Ronald Christ
AN INTERVIEW WITH MANUEL PUIG
Christ:
In each of your works, there is a kind of exterior form, an external
skeleton, giving literary shape to the narrative . I'm thinking of the
detective story format in
The Buenos Aires Affair,
of
thefolletin
or serial in
Heartbreak Tango.
Puig:
Yes, I always start with an obsession, a subject that haunts me, that I
need to develop . Such subjects are problems of my own that I can't deal
with consciously-personal problems . And I feel relieved if! develop the
subject as a story. Once I have that subject, I look for the best shape to
give it - some structure, some form that will help me express all I want
to . In
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth ,
I wrote about those people from my
childhood who had been close to me, people about whom I had a lot of
information because they had talked to me a lot. As a matter of fact, they
had devoted time to me because they were mostly misfits with not much
else to do. But in that novel, I wasn't able to deal with the other kinds of
people, the triumphant ones, the ones who had had less time for me
when I was young . I had a much less precise memory of them ; for me,
they were really mysterious characters: the professionals, the beautiful
girls who were surrounded by suitors-all those who had worked well
within the system, the system of machismo , of oppression that was the
only system at that time. I don't think that it has changed much in
Argentina but at least we (almost everyone) are conscious of it now . In
those days , not to fit into the pattern was a great source of anguish . We
thought that that pattern was the only one, the pattern of Nature: girls
had to be desirable objects and men had to be terribly strong without any
hesitation. I was only able to deal with these conformist types in a
literary way after my return to Argentina in 1967 . I had been living
abroad for ten years by then and I had written
Rita Hayworth
in Rome
and in New York without any need for research because I had all the
necessary information . I had the whole burden of memory inside me.
