Relative Humidity 95%

14/12/2025

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  One way to view a short story is to see it as potentially part of a wider work. Could it be a first chapter of a novel, or the concluding one? Might it seem like a synopsis rather than a story, a piece that perhaps covers such a vast expanse of time that we could imagine many of its details filled in and becoming a much bigger book? The wonderful Raymond Carver story 'Fat' could be the opening chapter in a novel about a woman’s emancipation: a waitress in a diner finding a way to escape her husband. Albert Camus’s 'The Adulterous Woman' could be the same but in reverse: the closing chapter of a novel about a woman’s realisation that she has wasted her life with a husband she doesn’t love in a country, Algeria, she has never understood. Doris Lessing’s 'The Habit of Loving' spans years in the life of a middle-aged Londoner approaching elderly status in the post-war years, as we follow his emotional vulnerability and increasing incomprehension about the country where he lives. It can read like a brilliant summary as Lessing has little interest in conforming to the unity of time and space expected of many a piece of short fiction. Yet just because a story is pregnant with possibility, that doesn’t mean you have to give birth to a novel. 'Fat' is self-contained in its allusiveness, and 'The Adulterous Woman' gives us all we need to know in asides about the titular character and her frustrations. Lessing wants to delineate the life of a man whose prime was too close to smug obliviousness, and shows his recognition of it in pain.

   But what does all this have to do with Manuel Puig’s 'Relative Humidity 95%'? Susan Jill Levine notes that the story was the beginning of a novel, a sequel to Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and based on Puig’s childhood vacationing in Mar del Plata. “He never finished this sequel” ('Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman'), she says, and now it functions as a stand-alone story. Or does it? Juan Carlos Onetti’s demanding 'The Dog Will Have its Day' elliptically offers an account of a town with all sorts of motivations barely rising to the surface as a murder takes place, and Horacio Quiroga’s 'The Dead Man' could potentially have been the closing chapter in a novel about a man’s useless strife as he has built-up a plantation in difficult terrain, only to end up accidentally with a machete in the gut. But 'Relative Humidity 95%' reads like notes for a novel never written that may pass for a story that some might claim should never have been published. This may seem harsh, and Puig has not been without his critics, even when a book has been more carefully brought into being. “Well, critics have power, unfortunately. With time the book will outlive anything. But they have the power to retard it a lot. I've had a very bad relationship with the critics. I don't have to say thank you to them.” (Paris Review)

   But let us put aside the quality or otherwise of his most famous books, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pubis Angelical, Heartbreak Tango and others, and concentrate on this tale whose complications are very different from those in Onetti’s story. Onetti’s is a murder mystery plonked inside a milieu that is finally more important than the investigation that takes place: any curiosity the reader might have has to contend with a commissioner who lacks the zeal to explore the minutiae of the case, and leaves the reader doing much of the work, as if we are more curious than the characters themselves over what exactly has happened. In 'Relative Humidity 95%', we have nothing much happening, and Puig determines to generate events out of a sort of phenomenological consciousness allied, as we will examine, with cinematic perception.

    Here we have a father waking up in the sticky heat and the parents discussing aspects of their own lives and the boy’s too, while he is next door. Puig was never shy of a modernist device and here uses stream of consciousness, but more especially another technique Mario Vargas Llosa often adopted. This is where Vargas Llosa discovered “…if I mixed two episodes that had something in common, a character or a place, I could give these two episodes a very peculiar atmosphere, a certain mystery, as if the material had been mixed in — how do you say it? — communicant vessels.” (Salmagundi) Puig doesn’t suggest quite so radical a device, one that in film can seem straightforward, but in literature can appear more obscure. When a film crosscuts between several events even quite rapidly, the viewer usually knows where they are. In a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort and his team are selling shares in non-existent real estate, and the film starts with one person making the pitch on the phone, following with a second person who continues the sale, and then a third. The film makes clear this is happening over a period of time, and while most would usually show a montage scene relying on voiceover as we know they are beginning to make successful deals over weeks or months, director Martin Scorsese absorbs the voice over into the story as one character starts, the film cuts to another character continuing, and then cuts again as a third character seems to take over. It is a clever device, and helps to solve a problem that has become a cliche in film. The voiceover tells us characters fell in love one summer, and we are shown a montage of those moments, or that they found many fools to finance their dodgy company, and thus Belfort and co. started to make a fortune.

    It is very common in literature to cover months in moments, which allows a story to move quickly on the page, and film offers its equivalent. But far less common is what Scorsese offers as a way of resolving the cliche: crosscutting between events as he moves from one person selling to another taking it over. It needn’t cause much confusion. But moving between two timelines in a story without a clear cue can often be confusing indeed. This is what Puig does in 'Relative Humidity 95%', and we might wonder what the purpose is, a point perhaps that would have been illuminated by a longer text.  

The comparison with cinema is hardly irrelevant. Few Latin American writers were more influenced by film than Puig, even though other figures like Guillermo Cabrera Infante and P.E. Salles Gomes worked as film critics. As Puig says: “I don’t have traceable literary models because I haven’t had great literary influences in my life. Instead, that space has been occupied by cinematographic influences.” ('Brief Encounter: An Interview with Manuel Puig') Like Pedro Almodovar, Puig was fascinated by melodramatic convention and how they could incorporate it into their work, while insisting on convoluted plotting and decadent environments.

      Yet if novels like Heartbreak Tango and Kiss of the Spider Woman (both filmed), suggest the family saga and the prison drama, 'Relative Humidity 95%' in its condensed, initial form alludes instead to soap opera. There is the moaning husband, the dutiful, nagging wife and the layabout son. The throughline of the story, such as it is, concerns a conservatively minded businessman looking for the bank to help him out financially. Yet the story is also interspersed with information in block capitals, clumps of history and the interior of the father’s body. When the father speaks of the government’s need to support small businesses, the narrator tells us that “the walls of his stomach give off a sharp, acid air that rises to the opening of his esophogus but the muscle that contracts there stops it, the hot gas after it has passed the tight half-occluded muscle of the esophogus snakes upward to the pharanx coated partly by mucous secretions, reaches his olfactory nerves which tremble as the rumble of its arrival.” This is the sort of information that might be useful if you go to the doctor with acid reflux, but is it relevant to a story of ten pages? When Garcia Marquez makes much of a character’s constipation in Love in the Time of Cholera, it plays out narratively in a key scene when he finally gets to spend time with the woman with whom he has long been besotted and, suddenly, he really, really needs to go. In Puig’s story, it can appear random, as though the writer wants to show literature can go anywhere it likes now that it is far removed from its 19th-century realist shackles.

      Just because a story can go anywhere that doesn’t mean it should, and while we are wary of any claim about an art form’s specificity, we have noted that cinema can do some things better than literature, just as, all things being equal, fiction can do things film struggles to do. To get inside someone’s head let alone their body isn’t something cinema is given to convey, even if we might by way of qualification offer the digressive: that film in the past has entertainingly allowed for a journey into bodily inner space in movies like Fantastic Voyage, and we now have a camera that takes the form of a pill, to be swallowed so it can film your gut bacteria. It is called a VCE: a video capsule endoscopy, and has been around for a couple of decades. Cinema, oddly, hasn’t incorporated it as a vital part of film form.

   However, that might be part of our broader point: that sitting behind any development lies a broader question of why. It isn’t difficult to answer this query when it comes to how useful cross-cutting has been to cinema: how laborious it would be to watch a chase sequence with five minutes of the person chasing and then another five of the person getting chased. Most of the tension resides in the intercutting between the two. When Zola in Germinal spends ten days detailing the rescue mission above ground before returning to the events that are happening in the depths of the collapsed mine, we might wonder if a version of parallel montage could have made the sections more immediate, instead of moving forward for ten days and then back and then forward again. The passages are brilliantly done, but would Zola have done them differently if he had access to 20th-century film techniques? Equally, in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, a character is left hanging from the cliff (and reputedly introducing the term cliffhanger to our lexicon), while the woman trying to help him disappears. Hardy doesn’t move between Knight, hanging there, and Elfride looking for help. He stays with Knight, and we wait for Elfride to return. Both Zola and Hardy brilliantly convey suspense while staying with one point of view at a time, and we should remember, too, these were books initially serialised. What better way to keep a reader in a state of expectation than wondering what is happening elsewhere? Find out in the next episode: a device proposing TV is closer to fiction than film in certain instances.

    Often an art form promptly adopts techniques it can do well, and arrives at predictability. But an art form using techniques alien to it, needs a good reason to adopt them. If that reason appears absent, the work can seem artificial, mannered and even irrelevant. Is 'Relative Humidiity 95%' one such work, and had Puig expanded it into a novel, would he have found a greater justification for its use than seems to be so in this short story? The work reads not so much experimentally as provisionally, as though it is a work that hasn’t quite absorbed the cinematic techniques it deploys, nor found the form (story or novel?) it wished to become.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Relative Humidity 95%

  One way to view a short story is to see it as potentially part of a wider work. Could it be a first chapter of a novel, or the concluding one? Might it seem like a synopsis rather than a story, a piece that perhaps covers such a vast expanse of time that we could imagine many of its details filled in and becoming a much bigger book? The wonderful Raymond Carver story 'Fat' could be the opening chapter in a novel about a woman’s emancipation: a waitress in a diner finding a way to escape her husband. Albert Camus’s 'The Adulterous Woman' could be the same but in reverse: the closing chapter of a novel about a woman’s realisation that she has wasted her life with a husband she doesn’t love in a country, Algeria, she has never understood. Doris Lessing’s 'The Habit of Loving' spans years in the life of a middle-aged Londoner approaching elderly status in the post-war years, as we follow his emotional vulnerability and increasing incomprehension about the country where he lives. It can read like a brilliant summary as Lessing has little interest in conforming to the unity of time and space expected of many a piece of short fiction. Yet just because a story is pregnant with possibility, that doesn’t mean you have to give birth to a novel. 'Fat' is self-contained in its allusiveness, and 'The Adulterous Woman' gives us all we need to know in asides about the titular character and her frustrations. Lessing wants to delineate the life of a man whose prime was too close to smug obliviousness, and shows his recognition of it in pain.

   But what does all this have to do with Manuel Puig’s 'Relative Humidity 95%'? Susan Jill Levine notes that the story was the beginning of a novel, a sequel to Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and based on Puig’s childhood vacationing in Mar del Plata. “He never finished this sequel” ('Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman'), she says, and now it functions as a stand-alone story. Or does it? Juan Carlos Onetti’s demanding 'The Dog Will Have its Day' elliptically offers an account of a town with all sorts of motivations barely rising to the surface as a murder takes place, and Horacio Quiroga’s 'The Dead Man' could potentially have been the closing chapter in a novel about a man’s useless strife as he has built-up a plantation in difficult terrain, only to end up accidentally with a machete in the gut. But 'Relative Humidity 95%' reads like notes for a novel never written that may pass for a story that some might claim should never have been published. This may seem harsh, and Puig has not been without his critics, even when a book has been more carefully brought into being. “Well, critics have power, unfortunately. With time the book will outlive anything. But they have the power to retard it a lot. I've had a very bad relationship with the critics. I don't have to say thank you to them.” (Paris Review)

   But let us put aside the quality or otherwise of his most famous books, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pubis Angelical, Heartbreak Tango and others, and concentrate on this tale whose complications are very different from those in Onetti’s story. Onetti’s is a murder mystery plonked inside a milieu that is finally more important than the investigation that takes place: any curiosity the reader might have has to contend with a commissioner who lacks the zeal to explore the minutiae of the case, and leaves the reader doing much of the work, as if we are more curious than the characters themselves over what exactly has happened. In 'Relative Humidity 95%', we have nothing much happening, and Puig determines to generate events out of a sort of phenomenological consciousness allied, as we will examine, with cinematic perception.

    Here we have a father waking up in the sticky heat and the parents discussing aspects of their own lives and the boy’s too, while he is next door. Puig was never shy of a modernist device and here uses stream of consciousness, but more especially another technique Mario Vargas Llosa often adopted. This is where Vargas Llosa discovered “…if I mixed two episodes that had something in common, a character or a place, I could give these two episodes a very peculiar atmosphere, a certain mystery, as if the material had been mixed in — how do you say it? — communicant vessels.” (Salmagundi) Puig doesn’t suggest quite so radical a device, one that in film can seem straightforward, but in literature can appear more obscure. When a film crosscuts between several events even quite rapidly, the viewer usually knows where they are. In a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort and his team are selling shares in non-existent real estate, and the film starts with one person making the pitch on the phone, following with a second person who continues the sale, and then a third. The film makes clear this is happening over a period of time, and while most would usually show a montage scene relying on voiceover as we know they are beginning to make successful deals over weeks or months, director Martin Scorsese absorbs the voice over into the story as one character starts, the film cuts to another character continuing, and then cuts again as a third character seems to take over. It is a clever device, and helps to solve a problem that has become a cliche in film. The voiceover tells us characters fell in love one summer, and we are shown a montage of those moments, or that they found many fools to finance their dodgy company, and thus Belfort and co. started to make a fortune.

    It is very common in literature to cover months in moments, which allows a story to move quickly on the page, and film offers its equivalent. But far less common is what Scorsese offers as a way of resolving the cliche: crosscutting between events as he moves from one person selling to another taking it over. It needn’t cause much confusion. But moving between two timelines in a story without a clear cue can often be confusing indeed. This is what Puig does in 'Relative Humidity 95%', and we might wonder what the purpose is, a point perhaps that would have been illuminated by a longer text.  

The comparison with cinema is hardly irrelevant. Few Latin American writers were more influenced by film than Puig, even though other figures like Guillermo Cabrera Infante and P.E. Salles Gomes worked as film critics. As Puig says: “I don’t have traceable literary models because I haven’t had great literary influences in my life. Instead, that space has been occupied by cinematographic influences.” ('Brief Encounter: An Interview with Manuel Puig') Like Pedro Almodovar, Puig was fascinated by melodramatic convention and how they could incorporate it into their work, while insisting on convoluted plotting and decadent environments.

      Yet if novels like Heartbreak Tango and Kiss of the Spider Woman (both filmed), suggest the family saga and the prison drama, 'Relative Humidity 95%' in its condensed, initial form alludes instead to soap opera. There is the moaning husband, the dutiful, nagging wife and the layabout son. The throughline of the story, such as it is, concerns a conservatively minded businessman looking for the bank to help him out financially. Yet the story is also interspersed with information in block capitals, clumps of history and the interior of the father’s body. When the father speaks of the government’s need to support small businesses, the narrator tells us that “the walls of his stomach give off a sharp, acid air that rises to the opening of his esophogus but the muscle that contracts there stops it, the hot gas after it has passed the tight half-occluded muscle of the esophogus snakes upward to the pharanx coated partly by mucous secretions, reaches his olfactory nerves which tremble as the rumble of its arrival.” This is the sort of information that might be useful if you go to the doctor with acid reflux, but is it relevant to a story of ten pages? When Garcia Marquez makes much of a character’s constipation in Love in the Time of Cholera, it plays out narratively in a key scene when he finally gets to spend time with the woman with whom he has long been besotted and, suddenly, he really, really needs to go. In Puig’s story, it can appear random, as though the writer wants to show literature can go anywhere it likes now that it is far removed from its 19th-century realist shackles.

      Just because a story can go anywhere that doesn’t mean it should, and while we are wary of any claim about an art form’s specificity, we have noted that cinema can do some things better than literature, just as, all things being equal, fiction can do things film struggles to do. To get inside someone’s head let alone their body isn’t something cinema is given to convey, even if we might by way of qualification offer the digressive: that film in the past has entertainingly allowed for a journey into bodily inner space in movies like Fantastic Voyage, and we now have a camera that takes the form of a pill, to be swallowed so it can film your gut bacteria. It is called a VCE: a video capsule endoscopy, and has been around for a couple of decades. Cinema, oddly, hasn’t incorporated it as a vital part of film form.

   However, that might be part of our broader point: that sitting behind any development lies a broader question of why. It isn’t difficult to answer this query when it comes to how useful cross-cutting has been to cinema: how laborious it would be to watch a chase sequence with five minutes of the person chasing and then another five of the person getting chased. Most of the tension resides in the intercutting between the two. When Zola in Germinal spends ten days detailing the rescue mission above ground before returning to the events that are happening in the depths of the collapsed mine, we might wonder if a version of parallel montage could have made the sections more immediate, instead of moving forward for ten days and then back and then forward again. The passages are brilliantly done, but would Zola have done them differently if he had access to 20th-century film techniques? Equally, in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, a character is left hanging from the cliff (and reputedly introducing the term cliffhanger to our lexicon), while the woman trying to help him disappears. Hardy doesn’t move between Knight, hanging there, and Elfride looking for help. He stays with Knight, and we wait for Elfride to return. Both Zola and Hardy brilliantly convey suspense while staying with one point of view at a time, and we should remember, too, these were books initially serialised. What better way to keep a reader in a state of expectation than wondering what is happening elsewhere? Find out in the next episode: a device proposing TV is closer to fiction than film in certain instances.

    Often an art form promptly adopts techniques it can do well, and arrives at predictability. But an art form using techniques alien to it, needs a good reason to adopt them. If that reason appears absent, the work can seem artificial, mannered and even irrelevant. Is 'Relative Humidiity 95%' one such work, and had Puig expanded it into a novel, would he have found a greater justification for its use than seems to be so in this short story? The work reads not so much experimentally as provisionally, as though it is a work that hasn’t quite absorbed the cinematic techniques it deploys, nor found the form (story or novel?) it wished to become.


© Tony McKibbin