"I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all"

Puig’s remark separates style from ideology, praising the sensuous surface of Faulkner’s prose while refusing the moral universe it frames. “Poetry” here names cadence, image, and the daring architecture of sentences, the hypnotic interior monologues of The Sound and the Fury, the choral rhythms of As I Lay Dying, the time-bending spirals of Absalom, Absalom! Puig acknowledges the exquisite music, the density of perception that can make a single paragraph pulse like a stanza. Yet he balks at the thematic burden: the haunted South, the insistence on guilt, bloodlines, fatality, racial violence, and the oppressive weight of history that often forecloses renewal.

That rejection is aesthetic and political. Puig, shaped by cinema, melodrama, and popular song, built novels that smuggle critique through pleasure, Boquitas pintadas and Kiss of the Spider Woman turn kitsch, gossip, and genre into instruments of emancipation. He favors camp’s democratic excess over the solemnity of high modernist doom. If Faulkner’s worlds bind characters to land, lineage, and inherited sin, Puig’s characters reach outward through fantasy, affect, and performance, improvising identities in the face of authoritarianism and machismo. Admiring the craft but resisting the themes becomes an ethics of reading: style can be intoxicating and still carry a metaphysic one refuses, nostalgia for a poisoned past, masculinist heroics of suffering, a tragic determinism that treats transgression as destiny rather than choice.

There is also a Latin American subtext. Faulkner influenced the Boom’s experiments with time and voice, but Puig stands apart from grandiose national epics. He converts modernist technique into intimate, subversive intimacy, where gossip and cinema are not frivolous but counter-hegemonic. His stance models a discerning cosmopolitanism: borrow the rhythm, reject the romance; keep the instrument, change the tune. The line honors craft without surrendering conviction, insisting that beauty is not neutral and that form, however ravishing, must answer to the lives it makes imaginable.