(2) Angela's gender-specifically her identity as a spiritual Represents the existential void caused by religious skepticism, andīlasillo-the village idiot symbolizes equally unsatisfactory blindįaith, Angela appears to be the one character capable of synthesizingįaith and doubt, or at least of sustaining them in dynamic opposition. However, a focus on the narrator of San Manuel Bueno, martir, AngelaĬarballino, has partially replaced an earlier tendency towardsīiographical and philosophical readings that attempt to compare orĬontrast Unamuno with his atheist-priest protagonist.
Indeed, it borders on the cliche to comment on theĮxhaustive variety of theoretical standpoints that critics have adopted Short but influential novel San Manuel Bueno, martir (1931) critics haveĪpproached the work from many angles, including literary, philosophical,īiographical, theological, psychological, socio-historical, gender andĬlass perspectives. IN the eighty years since Miguel de Unamuno first published his
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MLA style: "Spiritual mother or complete human? Gender and existence in Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, Martir." The Free Library."Estoy convencido de que la escuela de la explotacion esta en la pareja, en la primera celula y que de alli se traslada al campo del trabajo," he began ["I'm convinced that the school for exploitation is in the couple, the primary cell, and that from there. Shortly after its publication, Puig explained his linking of sexual-liberation and class-liberation themes in Beso. (3) Puig clearly puts into question in the footnotes not only "the entire subject-object system which constitutes an oppression of desire", (4) but also our received notions of male-female and homosexual-heterosexual difference upon which patriarchal institutions rest. Puig' s principle target of attack is that of what he calls "the Radical Freudianists": the repression that maintains in the West the fundamental taboo against bisexualism. It is my assertion that, while this aspect cannot boast the high cultural profile of motifs like revolution and Freudianism, myth is, nonetheless, solidly at the heart of both Puig's political and psychiatric messages and his novelistic design.Ī careful reading of the footnotes confirms that Puig' s aim in mounting a dialectic on homosexuality is a de/reconstruction of the Freudian view of sexual identity. (2) It is also coherently expressed in both explicit and implicit ways in the metaphoric, plot, and character strata of the novel, including the real life, scientifically grounded character information summarized in the footnotes. Nonetheless, the mythological nature of this work is suggested from its very beginning, from the reference to the "spider woman" and her kiss in the novel's title. It is an aspect much less discernible than the political or the psychiatric, perhaps, for the modern reader is usually unversed in classical culture.
The political optic that Puig brought to bear on Oedipalism in the narrative of his fourth novel had a (3) aspect, the aspect of myth. The other aspect, wrought at the level of character development, took two distinct shapes in the footnotes: (1) in a bogus polemic waged between science and popular belief in Chapters 3 and 5, where Puig debunked basic third-sex theories of homosexual causation (1) and (2) in the complex ideological debate between radical and orthodox Freudianism that fills the remaining footnotes. One aspect was articulated at the level of story it is particularized in the tension between a revolutionary's (Valentin's) struggle with a repressive state and its ideology and a homosexual's (Molina's) tacit acceptance of his oppression and the thinking that produced it. The political eye Puig now focused on oedipalism had two very visible aspects in the 1976 work. He would have to heighten the sharpness of the image he was presenting, oedipal ideology, by adjusting the filter through which he forced it to pass, the oedipal family. Continuing a deconstruction of the oedipal law, begun eight years earlier in The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth (1968), Manuel Puig's fourth novel, El beso de la mujer arana (1976), focusea the reader's eye on culture in a way that suggests a new awareness on the writer's part.
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