his examination of these institutions. He asks, 'Is there a narrative beyond the Archive?…[T]here seems to exist a desire to break out of the archive, one that is no longer merely part of the economy of the archive itself. Is a move beyond the Archive the end of narrative, or is it the beginning of another narrative? Could it be seen from within the Archive, or even from the subversions of the Archive?'
González Echevarría's Myth and Archive is very much imbued with the current academic identity crisis that has driven scholars in various fields to rethink the implications of the traditional objects of study and the accepted methodologies for studying them. As scholars like González Echevarría reflect on the limits of what he calls 'the archive,' so too do they come to an awareness of the limitations of a field of knowledge that more and more comes to seem provisionally situated. González Echevarría begins to write beyond the limits of his own text when he suggests, in a final footnote, that writers like Severo Sarduy (Cuba) and Manuel Puig (Argentina) seem to be plotting an escape from the archive in their post-Boom fictions: Sarduy, perhaps, through his commitment to French deconstructive theories; Puig in his obsession with popular art forms.
Manuel Puig is a particularly interesting case in point. Unlike the Boom novelists, his crucial referent is neither elitist high culture nor autochthonous reality. Instead, Puig's characters most commonly define themselves in terms of popular culture — the songs from the top 40, the 'in' soap opera, the movies, generally Hollywood imports, that dominate the theater screens. Puig's gently ironic vision of his hapless small-town dwellers is both compassionate and comprehending. While he displays the emptiness of an existence defined by Tinseltown values, his works, including La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971), Boquitas pintadas (1972; Heartbreak Tango, 1973), and Pubis Angelical (1979; English trans-626- lation, 1986), also offer a sincere homage to the films of the 1930s and 1940s that are his particular resource.
Perhaps most well known of his novels in the United States is El beso de la mujer araña (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979), a work released in a film version in 1985. This novel is told almost entirely through dialogue between two cellmates, one a political prisoner, one jailed for overt homosexual behavior (corruption of a minor). The story is essentially one of seduction — of seduction of each of the two apparently incompatible prisoners by the ideas of the other, a mutual seduction mediated by the romantic films the homosexual describes to escape mentally from the confines of prison and the even more stifling confines of a middle-class morality he paradoxically, yearningly espouses, a seduction that also implies that of the reader into the web of the text. The multiply negotiated kiss occupies a central symbolic role: the kiss of affection between friends, the passionate kiss of lovers, the fatal kiss of the panther woman that turns her into the assassin of the one she loves, the betrayer's kiss that sends the confederate to a horrible death. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the stereotypically lush movie settings contrast with the implicit barenness of the cell. Curiously, at the end of the novel the lavish romantic fantasies legitimated by Hollywood merge with the harshly murderous reality of the unnamed Latin American country as the homosexual, Molina, doubly seduced by movies and by politics, suffers either the romantic death of a movie heroine or/and the heroic martyrdom of a political activist. Or perhaps, cognizant of our own seduction by either of the two versions, we readers might glimpse another dimension in which Molina's death would become merely another in a frighteningly long line of meaningless disappearances, becoming in the Latin American context a metaphor for the violence authoritarian governments often exercise against their own citizens. Molina, the homosexual, has always been and still is part of a 'disappeared' segment of Latin American society: the homosexual subculture that is alternately ignored and persecuted by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. In the United States context, Molina's senseless death by fiction can be taken as an allegorical tale of all such disappearances, social and political, including the mysterious disappearance, and equally mysterious reappearance, of the entire continent from our collective memories. -627- Manuel Puig's works epitomize an ill-defined area of literature that I call, borrowing the term from Mexican 'cronista' Jose Joaquín Blanco, 'la novela de la transa.'[2] The 'transa' (sting or con operation) is, as Blanco notes, also a 'trenza' (a weaving together) of disparate elements of society, with the common ground of a 'supervivencia ilusionada' (an illusionary survival) based on the con-artist's confidence in his own cleverness. Unlike the United States model of the confidence game, the Mexican 'transa' is less focused on the individual doing the manipulating, more on the action as transaction between two individuals, each of whom knows that a 'transa' is taking place, each of whom thinks he (it is usually a 'he') has the advantage. 'Transa' then, eventually involves 'autotransa.' It is a quintessentially urban phenomenon, powered by young people who derive their models from television and popular culture. These young people may not know English, and their superficial indifference to politics does not mask a deep historical resentment to United States policies, but they can sing along with the latest heavy-metal rock bands from the United States and are attentive to fashions coming out of New York. They are also aware of sexualities ignored/disguised by the bourgeoisie. For simplicity's sake, I will divide the 'novela de la transa' into two dominant thematic tendencies, one emphasizing the social transaction, the second focusing on the sexual transaction. Clearly, however, most novels include both tendencies: Puig's works, for example, deal importantly with cultural imperialism, while also addressing areas of ambiguously negotiated sexualities. Likewise, Severo Sarduy's technically complex dramas, like Cobra (1972; English translation, 1975), highlight ambiguously trans-sexual characters such as Cobra/ Cadillac, the one castrated, the other endowed with a penis to cover her/his original lack.
The hormonal charge of a differently gendered discourse is nowise esoteric. It confronts directly an ingrained institutional history of seeing differently gendered literature as inherently limited when held up to a 'universal' standard. Ethel Krauze, a young writer and critic from Mexico, responds to those who uncritically adopt variations on -628- heterosexist, masculinist assumptions when she sensibly argues that the historical positioning of the gendered self applies to all the products of the imagination:
I felt that the feminine, as it has been interpreted throughout history, approximated me to zoology more than to humanity, inserted me more into a permanent provisionality where I would never stop being a woman, where I would never be able to create true literature: the literature men make. But my stubbornness won out. I started to write, period, with the sole desire of telling things: literature has no sex. And out came these pages where women dominate perhaps more than I might have proposed. And reading them over, I realized, then, that it is the same world, with its swamps and its heat, only that it is seen, or better, felt, from a woman's profile. Masculine literature has made its contribution: to describe men and invent women; probably feminine literature covers the other half, there where woman is really herself, and man begins to look at himself, in his own perplexity, out of her eyes.
What Krauze proposes is not the successive approximation of writing by women to a supposedly sexless, but inherently masculinist, model of 'good' writing, but rather the development of that model's complementary other side(s). Krauze, furthermore, signals the impossibility of doing anything else, for she is both a woman and a writer, and not a transvestite man. Her work will of necessity be inflected by this historical, social, and sexual positioning, and it is, moreover, to her advantage to recognize the usefulness of exploring the potentialities in writing from different points of view. In so doing, writers outside the male heterosexist orientation will instigate what Sylvia Molloy calls 'a new praxis of writing, subverting the authoritarian language that puts them 'in their place,' displacing themselves.' And from this other place, such authors can complete an image of the world that has, inevitably, only been partially drawn.
Overtly homosexual/lesbian writing has a particularly powerful charge in this context. Reina Roffé's Monte de Venus (1976) was highly controversial in Argentina for its frankly portrayed lesbianism. The novel, in many ways a rehash of tired romantic clichés drawn from countless sentimental love stories, popular music, and banal cinema, was banned in that country alongside other works with the cast of a more overtly political denunciation. As David William Foster notes, for the authorities, 'a novel that gives voice to an aggressive lesbian, whose inverted behavior threatens sacred institutions by -629- parodying them with notable fidelity, is clearly a new threshold in the allegedly mindless corruption of the national moral fiber.' The censors are probably right; novels like Roffé's do indeed pose a challenge to the precariously maintained facade of bourgeois gentility.
The aggressive point-by-point homage to/parody of heterosexual mores appears in other works as well, and
