Reading Desi Arnaz in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Abstract

Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won high praise from reviewers its depiction of New York Latin music scene of forties and fifties, although some critics have faulted it a dragging plot and excessive descriptions.(1) Nicolas Kanellos, director of Arte Publico Press, called it the best Hispanic book ever published by a large commercial press (113). He gives following reason why this novel stands out: Not your typical ethnic autobiography which charts a protagonist's search American dream, The Mambo Kings instead is an evocation of period when one segment of Hispanic culture heavily influenced American popular culture, dancing its way right into heart of mainstream (113). Indeed, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is populated by many of greats who brought Latin rhythms of mambo, rumba, and cha-cha-cha into North American mainstream: Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Perez Prado, Beny More, and, most important to this novel, Desi Arnaz. In a New York Times Book Review article, Joseph Cincotti calls Hijuelos's effort to evoke this place and time literary archaeology (30), while Hijuelos himself, in same article, refers to it as wandering around 1952..., taking walks down memory lane, even if it's not my memory. One might wonder to whose memory Hijuelos is referring. It is significant that text itself reflects this memory/not memory tension, this search something experienced yet not experienced. This dichotomy is revealed in novel's crucial linguistic ambivalence, which has been described by Gustavo Perez Firmat,(2) and which Ilan Stavans calls for tourists.(3) On another level text suggests that memory it seeks to recover is a collective one rooted in both Anglo and Hispanic cultural experiences of music and television. I will argue that Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo character construct serves multiple purposes in narrative, providing a stable referent author's archaeological finds while at same time creating unstable effects. The presence of historical characters in a novel may contribute to verisimilitude by relying on reader's knowledge to supply this very illusion of real, or it may serve a more subversive narrative purpose, such as creating tension between reader's knowledge and expectation on one hand and what narrative actually delivers on other. A proper name (say, Charlie Chaplin or John Wayne) is a locus of multiple meanings that can never be exhausted by a list of adjectives or a study of roles played. In The Mambo Kings names Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are deployed to draw on reader's experience of popular culture, thus providing a structure or map some of novel's thematic concerns; however, as we shall see, these names and their significance in popular culture are reinvented in novel. These names, not surprisingly, often appear in reference to I Love Lucy television show (a title which could arguably be said to function much way a proper name does), evoking even more extensive cultural significance. Fictional identities often blend, as reader of The Mambo Kings encounters references to Desi Arnaz (fictionalized historical person) and then Ricky Ricardo (fictional television character played by Arnaz) as if no boundary - real or fictional - existed between them. The effect is somewhat like a narrative optical illusion, where eye sees two distinct images but can process only one at a time.(4) This suggests, as histories of I Love Lucy show have said, that Desi Arnaz played himself in series.(5) While this is an easy line to swallow - after all Arnaz was a Cuban singer and bandleader and played one on show - it obfuscates division between performing self and non-performing self. For television viewer, Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are surely same entity. And reader of The Mambo Kings will have no difficulty visualizing Desi/Ricky in novel or assuming an acquaintance with him, because he is universally known. …