Rewriting the World

...Man is the creature who names, a Godlike attribute, yet in naming divides himself from the Other and further divides the Other into myriad fragments...

...Much of the time Cortazar's effort is a disaster...

...An author cannot abdicate responsibility for his fictional world by taking refuge in contrived mystery, still less by such mechanical devices as inviting the reader to shuffle the chapters like a deck of cards...

...Cortazar has already set forth his credo for this sort of thing in the "expendable" chapters of Hopscotch, where he delineated three categories of novelist...

...He does not want "a satisfactory world for reasonable people...

...But isn't this monstrous book a very monument to the Emperor's cultural clothes...

...Cortazar, he insists, is too indifferent to his characters to invent an organic relationship between them, preferring to bring them together by accident...

...The romantic author wants to be understood for his own sake or that of his heroes...

...One may not understand, but who wants to admit to being a female-reader...

...Otherwise the novel as a form reduces to sociology or pornography or subjectivist exotica or genre exercise-that is, when it isn't attempting to destroy language by language...

...In this universe-one of the many modern avatars of the underworld, reminiscent of Cocteau's film Orphee, or Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad—pale shades of men's mortal selves wander without volition to some presumably fatal encounter...

...it must be created like the phoenix...

...It is a Chirico-esque setting of arcades receding to a canal that glimmers on the horizon...

...Whenever things get dull, Calac and Polanco, a couple of Argentines, are always ready to conduct loud altercations in gibberish—pour epater le (by this time one would have thought thoroughly indifferent) bourgeois...

...This collective determinism is represented by a metametropolis called the City, whither the characters find themselves translated without warning...

...Take Helene, the frigid anesthetist hopelessly loved by Juan...

...Inspired by some Swedish theory about the neurochemical mechanics of the brain, Morelli postulates "a human group that thinks it is reacting psychologically in the classic sense of that tired old word" but is in fact moved by something more alien: "foreign occupying forces advancing in the quest of their freedom of the city...

...But here we are, holding the dictionary, and someone has to try...

...Obviously, language fails...

...Suspecting that they are guinea pigs in some transhuman experiment, they themselves play the demiurge, intervening as fate or accident in the lives of others-neo-Faustians blundering about in a world where the divine referee is out to lunch and no devil is on hand to whom one can sell one's soul...

...he is haunted by "nostalgia for the kingdom," by the intuition of a different order of being...

...unquestionably Cortazar's most important novel, is appallingly pretentious: The endless philosophical speculations of windbag intellectuals in their cups, the surfeit of vodka and fancy talk, the schoolboy existentialism and the pursuit of Meaning-all are mixed together with love-in-a-garret and magical encounters on the Pont des Arts...

...And indeed, before long a reader realizes that 62: A Model Kit is another of those post-existential mysteries littered with "clues" pointing in every direction and none, punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and spiced with a macabre death or two to tickle the palate jaded by massive doses of the Absurd...

...The book has no plot in any conventional sense...

...the attempt to puzzle it out must be its own reward...

...The point of reference in Cortazar's narrative is a secular coven, a collection of men and women-French, Argentine, Danish, rootless cosmopolitans all-who meet around a cafe table in Paris to plan and discuss their farcical adventures: bizarre practical jokes, para-physical experiments, and meaningless journeys...

...One person boards a barge that slides past on the black water of the canal, never to be heard from again...

...As for the female-reader, he will remain with the facade, and we already know there are very pretty ones among them, very much trompe l'oeil...

...With the Absurd enthroned in the empty center of their lives, Cortazar's characters are assailed by fragments of meaning, by inexplicable and probably malevolent correspondences, by broken dolls that are discovered to have an abomination (unspecified) in their innards...

...Cortazar's statement in the foreword to 62: A Model Kir-"The reader's option, his personal montage of the elements in the tale, will in each case be the book he has chosen to read"-is best taken as a declaration that the inscrutability of the novel is sufficient unto itself...

...The Creator's names for things came first and provided the necessary foundation...

...62: A Model Kit is a do-it-yourself book, as the title implies...

...The trouble with all this is that Cortazar's people, like the denizens of many an avant-garde movie, leave one cold...

...Familiar territory...

...The classical writer wants to teach, to leave his trace on the path of history...

...To the reader, too, of course...

...Something may have gone wrong with her father, Cortazar suggests in passing, but a clear "explanation" is presumably trompe ioeil for the female-reader...

...Cortazar's work bursts at the seams with his effort to encompass man's fundamental contradiction: Logos is the generative power of the universe, but it is also that which distances us from experience...

...Still, such criticism assumes Cortazar to be merely a gifted charlatan, and fails to ask what it is he is trying to do...

...Or she agonizes over a young man who dies on her during an operation, someone who closely resembles, and could well be, Juan...

...To smuggle back a transcendent frame of reference, Cortazar must invent demons, metaphysical glitches, moral poltergeists...

...These dawn tantalizingly in the awareness of the protagonists and are immediately dissolved, leaving them struggling with a sense of deja vu (or maybe a presque vu, or jamais vu, a la Catch 22...

...streetcars pass silently, filled with staring passengers...

...He has his reward: From the banal, the second-rate, the sophomoric...

...when not bedding down with an obliging accomplice, he is busy following a sinister old woman the group suspects of practicing vampirism on tourist girls...

...Even the author's admirers must admit West has a point...

...Cut out Genesis, though, and man is left holding the dictionary...

...The jests, Cortazar seems to say, are simply the clowning of condemned men...

...In a magisterial put-down West castigated the writer's intellectual condescension, charged him with a failure of imaginative sympathy vis-a-vis "ordinary people," and dismissed him as "a faker who will turn out symbolical or allegorical novels populated by theories and ideas dressed up as human beings...

...Let there be light" preceded man's awareness of light and his saying to himself, "light...

...in that work: "If he had made any choice when he was young it was that he would not defend himself with the rapid and anxious accumulation of 'culture,' the favorite dodge of the Argentine middle class to avoid facing national reality, or any other reality for that matter, and to think of themselves as safe from the emptiness surrounding them...

...This was no problem as long as God was around...

...The unknowable Fate that implicates everyone in the group presents itself also in a rash of curious coincidences...

...the town eventually receives its statues-carved upside down...

...this, in turn, suggests the vampire-countess of old Vienna who ended her sanguinary career in a Transylvanian keep, an association that somehow impels Juan to order a bottle of Sylvaner . . . and so on...

...A reference to Chateaubriand in a book is echoed by a diner in a restaurant ordering "un chateau saig-nant," a bloody castle...

...the contrived, his writing again and again takes off in brilliant flights that push discourse beyond its limits, into mad poetry, conveying something of the huge excitement of being, the soaring of an ambition whose objective is denied by the very structure of our perception...

...In any case, it's impossible to give a damn about Helene, or to feel anything but satisfaction when she comes finally to the nether world and gets chopped by the boyfriend of the runaway seducee...

...One need not accept Cortazar's pseudoscience to see what he is driving at: Free will is more of an illusion, man is further removed from the roots of his own behavior, than is commonly supposed...

...Cortazar is hugely talented...

...For the truth is that Cortazar has a genuinely heroic goal: to put fragmented human existence back together, and to accomplish this with words...

...The "characters" who inhabit the void left after the eviction of Meaning are in limbo, in a kind of moral free fall where they inflict obscurely motivated damage on themselves and others while awaiting their extinction...

...Everything mysteriously coheres, but the meaning, felt to be crucial, is forever inaccessible...

...But like a magnetic storm, he leaves the critical compass spinning wildly, and it is much easier to say what is bad about him than what is good...

...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the most coherent account of Cortazar's work was by a thoroughly hostile critic, Anthony West...

...Perhaps Cortazar's gesture of dissociation from his work parallels God's alleged withdrawal from the creation...

...And it is this novelist's peculiar gallantry that he is ready to go on attempting the impossible, trying to express the inexpressible...

...There is another way of living, only it does not exist yet...

...What on earth is the matter with this woman...

...In extreme moments Cortazar's characters tremble on the ontologj-cal brink, almost grasping a new synthesis...

...I know of no other writer who has faced head-on the possibility of rewriting the world rather than just trying to describe it...

...Elevators carry people up, and across, the cityscape, into identical buildings...

...This outline is merely Cortazar's little joke...

...The third type of novelist, however, wishes to make "an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion," a coparticipant and cosufferer...

...And if this palls, Osval-do the snail is made to run races...

...At times she wanders through the City with a package that grows heavier and heavier, or to a rendezvous with a person she doesn't know for purposes she doesn't comprehend...

...Marrast, a sculptor, in London to buy stone for a project commissioned by a French town, spends his time there playing tricks on the members of an organization called Neurotics Anonymous...

...Or she seduces a girl who has taken refuge with her after running away from home...

...I appear to have written this, announces Cortazar, make of it what you will...

...There, the author's alter ego, the philosophizing would-be novelist Morelli, contemplates writing a work wherein "standard behavior . . . would be inexplicable in terms of current instrumental psychology" (whatever that might be...

...it contains innumerable hotels (or perhaps only one hotel) with bamboo shades over the verandas, and endless rooms of faded wallpaper and ugly furniture that open into one another...

...Thus Juan, a peripatetic interpreter, travels to Vienna for a conference...

...Instead, he writes a resolutely antiesthetic comic novel, offering "something like a facade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the cosuffering...

...He has no interest in the "female-reader" (a term of abuse that should arouse ire in certain quarters), who lends himself passively to the designs of an author...

...Cortazar wrote (about himself...

...a quest superior to ourselves as individuals and one which uses us for its own ends, a dark necessity of evading the state of Homo sapiens towards . . . which Homo...

...What really lives in and through these pranksters is an unknowable Fate, a force that moves them around like pieces in a game whose rules are obscure and whose stakes cannot be guessed at...

...another is stabbed in the last ugly hotel room...