Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig’s line is a small masterclass in literary side-eye: admiration offered with one hand, a refusal with the other. He grants Faulkner “beauty” and even calls it “poetry,” elevating the sentence-level dazzle, the thick music of style. Then he yanks the praise back from the level where reputations are made: themes. “Not at all” lands like a door closing, blunt enough to puncture the reverence that often surrounds the Faulkner canon.

The subtext is aesthetic politics. Puig came up writing against the prestige machinery of “serious” literature, smuggling in melodrama, cinema, gossip, and popular speech to show how culture actually circulates. Faulkner, by contrast, is frequently treated as the cathedral of high modern American masculinity: guilt, violence, doom, dynasties rotting in place. Puig’s distinction implies that style can be intoxicating while the worldview it carries can still feel claustrophobic, even reactionary. It’s a refusal to let craft launder ideology.

Context matters: as an Argentine novelist shaped by mass culture and by the pressures of censorship and exile, Puig is alert to who gets to be “universal” and at what cost. Loving Faulkner’s language while rejecting his thematic universe is also a way of staking Puig’s own territory: the right to take technique from the canon without inheriting its obsessions. The line punctures hero worship and makes criticism feel alive again - not dutiful, but personal, even a little insurgent.