“Pitched Battles: Radio’s Common Places in Puig’s Boquitas Pintadas”

• In Event: Moving Sounds: Technology and the Sonic Sensorium from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone

Abstract

If radio did not begin the debates about the “proper” use of language in Argentina, it brought oral speech into the legislative realm, and provided a platform for political nationalists to push for linguistic norms in a country with a still fluctuating ethnic and national identity. For example, the May 1946 Radio Broadcasting Manual regulated actors’ tone: “The tone of voice, including sighs or the emotional relief of figures of intonation, will be appropriate for each situation, but will always avoid the falsettos of low comedy, excessively high-pitched timbre, feminized distortions, etc.” Through these dictates, the tone and timbre of voices, the particular diction of a speaker, the verbal inventiveness of a comedian became freighted with political and legal import.
This paper examines Manuel Puig’s Boquitas Pintadas as a counter narrative to the state’s interest in controlling radio speech. In a novel where characters change the sound of their speech, the choice of their pronouns (“tú” or “vos”), and even their stream-of-consciousness based on their radio listening, Puig reminds readers of the politics of spoken language. He emphasizes how immigrant children, in particular, developed their own language through the radio, and thereby gained access to the national culture that Borges, among others, had insisted could only remain open to those born with a “native” sense of pitch. Outlining battles over tone and radio, I read Puig’s writing as contesting the restrictions of popular speech by reimagining the language of the novel, and constructing new spaces for Argentine sonic culture.

Author

• Tom P McEnaney, Cornell University