Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

First published:Tres tristes tigres, 1967 (English translation, 1971)

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: Summer of 1958

Locale: Havana, Cuba

Principal Characters:

• Bustrófedon, an inveterate punster and the focus of the group of principal male characters
• Silvestre, a writer deeply interested in film
• Arsenio Cué, a television star and close friend of Silvestre
• Códac, a photographer, first of celebrities and later of scenes of street violence
• Eribó, a mulatto bongo drummer and would-be social climber
• La Estrella, a huge black singer of boleros
• Cuba Venegas, a nightclub singer

The Novel

The plot of Three Trapped Tigers is conceived as a nightclub show, introduced by the frenetic multilingual wordplay of the emcee of the famous Tropicana cabaret in Havana. His first word is “Showtime!”; his last ones are “Curtains up!” At this point a number of characters, some of them present in the club and introduced by the emcee, narrate sections of the text, with no further introduction or explanation. There is a one-sided telephone conversation, a letter, a story appearing as a series of fragments placed at various points in the text, and another story in two translations (only in the Spanish original) and complete with “corrections” by the author’s wife, who turns out to be a fictional creation of her husband. There are even fragments of a woman’s sessions with a psychiatrist. The author has said that the text consists of a series of “voices,” and that voices have no biography, which means that the only possible coherence results from the reader’s ability to assemble the fragments into a more or less meaningful whole.

There is a certain symmetry to the fragments, in that several characters, stories, and themes introduced in the first half are mirrored in the second, in some cases approximately the same distance from the end as their initial appearance is from the beginning. Thus, a story of Silvestre in which he and his brother witness a murder on the way to the cinema is related by him to his friend Arsenio Cué near the conclusion with some significant details reversed. Silvestre then vows that he will one day write the incident as a story. Presumably, the result is the version that appears earlier in the text. A character named Beba Longoria, whose rise in the society world has led to a serious “confusion of tongues” in her manner of speaking, is called “Babel” near the book’s conclusion. Also, Arsenio Cué completes a story near the book’s end that he has narrated in unfinished form near the beginning.

The incidents related generally have to do with false appearances and the resultant disillusionment. Relations between the sexes are not functioning in a normal manner, and significant persons in the lives of the principal characters are dying. There is a definite theme of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “carnivalization,” which brings about a reversal of values. One of the most important models for the novel is the work of Lewis Carroll, so that mirrors, both literal and figurative, play an important role in effecting such a reversal. The transition between the two halves of the book is a segment entitled “Headcracker,” in which Bustrófedon is viewed as a sort of Antichrist figure, or mirror image of Christ. Whereas the latter is presented as “the Word become flesh,” Bustrófedon is the man who “tried to be language.” He dies, and the text, which begins with an outburst of linguistic activity, ends in a manifold repetition of the word “silently.” The text too has reversed itself.

The Characters

In one of the segments narrated by Silvestre, he mentions that the five principal male characters are engaged in a search for total wisdom and that they desire to achieve immortality “by uniting the end with the beginning.” Each of them carries out that quest in his own way. Arsenio Cué races his convertible madly down the streets of Havana in what strikes Silvestre as an attempt to convert space into time. Códac seems to wish that he could unite sexually with all women at the same time, and Eribó transcends his mundane circumstances by means of sound and rhythm. For his part, Silvestre, who is a writer, desires to remember everything, while, as mentioned above, Bustrófedon has “tried to be language.” All of them suffer from a vague uneasiness as they witness the progressive disintegration of the Havana nightlife that they have known and loved, with the result that they become preoccupied with their personal mortality.

The social disintegration around them, the description of which is often couched in apocalyptic terms, reflects the precarious situation of Cuba in mid-1958, a few months before Fidel Castro’s revolution triumphed and Cuba’s national life was utterly transformed. The epigraph to the text, drawn from Carroll’s work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), reads, “And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.” Cabrera Infante has stated that his novels represent, in part, an attempt to re-create a Havana that no longer exists outside his works.

Each of the principal male characters reflects the move away from visual imagery and toward sound and language that characterizes much of twentieth century literature. Silvestre has been deeply involved with the cinema all his life, but is now a writer. Arsenio Cué has been a television actor, but he is no longer working at the studio and is increasingly interested in wordplay. The photographer Códac narrates the “I Heard Her Sing” segments, concerning La Estrella, whose essence, he says, is her voice. Códac also states that one of Bustrófedon’s words is worth a thousand pictures. Eribó has left a career as an illustrator to become a drummer again. Bustrófedon has abandoned even his ordinary name to assume one that identifies him with a rhetorical device expressive of language’s ability to reverse itself, just as he would like to be able to return from his inevitable death.

The major female characters also illustrate the play of visual and auditory phenomena. Cuba Venegas is a nightclub singer whose career is built largely on her superficial beauty. Her somewhat deficient singing must be accompanied by instrumental music. In total contrast is La Estrella, whose huge size and repulsive appearance are overcome in the public’s estimation by her rich, unaccompanied voice. It becomes clear that she represents the intrusion of genuine, primordial, creative sound into an artificial environment. She is tricked into signing a contract requiring her to sing with accompaniment, which is a devastating blow to her. Not long after, she eats a massive meal in the rarefied atmosphere of Mexico City and dies of heart failure.

Critical Context

In his book La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; the new Spanish-American novel), Carlos Fuentes first mentions Three Trapped Tigers in connection with its use of humor, which he considers “one of the notable features of the creation of the true Latin American language.” He goes on to say that Cabrera Infante’s novel “allows us to carry out the verbal transition from the past to the future,” in that “Cabrera’s savage intent to demolish goes to the roots of a Latin American problem: our language has been the product of uninterrupted conquest and colonization—a conquest and colonization whose language betrayed an oppressive hierarchical order.” Such a statement is perhaps typical of the thinking of authors and critics in evaluating this author’s contribution to Latin American prose fiction. During the years following its publication, it has gradually come to occupy an important place among the trendsetting novels of Latin America, especially where language and humor are concerned.

One of the major forces at work within the novel is the Cuban choteo tradition, which has been described as the tendency to mock everything that represents any form of authority. In this case, if Fuentes is correct, much of the text is concerned with an unrelenting attack on the Spanish language because that language is expressive of certain structures that Latin America must leave behind in her quest for a modern identity. Still, the author has repeatedly stated that the novel should not be taken too seriously, since it is nothing more than a joke that got out of hand. This is also in the choteo tradition, to attack even one’s own work if one fears that it may be considered in an overly serious manner.

Bibliography

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. “Wit and Wile with Guillermo Cabrera Infante.” Interview by Suzanne Jill Levine. Americas (English Edition) 47 (July-August, 1995): 24-29. In this interview, the Cuban-born author discusses his career and the influences that have shaped it. He talks about his Cuban and British roots, his love of puns, and his interest in film and music. A good source of background information.

Firmat, G. P. Review of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Cinema.Hispanic Review 59 (Summer, 1991): 370-371. Firmat asserts that Hall’s book “fails to produce new or interesting insights into the work of the author of Arcadia sodas las noches.” However, Firmat does contend that Hall makes some interesting comparisons between the film version of Tres tristes tigres and Some Like It Hot starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Also notes that Hall’s book contains an excellent bibliography.

Siemens, William. Review of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Cinema, by Kenneth E. Hall. Symposium 44 (Fall, 1990): 225-227. Offers an in-depth discussion of the place of film in the work of Cabrera Infante. Siemens mentions that Hall traces the evolution of Cabrera Infante’s thought concerning modern theories of film criticism, but notes that Cabrera Infante “may have undergone the same kind of transformation that Silvestre experiences in Tres tristes tigres, between an obsession with film and an equally strong preoccupation with the text.”

Souza, Raymond D. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas, 1996. An informative and lively biography of one of the most prominent contemporary Cuban writers. Souza’s work offers intriguing insight into Cabrera Infante’s family history as well as his literary career.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Touchstone.” The Nation 266 (May 11, 1998): 56-57. Vargas Llosa offers a tribute to Cabrera Infante, noting that even when Cabrera Infante was nearly destitute in London, “from the typewriter of this harassed man . . . instead of insults there poured a stream of belly laughs, puns, brilliant nonsense and fantastic tricks of rhetorical illusion.”