"I only understand realism"

Manuel Puig’s declaration, “I only understand realism,” comes from a writer whose work often straddled genres and blurred the boundaries between the real and the fantastic. On the surface, the statement feels paradoxical, Puig, after all, integrated elements of melodrama, pulp fiction, and Hollywood cinema into his novels, especially in works like "Kiss of the Spider Woman". However, beneath that apparent contradiction lies a conviction rooted in Puig’s artistic approach and world view.

Realism, in a literary sense, seeks to represent things as they are, eschewing embellishment and focusing on ordinary life, often highlighting the conflicts, dreams, and disappointments of everyday people. Puig’s background in cinema and pop culture shaped his narrative voice, but even his homages to kitsch and fantasy functioned as tools to decode real emotions, societal pressures, and psychological truths. The language of melodrama, the conventions of romantic pulp, the clichés of Hollywood, these are borrowed frameworks that Puig infused with genuine human struggles. The “realism” he understands isn’t confined to strict factuality; it embraces the emotional reality of his characters, no matter how extravagant or stylized their circumstances may appear.

Furthermore, Puig’s statement articulates his resistance to excessive abstraction or self-referential experimentation that characterized much of late modernist and postmodern literature. He privileges narrative clarity, directness of feeling, and a faith in character-driven storytelling. For Puig, the artifice of the genres he echoes does not distance him from truth; rather, these forms sharpen the poignancy and loneliness of his protagonists. Such realism is filtered through popular culture’s lens, but always with the aim of illuminating society’s authentic anxieties and desires. Puig’s brand of realism, then, becomes an all-encompassing framework, one that regards pop iconography and sincere emotion as equally valid windows into the genuine lived experience.