Reading Desi Arnaz in 'The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.'

Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won high praise from reviewers for its depiction of the New York Latin music scene of the forties and fifties, although some critics have faulted it for 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 the following reason why this novel stands out: "Not your typical ethnic autobiography which charts a protagonist's search for the American dream, The Mambo Kings instead is an evocation of the period when one segment of Hispanic culture heavily influenced American popular culture, dancing its way right into the heart of the mainstream" (113). Indeed, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is populated by many of the greats who brought the Latin rhythms of the mambo, rumba, and cha-cha-cha into the 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 the 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 the text itself reflects this memory/not memory tension, this search for something experienced yet not experienced. This dichotomy is revealed in the 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 the text suggests that the 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 the Desi Arnaz/Ricky Ricardo character construct serves multiple purposes in the narrative, providing a stable referent for the author's "archaeological" finds while at the same time creating unstable effects. The presence of historical characters in a novel may contribute to verisimilitude by relying on the reader's knowledge to supply this very illusion of the real, or it may serve a more subversive narrative purpose, such as creating tension between the reader's knowledge and expectation on the one hand and what the narrative actually delivers on the 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 the names Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are deployed to draw on the reader's experience of popular culture, thus providing a structure or map for some of the novel's thematic concerns; however, as we shall see, these names and their significance in popular culture are reinvented in the novel. These names, not surprisingly, often appear in reference to the I Love Lucy television show (a title which could arguably be said to function much the way a proper name does), evoking even more extensive cultural significance. Fictional identities often blend, as the 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 the eye sees two distinct images but can process only one at a time.(4) This suggests, as histories of the I Love Lucy show have said, that Desi Arnaz played himself in the series.(5) While this is an easy line to swallow - after all Arnaz was a Cuban singer and bandleader and played one on the show - it obfuscates the division between the performing self and the non-performing self. For the television viewer, Desi Arnaz and Ricky Ricardo are surely the same entity. And the reader of The Mambo Kings will have no difficulty visualizing Desi/Ricky in the novel or assuming an acquaintance with him, because he is universally known. …