RONALD CHRIST
57
might be superfluous. Most of this stems from my own limitations as a
reader. I get bored very easily. My attention goes to sleep very easily . So I
write for a reader who is like myself.
Christ:
But
T he Buenos Aires Afa ir
goes beyond that when you write about
what the characters don 't think about , what they don 't read in the
newspaper. It is a kind of filmic effect, as when a camera shows more of a
scene than the actor in the scene actually sees.
Puig:
What the characters do without paying attention interests me a lot.
What doesn 't go into the focus of your attention but is there anyway–
that is interesting
to
me . I tried to show how the surroundings affect the
character even if he doesn 't notice it . In
The Buenos Aires Affair,
the
police inspector glances over the newspaper and doesn 't concentrate on it
but you know that somehow all the tension in those pages goes into him,
and that is what I wanted to show.
Christ :
Latin American writers seem to have listened to and watched films
very carefully and to have absorbed their techniques more eagerly than
North American writers .
Puig:
I don 't know how to account for that , but maybe it is because we
always considered films an important part of our culture, because they
were foreign , and we saw them from a distance, with a certain perspec–
tive . Maybe also the fact that those things were happening in a foreign
language had an importance for us .
Chmt:
The foreignness intensified the quality of myth?
Puig:
Yes, you know, there is a very strange thing here: in Sweden Bergman
is almost a laugh-really . They say there: if you knew Swedish , you
couldn't take those dialogues seriously! It seems they are phony . The
phoniness of the lang uage allows no way to get into the magic of the
image, which is undoubtedly there. The language wrecks everything. In
our case, the dialogue of films was not understood and so it was
registered in a different way .
Christ:
This touches on the curious fact that when your books are translated
into English, many of the references have a different connotation because
they allude to our own culture. Consequently , many readers mistakenly
see a campy quality where you intended none .
Puig:
No , none at all. For me , those pieces offilm dialogue that I use in
The
Buenos Aires Affair
are-how can I say
it-meaning/ul.
Even more, I
think that they are good dialogue, good writing . The quality is obvious
in the excerpt from Sternberg's
Dishonored .
Still there is a resistance to
accepting that quality . Why , I don 't know. I think it may have to do
with a
diclasse genre.
Christ:
In
The Day Of The Locust,
West wrote that " it is hard to laugh at the
