RONALD CHRIST
55
the other five per cent accounts for an added dash of pink I gave it to
make all that blackness believable. I've been told that it is a very somber
book . If I had told things as they had happened, then no one would have
accepted it as a reflection of reality. The reality of the pampas was much
too dark to be believable.
Christ:
Were any of the literary models for this encounter of romantic
illusion and disinterested reality-Don
Quixote,
for example, or
Madam
Bovary
-of use to you?
Pttig:
I am never aware of literature when I am writing, never think of
literary models. Never, never, never, ever . But there is something
interesting here . When I started to write
Rita Hayworth ,
it was out of a
need to face, to understand my own failure to communicate with people,
my failure
to
write good, amusing film scripts and , later,
to
direct them.
But this investigation that I was carrying on in myself had to be
done-even if just for me-according to a certain esthetic code. Look,
up until I was twenty-five, I had always rejected reality. I wanted to
believe that the reality of life was MGM films. The rest was "B" picture
stuff that didn 't interest me at all. I thought that somewhere- in
Europe, in Hollywood - I would be able to live at that level of glamor, of
explicit, clean passion. I was even ready to suffer. But
to
suffer with
glamor. Maybe that's why Garbo was so important to me: because she
could make such beauty out of a character's painful moment . Simultan–
eously, though, I had the need to face reality, to come to terms with
myself. I had this fantastic belief in film fiction, which for me was not
just film but the whole world of fantasy, of imagination, and , of course,
of beauty. To live in terms of beauty , that's what I wanted . What.helped
me in literature was that I could put both things together-reality and
beauty . If not in life, at least in literature. For myself at least , my books
are always investigations, researches, certain ways of looking at prob–
lems that are mine , and not only mine, I hope. That research, however,
has to be done with an esthetic rigor. The reality must be recreated and
sustained at the same time and analyzed at the same time by a wish to
create beauty. Beauty, in this case, is form.
Christ:
Many readers seem to have missed the point of the form .
Pttig:
That happened with my first two novels . With the third I got a little
more respect. People would say: oh, those books are just taped records of
reality; you went out into the streets and recorded the voices of the
people, that's all. That made me furious. Even if the characters' voices
were the only material-and they were not- I was "editing" them just
as other writers edit cultured , written language . This was a matter that I
had made clear to myself from the first day that I started to write
