Tango and ‘Folletín’

Boquitas pintadas has some elements in common with La traición de Rita Hayworth; it is set in the same environment, Coronel Vallejos in the late 1930s, and the stifling parochialism of the first novel is still very much apparent. Moreover both novels are written in the form of different voices often recounting the same situations from different points of view. But there is a number of notable differences. The approach is, if anything, more experimental; the images of Hollywood are replaced by national cultural models, for example in the form of the tango, and by the folletín; and the concept of a central protagonist, embodied by Toto in the first novel, gives way to a number of protagonists, none of whom could really lay claim to a central position and none of whom invites the kind of psychoanalytic reading which seems to me so appropriate to the figure of Toto in La traición de Rita Hayworth.

All of these features of Boquitas pintadas (which I shall henceforth refer to as Boquitas), can be seen as pointing to different facets of postmodernity, and the first section of this chapter will mainly be concerned with looking at the novel in the light of the postmodern project as examined and defined by Fredric Jameson (1991) in his famous ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, and subsequently, although to a lesser extent, by Jean François-Lyotard. In the later section my intention is to explore aspects of the depiction of gender in Boquitas with reference to Paul Julian Smith's (1989) study of the issues of genre and gender in The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature, and to William Rowe and Vivian Schelling's (1991) Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America.

Postmodernity and ‘Boquitas Pintadas’

Jameson enumerates different features which he considers to be common to what he describes as all the postmodernisms; and this section will consist of an outline of some of these features with an analysis of the different ways in which they might apply to Boquitas. The first of these fits so well with Puig's work that it justifies a substantial quotation from Jameson's chapter.