Revamping the Popular in Snow White and Pubis Angelical: The Residual Fictions of Donald Barthelme and Manuel Puig

Abstract

Donald Barthelme ( 193 1 1989) and Manuel Puig (1 9321990) are exemplary of how U.S. and Latin American writers have revamped popular discursive forms by presenting in their fictions both parodies and stylizations of such forms. Barthelme’s better-known works-Snow White (1 967), The Dead Father (1 976) and The King ( 1990)-rewrite folktales and legends from a twentieth-century perspective, critiquing consumerism, politics, sexual freedom and family relations in U.S. society. For his part, Manuel Puig’s use of serial literature in Boquitas pintadas [Heartbreak Tango] (1969), detective fiction in The Buenos Aires AfSair (1973), or the cinematic melodrama in El beso de la mujer araiia [Kiss ofthe Spider Woman] (1976) overlaps with political, psychoanalytical or historical interpretations of twentieth-century Argentina. The pervasiveness of parodic popular narratives such as these is indicative of a change of dominant discursive forms in contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers. Novels like Puig’s and Barthelme’s reject the literary canon’s division between high and low cultural manifestations. Rather, they blur the differences between low and high types of discourses. Traditionally, the study of popular literature is based on a distinction between serious literature (erudite, canonical, elitist) and trivial literature (second-rate, entertaining, of the masses or popular), the latter being derived from the former. Popular fiction is understood as a re-collection of the remains and scraps of the permanent values exposed in serious literature, and it often presents a literary model commonly considered “cultural detritus” (Ashley 1-3). Thus, popular literature is seen as a residual part-and, as such, as inferior and subverted-within a hegemonic literary system. In the case of contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction, this distinction becomes problematic. Popular literature’s apparently limited importance gets to be questioned, since its residual nature becomes nec-