Performing the Novel and Reading the Romantic Song: Popular Music and Metafiction in 'Three Trapped Tigers', 'Sirena Selena', 'The Importance of Being Called Daniel Santos', 'The Notebook of Romantic Songs', and 'One Hundred Bottles'

In his essay "Las senas del Caribe," Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sanchez describes the necessity of the son--a popular Cuban music genre--to Caribbean men and women: "Particulariza al hombre y la mujer caribes el apego esclavizado al son. [...] Si en el Caribe no se escucha el son se dificulta la vida. Si en el Caribe no se hace el son se estropea la muerte" (Sanchez, "Las senas del Caribe," La guagua aerea 41-42).1 Sanchez's humorous comment underscores the centrality of popular music that cuts across cultures and social classes in the Caribbean. I analyze how five Caribbean novels juxtapose their own narrative performances with performances of popular music, particularly those of boleros and romances. The dissertation studies the Cuban novels Tres tristes tigres (1967) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Cien botellas en una pared (2002) by Ena Lucia Portela, the Puerto Rican novels La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988) by Luis Rafael Sanchez and Sirena Selena vestida de Pena (2000) by Mayra Santos-Febres, and the Martinican novel Le cahier de romances (2000) by Raphael Confiant.;I examine three paradoxes that, to varying degrees, nuance the relationship between popular music and literature in each of the novels. Though the novels seem to yearn for the affective impact that popular music has on its audience, they contrast the ephemerality of live performance with literature's ability to preserve moments of time. They also question the emotional authenticity of popular music and simultaneously reveal their own construction as pieces of fiction, thus casting doubt on the ability of art to represent lived experience faithfully. Finally, the novels reveal the desire to transmit local cultural specificity and to reach a broad international audience, as popular music does. The thesis combines a series of close readings of each novel and a dialogue with theoretical discussions drawn from Performance Studies, World Literature, and popular music studies of the bolero and the romance.;In Chapter One I argue that Cabrera Infante questions the written signifier's exclusive claim to generate meaning by centering Tres tristes tigres around two characters who perform--La Estrella, an unconventional bolerista, and Bustrofedon, admired for his creative play with oral language. Chapter Two analyzes how Sirena Selena recontextualizes the classic bolero through dramatizing its performance by an adolescent drag queen, Sirena. I engage with Pascale Casanova's conception of literary centers and peripheries to argue that Sirena's liminality extends to Santos Febres who both exploits and resists her ability to write commercialized, international literature. Chapter Three contends that La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos's essayistic form and style invite a comparison between the bolerista and the author figure and the roles that their respective kinds of artistic production play in the cultural consciousness of the Caribbean and of Latin America. In Chapter Four, I establish a contrast between the sung romance's ability to transmit sentiment in Le cahier de romances and the difficulty of achieving authentic individual and cultural expression through writing within the context of Martinique. Chapter Five draws a parallel between the discussion of what constitutes good music in Cien botellas en una pared and the novel's overarching concern for what it means to be a contemporary Cuban novelist. Once again I invoke Casanova and show how Portela's novel questions Casanova's definition of "world fiction.".;By dramatizing performances of popular music and their reception, the five novels ultimately measure themselves against embodied modes of generating meaning, such as music and oral storytelling. The novels aspire to lay hold of lived experience with the same degree of immediacy that the musics of the Caribbean seem to achieve. At the same time, each novel also dramatizes its own creation as a piece of writing and highlights the literariness that separates it from the more popular forms of expression that it depicts. Popular music allows these novels to explore the supposed divisions between low and high culture, the local and the cosmopolitan, the authentic and the artificial, life and literature.;1 Analysis in this dissertation is based on the original Spanish and French editions of each novel. In the body of the thesis, I use the original titles to refer to the novels: Tres tristes tigres, Sirena Selena vestida de pena, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, Le cahier de romances, and Cien botellas en una pared. La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos and Le cahier de romances have not been translated into English. Translations of their titles into English are my own. 2 "A slavish attraction to the son defines the Caribbean man and woman. [.. .] If a person in the Caribbean doesn't hear the son, life becomes tough. If no one plays the son in the Caribbean, death is ruined" (Sanchez, "Las senas del Caribe," La guagua aerea 41-42).