A Life Without Patterns

...Blackburn's errors are not stylistic misjudgments but bungling mistranslations Similar sounding words are sometimes confused into sentir(to feel) is translated as if it were seen-tar (to sit) He often guesses at the meanings of words which could have been found in any dictionary pastels de Damascus (apricot tarts) appears as "Damascus tarts," lustrina (alpaca) is translated as "shiny," perhaps because it resembles "luster " It these mistakes were infrequent, the editions might be blamed, but the stories are so filled with every kind of mistake...

...the sentiments of a high school oozy who sees them from the tram When he arranges to visit the sisters, Leticia realizes that the masquerade will have to end and refuses to see him, sending an explanatory note with the other two Reality here is too harsh and the only possible happiness for the girl is in a fragile world of fantasy where she can be someone else...

...The pattern is typical of all the stories in Bastian Characters suddenly have thrust upon them something unnatural, and instead of finding out what it is, they attempt to arrange their lives around it, to accommodate it to their usual pattern of living The old couple idly wasting their lives away in the old house were slowly killing themselves, denying life by embracing a reality which m itself was unreal The noise was just an imposition at first, but it became, when it forced them into the street, a liberating energy that made them finally rejoin human society...

...even in the English syntax—that Blackburn's competence in Spanish must be seriously questioned...

...Bastian differs from the other two books in that its stories all have a preternatural or fantastic tone The characters appear in normal or realistic settings which are later deformed by some bizarre occurrence to show that what seemed natural was actually a grotesquely warped reality In the story "House Taken Over," the narrator and his sister have lived all their lives in their family's Buenos Aires mansion Suddenly one evening he hears a sound m the rear wing, concludes that something has taken over that part of the house, and locks the door before it can come into the forward wing Except for some minor inconveniences, he and his sister live normally until, on another evening, he hears the noise on their side of the house and they flee into the street...

...Blow-Up," renamed here for the film it inspired, recalls the allegorical stories m Bastian because its narrator is punished by supernatural powers for refusing to be himself The narrator begins by saying that he has somehow become disembodied, but identifies his former self as, "Roberto Michel, French-Chilean, translator and in his spare time an amateur photographer " Implicit m his identification is a negation of identity He has more than one nationality and consequently belongs to neither country He translates what someone else has written into another language, writing nothing himself He is a photographer, creating nothing out of himself but appropriating what is already there, simply choosing the correct moment to snap the shutter In this figure Cortazar sees a man who has spiritually transformed himself into nothing, a man he castigates b\ turning him into what he really is a bodiless spirit whose only view to the world is that of the camera lens in his last photo Strolling along the Seem one November Sunday, Cortazar's photographer stops on a bridge and soon finds himself watching a young boy talking with a woman Immediately he invents a situation to fit the scene, convincing himself that the woman is tantalizing the boy with the promise of sexual adventure in order to make a fool of him later for her own perverse pleasure He then notices a man sitting m a nearby car and adds him to the plot to debauch the boy At the precise instant when he thinks the woman is dominating the boy, he focuses his camera on them and snaps their picture They notice him, and while the boy slips away, the woman demands the film because the photo was taken without her permission The narrator refuses and leaves the woman and the man, who has come over to investigate the argument, standing on the bridge Later he develops the film, likes the shot of the couple and enlarges it Fascinated by the scene, he enlarges it still more to poster size and studies it while he translates Suddenly he realizes that the figures on the bridge have begun to move and that the scene is going to re-enact itself as if he were not there This time the boy is being propositioned and is about to accept, with no one there to rescue him All the narrator can do is scream, and then he becomes part of the picture, moving closer to the man and woman as the boy flees a second time The man approaches him menacingly and everything goes black When he legumes consciousness, he is no longer himself, and all he can see is the scene he had photographed, now devoid of people The relationship between the story and Ant mom??s film rests upon the precept that passive acceptance of any reality is a degradation of human dignity In Cortazar's story, the narrator is punished because he denied himself a legitimate existence and lives parasitically off the lives of others Ant mom??s photographer is guilty of living m a concrete world in which only physical objects have meaning, and the film traces his awakening to the realization that metaphysical realities do exist and that there is more to life than what he can capture on film Antonioni and Cortazar concede m a desire to reaffirm man's freedom from the purely material and to reinstate his spiritual autonomy in an age of metaphysical constraint...

...For Cortazar, the person who conforms to a system without establishing the legitimacy of his relation to it is committing a crime This failure to verify whether a given set of norms is valid or not constitutes a corruption of human dignity and a reduction of life to a series of conditioned responses Human life becomes a bland appropriation of something exterior to the person, a routine which destroys intellect and turns people into animals Cortazar demands a life without set patterns, where the forces of chance constantly assert themselves and startle the ego out of its lethargy Cortazar's sense of responsibility is existentialist, but he does not require that the liberated person align himself with some greater social movement His chief preoccupation is to show what people who refuse to exercise their self-awareness become and to demonstrate that escape from routine may occur anywhere and under any circumstances The lesson in the stories of End of the Game is that we are surrounded by systems, patterns and molds and if we do not realize it, we ask losing our identity, our right to exist as individuals...

...In 'Blow-Up, from Las Aromas Secretes, Cortazar fuses his notion that refusal to exercise self-examination-tin is a sin against humanity with the theme of metempsychosis This theme also runs through all of his books, appearing here in the stories "Axolotl "The Distances" and "The Night Face Up " Cortazar believes that individuals may form part of beings which transcend time and space and that we may be influenced by the movement of this metaphysical whole of which we are unaware In many stories the characters' identities are changed because their souls are caught in a mysterious transmigratory process...

...A Life Without Patterns END OF THE GAME AND OTHER STORIES By Julio Cortdzar Translated by Paul Blackburn Pantheon 277 pp $5 95 Reviewed by ALFRED J. MACADAM Department of Romance Languages, Princeton University This is the first collection of Julio Cortazar's short stones available in English His novel, Hopscotch, won this year's National Book Award for foreign books in translation, but the bulk of his writing is made up of short stories —a genre which publishers seem reluctant to print until an author "establishes" himself with a novel Perhaps for this reason Cortazar's countryman and early influence, Jorge Luis Borges, was not published here until after he became famous in Europe Cortazar's debt to Borges is more a matter of discipline than style, and while both pay careful attention to technique, they are totally different in intellectual focus Borges is concerned with man's confronting a monstrous universe and realizing that any attempt to comprehend it would end in failure and disillusion, Cortazar concentrates on the individual's reaction to his own particular reality Borges has often been accused of writing only about an abstract, dehumanized world, turning his back on his own political and social situation, when m fact he deals with social and political matters philosophically, deriving the universal from the particular Cortazar, too, has been accused of having no social commitmint, yet in reality his primary theme is individual freedom...

...While the stories in Bastian are allegoric because of their exemplary, almost didactic spirit, the stones in Final del Jogo, with some exceptions, have no supernatural air "End of the Game," for which the anthology is named, is narrated by a school-age girl, the type of naive narrator Cortazar often uses to stress his characters' inability to understand what they are experiencing The narrator and her two sisters sneak out of the house every day during the siesta and go down to the railroad tracks, one of the three dresses up each time in an improvised costume and poses where people in the passing tram can see her One of the girls, Leticia, is partially paralyzed, but is so attractive in her costumes that she arouses...

...The central theme of how an individual reacts to his own reality appears in all three of the books from which End of the Game was assembled The editor fails to mention that Bastion (Bestiary) appeared in 1951, Final del Jogo (End of the Game) in 1956 and in a revised edition in 1964, and Las Aromas Secretes (Secret Weapons) in 1959 He also neglects to note that the stories are neither m the order in which they appeared in the respective books nor in order of publication...

...End of the Game is remarkably representative of the consistencies and variations in Cortazar's themes and style, but once again Cortazar has been betrayed by his translator Hopscotch may have won a National Book Award, but it could only have been for the fluidity and imagination of Paul Blackburn's translation, not for its precision Coitazar's first novel, The Winners, was even more poorly translated and does not even have the verve that makes Hopscotch at least tolerable if not correct And, while Blackburn's translation of these stories is more palatable than The Winners, it is so outrageously erroneous that the originally excellent anthology can be recommended only with extreme reservation...