Manuel Puig, published as La traición de Rita Hayworth in 1968. This semiautobiographical novel is largely plotless. It examines the psychosocial influence of motion pictures on an ordinary town in the Pampas of Argentina. It makes use of shifting perspective and multiple narrative techniques, such as interior monologues, telephone conversations, and school compositions. The book focuses primarily on the first 15 years in the life of Toto Casals, from 1933 to 1948. He becomes obsessed with the films that he regularly attends with his mother. Like others in the community, Toto escapes into the artificial world of popular culture, accepting and absorbing its social norms. He is, however, troubled about sexuality, particularly his own latent homosexuality. This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper. novel Table of Contents Introduction & Top Questions Elements Uses Style Types of novel Social and economic aspects Evaluation and study The future of the novel References & Edit History Related Topics Images & Videos Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors To the Lighthouse What was the first novel ever written? For Students To the Lighthouse novel summary Quizzes Textbook chalkboard and apple. Fruit of knowledge. Hompepage blog 2009, History and Society, school education students The Literary World (Famous Novels) Row of colorful books on a bookshelf. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society The Literary World Nobel prize-winning American author, Pearl S. Buck, at her home, Green Hills Farm, near Perkasie, Pennsylvania, 1962. (Pearl Buck) Novels and Novelists Quiz Portrait of young thinking bearded man student with stack of books on the table before bookshelves in the library Famous Novels, First Lines Quiz Young woman with glasses reading a book, student Famous Novels, Last Lines Quiz Read Next Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales. 10 Captivating Contemporary Novels Set in the British Isles Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Girl Reading On Turquoise Couch 9 American Countercultural Books Britannica's Book Bingo. Take our reading challenge! Books range form greatest, banned, and counterculture. Britannica’s Book Bingo poem. A poet in a Heian period kimono writes Japanese poetry during the Kamo Kyokusui No En Ancient Festival at Jonan-gu shrine on April 29, 2013 in Kyoto, Japan. Festival of Kyokusui-no Utage orignated in 1,182, party Heian era (794-1192). World Poetry Day Discover Close up of books. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Homepage 2010, arts and entertainment, history and society 12 Novels Considered the “Greatest Book Ever Written” Statue of Nostradamus Nostradamus and His Prophecies David Cameron. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom talk during the G8 Summit at the Lough Erne Resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, June 17, 2013 What’s the Difference Between a President and a Prime Minister? Portrait of a mountain gorilla at a short distance. gorilla close up portrait.The mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) Falling Stars: 10 of the Most Famous Endangered Species Figure 13: A Maxim machine gun, belt-fed and water-cooled, operated by German infantrymen, World War I. 7 Deadliest Weapons in History Two domestic cats lying down with each other. Feline mammal snuggle whiskers Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia? Franklin D. Roosevelt, who formulated the Four Freedoms. 7 Alphabet Soup Agencies that Stuck Around Home Literature Novels & Short Stories Arts & Culture novel literature Written by Fact-checked by Last Updated: Apr 15, 2024 • Article History To the Lighthouse To the Lighthouse See all media Category: Arts & Culture Key People: S.E. Hinton Anthony Horowitz Renée Watson Frances Lockridge George Saunders Related Topics: graphic novel picaresque novel Booker Prize epistolary novel psychological novel Top Questions What is a novel? What are the elements of a novel? What are the different types of novels? Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors Learn about essential elements of the novel—including mood, motivation, characterization, and style—with editor and anthologist Clifton Fadiman and actors from London's Old Vic theatre company. This is a 1962 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. See all videos for this article Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones. The novel is a genre of fiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre. The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus, meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings of known fables or myths, and they are lacking in weight and moral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such as Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it from aesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of sentimentality or pornography. It is the purpose of this section to consider the novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium catering for all the strata of literacy. Such early ancient Roman fiction as Petronius’ Satyricon of the 1st century AD and Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass of the 2nd century contain many of the popular elements that distinguish the novel from its nobler born relative the epic poem. In the fictional works, the medium is prose, the events described are unheroic, the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces. There is more low fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the action; the dialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of the need to find—in the period of Roman decline—a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe seems to have been conceived. The most memorable character in Petronius is a nouveau riche vulgarian; the hero of Lucius Apuleius is turned into a donkey; nothing less epic can well be imagined. Portrait of young thinking bearded man student with stack of books on the table before bookshelves in the library Britannica Quiz Famous Novels, First Lines Quiz The medieval chivalric romance (from a popular Latin word, probably Romanice, meaning written in the vernacular, not in traditional Latin) restored a kind of epic view of man—though now as heroic Christian, not heroic pagan. At the same time, it bequeathed its name to the later genre of continental literature, the novel, which is known in French as roman, in Italian as romanzo, etc. (The English term romance, however, carries a pejorative connotation.) But that later genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century in an antichivalric comic masterpiece—the Don Quixote of Cervantes, which, on a larger scale than the Satyricon or The Golden Ass, contains many of the elements that have been expected from prose fiction ever since. Novels have heroes, but not in any classical or medieval sense. As for the novelist, he must, in the words of the contemporary British-American W.H. Auden, Become the whole of boredom, subject to Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just Be just, among the Filthy filthy too, And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man. The novel attempts to assume those burdens of life that have no place in the epic poem and to see man as unheroic, unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd. This is why there is room among its practitioners for writers of hardboiled detective thrillers such as the contemporary American Mickey Spillane or of sentimental melodramas such as the prolific 19th-century English novelist Mrs. Henry Wood, but not for one of the unremitting elevation of outlook of a John Milton. Elements Plot The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties. The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters. Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice, frequently prevail. There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. The traditional picaresque novel—a novel with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In the works of Virginia Woolf, the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader. Character The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by things as much as by characters. Henry James could be vague in The Ambassadors (1903) about the provenance of his chief character’s wealth; if he wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or estate. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s car, gun, and preferred way of mixing a martini. But the true novelists remain creators of characters—prehuman, such as those in William Golding’s Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader may be prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and formal difficulties because of the intense interest of the central characters in novels as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67). It is the task of literary critics to create a value hierarchy of fictional character, placing the complexity of the Shakespearean view of man—as found in the novels of Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad—above creations that may be no more than simple personifications of some single characteristic, like some of those by Dickens. It frequently happens, however, that the common reader prefers surface simplicity—easily memorable cartoon figures like Dickens’ never-despairing Mr. Micawber and devious Uriah Heep—to that wider view of personality, in which character seems to engulf the reader, subscribed to by the great novelists of France and Russia. The whole nature of human identity remains in doubt, and writers who voice that doubt—like the French exponents of the nouveau roman Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as well as many others—are in effect rejecting a purely romantic view of character. This view imposed the author’s image of himself—the only human image he properly possessed—on the rest of the human world. For the unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position in time–space and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial) attributes will be taken for a character. Though the critics may regard it as heretical, this tendency to accept a character is in conformity with the usages of real life. The average person has at least a suspicion of his own complexity and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as composed of much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created out of the author’s own introspection are frequently rejected as not “true to life.” But both the higher and the lower orders of novel readers might agree in condemning a lack of memorability in the personages of a work of fiction, a failure on the part of the author to seem to add to the reader’s stock of remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on recollection, to have a life outside the bounds of the books that contain them are usually the ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of psychological penetration, the ability to make a character real as oneself, seems to be no primary criterion of fictional talent. Scene, or setting The makeup and behaviour of fictional characters depend on their environment quite as much as on the personal dynamic with which their author endows them: indeed, in Émile Zola, environment is of overriding importance, since he believed it determined character. The entire action of a novel is frequently determined by the locale in which it is set. Thus, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) could hardly have been placed in Paris, because the tragic life and death of the heroine have a great deal to do with the circumscriptions of her provincial milieu. But it sometimes happens that the main locale of a novel assumes an importance in the reader’s imagination comparable to that of the characters and yet somehow separable from them. Wessex is a giant brooding presence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose human characters would probably not behave much differently if they were set in some other rural locality of England. The popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic Scotland. Setting may be the prime consideration of some readers, who can be drawn to Conrad because he depicts life at sea or in the East Indies; they may be less interested in the complexity of human relationships that he presents. The regional novel is a recognized species. The sequence of four novels that Hugh Walpole began with Rogue Herries (1930) was the result of his desire to do homage to the part of Cumberland, in England, where he had elected to live. The great Yoknapatawpha cycle of William Faulkner, a classic of 20th-century American literature set in an imaginary county in Mississippi, belongs to the category as much as the once-popular confections about Sussex that were written about the same time by the English novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith. Many novelists, however, gain a creative impetus from avoiding the same setting in book after book and deliberately seeking new locales. The English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Brontë wrote of them in Wuthering Heights (1847), and literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent, in northern England, because it comprises the “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennett’s novels of the early 20th century. Others go to the Monterey, California, of John Steinbeck’s novels in the expectation of experiencing a frisson added to the locality by an act of creative imagination. James Joyce, who remained inexhaustibly stimulated by Dublin, has exalted that city in a manner that even the guidebooks recognize. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale. The literary artist sometimes prides himself on his ability to create the totality of his fiction—the setting as well as the characters and their actions. In the Russian expatriate Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969) there is an entirely new space–time continuum, and the English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings (1954–55) created an “alternative world” that appeals greatly to many who are dissatisfied with the existing one. The world of interplanetary travel was imaginatively created long before the first moon landing. The properties of the future envisaged by H.G. Wells’s novels or by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) are still recognized in an age that those authors did not live to see. The composition of place can be a magical fictional gift. Whatever the locale of his work, every true novelist is concerned with making a credible environment for his characters, and this really means a close attention to sense data—the immediacies of food and drink and colour—far more than abstractions like “nature” and “city.” The London of Charles Dickens is as much incarnated in the smell of wood in lawyers’ chambers as in the skyline and vistas of streets. Narrative method and point of view Where there is a story, there is a storyteller. Traditionally, the narrator of the epic and mock-epic alike acted as an intermediary between the characters and the reader; the method of Fielding is not very different from the method of Homer. Sometimes the narrator boldly imposed his own attitudes; always he assumed an omniscience that tended to reduce the characters to puppets and the action to a predetermined course with an end implicit in the beginning. Many novelists have been unhappy about a narrative method that seems to limit the free will of the characters, and innovations in fictional technique have mostly sought the objectivity of the drama, in which the characters appear to work out their own destinies without prompting from the author. The epistolary method, most notably used by Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), has the advantage of allowing the characters to tell the story in their own words, but it is hard to resist the uneasy feeling that a kind of divine editor is sorting and ordering the letters into his own pattern. The device of making the narrator also a character in the story has the disadvantage of limiting the material available for the narration, since the narrator-character can know only those events in which he participates. There can, of course, be a number of secondary narratives enclosed in the main narrative, and this device—though it sometimes looks artificial—has been used triumphantly by Conrad and, on a lesser scale, by W. Somerset Maugham. A, the main narrator, tells what he knows directly of the story and introduces what B and C and D have told him about the parts that he does not know. Seeking the most objective narrative method of all, Ford Madox Ford used, in The Good Soldier (1915), the device of the storyteller who does not understand the story he is telling. This is the technique of the “unreliable observer.” The reader, understanding better than the narrator, has the illusion of receiving the story directly. Joyce, in both his major novels, uses different narrators for the various chapters. Most of them are unreliable, and some of them approach the impersonality of a sort of disembodied parody. In Ulysses, for example, an episode set in a maternity hospital is told through the medium of a parodic history of English prose style. But, more often than not, the sheer ingenuity of Joyce’s techniques draws attention to the manipulator in the shadows. The reader is aware of the author’s cleverness where he should be aware only of the characters and their actions. The author is least noticeable when he is employing the stream of consciousness device, by which the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a character are presented in interior monologue—apparently unedited and sometimes deliberately near-unintelligible. It is because this technique seems to draw fiction into the psychoanalyst’s consulting room (presenting the raw material of either art or science, but certainly not art itself), however, that Joyce felt impelled to impose the shaping devices referred to above. Joyce, more than any novelist, sought total objectivity of narration technique but ended as the most subjective and idiosyncratic of stylists. The problem of a satisfactory narrative point of view is, in fact, nearly insoluble. The careful exclusion of comment, the limitation of vocabulary to a sort of reader’s lowest common denominator, the paring of style to the absolute minimum—these puritanical devices work well for an Ernest Hemingway (who, like Joyce, remains, nevertheless, a highly idiosyncratic stylist) but not for a novelist who believes that, like poetry, his art should be able to draw on the richness of word play, allusion, and symbol. For even the most experienced novelist, each new work represents a struggle with the unconquerable task of reconciling all-inclusion with self-exclusion. It is noteworthy that Cervantes, in Don Quixote, and Nabokov, in Lolita (1955), join hands across four centuries in finding most satisfactory the device of the fictitious editor who presents a manuscript story for which he disclaims responsibility. But this highly useful method presupposes in the true author a scholarly, or pedantic, faculty not usually associated with novelists. Nobel prize-winning American author, Pearl S. Buck, at her home, Green Hills Farm, near Perkasie, Pennsylvania, 1962. (Pearl Buck) Britannica Quiz Novels and Novelists Quiz Scope, or dimension No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It may or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of considerable length—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since World War II, brevity has been regarded as a virtue in works like the later novels of the Irish absurdist author Samuel Beckett and the ficciones of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and it is only an aesthetic based on bulk that would diminish the achievement of Ronald Firbank’s short novels of the post-World War I era or the Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One (1948). It would seem that there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a significant episode in the life of a personage or group of personages; the other, which admits of limitless length, through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives, sometimes beginning with birth and ending in old age. The plays of Shakespeare show that a full delineation of character can be effected in a very brief compass, so that, for this aspect of the novel, length confers no special advantage. Length, however, is essential when the novelist attempts to present something bigger than character—when, in fact, he aims at the representation of a whole society or period of history. No other cognate art form—neither the epic poem nor the drama nor the film—can match the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous, passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War and Peace is the great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that of early 19th-century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also conveys directly the sensations and emotions of living through a period of cataclysmic change. In the 20th century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in his Doctor Zhivago (1957), expressed—though on a less than Tolstoyan scale—the personal immediacies of life during the Russian Revolution. Though of much less literary distinction than either of these two books, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) showed how the American Civil War could assume the distanced pathos, horror, and grandeur of any of the classic struggles of the Old World. Needless to say, length and weighty subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of fictional greatness. Among American writers, for example, James Jones’s celebration of the U.S. Army on the eve of World War II in From Here to Eternity (1951), though a very ambitious project, repels through indifferent writing and sentimental characterization; Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (1948), an equally ambitious military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a concern with compression, and an astringent objectivity that Jones was unable to match. Frequently the size of a novel is too great for its subject matter—as with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), reputedly the longest single-volume novel of the 20th century, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and John Fowles’s Magus (1965). Diffuseness is the great danger in the long novel, and diffuseness can mean slack writing, emotional self-indulgence, sentimentality. Even the long picaresque novel—which, in the hands of a Fielding or his contemporary Tobias Smollett, can rarely be accused of sentimentality—easily betrays itself into such acts of self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake, the coy digression, the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that should lie in all fiction. If Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a greater novel than Fielding’s Tom Jones or Dickens’ David Copperfield, it is not because its theme is nobler, or more pathetic, or more significant historically; it is because Tolstoy brings to his panoramic drama the compression and urgency usually regarded as the monopolies of briefer fiction. Sometimes the scope of a fictional concept demands a technical approach analogous to that of the symphony in music—the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic movements, each of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends on the theme and characters that unify them. The French author Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe (1904–12) sequence is, very appropriately since the hero is a musical composer, a work in four movements. Among works of English literature, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) insists in its very title that it is a tetralogy rather than a single large entity divided into four volumes; the concept is “relativist” and attempts to look at the same events and characters from four different viewpoints. Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a multivolume series of novels that began in 1951 (collected 1962), may be seen as a study of a segment of British society in which the chronological approach is eschewed, and events are brought together in one volume or another because of a kind of parachronic homogeneity. C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, a comparable series that began in 1940 and continued to appear throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s, shows how a fictional concept can be realized only in the act of writing, since the publication of the earlier volumes antedates the historical events portrayed in later ones. In other words, the author could not know what the subject matter of the sequence would be until he was in sight of its end. Behind all these works lies the giant example of Proust’s roman-fleuve, whose length and scope were properly coterminous with the author’s own life and emergent understanding of its pattern. Myth, symbolism, significance The novelist’s conscious day-to-day preoccupation is the setting down of incident, the delineation of personality, the regulation of exposition, climax, and denouement. The aesthetic value of the work is frequently determined by subliminal forces that seem to operate independently of the writer, investing the properties of the surface story with a deeper significance. A novel will then come close to myth, its characters turning into symbols of permanent human states or impulses, particular incarnations of general truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the act of reading. The ability to perform a quixotic act anteceded Don Quixote, just as bovarysme existed before Flaubert found a name for it. But the desire to give a work of fiction a significance beyond that of the mere story is frequently conscious and deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. When a novel—like Joyce’s Ulysses or John Updike’s Centaur (1963) or Anthony Burgess’ Vision of Battlements (1965)—is based on an existing classical myth, there is an intention of either ennobling a lowly subject matter, satirizing a debased set of values by referring them to a heroic age, or merely providing a basic structure to hold down a complex and, as it were, centrifugal picture of real life. Of Ulysses Joyce said that his Homeric parallel (which is worked out in great and subtle detail) was a bridge across which to march his 18 episodes; after the march the bridge could be “blown skyhigh.” But there is no doubt that, through the classical parallel, the account of an ordinary summer day in Dublin is given a richness, irony, and universality unattainable by any other means. The mythic or symbolic intention of a novel may manifest itself less in structure than in details which, though they appear naturalistic, are really something more. The shattering of the eponymous golden bowl in Henry James’s 1904 novel makes palpable, and hence truly symbolic, the collapse of a relationship. Even the choice of a character’s name may be symbolic. Sammy Mountjoy, in William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), has fallen from the grace of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title makes clear. The eponym of Doctor Zhiva

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Book Title: PUBIS ANGELICAL

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