"I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality"
About this Quote
Puig frames the novel not as a display of mastery but as an admission of bafflement, and that reversal is the engine of the line. “Because” makes writing sound less like a calling than a necessity: reality has a loose thread, and the only way he can stop picking at it is to weave a different fabric. The subtext is quietly anti-authoritarian. If reality is something you can’t understand, then the official stories that claim to explain it - family mythologies, national narratives, machismo scripts, even literary “seriousness” - start to look suspiciously like stage sets.
That suspicion fits Puig’s moment. Writing under and around Argentina’s decades of political repression and cultural policing, he became famous for smuggling critique through form: letters, gossip, film dialogue, pop songs, melodrama. His novels don’t lecture; they eavesdrop. They treat mass culture not as junk but as a language people actually use to survive. So “I don’t understand” isn’t helplessness. It’s a method. He approaches reality the way his characters do: indirectly, through borrowed voices, through fantasies that reveal what public life makes unsayable.
The intent, then, isn’t to escape the real world but to interrogate it without pretending it’s coherent. Puig suggests the novel exists precisely where rational explanation fails - where desire, shame, and power collide and everyone pretends not to notice. Fiction becomes a laboratory for what reality won’t confess.
That suspicion fits Puig’s moment. Writing under and around Argentina’s decades of political repression and cultural policing, he became famous for smuggling critique through form: letters, gossip, film dialogue, pop songs, melodrama. His novels don’t lecture; they eavesdrop. They treat mass culture not as junk but as a language people actually use to survive. So “I don’t understand” isn’t helplessness. It’s a method. He approaches reality the way his characters do: indirectly, through borrowed voices, through fantasies that reveal what public life makes unsayable.
The intent, then, isn’t to escape the real world but to interrogate it without pretending it’s coherent. Puig suggests the novel exists precisely where rational explanation fails - where desire, shame, and power collide and everyone pretends not to notice. Fiction becomes a laboratory for what reality won’t confess.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Manuel
Add to List
