Kiss of the Spider Woman (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Kiss of the Spider Woman (Spanish: El beso de la mujer araña) is a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig. It depicts the daily conversations between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, Molina and Valentín, and the intimate bond they form in the process. It is generally considered Puig's most successful work.
The novel's form is unusual in that there is no traditional narrative voice, one of the primary features of fiction. It is written in large part as dialogue, without any indication of who is speaking, except for a dash (-) to show a change of speaker. There are also significant portions of stream-of-consciousness writing. What is not written as dialogue or stream-of-consciousness is written as meta-fictional government documentation. The conversations between the characters, when not focused on the moment at hand, are recountings of films that Molina has seen, which act as a form of escape from their environment. Thus there are a main plot, several subplots, and five additional stories that comprise the novel.
The novel makes extensive use of footnotes.
Themes
The author includes a long series of footnotes on the psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality. The footnotes act largely as a representation of Puig's political intention in writing the novel: to present an objective view of homosexuality. The footnotes include both factual information and that given by the fictional Anelli Taub. The footnotes tend to appear at moments of misunderstanding between Molina and Valentín. The extended notes deepen the novel's experimental nature while clarifying the book's challenge to traditional psychoanalytic views of homosexuality. However, the two levels, the literary one of the dialogue and the one of the footnotes, proceed hand in hand, aiming at the same goal, an objective that the author deliberately leaves open to the interpretation of the reader.
