AN HOMOSEXUAL AFFAIR?

Interview with Manuel Puig by Ronald Christ.

(Christopher-Street, abril de 1979. Nueva York: Estados Unidos.)

Sitting on a rattan sofa, his back to a bamboo blind with sunlight streaming through, languidly stroking the long leaf of a plant as he explains his belief in total, not specialized sexuality ("With a person of your own gender, with a person of the opposite gender, with an animal, with a plant, with anything"), Argentine writer Manuel Puig might seem an exotic transplant - too mild, too understanding, too easily selfmocking. But outside his Greenwich Village apartment, where he has lived since 1973 (Puig left Argentina when the political seesaw tipped to the military right), the snow falls heavily and it is bitter cold; any tropical warmth, therefore, any radiating wit, is the careful construct of Puig's imaginative intelligence. Similarly, the aesthetic qualities in Puig's five novels that seem like effortless recordings of other people's conversations to a few reviewers are actually the signs of masterful and unpretentious control (which a growing majority of critics and readers in several languages have come to understand and appreciate, especially the National Library Association, which has twice listed Puig's novels among the ten best books of the year). Puig was born in 1932 in the Argentine town of General Villegas. Ten years later he had begun to learn English, because that was the language spoken in the movies he loved so much. (“I felt I had one foot in Hollywood," says Puig. "In reality, I was twelve hours, by train, from Buenos Aires.") He kept up his love affair with the movies, and especially with their stars, but when he saw Clouzot's Quai des Orfevres (released in the U.S. as Jenny Lamour) he realized that "the director was the real star, and at last I knew what I wanted to become: a film director. I couldn’t be Tyrone Power or Ginger Rogers or Robert Taylor or Eleanor Powell. But I could be Clouzot. " After an "awful year" in military service as an Air Force translator, Puig went to Europe. He tried first to become a director and then a scriptwriter; neither career worked out "I didn't know it then," he says, "but what excited me in film was to copy, not create." What he began copying at the start of his career as a novelist was the voice of an aunt. "The description of my aunt was supposed to take one page, but it took almost twenty-five! It was all her talking, all in the first person, and I could play with it all I wanted. By the second day it was clearly a novel." This transition from film script to novel eventually became Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (Bard/Avon). Puig continued his bent for copying rather than creating, telling his story through dialogues where the speakers are unidentified, conversations where only one side is reported (as we often hear only one side in the movies or on the radio), and through letters and school compositions about movies. How Puig tells the story is at least as important as what he implies about the claustrophobic social and psychic life of people whose only outlet for fantasy seems to be the communion of mass media. Remaining almost invisible within his narrative, Puig presents all the limitations of his characters without ever satirizing or taunting them. The result, which is typical of all his work, indicates a rare sensitivity to people, with no need to ignore their flaws or to judge them authoritatively. Puig's next novels continued the development implied in his first book and extended his technical virtuosity. Heartbreak Tango (Dutton) was originally planned as an old-fashioned magazine serial about the life of a small time, consumptive Don Juan. But after reading the first installment, the magazine's editor turned it down. Nevertheless, when the book came out in Buenos Aires it was an immediate best seller (as Rita Hayworth had become in France, where Le Monde picked it as one of the best books of 1968-1969). In his third book, Puig abandoned the provincial subject matter of his early fiction for city life. Puig's writing in The Buenos Aires Affair (Dutton) took on darker, starker qualities. In the most recent of his works to be translated into English, Kiss of the Spider Woman (Knopf), all the Puig hallmarks are present - the seemingly objective reporting of dialogue, the use of documents and bureaucratic reports to narrate highly melodramatic events, the use of popular mythology - as well as a heightened starkness. This time Puig has virtually limited himself to two characters in a jail cell, one a homosexual named Molina and the other a political prisoner named Valentin. As if to conform to Molina's wildest fantasies, the novel's plot turns on a surprising twist: Molina is being used by the authorities to spy on the revolutionary. In deliberate counterpoint to this thriller content and to the campy talk of Molina (who narrates old films to the revolutionary in order to pass the time), Puig inserts a series of formal, didactic footnotes on the origins of homosexuality. Drawing on writers such as Freud, Marcuse, and Altman, these notes offer divergent views, forming what is at once a cold bank of information and a radically unemotional backdrop for the camp and drama of the narrative. So crucial are these footnotes that, if they are not read the reader gets an entirely false notion of the author's intention - which is what happened in Brazil, where the book was printed without the footnotes and consequently drew protests from gay publications. Flustered by this willful misrepresentation of his book, but as methodically at work as ever (reading page proofs for his next novel, whose title may be translated literally as Angelic Pubis), Manuel Puig recently stepped from behind his screen of authorial invisibility to talk about his work - with a slyly penetrating intelligence, a wide-eyed humor, and a flair for self-caricature one might have guessed would be present from his books, but hardly ever expected to find in life.

Ronald Christ: A homosexual affair in an Argentine prison is quite a jump from your previous fiction, isn't it?

Manuel Puig: I wouldn't call it a homosexual affair. In that cell there are only two men, but that's just on the surface. There are really two men and two women. I agree with Theodore Roszak when he says that the woman most desperately in need of liberation is the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.

Ronald Christ: Where did you get the idea for having the gay prisoner tell the plots of films to the political prisoner?

Manuel Puig: That was the very first idea I had for the novel that these two guys would meet through a mediator (films), that otherwise they couldn't talk to each other. One is heterosexual, the other one isn't; they're both defensive. The gay one doesn't have much education, but has a great fantasy.

Ronald Christ: He's been educated in the films.

Manuel Puig: Yes, so he tells the other one films at night,to help him fall asleep. They can't face certain subjects directly. Slowly, unconsciously, they reveal themselves.

Ronald Christ: But that's true in almost all your fiction, isn't it? The meeting of people in popular art forms such as films, tangos, radio programs? Right from Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, where the little boy goes to the movies every day with his mother and writes about them in school.

Manuel Puig: Yes, the beginning of Kiss of the Spider Woman is all there in the boy's composition class from Rita Hayworth. In a repressive society some people only dare discuss matters metaphorically.

Ronald Christ: But now we can see how you've developed the theme from a little boy in school to adults in jail, from provincial life out on the pampas to urban life in Buenos Aires.

Manuel Puig: Sure, because I moved to the city. I grew up in this small town in the pampas and my later experiences are all city experiences. I started going to a boarding school in the capital at thirteen, and then my family moved to Buenos Aires when I was seventeen. So I can't say much more about small towns, because l've got this impression that l've said everything about them that I've got to say in the first two novels.

Ronald Christ: You started your career wanting to write movie scripts and, in a sense, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a return to that wish. It's almost entirely dialogue.

Manuel Puig: That was not intentional at all. My two previous novels had used a lot of technical narrative devices - stream of consciousness, letters, diaries, classical third person - and I thought this new novel would need all those again. But I thought that the first chapter could be handled more easily in dialogue. And once I got started, I just couldn't stop. I saw that the dialogue was the real vehicle for the narration, dialogue where what isn't said is very important, where what's skipped expresses may be more than the rest.

Ronald Christ: That's another constant in your books,isn't it? Like the one-sided telephone conversation in Rita Hayworth, or the passages in Buenos Aires Affair describing what the characters don't see, don't consider.

Manuel Puig: Here it's especially important since we have two characters, and they meet only in words. They almost cannot look at each other, let alone touch each other, because they are men and that's forbidden. The communication is only verbal in that prison cell. But what characters do without paying attention always interests me. What's not in the focus of your attention but is there anyhow.

Ronald Christ: While you were writing the novel, did you ever think of turning it into a play?

Manuel Puig: Technically, it would be very difficult. The development of the plot is too long and fragmented to be fitted into a play. I've been approached to make a theatrical adaptation, but it's hard for me to forget the novelistic structure the plot was born with. I'd need to think of a totally new structure, a theatrical one.

Ronald Christ: So you started with a movie that was set in New York, the 1940s Cat People.

Manuel Puig: It wasn't Cat People in the first draft. It was more of a Dracula thing for the first chapter. The structure of the novel was all set. I was here in New York around the end of '73 when I'd left Argentina, and I was gathering all the materials for the novel, I'd done a certain amount of research.

Ronald Christ: What kind?

Manuel Puig: First of all, I'd met with prisoners inArgentina.Ronald Christ: Political prisoners?Manuel Puig: Yes, it was very easy in June of '73,because when the Peronists came into power again the president was Campora, and he freed all political prisoners. I asked a lawyer friend who defended political prisoners to help me meet some of them. Two months later the political equilibrium tilted to the right and I decided to leave the country.

Ronald Christ: Did you interview gay people, too, like the prisoner Molina?

Manuel Puig: No, I already knew that type very well and I wanted to work with an unsophisticated type, a reactionary in a certain way - the type of homosexual who rejects all experimentation, all new trends. They've accepted the models of behavior from the Forties—you know, the subdued woman and the dashing male - and they have, of course, identified with the subdued, though heroic, woman. And they don't want to change that fantasy; or they can't. These types, although they're film-crazy, would even reject the new movie heroines and heroes. They're still attached to the prototypes of One Way Passage and Now, Voyager. I think one of the main questions of the novel is: Can people change their eroticism after a certain age? I believe it's almost impossible; sexual fantasies crystallize during adolescence and imprison you forever. I'm saying all this with a Claude Rains cocked eyebrow.

Ronald Christ: All right, a cocked eyebrow, but if there's a kind of parody of the homosexual . . Manuel Puig: No, not parody. "Parody" is a word I don't trust much, because it carries some degree of scorn. I don't let myself go in the direction of scorn very often. The character is parodic in itself. If he's mimicking a woman of the Forties, a film character of the Forties, he's already parodic. It's not me who's doing the parody. Greer Garson wouldn't have liked me to do that.

Ronald Christ: What about the revolutionary, Valentin?

Manuel Puig: Oh, no, there's no space for parody in his case. I've tried to give realistic portraits. Both Valentin and Molina, in their own ways, are excessive; but the excess is not in my treatment of their nature.

Ronald Christ: The revolutionary learns a lot from the homosexual. What about the homosexual from the revolutionary?

Manuel Puig: That I leave up to the reader. Personally, I think that Molina just uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him by the revolutionary, the possibilities of becoming an underground heroine.

Ronald Christ: But the homosexual comes to be protective of the revolutionary; for example, he doesn't give the authorities all the information he could.

Manuel Puig:Yes, but not for ideological reasons, for sentimental ones.

Este artículo forma parte de:

"Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica."
Una biografía multimedia en formato CD-ROM.
Investigación, entrevistas y compilación a cargo de Gerd Tepass.
Buenos Aires, junio de 2008.
ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9