A Tropical Destiny: an “archiphilological” reading of the unfinished script Nina y Hé by Manuel Puig

Abstract

At the end of 1961, settled in Rome after spending 2 years working in film productions in Buenos Aires, Manuel Puig began to write what was to be his fourth script. The project received the provisional title Nina y Hé and the plot was centered on the shooting of a movie in Brazil with a Latin American crew and the stellar participation of an actress from Hollywood. After 3 months of an intense writing campaign, Manuel Puig abandoned the script, leaving it unfinished to focus on a new project about his hometown General Villegas, which would become his first novel: La traición de Rita Hayworth. Although the project Nina y Hé remained unfinished, that script continued to be written in the work of Manuel Puig and reading it can prefigure many of the motifs that would become characteristic of his literature.