"I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side"

Manuel Puig evokes a sense of vocation that operates less like a career decision and more like a force that lays claim to a life. The phrasing denies the myth of the sovereign artist calculating a path and instead frames creativity as something that commandeers the subject. To say literature chose him is to suggest compulsion: stories, voices, and forms insisting on emergence regardless of convenience, prestige, or practical reward. It is a humble posture, almost a surrender, yet also a fierce recognition that genuine art often begins where choice ends, at the point where language offers itself as the only viable medium for feeling and thought. The artist becomes a conduit, not a sovereign, and the work’s necessity dictates the terms.

Puig’s biography gives this assertion extra resonance. Drawn first to cinema, he trained in film and admired the grammar of melodrama, montage, and popular genres. When the film world did not open its doors as he hoped, narrative still demanded expression, migrating into novels that appropriated cinematic techniques: dialogue without exposition, collage of documents, the intercutting of voices. Literature, then, arrived not as a fallback but as the form that could contain the pressures he carried, desire, exile, censorship, and the textures of mass culture. In Argentina’s turbulent political climate, with repression and marginalization shaping daily life, writing became both refuge and instrument, a place where the unofficial, the camp, and the popular could take authoritative shape. To say there was no decision is to name the inevitability of expression for someone whose sensibility had already been structured by narrative forms; the stories were coming, and they chose the vessel. The statement rejects the heroic narrative of authorship even as it testifies to a fiercer calling: art as destiny more than project, form as fate more than preference, the page as the only landscape capacious enough to hold a life.