Julio Cortazar’s Stories

Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: May 10, 2009

• In: Literature
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In this book are collected some of the most well-known short stories of the great Latin American writer, Julio Cortazar. Cortazar was a great experimental writer (his most famous novel, “Hopscotch”, was a pre-cursor to future hyper-text novels) who drew his inspiration from French Symbolism, Surrealism and the improvisational nature of Free Jazz.

Fellow Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, once famously stated that there was no way of retelling the plot of a Cortazar story – he was absolutely right. The plot is minimal for many of the stories in this collection and in a sense, it is subsidiary. The `essence’ of a Cortazar story is largely ineffable. Attempting to capture it in words leads one to fumble just the way that his characters do (see, for example, the short story “The Idol of the Cyclades” or “The Pursuer”). In Cortazar’s fictions, reality and fantasy are separated by a permeable membrane and the proper way to read his writing is to experience it, to exercise to the fullest extent possible one’s sense of empathy with the writing, in a sense, to merge with it. Indeed, this merging of the fantastic and real, of several viewpoints, is a recurring theme in this collection of short stories – it is most fully manifest in “Axolotl” wherein the young boy becomes obsessed with the axolotls to the point where he actually becomes one. However, the theme also recurs in “The Distances”, “A Yellow Flower” and “The Continuity of Parks.”

Many of the stories are a bit like the Taoist parable of Chuang Tzu who dreamed that he was a butterfly but upon waking was no longer sure whether he was a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. Cortazar’s stories seem to exist in kind of quantum superposition states where both one and the other are simultaneously being realized — this is literature at the Planck scale. Probably no other author has managed to capture, in writing, the feel of the uncanny as masterfully as Cortazar has. There is a sense of unease, half-hinted, that permeates through almost the entire collection. This barely expressible sense of a discordant note is especially evident in “The House Taken Over”, “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”, “The Night Face Up” (a stand-out story which for me had some similarities to Borges’ story, “The South”), “Bestiary”, “Blow-up” (on which the Michelangelo Antonioni film was loosely based) and “Secret Weapons.”

I suspect that I will be returning to many of these stories in the future as they seem to welcome repeated visits. Not all of the stories were of equal quality for me – some were less enjoyable than others. In discussing Cortazar as a novelist Borges once commented “He is trying so hard on every page to be original that it becomes a tiresome battle of wits, no?” To a certain extent, I felt the same way about some of the short stories in this collection, though quite possibly this is because I am not a sophisticated enough reader of post-modernist literature.

Overall however, reading the collection was an enjoyable experience which I recommend to other readers. Some of the stories are sure to persist in one’s memory as beautifully strange, haunting experiences, inviting repeated visits.