Imagining an interview with Manuel Puig upon reading Betrayed By Rita Hayworth

– Manuel Puig, thank you for agreeing to talk to me.

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– Of course. What I do want to talk about is your first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.

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– It was your first novel?

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– But why a novel? Why did you not write it as a screenplay? Or did you?

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– I see. But did your screenwriting experience influence the way you wrote the novel?

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– Well I was thinking particularly of the structure, especially the early chapters that are told entirely in dialogue. You even have one chapter that gives just one side of a telephone conversation.

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– I know that’s not unusual in film, but it is not something you find in novels. That’s why I was wondering about how much Manuel Puig the screenwriter affected Manuel Puig the novelist.

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– I presume, by the way, that you did know exactly what was being said at the other end of the telephone line?

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– Really? And you didn’t think of putting that in the novel?

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– But then, so much of the rest of the novel is decidedly unfilmic in structure, long interior monologues, stream of consciousness if you like.

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– Were you reading the modernists, then?

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– If think what I’m trying to get at is whether this was a deliberate attempt to get as far away from film as possible?

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– The overlapping voices of the first chapter (not a particular feature of 1960s film); rambling, disconnected interior monologues that are often almost incoherent; and towards the end of the novel a variety of distinctly literary forms, a diary, a commonplace book, an essay, a letter. All of this looks like the exact opposite of what you might normally expect of a screenwriter.

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– Yes, I know, I’m contradicting myself there. But somehow that contradiction seems to be implicit within the book.

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– Right, but what about the modernist stuff? Do you see yourself as a modernist, or a postmodernist?

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– Yes, I agree. But there is still the experimental quality of your work. Or would you describe it as experimental?

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– Well, if not experimental, how about abstract? At least in the sense that so much is abstracted from what we have come to expect of a novel: identification of speakers, markers of place, physical description?

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– Good. But the other movement, if you want to call it that, with which your name is always linked, is the whole Boom/post-Boom thing. How do you see your work in relation to that?

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– Does being a Latin American novelist automatically qualify for inclusion in the Boom?

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– Well, One Hundred Years of Solitude was only published the year before Betrayed by Rita Hayworth came out. It can’t have been much of an influence.

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– Well, let’s go back to the start of the magic realist style, genre, call it what you will. Do you see Borges or Alejo Carpentier as particular or identifiable influences on your work?

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– No, but you wouldn’t say you were influenced by contemporary North American writers either?

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– So, if we’re talking influences, how much did your life influence Betrayed by Rita Hayworth?

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– I know nothing about General Villegas, where you were born, is it very much like you describe Vallejos in the novel?

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– And you are roughly the same age as Toto.

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– No, I’m not trying to take a biographical approach to criticism. But I do note the coincidence, and wonder if there is much of your own family experience that found its way into the novel.

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– Yes, I was going to ask you about that. Were you as fixated on film as Toto? You did, after all, try to become a screenwriter.

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– So film really was an escape from the boredom of small town life?

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– That did strike me when I read the novel. It’s rather a bold move to write your first novel about boredom, don’t you think?

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– Okay, honestly, what do you think of Rita Hayworth?

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– No, I won’t tell. Manuel Puig, thank you very much for speaking to me.