"It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade"

Puig locates the source of style beneath deliberation, where memory, desire, shame, and fantasy assemble a surface without asking permission. The “aesthetic facade” is the visible skin of the novel, its voices, rhythms, genres, and textures, and he attributes that surface to the private, unruly operations of his own unconscious. Craft matters, but it is the dream logic of condensation and displacement that selects which fragments of cinema, gossip, melodrama, and pop detritus will cohere into an alluring mask.

Calling it a facade is not an admission of falseness so much as an acknowledgment that art appears as a face: a presentation to the world that conceals and reveals in equal measure. The writer’s impersonal techniques sit atop idiosyncratic impulses that can’t be legislated by theory. Syntax, montage, the lilt of dialogue, even the choice to withhold description, these often register as decisions after the fact, yet they arise from deeper patterns of attraction and aversion. The style becomes a symptom: a formal self-portrait produced not by what the author intends to confess but by what cannot help surfacing.

By stressing the personal unconscious rather than a collective one, Puig insists on singularity. Even when he borrows shared cultural forms, the filter is uniquely his; the same soap-opera plot, refracted through a different psyche, would crystallize a different facade. This stance also complicates interpretation. Authorial control is porous. A reader decoding motifs and tonal shifts is, in a sense, reading the writer’s dreamwork, the manifest surface that hints at latent energies without fully disclosing them.

There is a political and erotic undercurrent to this aesthetics. In environments of censorship or social constraint, the facade protects and seduces; camp, pastiche, and melodrama can camouflage forbidden intensities while giving them a stage. The statement is both humility and credo: style is not a program to execute but a fate to accept, and the most persuasive surfaces are those the unconscious has already composed.