56
PARTISAN REVIEW
literature: the fact that I was dealing with reality wasn't enough; reality
had to be told in terms of beauty, otherwise there was no satisfaction for
me.
Christ:
When you speak of this esthetic rigor , you are speaking, for an
English-reading audience, of technical devices very much associated
with Joyce; most glaringly , I suppose , in the case of
Heartbreak Tango
and
TheBuenos Aires Affair,
with the catechism technique of the "Ithaca"
chapter in
Ulysses.
Puig:
I have never read
Ulysses
all the way through. In truth, all I did was
peruse it. I haven 't even read all of Molly Bloom's monologue . But what
I saw in the book was the immense freedom, which was very stimulat–
ing, very liberating to me. I learned that there was no need to tell the
story with just one technical device. Of course, I saw
Ulysses
years and
years before I started to write and at that time I had no idea that I would
ever write. Perhaps these were examples that guided me unconsciously.
Christ:
But surely some of your devices are taken from films. For example ,
the one-sided conversation is something we all know from film, from
radio. The extradordinary thing is to
read
such a conversation.
PlIig:
I must tell you how the first one-sided conversation started . In
Rita
Hayworth ,
Choli 's chapter, Chapter IV, was one more monologue . But
when I went back
to
it (it was the second or third monologue I wrote after
writing all the novel) it was weak. It gave too much information about
Mita, the wife of the man who is revealed at the end. And I didn 't want
to give away much information about her either until the middle of the
book . Furthermore, I felt that I needed a certain variety at this earlier
point in the book and another monologue wouldn't do . I saw that the
inner world of Choli, this girlfriend of Mita, wasn 't too interesting . It
was better when she was speaking than when she was thinking, because
all the color was in her language; her language contained her complete
psychology .
So
I thought : why not do a conversation between Choli and
Mita? Consequently , I wrote a dialogue between them in which Mita
was very defensive and reserved since they were discussing her submis–
sive attitude toward her husband. But then what she was saying was
purely evasive, not interesting at all, which gave me the idea of eliminat–
ing it and leaving only Choli's side of the dialogue .
Christ:
What you say is important because one of the most impressive things
about
The Buenos Aires Affair
is what is
not
there. It is a detective story
which really lacks both a detective and a corpse and the editing is largely
cutting, in combination with reports of what is missing, lacking ,
unnoticed, unobserved .
Puig:
I became more and more conscious of the need
to
eliminate all that
