Can We Still Say “We”? Manuel Puig and the Question of Readership in the Global Age

Abstract What kinds of collectivities might come into being in literature in an age of diverse global readership? This question, pressing for twenty-first-century reevaluations of comparative literature, is not new to Latin American literature and its criticism. This article takes Manuel Puig’s 1980 novel Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas as an example of a text that engages in debates of its moment, including reader-response theory and Latin American testimonio, while also looking over their horizons to anticipate the ways the collective “we” of literary studies would be thrown into question in the decades to come. Though the novel, which was written during Puig’s exile in New York and anticipates a metropolitan readership, condemns its reader from the outset to read badly (incompetently, extractively, parasitically), it also suggests that there is ethical value in staying with the textual encounter in which meaning, power, and relation are negotiated. Miscommunication, distortion, and projection may be inevitable when continuity in culture, language, and life experience cannot be assumed between writer, characters, and readers, but Puig’s novel affirms that the creative collaboration (however conflictive) that takes place in the act of reading is what gives rise to new ways of saying “we.”