Category Archives: Vol 14

Sanda Valeria Moraru

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Revistas del exilio rumano en América Latina (1944 – 1989) /

Journals edited by the Romanian Diaspora in Latin America (1944 – 1989)

Abstract: When the Second World War finished, Romania entered from the political point of view under the influence of the Soviet Union, which meant the restoration of the communist regime, which produced great upheavals in the Rumanian society and the Romanian institutions and spirituality visibly suffered and decayed. Many of the Romanian intellectuals, who worked in diplomatic missions of Romania abroad, decided not to return home, and others, who were still in the country, decided to live in the exile, because they foresaw the future of the country with distrust. Some of the Romanian intellectuals chose to live in South and Latin America, very far from their native country. They decided to found magazines, newspapers and reviews of Romanian culture, with great material efforts. This way, they could publish their own works in Romanian, their mother tongue. We will briefly present the magazines that were published in Latin America during the period 1945-1989: “Cuget românesc”, “Pământul strămoşesc”, and “Drum”.

Keywords: Argentina; Romanian Immigration; Exile; Communism; Freedom; Hope.

Introducción

Al final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, después de haberse instaurado en Rumania el comunismo, en 1944, muchos de los intelectuales rumanos eligieron exiliarse, ir a vivir a otros países de Europa e incluso a otros continentes. El núcleo más importante se encontraba en el oeste de Europa, especialmente en Francia, Alemania, España e Italia, pero algunos de ellos llegaron a vivir incluso en la América Latina, donde fundaron pequeñas comunidades rumanas.

Presentaremos en el presente artículo algunas de las revistas que los exiliados rumanos lograron publicar en los países hispano – americanos. Ellos se enfrentaron a muchos problemas para poder publicarlas, ya que el mayor problema era el material, el de la financiación. Muchos de ellos hicieron grandes esfuerzos económicos y sacaron dinero de su propio bolsillo para contribuir a la aparición de dichas publicaciones.

Era importante y, a la vez, imprescindible para ellos que siguieran escribiendo en rumano, ya que luchaban a través de su escritura, en contra del comunismo que se había apoderado de Rumania. Escribían en contra del nuevo régimen, sin temor, libremente, ya que los países en los que se encontraban les permitían ser libres, escribir lo que pensaban, sin censura. Era justamente lo contrario de lo que pasaba en Rumania, donde los comunistas empezaron a depurar políticamente las universidades, las asociaciones de escritores y las culturales también. Por atenerse a su ideología y por no querer aceptar el nuevo orden estatal, muchos de los intelectuales que decidieron quedarse en Rumania y enfrentarse al régimen, llegaron a las cárceles, donde sufrían castigos inhumanos, los condenaban a muerte o a cadena perpetua. A muy pocos de ellos les indultaron, pero tras el indulto eran perseguidos y vigilados permanentemente, no podían salir del país, así que su libertad era aparente. Era otra cárcel, pero de otras dimensiones.

Las revistas culturales rumanas más destacadas que se publicaron en la América Latina fueron: “Cuget românesc” (Pensamiento rumano) y “Pământul strămoşesc” (La Tierra de nuestros antecesores) (ambas en Argentina), “Drum” (El Camino) (en México). Todas llevan títulos sugerentes, relacionados con el país, con su destino común, pero lo más importante era que les ofrecieran la oportunidad de expresarse libremente.

Después de la Revolución rumana de 1989, que significó el fin del comunismo, después de casi medio siglo de traumas físicos y psicológicos, paulatinamente se instauró la democracia, lo que conllevó la libertad de expresión, la que había faltado completamente durante el duro régimen. Los críticos literarios rumanos empezaron a dedicarse a la recuperación de las obras que se escribieron en rumano, en todos los países del mundo. Ha sido un trabajo muy duro y largo, que sigue todavía, porque se escribieron y se publicaron muchísimas obras y revistas[1] en rumano en casi todos los continentes. Muchas de dichas publicaciones fueron donadas a las bibliotecas rumanas, así que el mayor fondo del exilio se encuentra en la Biblioteca Nacional de Bucarest y en Biblioteca de la Academia de la misma ciudad.

1. 1. “Cuget românesc” (Argetina)

Uno de los rumanos que vivió su exilio en uno de los países de la América del Sur, en Argentina, Dumitru Găzdaru tuvo la idea de fundar una revista de cultura rumana, “Cuget românesc” (Pensamiento Rumano). Apareció desde enero de 1951 hasta 1957 – 1958, „cu sacrificiul şi sub îngrijirea redacţională a unui comitet de intelectuali din exil”[2]. La dirección de la redacción era: Calle Mariano Acosta, 81, Buenos Aires, y la Administración se encontraba en Calle Aráoz 2361 – C.

Los textos publicados estaban escritos a máquina, según las posibilidades técnicas de los años `50-`60. Los primeros números tuvieron también un Supliment literar (Suplemento literario), a través del cual se ofrecían a los lectores fragmentos representativos[3] de la literatura popular y culta rumanas, sin haberse propuesto elaborar una antología de textos literarios rumanos:

„Amintim din capul locului că prin acest adaus literar nu ne-am propus altceva decât să mulţumim gustul cât mai multor categorii de cititori din lumea compatrioţilor dornici de slovă românească. Nu avem pretenţiunea de a înjgheba o antologie în care să se oglindească în chip sistematic un anumit spirit de epocă, sau preocuparea de a reproduce pentru fiecare scriitor texte reprezentative care să exprime stilul şi atitudinea sa distinctă”[4].

A partir del número 6 (1957 – 1958), los artículos estaba agrupados en los siguientes apartados: Articole – Literatură (Artículos – Literatura), Cronică – Necrologie (Crónica y Necrología), Note şi comentarii (Notas y cometarios), Recenzii şi semnalări (Reseñas), Varia (Miscelánea).

Colaboraron a esta revista los siguientes: Dumitru Găzdaru, que escribió artículos, J. B. Aguilar Torres, Anton Bălan, N. D. Ciotori, N. I. Herescu, que enviaron para publicar versos, ensayos y artículos; el conocido novelista Vintilă Horia, que en aquel período vivía en Argentina, escribió versos; G. Racoveanu, J. N. Manzatti, M. I. Lefter, D. Şt. Marin, Liviu Bogdan, Virgil Ionescu, Meluţa D. Marin, Marcel Nicolau, Lucia A. Popovici, N. Sestean, Stan Ionescu, Emil Turdeanu[5], la mayoría de ellos escribieron artículos sobre temas políticos.

Los artículos que aparecieron en la revista trataron sobre diversos temas: los sufrimientos de los rumanos que fueron desterrados a Siberia[6], después de haber acabado la Segunda Guerra Mundial; el evento del 23 de Agosto de 1944[7], que significa el comienzo de la dictadura comunista en Rumania; el plagio[8] en la elaboración de los trabajos de investigación científica; los descubrimientos en los sitios arqueológicos[9] de Rumania; el éxito de los intelectuales rumanos[10] a nivel internacional; la vida y la obra de los escritores, intelectuales, hombres de cultura rumanos[11]; el génesis del pueblo y el desarrollo del idioma[12] rumano; ensayos en contra la literatura rumana[13] escrita durante el período comunista en Rumania, que elogiaba el régimen y al dictador; la cultura[14] rumana; las tradiciones[15] populares y religiosas de Rumania; la historia[16] nacional y mundial; el exilio[17].

Asimismo, se escribieron cuentos[18], poesías, memorias[19], reseñas de libros publicados en rumano y en otros idiomas[20]; correspondencia[21]; conmemoraciones de figuras[22] ilustres de la literatura e historia rumanas y mundial.

En cada número hay dos apartados titulados: Cărţi, broşuri şi extrase primite la redacţie (Libros, folletos y extractos enviados a la redacción), y Reviste şi ziare primite la redacţie (Revistas y periódicos enviados a la redacción), donde aparecen enumerados títulos de libros, artículos de distintos periódicos, la mayoría de ellos en rumano, que recibieron los miembros de la redacción para su difusión.

En la última página de cada número, el redactor agradece a todos los que apoyaron y contribuyeron a la aparición de la revista y, al mismo tiempo, menciona las dificultades a las que se enfrenta para poder llevar a cabo la aparición de la revista.

1. 2. “Pământul strămoşesc” (Argentina)

Es otra revista que se publicó en Argentina, pero era de orientación legionaria, cuyo redactor fue también el profesor Dumitru Găzdaru. Aparece en la capital de Argentina, Buenos Aires, por un período, paralelamente con la revista “Cuget românesc”. Su primer número es de junio – noviembre de 1952, y los siguientes aparecen a partir de 1974 hasta 1979[23]. De sus colaboradores mencionamos a: I. G. Dimitriu, Valeriu Cârdu, Viorica Lăzărescu, Stelian Stănicel, Zahu Pană, con versos; Nicolae Şeitan, Petre Vălimăreanu, C. Horodineceanu, con artículos; Constantin Papanace, Ion Ţolescu, Vasile Iasinschi, Eugen Lozovan.[24]

1. 3. ”Drum” (México)

Esta revista literaria apareció en la capital de México, Ciudad de México, bajo la dirección de la „Asociaţia Enciclopedică Română” (“Asociación Enciclopédica Rumana”) de México. Sus apariciones se extienden por un período de 20 años, desde septiembre de 1963 hasta abril – diciembre de 1983[25]. Formaban parte de la redacción los siguientes: Vasile Posteucă, Nicolae Petra, Nicolae Novac, Ion Cârja. Vasile Posteucă y Nicolae Petra son, de hecho, los fundadores de la revista.

Al motivar el deseo de publicar una revista de cultura rumana en México, en la que tengan la posibilidad de expresarse libremente y lo que era más importante, en rumano, escriben en uno de los artículos lo siguiente:

„Revista noastră va continua să apară pe aceleaşi linii de orientare românească şi creştină care au fost definite în paginile ei şi în spiritul cărora colaboratorii şi-au adus aportul lor de creaţie culturală. Apariţia şi continuitatea ei răspunde unei nevoi urgente şi unor obligaţii morale, care depăşesc ambiţiile personale sau dorinţa simplă de a ne afla în câmpul culturii româneşti. Întregul popor românesc este supus unei terori necunoscute istoriei sale, teroare care înăbuşe spiritul de creaţie liberă, alterează valorile fundamentale ale culturii naţionale şi desfigurează identitatea spirituală românească”.[26]

La revista contenía las siguientes secciones: Iconar[27], que abarcaba reseñas y artículos escritos por Vasile Posteucă, Crestături[28], bajo el mando de Nicolae Petra, Carnet, de Nicolae Petra y Nicolae Novac, Chenar bucovinean y Cronica literară[29], firmadas por Alexandru Ionescu Lungu[30], Zodii[31], bajo la firma de Nicolae Petra. Contribuyeron a la aparición de la revista a través de sus colaboraciones: Vasile Posteucă, con versos, notas y artículos; Nicolae Petra, Dumitru Bacu, con versos; Nicolae Novac, John Halmaghi, Vianor Bendescu, J. N. Manzatti, con memorias; Vasile Lăpădat, Octavian Buhociu, Ion Cârja, Al. Petru Silistreanu, Ioan Cuşa, Mira Simian, C. Michael Titus, Dorina Ienciu, Ştefan Baciu, I. G. Dimitriu, Vasile Iasinschi, Ion Sân-Giorgiu, Horia Stamatu, Virgil Ierunca, Ştefan Munteanu, Ioan I. Mirea, Mihai Cismărescu, Vintilă Horia[32], con versos y artículos.

En la última página de cada número, aparece la siguiente mención: la revista aparece cada dos meses. La dirección de la redacción es: Calzada de Tlalpán, 663, México 13, D.F. Desde el primer número hasta el n^o 1 de 1965, sus redactores son: Vasile Posteucă y Nicolae Petra. A partir del n^o 2, abril de 1966, aparecen las direcciones de los redactores, donde se podían enviar los artículos para su publicación posterior: Vasile Posteucă vivía en Canadá, Nicolae Petra en México y Nicolae Novac en los Estados Unidos. Desde 1966, se añade un nuevo miembro al comité de redacción, Nicolae Novac. Por un breve período de tiempo, de un año (1968-1969), Ion Cârja fue también redactor de la revista.

Los temas más importantes que encontramos en las poesías son los siguientes: el echar de menos al país[33], la liberación del país de debajo del comunismo[34], el exilio[35]; la muerte[36]; los recuerdos de los lugares natales[37]; la tristeza[38]; el amor[39]; la soledad[40]; la vida eterna conseguida a través de la fe en Dios y de la creencia en la salvación del alma[41]; la belleza del paisaje[42]; la vida[43]; el paso irreversible del tiempo[44]; las duras experiencias[45] vividas en las cárceles comunistas o en las deportaciones; la incertidumbre[46] respecto al futuro; la libertad[47]; la desesperación[48]; la esperanza[49].

Además, en los artículos los autores escriben sobre los siguientes asuntos: la lucha en contra del comunismo instaurado en Rumania[50]; biografías y conmemoraciones[51]; el idioma y la literatura rumanas[52]; los problemas de adaptación[53] a los que se enfrentaron los desplazados políticos rumanos; las actividades y los eventos culturales[54] que se organizaban en el exilio por las Asociaciones Culturales Rumanas; la cultura rumana[55]; descripciones de paisajes[56]; la economía[57]; ensayos en contra de las guerras[58]; la pobreza[59]; la eternidad[60]; la esperanza[61] de volver a Rumania; la historia[62] de Rumania; las dificultades de la vida[63]; el primer paso dado por un hombre en el Cosmos[64]; los recuerdos del pasado[65]; el ateísmo[66] impuesto por el comunismo; el drama[67] de los encarcelados en las prisiones comunistas de Rumania; la fe[68]; las artes[69]. Se incluyeron, en algunos números de la revista, novelas cortas[70],

Las traducciones[71] de la literatura universal al rumano y de la literatura rumana a los idiomas extranjeros constituyen un aspecto importante no sólo para la difusión de la cultura universal, sino también de la rumana.

En las secciones Carnet, Iconar, Cronica literară, Breviar y Coordinate, los autores publicaron reseñas de libros[72] y breves presentaciones de las revistas rumanas y extranjeras[73] de cultura. En la sección Zodii, Nicolae Petra cuenta tanto sus recuerdos de Rumania, como sus experiencias en el exilio: vivió gran parte de su destierro en la Ciudad de México, pero hasta llegar allí, había recorrido varios países del mundo, de los que mencionamos: Brasil, Italia, que dejaron huellas importantes en su corazón. Aunque de sus recuerdos reside un sentimiento de tristeza en lo que concierne sus lugares de origen y el hecho de que no puede volver a su país, no se arrepiente de haber vivido por tanto tiempo en el exilio. Lo único que hubiera deseado era haber podido llegar a visitar la India. Lo único que le quedó en el exilio fue la fe en Dios, la esperanza y la pintura. Siente lástima por los que se quedaron en el país y les exige a los rumanos que estén unidos en el exilio, porque solamente a través de la unión podrían ayudar al país.

A partir del número 5-6 de septiembre – diciembre de 1966, en la última página de la revista se publicaron las opiniones y sugerencias de los lectores de la revista, y, a la vez, las donaciones que hicieron los exiliados rumanos para que la revista siguiera publicándose. Desde 1968, el formato de la revista cambia y en la portada se menciona que se trata una nueva serie; en la última página, se especifica que a partir de aquel número, la revista se publica trimestralmente. En una nueva sección, Pe răboj, Lucia A. Popovici presenta acontecimientos importantes de la historia y literatura rumanas y universales. Desde 1969 se mencionan en la última página incluso los libros que fueron enviados a la redacción, de distintos lugares del mundo.

Uno de los números de la revista, el n^o 4 de Agosto de 1966, fue dedicado a uno de los máximos representantes de la poesía rumana, el poeta George Coşbuc[74].

Los redactores de la revista fundaron incluso una editorial “Drum”, en la que se publicaban por antonomasia libros de la literatura rumana. Cada nueva publicación iba mencionada en la última página de la revista.

Conclusiones

Después de haber presentado algunas de las revistas de cultura rumana del exilio latino-americano, cabe destacar el deseo de los escritores rumanos de seguir publicando en su propio idioma, aunque estaban lejos del país y dominaban, al mismo tiempo, el español. Hay que poner de relieve el esfuerzo intelectual y material de los colaboradores para apoyar las revistas, a pesar de que se publicaron por 5 ó 20 años. La mera idea de fundar una revista de semejante tipo, tan lejos de Rumania, en el continente americano, merece nuestro respeto.

Se puede notar el gran número de colaboradores que contribuyeron a la aparición de las revistas y, a veces, encontramos los mismos autores en distintas revistas. Los temas más importantes que resaltan de las poesías y de los artículos son, principalmente, la muerte, el sufrimiento causado por el exilio, la tristeza, la inadaptabilidad a un país y cultura completamente nuevos, la frustración en lo que concierne la imposibilidad de ayudar a Rumania a liberarse del régimen comunista y soviético. De este modo, traspasa un sentimiento predominante de pesimismo. Los ecos del grito de echar de menos al país se oyen literalmente en cada página de las revistas.

Existen algunos aspectos del exilio, menos agradables, que los autores decidieron presentar en sus artículos: la falta de unidad de los exiliados que existía en algunos países, porque los rumanos estaban divididos en varias asociaciones que rivalizaban entre sí, según sus intereses; el reducido número de asociaciones culturales rumanas; la falta de cooperación entre sí. Muchos de los autores exigen a los rumanos del destierro que queden unidos, porque solamente a través de la unión, podrán apoyar su interés común, el de liberar el país.

A través de su actividad de los periódicos y por los eventos culturales que organizaban, los exiliados rumanos intentaron llamar la atención a los extranjeros sobre la grave situación en la que se encontraba Rumania, pero, lamentablemente, sus intentos fracasaron la mayoría de las veces.

Un problema muy importante aparecía en los artículos del exilio: el de considerar el exilio como la Verdadera Rumania durante el comunismo, y, al mismo tiempo, considerar las creaciones del exilio como la verdadera literatura rumana. El aspecto se sigue debatiendo y los críticos e historiadores de la literatura, a quienes les incumbe tomar una decisión al respecto, no han dado todavía una respuesta concreta.

Cuando tomaron la decisión de vivir en el exilio, los intelectuales rumanos pensaban que no duraría mucho, pero, al pasar el tiempo, tanto tiempo, lo único que les quedó fue la fuerte fe en Dios, porque la fe los acompañó en todos su sufrimientos, la esperanza de volver algún día a Rumania, aunque aquel día fuese lejano. Desgraciadamente, muy pocos de ellos pudieron volver a su país, porque la mayoría de ellos murieron en el exilio, en tierra ajena.

Bibliografía general

Manolescu, Florin, Enciclopedia exilului literar românesc, Bucureşti, Editura Compania, 2003;

Hangiu, Ion, Dicţionarul presei literare româneşti (1790-2000), Bucureşti, Biblioteca Institutului Cultural Român, 2004;

“Cuget românesc”, anul 5 (1955 – 56), anul 6 (1957 – 1958)

„Drum”, anul I, nr. 1, septembrie 1963; anul I, nr. 2, noiembrie 1963; anul I, nr. 3, ianuarie 1964; anul I, nr. 4, martie 1964; anul I, nr. 5, mai 1964; anul I, nr. 6, iulie 1964; anul II, nr. 1, mai 1965; anul II, nr. 2, aprilie 1966; anul II, nr. 3, iunie 1966; anul II, nr. 4, august 1966; anul II, nr. 5-6, septembrie – decembrie 1966; anul IV, nr. 1, ianuarie – martie 1968 – serie nouă; anul IV, nr. 4, octombrie – decembrie 1968; anul V, nr. 2, aprilie – iunie 1969; anul V, nr. 3, iulie – septembrie 1969; anul V, nr. 4, octombrie – decembrie 1969; anul VI, nr. 1, ianuarie – martie 1970; anul VI, nr. 2, aprilie – iunie 1970; anul VI, nr. 3, iulie – septembrie 1970.

Notas

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Images of Otherness in the Chilean Exile Literature

A Pretext: Isabel Allende’s ‘Daughter of Fortune’

Abstract: Dealing with the literary theme of Otherness in the contemporary Latin American literature, the study focuses on one of the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s books, Daughter of Fortune (1999). The author is here obviously interested in projecting her narrative discourse on a net of cultural hybridizations and complex identities, very different at the ethnic, national, racial or social level. That is why the image of the Otherness works both ways: for each identity (represented by a group or just by an individual) the Other is the Stranger. Allende uses her own personal cross-cultural history in order to give shape to a world which functions through oppositions and hierarchies. The heroine of the novel, somehow a marginal because of her gender, ambiguous origin and social status, performs a voyage between the two symbolical spaces (Valparaiso and California), travel which eventually becomes a quest for her own identity. The book is abundant in literary clichés, especially regarding the representations of the Other

Keywords: Latin-American Literature; Isabel Allende; Otherness; the Other, Stranger; “Daughter of Fortune”; Intertextuality.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (1999) represents an interesting, but also a significant field of interpretation in which the subject of the present study (the Otherness) is concerned, because of the multicultural background the plot develops in, but also through the characters, who have very different ethnic origins and therefore are involved in a game of complex interactions and perspectives. The first section of the novel has as a background the Chilean port of Valparaiso in the first half of the 19^th century, while the second, through the symbolical voyage of the female character, is California in the years of the Gold Rush. Yet, the natives of both places, Chileans and respectively Mexicans, are somehow left behind, being represented by less important characters, while the attention of the novel focuses on the different strangers arriving and inhabiting both spaces (English in Chile, Chinese, Europeans, South-Americans in California, now a land belonging to the United States). It is therefore, a story about the Other and his or her voyage into the unknown, a story about identities and carrying one’s culture to new lands, about interaction and hybridization. The author’s life itself wears the marks of her exile and constrained wanderings[1] and this becomes apparent in the choice of the spaces present in the novel (Chile and California, her two homes). Isabel Allende’s cultural and personal evolution places her rightfully in the area of both Latin and Inter-American writers[2].

Before analysing Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune within the complex of Otherness there are some preliminary references to be made to the history of this concept. As the present study deals precisely with the image of otherness and with the cross-cultural perspectives in Allende’s novel on this diversified background, the main concept (that of the other or the stranger) implies a preliminary reference to the notion, distinguishing the fact that there has always been an ambiguity noticeable in the perception of the stranger, the exotic. The perception towards the Other has always been a combination between fascination (in discovering the difference and the delights of the immersion of the discoverer/ conqueror into a “new world”) and suspicion or anxiety (as Jean Delumeau highlighted in his anatomy of Western fears[3], the one towards the Other is very persistent in the European imaginary). The concept was determined within philosophy[4] in relation with the problems of identity and defined itself through the area or segment of difference towards the subject, in opposition with the essence of the Self: Michel de Certeau believes that in the Western tradition there are two representations on the other: one defined by similarity and another by difference.[5] Individual identity suffered extension towards group identity and the Other gained a social, racial, ethnical or religious connotation, actually illustrating a phenomenon which was present for centuries (at least) in the history of Western societies. Professor Lawrence Cahoonee[6] emphasized that

“What appear to be cultural units — human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations — are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchizing. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way.” [7]

The otherness involves tension by definition, the stable coordinates of one’s perception of the self being confronted with the difference. Edward Said’s reflections on the relation between East and West are of interest in this context through some of the reflections on the subject of otherness: Said acknowledged that the discourse built around the image of the Stranger is preliminary coded. Still, the prior representation is not necessarily reflected by the confrontation to reality itself[8]. Baudrillard, after quoting Simmel’s opinion on the existence not of a distance but of a boundary between the Self and the Stranger, recognizes a crisis nowadays (an elision) of the Other and simultaneously a need of the Self for such a complementary figure (with the result in the creation of an “artificial stranger”, a fiction of otherness). As Isabel Allende’s book (the subject of this analysis over the image of the Other/ the Stranger) unfolds its plot in mid-19^th century Chile and California, Baudrillard also interests us for his observations over the fascination of the period for the idea of the Other as exotic[9] and the voyage towards the Other, mainly assimilated to the Oriental: the voyage, Baudrillard writes, is a manner of metaphorical exploration of the Other, of “wandering” in a foreign world, of “tasting” or “touching” its difference[10].

Finally, in closing this selection of reflections on the idea of Other, we’ll emphasize the idea of the Stranger as belonging par excellence to exteriority[11], to a ex-centric space. In this respect, colonialism has changed, actually reversing the relation between the stranger as extraterritorial and the local, who becomes “a stranger within his own country”[12].

Daughter of Fortune (1999) is by its characters and spatial organisation a crossroad of national identities and complex multicultural relations. The plot develops around Eliza, an orphan adopted by the Sommers brothers (English immigrants living in Chile) and raised up by the sophisticated spinster Miss Rose and her Amerindian servant, the wise Mama Fresia. When she becomes a young woman, the well-educated Eliza falls in love with a Chilean, Joaquin Andieta. The latter, attracted to California by the Gold Rush, will be soon followed by the pregnant Eliza, who travels clandestinely and thus suffers a miscarriage. In California she continues her quest dressed as a man, with the help of a constant friend, the Chinese doctor, Tao Chi’en, but ends discovering her own identity and starting a whole new life in the recently built San Francisco.

In what regards the cross-cultural structure of the novel, the main character, Eliza, is the most hybrid of all, as Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos notices[13], mainly because of her ambiguous origin (she is found in a soap crate at the doorstep of the British Company for Importation-Exportation), education and eventually her destiny. Similar to the closed British societies formed in the colonized India, the Sommers live in a simulacrum of England within the Chilean port of Valparaiso, where, although surrounded by Indian servants and maintaining professional activities with different nationalities (as they move in an open space, a naval town), they only cultivate social relations with the British.

In the second part of the novel, after the monstrous voyage performed by the heroine, the plot moves into the California of the Gold Rush, were nationalities mix in a “melting pot” of European, South, North-American and Oriental adventurers. The couple Eliza – the Chinese Tao remain the centre of the action, in a multicultural world, somehow polarized by the appearance of some symbolical spaces, baptized after their inhabitants’ natal places (like Chinatown and Chilecito, which means “Little Chile”). The history in California changes the accents of the Valparaiso episodes (the “all is possible” of childhood and teenage magical territories) transgressing into a chaos of violence and adventure.

Returning to the first stage of the story, a central, yet mysterious episode is represented by the finding of the heroine, as an infant, on the doorstep of the two brothers (Rose and Jeremy Sommers) by people with again mixed identities: an English lady, Miss Rose Sommers and her indigenous housekeeper, Mama Fresia. At this point they already represent two totally different attitudes (with a religious, symbolical background): the Christian woman, who adopts the orphan, and the superstitious Mapuche Indian, who suggests the abandoned child must be cursed and could bring misfortune to the family. On the other hand, in an interesting manner of empathising to the child, both women tend to attribute to the girl her own ethnical provenance[14]: while Miss Rose assures Eliza later that she has English origin

(“You have English blood, like us. Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language”[15]),

the servant sees her as indigenous[16] (“You, English? Don’t get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine”), beliefs which both prove to be true, due to Eliza mixed origin[17]. Later on, the ambiguity of this birth is cleared, in Eliza’s absence, as well as Miss Rose’s deep interest in her education in future, which, as becomes obvious, is not ethically or religiously motivated, not even psychologically (in her lack of children), but lies in her knowledge of the blood relation between the family and the child (as the third brother, captain John Sommers, is actually the father of the abandoned child). All this melodrama is actually part of a complex texture Isabel Allende creates by placing together different national and cultural backgrounds, combined with the prejudices created towards the Other by each of them.

The Sommers brothers live within this England in miniature, labelled symbolically by the name of The British Import and Export Company, Limited, title comprising suggestions about relations of international change. They have created for themselves the perfect illusion of ignoring the distance and living in the same world, by using English products ordered by catalogue, frequenting a Protestant church (Miss Rose even sings in the choir), having English friends and even ignoring the local clime by respecting their native country season’s calendar (which was the reverse of the Chilean one)[18].

Born under an ambivalent star, Eliza Sommers lives in Valparaiso a double existence, somehow typical to this cultural colonial background, between Miss Rose’s illusory space (imaginary England, a house of dolls) and Mama Fresia’s tangible reality, a persistent one, aromatized with the Creole ingredients of the kitchen. She is provided a good, aristocratic breeding by Miss Rose’s efforts to teach her piano, foreign language and good manners but also left to spend many days in the society of Indians, where she is initiated into the beliefs and habits of the local people[19]. Her oscillation between the world of masters and that of servants emphasised her ambiguous status.

Regarding the Latin-American cultural environment many observed that it represents a specific mixture of magical Indian beliefs and Catholicism: “the influence of the Amerindian presence and of the American landscape has distilled religious rituals which differ from those of the European communities in which they originated”[20]. The author describes such a local procession, that of the Christ of May (Cristo de Mayo) using the perspective of the Stranger, of Jacob Todd, an Irish recently installed in Valparaiso. He finds the image unbelievable, through its typical mixture of violence and religious devotion, primitiveness and sadness: the impression is that of a medieval procession, impossible to be shared to his incredulous friends in London. Actually his character is used more than once to reflect the distance between the European and the native (Chilean and Indian perspective), and even as a new pole of discussion through his liberal opinions regarding the relations of power with the natives, which, although Chile was no longer a colony, were still in the disadvantage of the latter:

“this is a country of thieves – says Jeremy Sommers – nowhere else in the world would the Company spend so much in ensuring the merchandise. They steal everything and all that escapes the burglars is flooded during the winter, burnt during the summer or get wrecked in an earthquake”[21].

The Sommers, as the entire symbolical British community, cultivated a negative attitude towards the natives (considered as inferior, immoral, uncivilized etc., perfect savages[22]):

“the indigenous blood is hidden as if it were a disease. I don’t blame them: Indians are famous for being dirty, drunker and lazy. The government tries to improve the race by bringing European immigrants”[23].

Still, their Chilean household survives mainly because of the Indian Mama Fresia, her wise interventions in crucial moments and multiple skills of a housekeeper, empirical healer, cook etc. Judy Berry-Bravo believes the character of Mama Fresia, an Indian Mapuche, to be one of the successes[24] of the novel, as it is a rare case in the Chilean novel to find such a picturesque description of a native, playing an important part in the family economy. In spite of the passive tension between the immigrants and natives, the latter acting as servants in the European hybrid local mansions (the South American clime and habits implied some “unorthodox” appendages to the houses, inhabited or used by the Indian staff), Mama Fresia has a benign influence in the story. As the story evolves, she is described as empathizing with the girl, whose ambiguous ethnical identity becomes one of the many reasons of their close relationship and mutual affection (the Mapuche servant would become Eliza’s confident and main help as she falls in love and becomes pregnant, which leads to her secret – and traumatic – trip to California).

The situation of the Indians as colonized people and the way they react to the conquest and the change of relations of power (which has made them strangers in their own native land) interest Allende. Asked about the colonising process (from which she was inspired for another of her books, Inés Del Alma mía[25]) and the situation of the Mapuche in Chile, Allende answers: “The war has lasted for 300 years. The Mapuche have never been submitted, they have lived marginalized by the Chilean society and now they are treating war again. They have been an invincible people, preferring death to submission. […] – Is this conquest completed? – No, it is not.”[26]

The image Allende creates to the Indians is at best illustrated through the character of Mama Fresia, who notices and finds solutions to everything, being in a way the centre and organizer of a world in which she seems an outsider, while Miss Rose reigns with grace over her “house of dolls”, an illusion of a traditional English mansion. Fighting efficiently the diseases, the clime and natural disasters, Mama Fresia, a very prominent feminine goddess in the book, manages the real, dark and complicated side of the idyllic space Miss Rose had built at the surface, and Eliza, with her ambiguous identity, circulating between the two worlds, is familiarized with both, without a preference, accepting symbolically her Creole, rich, identity.

The image of the Other perceived as a savage is very significant here and requires attention, being a cultural representation inherited from, some researchers say, pre-colonial times. It seems to represent a psychological want for the Other (and determining in a way the process of colonizing), in order to assure the identity illusion of the accomplished society “an internal demand of the structure of the Western society. In the heart of the European civilization, , there has been developed, similar to a functional growth, a myth which hides and in the same time reveals the nature of this culture which has provided identity consistency for itself based on a fundamental myth: that of the savage”[27]. Sonia Mattalia also believes the image of the savage is a pre-representation, built a priori, pre-existent in the European imaginary and projected over the conquered colonies”[28] and which accompanied him as his “shadow” (using Roger Bartra’s image[29]).

“The problem of identity has always been an intellectual preoccupation, in the countries born out of very different ethnics and cultures”[30]. The Creole, the product of such mixed, hybrid communities, is yet generally defined by the area of provenance, and not by the race or nationality.

As Isabel Allende emphasized in her memoir, Mi país inventado (My Invented Country), the Chilean society has always been a multilayered one, similar to a “millefeuille” cake, to class selection, a national criteria being added in the novel. The Europeans were considered the civilized, the superior nation (and race), brought to a “savage” place to bring the light of reason to barbarians (fact which becomes obvious in the discussions around Todd’s so-called missionary intentions and his discovery, with a journalistic eye of Chile and later, of California). “The Westerner is at the top of any social division[31]. [..] If the English, the French or the US citizen are examples of civilization, the Native American, the Chilean in this case, the Araucanos and all the other «dirty» American [native] people are thieves and barbarians. Classifying the type of society the action in The Daughter of Fortune takes place in, the researcher Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos says that “at the superior level there is the Western world, represented by England, France and the United States. At a second level, there are the Chileans and Mexicans (Latin Americans in general, but all men). They are followed by native Amerindians and Asians [the latter, coming, the English in the novel say, from] «a land of dirty people, ugly, weak, noisy, corrupted and savage, who were eating cats and cobras and were killing they own recent-born daughters»[32]. The fourth place was for the black slaves from African origin and at the bottom of all these levels there was the woman (in the novel, the Asian and Chilean woman)”[33].We shall come back to this ultimate, submitted, yet essential generic character in the novel.

First of all, there is the image of the Oriental, which comprised at a first level the character of Tao, Eliza’s friend and eventually her husband (the history of the couple continues in Retrato en sepia, another novel of the writer, published in 2000) and pluralized in a series of smaller appearances of other Orientals in the story (perceived as the community – called Chinatown – and its problems). Still, next to the part Tao plays in the development of the story, what matters most is the perspective of the Western over the Oriental and the prejudices of the former over the latter. The Chinese doctor, Tao Chi’en, is perceived, in spite of his profession and culture, as a marginal, an insignificant and inferior Other, mainly a Stranger to all the Western values. Still, through the novel the Tao reveals his wisdom and depth of mind, his skills as a doctor and his human quality, being also very respectful towards his cultural inheritance. He becomes progressively more and more important in Eliza’s story, as a geographical unknown area which reveals itself to the look of the traveller, in this case the woman. Isaac Galileo Rivera Campos sees Daughter of Fortune as crossed by an “Oriental route”, insisting, on the grounds of Edward Said’s theories on the “discourse of power”, on the perspective in the novel towards the Oriental. Rivera speaks of the Asian, who is regarded as the other of the Western man, but as a subaltern other, who initially is not allowed an individual voice in the Western world. Still, the perspective in the novel is not unique, but multileveled, showing that the author doesn’t belong to the Western male society, but that she is also a marginal, but one who belongs to another century and can speak: “On the one hand, the narrative voice in The Daughter of Fortune presents an exotic Far East, where one could find the best balms and lotions and where, even better, «there were the most beautiful women in the universe», who are, actually the worst treated in the novel. In the chapters entitled The Fourth Son and Tao Chi´en, the narrative voice continues showing an idealized vision on the intelligent and wise East: «Tao, …as way, direction, sense and harmony»”[34]. On the other hand, Rivera continues, the author presents in more than one situation the contempt of the Western society towards the Far East (such as the passage describing the Opium Wars between China and Great Britain). Still, the negative perspective works both ways, as the Chinese felt the same contempt for the Western, perceived as a savage in his violence[35] and arrogance.

Eliza and Tao, both faces of the other for the Western society, find eventually in the “melting pot” of California in the Gold Rush time a new home[36] and, most importantly, a place to develop their skills (Tao as a doctor, Eliza in pastry) and to grow their hybrid family (developed in Retrato en sepia). The relation of the characters with the Californian space is also ambivalent: they are in a way assimilated, becoming part of the new community, but they also maintain they roots and ethnical identities. In the novel this credo of the “American dream”[37] is explicitly described: in the United States, “one wipes down one’s past and can start all over again. […] The ability of renewal, as individualism, is part of the North American myth”[38].

Over the time, “the notion of «the colonized» has expanded considerably to include women”[39] and other marginalized figures. Although the main character is that of a woman and even more, the novel is signed by a female writer[40] (also very much interested in the problems regarding gender and womanhood), we talk of the inferior place women occupy because of the hierarchical scale imposed by the 19^th century perspective[41]. Eliza lives in a world where, among different types of otherness, she is one of the less valued. That is why she has to be mentioned, paradoxically, in an analysis of the image of Other, although she is the main character and Allende’s novels usually impose a “femino-centric” world[42]. The society, in which Eliza is born, although cross-cultural, preserves a cultural tradition about the woman as the Other. Even more, in the novel, the North American recently born (during the Gold Rush) community of San Francisco, absorbs in the beginning no other women but prostitutes, treated as objects, emphasising this way the marginal position of women in society. That is why Eliza has to disguise for a long time as a man (the temporary male identity is emphasized by the absence of her menstruation for a time and lack of interest in all that represented her feminine side before), and has the feeling of somehow loosing her gender identity, until the last scene of the novel, when she symbolically recovers her initial clothing and her sensuality. Still, the new born community will little by little assimilate women, some of them (many, actually, Allende’s fictional world being dominated by women) becoming prominent independent personalities (such as Paulina del Valle, who is a brilliant businesswoman). Although some of the ideas are ahead of their times and come in a line Allende preserves when women are concerned (see the suffragette character of Nívea, in The House of Spirits), the woman characters are very well constructed and have their independence and persistence.

In which Eliza herself is concerned, we insist again upon her ambivalence: ethnical, educational spatial etc. Careful with filiations, Allende offers her a double genealogy, which implies a wanderer father (the sailor), but also places her always between two worlds, two social classes etc., with the uncertainty of a future which for another girl (with a known situation) would have been a very stable. An exception is the same Paulina del Valle[43], also brave enough to make her own destiny. Living this fractured identity, Eliza tries to discover herself in the love story with Andieta, which initially represents the centre of her quest, but whose image dissipates little by little, until it disappears along the way. Eliza changes and evolves by over passing different initiation tests in her travel to and inside California, and reveals a more and more complex identity. In the end, after experimenting different symbolical dangers and drawbacks (disease, death, solitude, poverty etc.), the heroine builds herself a new identity, which comes together with her rediscovery of her womanhood, and the acknowledgment of the freedom she had acquired in her quest (her last line is actually: “Now I’m free….”).

There is one more, although secondary, aspect to discuss in the problem of otherness in the novel: a permanent sensation of déjà vu, of the use of some literary clichés, which we decide to read, because of various reasons, as an (intentional or not) persistence of intertextuality, which is to be found in more than one of Allende’s novels. Allende, a great reader as she declares and she is obvious to be, cultivates some traditional literary images, which are attached especially to national identities. The Victorian society (which is developed, of course as a copy, in Valparaiso) brings to the fore some literary clichés: features of the English lady, the spinster, the English club, the gentleman, the captain, etc. Yet, the characters individualize and acquire shape during the process, detaching somehow from the stereotype. Many analyst have noticed literary filiations, but some, such as, Rossane Brunton stated that they are “deliberate”[44]. The examples of such stereotypes are numerous, but the most obvious is probably the character of the French count in The House of Spirits, too significant to be missed in a study of the Otherness. Count Jean de Satigny is obviously the product of an identity stereotype: the French aristocratic decadence and degeneration, from an entire cultural tradition, with the peak in the fin de siècle. Satigny fills the cliché and even surpasses it: he is a dandy[45], with the most extravagant fashion habits, has original, but extremely elegant manners, is interested only in art and beauty (“the count decorated [the house] after his taste, with an ambiguous and decadent refinement”[46]) and, of course, eventually proves to be vicious beyond imagination, through his orgies implying his Indian servants[47]. Paradoxically, the character most obviously inspired from literature, has also origins in the author’s personal history, as she associates to him the character of her father, an ambiguous image in her past, and initially even adopts his name subconsciously[48] (Bilbaire), changed afterwards at her mother’s wish. Amused, the writer recognized that some of the orgies described in the chapter regarding the French count were also suggested by her mother[49]. Still, the literary layer is not only most obvious but also evidently adopted deliberately, as the image of the “French count“ respects, sometimes ironically, the coordinates of the stereotype. It is used in order to fill a segment which required vice and strangeness, which says many things about the perception of the distant other.

In order to conclude, we can notice Isabel Allende’s interest in projecting her narrative discourse on a net of complex identities, very different at the ethnical, national, racial or social level. That is why the image of the Otherness works both ways: for each identity (represented by a group or just by an individual) the other is the Stranger, the Different. Allende uses her own cross-cultural personal history in order to give shape to a world which functions through oppositions and hierarchies. Her heroine, a marginal person, because of her gender and ambiguous origin and social status, is forced in a way to lead this quest for her own identity and way, and California in the time of the Gold Rush is the perfect place for Eliza to start a new life, on her own rules. The book is abundant in literary clichés, especially in the representations towards the Other, and one of them is that regarding the space: the voyage to a new world (Valparaiso for the English and other immigrants, California for an incredible variety of adventurers). Allende is fond of hybridized images and creates unbelievable associations between characters, historical information and fantasies (in the magical realism style), ideas and beliefs belonging to the 19^th, but also to the 20^th century, one of most interesting results being the system of metaphorical mirrors (some of them distortional) which reflect the subspecies of the Other.

References

Allende, Isabel, Casa spiritelor, trad. din spaniola de Cornelia Radulescu, col. Raftul intai, 2004

Allende, Isabel, Fiica norocului, trad. din spaniola de Cornelia Radulescu, col. Raftul intai, 2002

Allende, Isabel, Hija de la fortuna, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1999

Allende, Isabel, Hija de la fortuna, Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 2001

Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1995

Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espiritus, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1984

Allende, Isabel, Mi país inventado, Editorial Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 2003

Baudrillard, Jean, Marc Guillaume, Figuri ale alterităţii, Traducere de Ciprian Mihali, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2002

Berry-Bravo, Judy, Isabel Allende e Hija de la Fortuna¹. Chilenos en la California del Gold Rush., http://www.revistacienciasociales.cl/archivos/revista11/word/revista11_resena1.doc

Brunton, Rosanne D. , Feminine discourses in the fantastic : A reading of selected inter-American writers, Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1990

CULTURA : LA ESCRITORA CHILENA HOY PRESENTA SU NUEVA NOVELA, “INES DEL ALMA MIA”, EN BUENOS AIRES, Isabel Allende: “La Conquista de Chile todavía no ha terminado” , http://www.si.clarin.com.ar/diario/2006/08/25/sociedad/s-03901.htm

de la Parra, Marco Antonio, La mala memoria. Historia personal de Chile contemporáneo, Planeta, Santiago de Chile, 1998

Ferreol, Gilles, Guy Jucquois (coord.), Dictionarul alteritatii si al relatiilor interculturale, Traducere de Nadia Farcas, Editura Polirom, 2005

Mattalia, Sonia, Mascaras suele vestir. Pasión y revuelta: escrituras de mujeres en América Latina, Iberoamericana, Madrid, 2003

Rivera Campos, Isaac Galileo, La ruta orientalista en Hija de la fortuna de Isabel Allende, in Especulo. Revista de estudios literarios. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html

Said, Edward, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press., 2000

http://elespaciodeastartet.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!E0CC6C78506F46B4!137.entry

http://webs.ono.com/libroteca/allende.htm

http://www.coh.arizona.edu/spanish/divergencias/archives/fall2003/Hija%20de%20la%20Fortuna.pdf

http://www.revistacienciasociales.cl/archivos/revista11/word/revista11_resena1.doc

http://books.google.com/books?id=VlbOvw0Rx8EC&pg=RA1-PA135&lpg=RA1-PA292&dq=isabel+allende+mapuche&hl=ro&output=html&sig=7DnCRZ_hKBzeVwRfltSIDKs6FzE

http://webs.ono.com/libroteca/allende.htm

http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/rutaorie.html

http://archivo.elnuevodiario.com.ni/2003/marzo/20-marzo-2003/cultural/cultural3.html

Notes

Simona Ardelean

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Auster and Casares or Life between Movies and Reality

Abstract: Both The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Auster’s Book of Illusions share the same interest for the multiplicative possibility offered by the world of movie and literature. The South-American writer presents a palimpsest made from the overlaying of a beautiful love-story and a deep philosophical concern related to the problem of re-creating the conscience through filming machinery. The North-American one speaks about a disappeared actor of the mute movie world, who goes from being a character in a book to a real self-creator himself.

Keywords: Adolfo Bioy Casares; Paul Auster; Mute Movies; Louise Brooks; Delirium; Immediate Perception; Repetitive Eternity.

“Everyone thought he was dead.”

(Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions[1])

According to the first lines of Paul Auster’s book the entire world thought Hector Mann was dead. The art of this writer consists in finding the starting point of a writing process where you would least expect it, in the almost biographical final announcement upon someone’s life.

Hector Mann, the character, was a mute movie actor who lived somewhere in the twenties leaving behind nothing else but an almost vanished trace imprinted on some films that were hardly attracting viewers in the time when the plot of the book occurs.

The playful tone of Nicci Gerrard’s article[2] about Auster’s book, “Dead Men do tell Tales” is essential for our attempt to prove that although Hector Mann is merely presented as a shadow of the mute movie times, he is permanently interconnecting different temporal realities. Obviously, he has his own story and he becomes a sort of arguable “indirect false narrator” after more than 80 years from his sudden disappearance, when trough a movie sequence he makes professor Zimmer regain his lost smile (Zimmer is in deep emotional pain after the tragic death of his wife and two children in a plane crash).

When the professor sees that movie sequence mentioned he has the status of a living dead among the others. No longer active in society after the tragic happening he isolates himself in a sort of self-destructive own universe, outside any time reference, where all that is left are desperate and inutile attempts to bring back his wife and children by touching their clothes, toys or sensing their perfume. The movie Zimmer sees and to which he connects with presents the long disappeared Hector Mann, no longer important to the contemporary world. The professor starts a quest on Mann’s films because of the admiration for this actor but also to keep himself busy and far from the outside world, but surprisingly, after he finishes his project, “The Mute Universe of Hector Mann” he receives a letter saying that the actor is still alive and more to that he invites Zimmer to pay him a visit.

The main character of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ book “The Invention of Morel” is also dead for society. He exiles himself on an island running from some events that he keeps describing as “terrible” and he imagines that he lives alone. His belief of being the only one there is wrong. The story of this “dead man” (“I feel with disgust that this paper transforms into a will”) starts through a miracle: on the so believed deserted island simultaneously with the beginning of the early summer some rather anachronistic inhabitants appear.

There are no striking similarities between these two books to which we refer in this study and they are not even interrelated. “The Invention of Morel” is written in 1940 and finds its basis in the sustained interest of the writer for those ambiguous situations that cannot be understood by protagonists and which can have dramatic results, but also interest for other literary themes like time, metamorphosis (it is not a coincidence the fact that the name of the book resembles to “The Island of Dr. Moreau”), love and the way the lovers can loose themselves pathetically, or even ridiculous in totally different worlds and especially interest for the movie. Alex Leo Serban emphasizes in his article concerning Casares’ relation with the film world, published in Dilema Veche[3], that Adolfo Bioy Casares dreamt of seeing “the end of the world sitting in an armchair in the cinema “ but ironically instead of the writer Casares assuming the role of a spectator, his book becomes the inspirational subject for the movie “Last year at Marienbad”[4] (1961).

“The Invention of Morel” is never far from the movie. It is either an unintended projection of the mental imaginary of the other writers or inspired by the admiration for one of the famous actresses of the mute movie (Louise Brooks), whom he would have liked to perform in the role of Faustine, as he confesses to Sergio Wolf in 1995. It is worth mentioning that the edition appeared at New York Review Books in 2003[5] has on the cover the photography of the artist and writer (she writes “Lulu at Hollywood”), Louise Brooks, from 1927.

Adolofo Bioy Casares declares himself interested in movie, the inspirational source for his main feminine character is an actress and more to that the gist of his ingenious novella is based on the idea that the appearance of the anachronistically visitors is caused by the construction of a “demonical” machinery (by Morel), a machinery meant to register and continuously repeat a few days from the life of the tourists on the island.

On the other hand, Paul Auster is the writer deeply involved in the cinematography: he is the scene writer of the movies “Smoke” and “Brooklyn Boogie” in 1998 and the scene writer and director of the movie ”Lulu on the Bridge”, which “the Louise Brooks Society”[6] finds it similar, through the role of Mira Sorvino, to the Brooks’ style and which is described by Faber & Faber Reviews[7] in this words:

“In Lulu On The Bridge, Paul Auster plays with this image, creating not just a world within a world, but also alternative worlds where the variations on the themes of love and death are worked out eternally. Moving effortlessly between reality and the fiction of film-making, Paul Auster displays a mastery of form, as well as the ability to engage the emotions in a powerful way.”

It is the story of a saxophone player whose life is completely changed after an accident and especially after he finds, by hazard, a mysterious stone and a telephone number that leads him to a young actress who is performing the role of Lulu (Louise Brooks) in the remake of the classic 1929’s German movie “Pandora’s Box”. The farm where Hector Mann retires in “The Book of Illusions” is called Blue Stone Ranch at Tierra del Sueño, New Mexico, and its name comes from a little stone that the former actor finds in a rainy night near a sidewalk and which proves to be rather an optical illusion. His disappearance from the screen is a process of self destruction, but professor Zimmer embarks on an intense study of Mann’s nearly forgotten work and thus he re-creates the actor’s life indirectly and the result is that he saves himself. We are the second type readers (indirect presentation through the primary lecture of Zimmer) of the fictional film career of Mann and we find out that his disappearance as an artist was premeditated:

“Hector was looking for a way to say good-bye to us, to bid farewell to the world, and in order to do that he must eradicate himself in his own eyes. He becomes invisible, and when the magic finally wears off and he can be seen again, he does not recognize his own face. We are looking at him as he looks at himself, and in this eerie doubling of perspectives, we watch him confront the fact of his own annihilation”[8].

His movie, ”Mister Nobody” presents some particular traits that worth to be remembered in a future analysis: the main character becomes invisible (the mirror does not reflect his image) after he drinks from a strange potion (Jazzmatazz) goaded by his so-called friend. Although he is invisible he can still interact with the others (his body preserves the ability to touch). At the end of a series of comic scenes he defeats his opponent and he goes back to being visible again just when he was about to abandon any hope and to resign himself to watch his wife’s sleep, from posture of a guardian spirit. The immediate effect of his victory is his reflected image in the mirror, sign of his visible side, but not necessary of his identity. Hector is no longer Hector anymore, but a new persona. He is a reinvented man, a transformed one and his content smile fades bit by bit on the screen until nothing else remains of it.

Zimmer considers that this movie is the most relevant one for the mute actor:

“It is a meditation on his own disappearance, and for all its ambiguity and furtive suggestiveness, for all the moral questions it asks and refuses to answer; it is essentially a film about the anguish of selfhood”[9].

To assess his work fairly, we have to look at Mr. Nobody as his last film. It should have been the last film made by Mann according to its significance and at a certain extent it is, but it not the last one produced. In order to observe his contractual obligations he had with the production house, he makes another movie, a sort of repetition of his major themes, but whose name is important for the rigor of the title conforming the reality of the artistry fate. It is “Double or nothing” and it is the only movie where the “the end” finally appears.

David Zimmer travels through the entire world so as to retrieve the left few films of this actor. His fascination for the mute world of the big screen and the book he writes have no other subjective basis than his need to engross himself in work as a defensive mechanism to face the tragedy of his life. No need to make himself known to the public, no inner passion. When he completes this self imposed task another one appears shortly after: the translation from French of Chateaubriand’s book “Mémoires d’outre-tombe“ or as he calls it

“The memoirs of a dead man”. Are they simple coincidences? Let us analyze one relevant fragment: “No one can imagine what I have suffered in being obliged to pawn my tomb, but I owed this last sacrifice to my solemn promises and the consistency of my conduct… My plan was to bequeath them to Madame Chateaubriand. She would have sent them out into the world or suppressed them, as she saw fit. Now more than ever, I believe the latter solution would have been preferable”[10]

After a surprising letter turns up in his mailbox during his work on the “Memoirs” he finds inside the envelope a card saying that Hector Mann lives. More to that he is visited by Alma Grund, a woman who spent most of her live at the Blue Stone Ranch and whose only role seemed to be that one of convincing David Zimmer to go back with her at the farm to meet Hector. During this trip the professor will get to know the whole post-disappearance life of the actor: the jealousy of the two women he loved the when he was performing, the accidental death of one of them, the fact that he changes his name onto Herman Loesser (a lesser or loser Her Mann), his novice years in Spokane, the hometown of Brigid, the dead one (he wants to be near her family as a form of repenting), the time when he knows the vulgar side of the Eros through Sylvia, the porn star and finally the rescue of his future wife, Frieda, from the bank assault, when he was about to die and their decision to retire at the farm. It’s a form of backwards process of an initiation and Hector who meanwhile became Herman suddenly wakes up in a similar situation to his character from “Mister Nobody”: a changed man when no hope was left, reborn and yet dead for society, because he chooses to live anonymously.

What determines him to re-start directing and performing in movies is the premature death of his child, Tad[11]. He is filming in a crazy tempo, using an improvised studio, with poor means, outstripping the conventional taboos of the movies previously made, in an innovator manner (not using the dialogue or with a modern usage of the close-ups), but he promises himself that at the end, all these efforts would be for naught, because the movies will be suppressed. He acts like a destructive genius so as to feed his hunger for art, but he knows that his major oeuvre will be the final scene, the one in which his work will be burned. The previous quote from Chateaubriand was not a random choice, obviously. The wife is in both cases the one who is left behind and the one who has to accomplish this strange and tragic mission: to make sure that the creative agony of her husband will not survive. In Hector Mann’s library, Zimmer discovers to his amazement the volume of Chateaubriand. Auster’s world is a labyrinth, with permanent reflections and reverberations.

The first and the last movie the professor sees before the burning scene of the films is “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”. It is a movie about a writer invited to Hector and Frieda’s farm to find his peace and maybe inspiration for a next book. He meets there Claire, the “niece” of the hosts, proving to be nothing more than a mental projection, who lives in the pace of novel written by the man. The montage is zigzagged, based of the surprising combination of plans, natural sounds, strange perspectives and tempos. Quotes from Kant, like: ”if we divest ourselves of our self or of our subjective form of our senses, of the qualities and relations between objects and the spatial and temporal dimension – even time and space itself- would disappear” are inserted in the movie to offer an explanation for mixing the real and imaginary plan. To save Claire, the writer burns one by one the pages of his new book keeping his character as an unfinished project, of whose re-creation is at any moment repeatable in a fictional universe.

Paul Auster actually writes and directs the movie “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”, starring David Thewlis, Irene Jacob, Michael Imperioli, and Sophie Auster.
Unlike the fictional black and white film of the same title, Auster’s celebration of the mysterious paths of love, art, and the imagination is released in 2007. The recent critical journals we have read[12] are disputing the quality of the movie, but the idea of the movie itself, as a concept, of interrelating cinema and literature is accepted as salutary.

In the deserted island that Casares fictionally creates his main character, a refugee, goes from absolute silence and wilderness to the surprisingly former fashionable sounds of “Valencia” and “Tea for two”. The bizarre materialization of the tourists leaves him with a blank look. All that he can think of is that he will be discovered and to avoid that he isolates himself in the most secluded area of the island, living in the harshest conditions. In the rare moments when he feels secure he inspects the museum, but even if he is alone he has the permanent, strange and confusing sensation of a multiplied loneliness. One day he notices with wonder that there are two suns on the sky, but this unnatural phenomenon is not as appealing as the woman he sees on the cliffs, the woman who is contemplating the sunset in a statuesque manner. Lurking for several days he continues to observe her but by little by little the inner strength of the one who survived on such an unaccommodating island is taken by the fragile hope every in love person has: ”Perhaps my “hope” therapy is a little ridiculous; never hope to avoid disappointment; consider myself dead, to keep from dying”[13]. We know that this quote reflects Hector and Zimmer’s strategy in similar circumstances, but we also know that what saves them from an imposed death, even if denied, is love. The tragedy of our present character is that the woman simply does not see him as if he were invisible.

While lurking, all sort of strange things happen to him:

“and all at once two people were standing there, as if they had not arrived, as if they had appeared only in my sight or my imagination. I hid–nervously, stupidly–under the altar, among the red silks and laces. They did not see me. I am still amazed at that[14]”.

He finds himself in the position of a accomplice to repetitive dialogues, some objects are in different wears state, what was devoiced of life in a previous day the second one is living. The hypothesis he starts to think of look like a logical delirium. Plague or even the fact that he might already be dead is not excluded.

His inner roadmap suffers a process of objectifying itself. The first sight we have on him is that one of a refugee that keeps a journal, a journal understood as a future will, but then he is all of a sudden distributed in the role of an actor in a world that does not accept his existence and finally a mute witness. So his doubt whether he is real or not are almost justified. Sounds absurd, but the tourists he sees have a consistency that according to out way of judging if something is true or not is valid: his senses function and he hears, sees, smell their presence. Everything is empirically correct. Far from what we would call today through the concept of holograms, this tourists are complex structures according to the exterior relevance, “copying” everything that is accessible to the immediate perception. Parallel universes seem possible in this space, but the temporal variant is specific. The key of ontological multiplication rests in the Morel’s mechanism that registers three-dimensionally the person came in vacation on the island, propagating repetitive images of the same scenes. In a very interesting study, “Subjectivity and Mechanical Reproduction in Bioy Casares’ Morel’s Invention” of Irmgard Emmelhainz[15] she emphasizes the question whether it is possible to register in the same time the exterior appearance and the conscience as well, idea provided by the explanation of Morel who reveals to those present on the island that they were filmed and that their future fate is a physical discomposure, but an eternally life. We cannot cease asking ourselves what is the use of his explanation. The promised eternal life is just a pioneer fragment of a future complete experiment. This machinery can anytime be perfected.

To the refugee from “The invention of Morel” the world he comes to know has this essence: “Our life can be compared to a week of this repetitive images in neighboring worlds”[16]an explanation which even the creator of the machinery cannot understand until in the final phase of his filming process:

“My abuse consists in the fact that I have taken your photos without your permission. It is obviously that is not an ordinary type of photo; it is my last invention. In that photography we will live eternally[17].”

The main character feels he is performing a double role: actor and spectator and that’s why we are not surprised of his attempt of insertion in the scenes that he has seen so many times before. He does it knowingly thanking care to be always near Faustine so that a future spectator could be mislead to think that he was contemporary to those on the island. For whom he is directing the following of this “false” movie? For the one who will succeed more that Morel succeeded, the one who will be able to copy the fragmentary present and doing that, to copy the consciences as well. He is his first spectator is because he sees himself next to Faustine in the new scenes, but he sees himself living in the movie and dying in the real world in the same time. This may look like a split conscience, a tragedy to an everyday man. He “inherits” from Morel the cursed talent of creating in an indirect way, but no matter how his prove of love would be judged or appreciated he is a creator anyway.

Zimmer dreamt that one day someone will find the lost movies of Hector, the ones he liked to think that were copied before being destroyed by Frieda in the same way that Casares’ refugee hoped to find a future spectator of his movie, a spectator that impressed by this tragic love story would make possible his entrance into the conscience of the woman. In order to do that someone will have to read his journal too, because otherwise the movie might seem quite real. So the coexistence of movie and writing confession is a must. Books and movies are in a permanent interrelation for these two writers, Auster and Casares. Martin Frost, the character played by the character of Paul Auster re-writes his novel so as to keep alive his character. Sounds amusing we utter that, but it is one of the facets of the meaningful core of the “The Book of Illusions”. The permanent re-invention is characteristic to Casares as well. The refugee re-writes himself in the posture of an actor so as to live in a repeated and never ended creative act near the woman he loves.

Not directly correlated these two books share a common preoccupation balancing their beautiful content between the inseparable worlds of movies and literature, two of the most expressive means of expressing repetitive eternity.

Notes

Iulia Micu

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Imaginary Intimacy as a Death Metaphor

in La Invención de Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Abstract: This paper analyses how imaginary intimacy becomes both the equivalent of death in La Inventión de Morel and the key metaphor in Casares’ fiction. In combining two essential points of view (circular time and the transmigration of consciousness from the original to the replica), the novel insists on the ingenious way in which reality can be restructured and multiplied. Intending to avoid or postpone death, the mechanical temptation really brings it closer. The idea of virtual reality as ‘life inside an image’ reinforces the inversion of the relationship between image and its object and carries the metaphor to its ultimate consequences. The story is also at its best in creating a painfully ironic new metaphysics, an allegory of individuality in the modern world. It also relies on all the modern concepts related to image theory.

Keywords: Argentinean Literature; Adolfo Bioy Casares; La Invención de Morel; Mirror; Photography; Reflection; Reality vs. Virtuality.

In Alternating Current, the poet Octavio Paz, one of the Nobel Prize winners, defines Latin American literature as a mask of the author and the world. Literature is a critique of the world and of the author himself. Every novel is centred on an axis whose two poles are the mask and consciousness, verbal invention and the critique of language. Each novel strikes the reader as a hieroglyph. Each sign leads to another sign. Besides this lies ‘an enormous, joyous, painful, hallucinatory verbal material which may remind the reader of the baroque style’ (Paz, 1990: 42). Paz also talks about a process of abstraction and purification, about cosmopolitanism and crystallisation. The body occupies a central place in literature. Erotic passion has a privileged place, and imagination, its implacable double, is consequently uniquely privileged. Although they belong to different generations, Márquez and Casares regard love as a sovereign passion.

‘Bioy Casares’s theme is not cosmic [as in Márquez] but metaphysical: the body is imaginary, and we yield to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most complete and the total perception not only of the unreality of the world but also of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; we ourselves are shadows’ (Paz, 1990: 43-44).

Casares considers phantoms no less real than physical bodies. Paz concludes,

‘The body is a very real thing, and the revelation that it offers us, whether animal or divine, is human: it tears us away from ourselves and projects us into another, more total, life or death. Bodies are visible hieroglyphs. Every body is an erotic metaphor and the meaning of all these metaphors is always the same: death’ (Paz, 1990: 44).

The Invention of Morel is a text about a man who first became an artist, and then a work of art. At first, he keeps a diary, and then he turns into a component of an image and becomes part of an art object. This is how what we could call the “l’ère du faux” (Guy Scarpetta, 1985) begins. The Argentinean writer combines two essential points of view: circular time (the eternal recurrence theme that also fascinated Borges, his close friend) and the transmigration of consciousness from the original person to the replica which then plays out his part endlessly, from the very beginning to the end. To create a copy of a person in an identical context means that the consciousness of the copy cannot be differentiated from the originals and they simply cannot coexist. Casares inverts here the idea from The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the picture and not the man is subject to time. He inverts it again until the playback of a recording takes on greater reality than the continued existence of the subjects. The story is also unique for its alienation from the consciousness that persists in the projections. Although Morel claims his machine creates nothing, it only replicates what exists; Casares makes it clear that the machine restructures reality. Or, maybe the book wants only to give a painfully ironic new metaphysics, an allegory to freedom and individuality into the modern world. The priority of this novel is to reflect on all the modern concepts about image theory.

Deeply influenced by his father’s library (especially by Schopenhauer, Hume and Barkley), Bioy Casares began writing under the influence of the cosmopolitan atmosphere from Sur magazine founded by Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires, in the early 1930’s. Casares travelled often, mainly to France, which was a second home for him and, as for many Latin America intellectuals, a cultural Mecca. Thus, his early writings reveal the chaotic influence of the Surrealist ‘automatic writing’ and Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Also he embraced Borges’s poetics of condensation and concision and favoured the speculative and the artificial over the expansive representation of human experience. On the other hand, he was more concerned than Borges with re-creating the ‘lived and the seen’. Bioy’s sentences are relevant for his tendency toward shorter, more concise narrative forms made up of elliptical phrases meant to be read between the lines. Borges wrote upon Casares’s Luise Greve, Dead (1937) in Sur,

‘Our literature is poor in fantastic narratives, preferring the formless tranche de vie or episodic which makes Bioy Casares’s work unusual. In Chaos (1934) and The New Storm (1935) imagination predominates; […] In Luis Greve he began to master time and space games which attempt to impose another order – a literary one – upon the absurd universe’.

One of the stories in his early volume, The Postcard Lovers is about a young man who interpolates his image into the photograph of the girls he loves. It anticipates The Invention of Morel which carries it to its ultimate consequences, transporting this scheme into the realm of science fiction away from Argentina to an unknown and deserted island as the author needs to decontaminate himself from subjectivity and gain aesthetic distance. Relying on science fiction from Wells to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, his textual ‘invention’ was prophetic and intuitively predicted future scientific realities. The central female figure in the novel is Faustine, one of the virtual beings with whom the narrator happens to fall in love while watching her as she watches the sunset:

‘She wears a bright scarf over her dark curls; she sits with her hands clasped on one knee; her eyes, her black hair, her blossom make her look like one of the Spanish or gypsy girls in those paintings I detest’.

This was apparently based upon the great silent movie actress Louise Brooks, star of Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. In July 1995, when asked by Sergio Wolf about this as his prior inspiration for La invención de Morel, Casares admitted that he was in love with her but he didn’t have any good luck. She disappeared quickly to Europe in order to shoot a movie and then quickly vanished from the movies. ‘She would be Faustine’, the Argentinean writer concluded. The idea of voyeurism reinforced here the mythological orphic story re-thought in a technological way mixed with the literary theme of the shipwreck. Translated into French in 1953, this plot about the two lovers coexisting spatially into different temporal dimensions inspired Robbe-Grillet’s script for Resnais’s 1961 film L’Anée dernière á Marienbad. Soon, Morel became the cultural pattern for all images of an intellectual enamoured of his own mental constructions or ‘bachelor machines’.

Seeing his friend’s work as a ‘perfect’ contemporary model of the genre, Borges placed Casares‘s first successful fiction in the company of Henry James‘s The Turn of the Screw and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In Borgesian terms, the fantastic or the ‘magic’ emanates from pre-modern modes of thought. The fantastic narrative involves the irruption of a lucid magical system of causation known as ‘natural’ causation, making the reader question the normal boundaries between fantasy and reality. Borges concludes in his 1940 preface,

‘In Spanish, works of reasoned imagination are infrequent and even very rare […] The Invention of Morel […] brings a new genre to our land and our language’ (Casares, 1964: 7).

Casares’s 1940s novel turns out to be a veritable tangle of texts, like a Borgesian labyrinth of a library. First, it is an island book, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or, more pertinently still, Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. This island on which the fugitive narrator has shipped up is full of voices and holographic entities just like Prospero’s. The entire book is about the human capacity to interact with imaginary worlds. The island, either empty or the land of monsters, is a sham virtual underworld. Secondly, in her essay on the Psychology at the Fin de Siècle, Jenny Bourne Taylor talks about a real Doctor B. A. Morel, an influent psychologist, whose Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneracy of the Human Race of 1857 was regarded as one of the most important works on mental science in the nineteenth century. Degeneracy, in psychologist Morel’s opinion, takes the form of a ‘morbid deviation from an original type’ which ‘contains transmissible elements’ that accumulate in descendants, until the line finally becomes infertile (Marshall, 2007: 15). He changes the evolutionary optimism of his time into a degenerationist theory which sees humans in a gradual process of adaptation to the environment and which had many echoes in all the artistic manifestations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from H. G. Wells up to Casares. In contrast to these Morel doctors, there is another Morel, Carlos Morel (1813-94), the most important Argentinean painter. He is mostly known by posterity for his social scenes with ‘gauchos’, Indians and local customs in the late 1830s and early 1840s. This is how Leslie Bethell characterises him when analysing the cultural history of Latin America. He was the first who felt that the labyrinthine metaphysic of fantasy emanating from the River Plate, in the absence of such alternative culture, fused local reality (Bethell, 1998: 169). In Le miroir. Revelations, science-fiction et fallacies, Jurgis Baltrušaitis comes up with a different Morel, who lived between 1728-1810, was a gardener, architect, and coined the French term architecte-paysagiste. His ideas were far more influential on the later landscape style of the early nineteenth century (Baltrušaitis, 1978: 24). Last but no least, H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist turns beasts into humans, becomes a kind of leitmotif throughout Bioy’s novels, from Morel and A Plan for Escape (1945) to Asleep in the Sun (1973).

Later on, the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz described the central themes of Casares’ fiction as not cosmic but rather metaphysical. From The Invention of Morel to such later stories and novels as The Adventure of a Photographer in La Plata (1985), Casares’ fiction is meant to suggest the awareness of solitude, of the pathetic, the tragic and yet comic ways in which lovers lose one another. It also suggests the impossibility that one should be the heroic master of his/her destiny. Borges once called Bioy the ‘secret master’ in order to pinpoint how he experimented with baroque metaphors in classical prose. Love was always to be an endangered and endangering obsession for the Latin American writer. In a short chronology of his life written in 1975, he recalls the stories his mother told him in early childhood, around the age of five. They provided the blueprint for many of his own fictions,

‘My mother tells me stories about animals who stray from the nest, are exposed to danger, and in the end, after many adventures, return to the security of the nest. The theme of the safe, or apparently safe, haven and of the dangers that lurk outside still appears to me’.

In search for a new demonstration of the secret of Golem, Maurice Blanchot considers The Invention of Morel a proper example of a story in which the image-men produced by the diabolic camera of a demiurgic scientist, lure into their retreat a fugitive who is seduced by one of them, becomes an image himself and dies in the wake of these immortalised shadows. The French writer dismisses any relation between the image and the audio-visual production. What matters here first is the relation to the myth of Orpheus and the double composition of the image-experience. The image is demonstrable insofar as it is born of the gaze cast upon the object; secondly, far from replacing the gazed upon thing or being, the image insinuates itself at the core of the object, precipitating its ghostly becoming. No doubt it would be appropriate to connect this experience with the experience of death, as proposed by the second version of the imaginary, where the vision of the corpse offers a radical example of the becoming-image of the human in and through death. But this unveiling of the image in the human’s mortal fall which, paradoxically, is also the becoming immortal of the human, should not conceal the fundamental relation that the uncovering of the image maintains with the condition of writing. The writer resides in proximity to the image. He aims to live wonderfully in this imaginary intimacy.

Blanchot explains next that Morel, like Orpheus looking at Eurydice, precipitates the death of representation by the transformation of the body into image. As it proposes a double of the real, writing is a process of doubling. Eurydice was twice lost in the gaze of her lover, given over to the night, and thereby to the inspiration of Orpheus. As a shadow, she opens the network of resemblance that from text to text designates, with Blanchot, the relation between becoming image and the exile from the self. The extreme logic of the intransitive resembling is manifest in the gaze of Narcissus, who does recognize himself in his image, initiates a fundamental paradox, and simultaneously proposes the imprint and the exile, splitting and becoming estranged. Having already looked at Eurydice, Orpheus experiences expropriation and death, ‘he, himself in this gaze is absent’ (Blanchot, 2003: 89).

The image has a contradictory relation to space. As it is both a symptom and a mask of space, it figures the attraction of the void while denying it in any figural form. The image has a reaction to the gaze, to the attraction of death: this is what was at stake in the above-mentioned story by Casares. But the image’s relation to death is not one that could be underwritten by too a rash reading of the second version of the imaginary or even of the gaze of Orpheus (Bailey Gill, 1996: 146). It turns out that Morel’s invention is a diabolical holographic recording, a device that captures all of the senses in three dimensions. It is diabolical because it destroys the subject in the recording process, rotting the skin and the flesh off the bones. Thus it confirms the natives’ fear of being photographed and it is also a warning of the dangers faced by art when it holds up a mirror to nature.

In his story The Aleph, the name of the kabbalistic Hebrew letter, Borges invents his own ‘mirror of ink’ in which he saw the whole history of the world and his own self immersed as in a mirroring whirlpool. Borges always regarded all literary production as an infinite reproduction. Thus he compares textual reproduction with the reproduction in a mirror and he also considers it is analogous with sexual reproduction.

‘Then, Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they both multiply the number of men’ (Borges, 1962: 17),

says the narrator in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius , one of the most important stories of the century. They are all stories about the parallel existence of words and worlds, replicas of reality, its copies which finally disintegrate the real world. Explaining his first contacts with the supernatural, as ‘something attractive’, Casares wrote, ‘I would like to go inside a tree-way mirror, where the images would repeat themselves clearly’. Thus, Morel, the novelistic character, invents a machine which can produce perfect copies using a sort of catoptrical theatre. The exact replicas of images such as those from the cinema fascinate him as much as they fascinate Bioy. The copies would be so realistic that they would get confused with the objects they were meant to represent, giving ‘perpetual reality to his sentimental fantasy’. The points of correspondence between the objects and their representation are so minute that the device seems not to invent but to preserve them,

‘Before these machines, a person, an animal or a thing are comparable to a broadcasting station […] if you open the full range of the transmitters you will see Madeleine as a totality and totally similar to herself. Do not forget that we have here images extracted from mirrors, perfectly synchronised with the sounds, the touch, the tastes, the smells and the temperatures. […] No one who sees this will admit that he is seeing images and if, later, it is our own images which appears to your eyes, you will not believe that these appearances are images: it will be easier for you to think that I hired a company of actors’ (Casares, 1964: 58).

Such an opposition may introduce an aesthetic of the disappearance contradictory in many ways. The disappearance through multiplication would be the first contradiction. Furthermore, the aim of mechanical preservation is total and in order to be accurate, it destroys what it conserves. By confusing the representation with the object it represents, it ceases to be what it is and become something else, it can be any object or it can simply not be at all. Therefore, technical recording has a double meaning: through mechanisation it both preserves and destroys. Because of its increasing fidelity the mechanical overproduction of images makes the real thing become redundant, even disposable. As the narrator from The Invention of Morel says, ‘the copies survive, incorruptible’ (Casares, 1964: 81). The same thing occurs in Tlön where ‘even in memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of another, so that we can know nothing for sure – not even if it is false’.

But the mystery of mirrors is no less important than the mystery of reflection. In the Invention of Morel the reflecting mirror can be sinister or good, fearful or beautiful, depending upon how it is perceived. In this paradoxical universe the symbol turns upon itself. As Casares quotes Mallarmé in his Plan for Escape, ‘anything is a symbol of anything’. Neither mirrors, nor fatherhood are abominable to Bioy, who would often recall with delight the triple mirror in the dressing room in which his mother, Marta was repeated to infinity. Sliding between two images, the hero of The Invention of Morel, becomes an image that moves away from real life. The narrator from Tlön discovers that mirrors are monstrous devices but, at the same time they normalise the phenomenon of inversion. Here is both an inversion and an investment: an object, when turned upside down is inverted, but it also invests, because it multiplies. The mirror-image is monstrous not only because of its hybrid condition, not only because it multiplies itself, but also because it (de)monstrates (the Spanish monstrous comes from the Latin monstrare). To show (mostrar) is to make visible, and it is, above all, not to tell. Since Antiquity to tell and to show (contar vs. mostrar) appear as opposite actions, rooted in two different figures, the former agonistic, the latter imitative: diegesis and mimesis. Both figures appear at the beginning of the Borges story as contradictory and cooperative principles: ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia’ (Borges, 1962: 17). The mirror exposes, it shows and risks. By not showing, the book contains and conceals. Both are imperfect limitations, ambivalent reproductions. They present an absence, i.e. they re-present, they present something anew.

Borges’ narrator says:

‘Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we pondered a long time on a vast polemic concerning the execution of a novel, in the first person, whose narrator would omit and disfigure facts, or incur in diverse contradictions which would allow just a few readers – indeed very few readers – to intuit atrocious or banal reality’ (Borges, 1962: 17).

It is still possible that the novel Borges refers to is The Invention of Morel. The publication date of the story coincides with that of the novel. In this short novel, the narrator speaks in the first person singular, leaves out data, twists the facts and contradicts himself. Both works justify a philological leap and they even seem to be identical as a way of denying time. They also seem to affirm a sort of bi-localisation and talk about a parallelism between worlds and words. The two books need one another in order to support but also to contradict themselves. Bioy dedicates his novel to Borges, Borges writes the prologue. Borges uses Bioy as a character of his story and attributes to him the invention of the discovery of a secret cita as an encounter during which imagination and thought, reason and unreason, are reconciled.

The multiplication of a figure in a mirror or in a species, i.e. reproduction, does not start with the image or with the mirror, it predates both of them. Whether textual or natural it saves the existent species from extinction. This is why the museum is a recurrent site with Casares. The museum and the library (also frequent metaphors with Borges) are both spaces which collect, index and exhibit all kinds of relics in a parallel world, metaphors of displacement, the utopian outside-time place where history and human imagination is preserved. In the novel, Morel explains his invention which anticipates death and consequently, will afford immortality:

‘Now I have entered this new universe; it is now impossible to suppress Faustine’s image without mine simultaneously disappearing. […] I hardly felt the process of my death. I still see my image in the company of Faustine, but my soul has not yet passed into the image. […] When this occurs, it will mean that I am dead and have ceased to see Faustine in order to reside with her in appearance, an appearance that no human eye will capture’ (Casares, 1964: 88).

In the same year, 1940, Walter Benjamin, persecuted and threatened by the French police or the Gestapo, committed suicide. Neither Borges’ story nor Bioy’s novel are detached from the tragedy of a century which could not stall the advance of totalitarianism, the obsessive problem of a Trauerspiel, a mourning for which memory cannot revive and which mechanical reproduction killed in a final game. It is an inside-out Faustian pact: the narrator falls in love with Faustine, a Faust turned woman but above all, a false Faust an un-Faustian one. Significantly, the first syllable of Faustine is pronounced Fausse in French. If we spell out the capitals letters in the title of Borges’ story, we get T. O. U. T. which, if read the way round, give us the French word tout. Everything is referred to as the image in the mirror. It is an upside-down world ruined by machines such as those invented by Morel in order to reproduce life and which ended up immobilising it. Thus, an invention intended to avoid or postpone death does bring death closer. As Benjamin said, all is about an aura and its loss, an aura which earlier marked the individuality of each work of art leading to individual denial, to suicide. Instead of a person, here comes the image. Instead of the work, here comes its reproduction. Man is exposed to a mechanical temptation which blinds memory and destroys immortality by upholding a replica to the original. Neither Mephisto, nor Dr. Moreau or Morel, nor any Doctor Faustus could prevent the ultimate advent of machines and through them ultimate death as memory loss.

The story’s theme, i.e. the constant duplication of events, is literally enacted as it is represented both by the writer’s diary and Morel’s holographic invention. As Lucia Santaella argues, if a sign had the power to become identical with what it represents, it would cancel itself out. If a sign could lead an independent life, it would no longer be a sign: because of his intimate link with the object, it will become an object itself. This novel is about life and death because Morel has pushed the metaphor of death to its limit. And although this metaphor is valid for each sign, it reminds the absence of what it represents: ‘The sheer presence of signs brings with it a kind of death, which is the longing for what is absent’ (Lucia Santaella 1998: 267). In Photography and Fetish, Christian Metz analyses the lingering look upon photography as a powerful trauma of loss and separation, concerning the inevitable approach between representation and death. Firstly, he tackles the social custom of keeping the photographs of those who died as souvenirs. Secondly, the photographed person becomes an effect of time and of his/her own disappearance. Thirdly, the instantaneous becomes a link between photography and death, a spontaneous detour of the object away from this world into another one, into another time. This is also what Barthes means when he says that any photograph is a memorial of a relic of the person or the thing whose image it preserves (Barthes, 2000: 96). This idea is very well explored in Bioy Casares’s novel. For Barthes, as for the others, the photograph is a way to represent the relation between the subject and the photographed object, the relation between the human being and things.

‘The structure of culture – and therefore existence itself – is undergoing a fundamental change’, Vilém Flusser writes (Flusser, 2000: 7). In Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography) he proposes the hypothesis that two fundamental turning points can be observed in human culture since its inception. The first can be summed up under the heading the invention of linear writing. The second is being experienced by us right now and it could be called the invention of technical images. As significant surfaces, images signify mainly something out there in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions. It is imagination which has the specific ability to do all these. Consequenly, the significance of the image is a synthesis of a double thinking process, of two intentions. One is in the image, the other belongs to the observer. ‘It follows that images are not denotative but conotative complexes of symbols providing space for interpretation’ (Flusser, 2000: 8). One’s gaze at the surface of the image can return to an already seen element. The ‘before’ can become the ‘after’, reconstructing the time as an eternal recurrence of the same process. Therefore, images have magical powers and become mediations between the world and human beings.

‘They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: instead of representing the world they obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create’ (Flusser, 2000: 10).

In fact, today technical images have taken the upper hand when magically reconstructing reality and turning it into a global image scenario. Aiming to remember the original intention behind the images, linear writing was invented, thus transposing the circular time of magic into the linear time of history. From this moment onwards, historical consciousness was ranged against magical consciousness: it was the struggle of writing against the image.

In the nineteenth century, the organic metaphor still reigned. Perfume companies produced crystal bottles shaped as coffins and meant to hold the last drops of the perfume the beloved departed preferred. It was a futile gesture defying the irreparable loss. First, the invention of the photography, and then the invention of the phonograph would keep alive the memory of the deceased while the mortal body dissolved into the inert matter of the universe. The uncanny confluence and confusion between the human and the machine was motivated by the external struggle against death. It would change the expectations and forms of mourning and melancholia even more, transposing the very modality of the humans’ intimate relation to death. The perfectibility of simulacra through recording, the hybridisations of humans and machines are cultural results of this anthropology of modern death which has split the world into poets and scientists. The former fantasise that technology would compensate for the cataclysms of the soul; more specifically it would counter the nostalgic wounds of lost or unrequited desire. The latter imagine that technology would compensate for all the catastrophes of the body. If prosthesis can be created for a lost limb, why not also for an impossible passion or a lost love?

In the 1950’s the French artist Michel Carrouges coined the term machines célibataires (bachelor machines). It refers to ‘a fantastic image that transforms love into the mechanism of death’ (Carrouges, 1976: 21-22). Recording becomes intimately bound to transformations in the poetic forms of nostalgic lyricism and romantic morbidity. Such transformations describe the solipsistic circuit of the same three terms: a delirious metaphysic, a useless simulation, and a morbid functionalism where time, solitude, and death exist synonymously and contemporaneously. The major characteristics of the bachelor machines are the chronological transformations, art-making, artificial life, and voyeurism. They are like the “machines désirantes” of Deleuze and Guattari, the same as those imagined by the Avant-garde movements at the start of the twentieth century. Through this kind of early modernist technophilia and technophobia, science and literature diverge even further within the genres of science fiction and Virtual Reality. Living virtuality as a life inside an image reinforces the inversion of the relationship between image and its object, in Peircean terms, the inversion between an object and its representamen. Here phenomenology becomes necessary to complement semiotics. The question of a consciousness ‘entering’ an image was already examined by Sartre in his seminal L’imaginaire (1936), the most complete phenomenological description to this day. The idea of virtual reality as ‘life inside an image’ transgresses the limit between the object and the icon.

Casares dreamed of a machine that could penetrate consciousness and record the thoughts and feelings of the transmitter. The artificial ecosystem he describes evokes the most recent developments in the domains of Interacting Cinema and Virtual Worlds where symbolic relationships develop between human and artificial sensorialities. Like Augusto Roa Bastos’s ‘pluma recuerdo’ in Yo, el Supremo, Morel’s machine is like the memory pen, a sort of light pen which optically reads and records the objects over which it passes. Like the Aleph in the story with the same title by Borges, the holographic camera in Bioy Casares, or like José Buendía’s spinning dictionary in Cien años de soledad, the memory-pen is an attempt to capture, control and dominate reality.

Bibliography

Bailey Gill, Carolyn (ed.) Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, Routledge, 1996.

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, translated by R. Howard, London: Vintage, 2000.

Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, Le miroir. Revelations, science-fiction et fallacies, Elmayan-Le Seuil, Paris, 1978.

Bethell, Leslie, A Cultural History of Latin America: Literature, Music and The Visual, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Bioy Casares, Adolfo, The Invention of Morel and Other Stories, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, University of Texas Press, 1964, (for the Romanian edition see Adolfo Bioy Casares, Invenţia lui Morel, traducere din spaniolă de Ion Oprescu, ediţia a II-a revăzută, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2003.)

Blanchot, Maurice, The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Standford University Press, 2003, (for Romanian edition see Maurice Blanchot, Cartea care va să fie, traducerea din franceză de Andreea Vlădescu, Biblioteca Iinternaţională 31 EST, Bucureşti, 2005).

Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficctiones, (p. 17-37), translated by Anthony Bonner, Anthony Kerrigan (editor), Grove Press, 1962, (for the Romanian edition see Jorge Luis Borges, Opere, volumul I, traduceri de Cristina Hăulică, Andrei Ionescu şi Darie Novăceanu, îngrijirea ediţiei şi prezentări Andrei Ionescu, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1989).

Bourne Taylor, Jenny, Psychology at the Fin de Siècle, in Marshal Gail (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, (pp. 13-31), Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Carrouges, Michel, Mode d’emploi. Catalogue de l’Exposition “Les Machines Célibataires”, Venise, Alfieri, 1976.

Flusser, Vilém, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, translated by Martin Chalmers, Contributor Hubertus Von Amelunxen, Reaktion Books, 2000, 94 p. (for the Romanian edition see Vilém Flusser, Pentru o istorie a fotografiei. Texte despre fotografie, traducere de Aurel Codoban, Idea Design & Print, ‘Colecţia Balkon’, 2003, Cluj-Napoca).

Paz, Octavio, Alternating Current, translated by Helen Lane, contributor Helen Lane, Arcade Publishing, 1990.

Powrie Phil, The Cinema of France, Wallflower Press, 2006.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Last Year at Marienbad, translated by Richard Howard, New York, Grove Press, 1962.

Santaella, Lucia, The Prephotographic, the Photographic and the Postphotographic Image, in Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media, State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives (pp. 121- 132), Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyer, 1998.

Viorel Rujea

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Un tema de la literatura fantástica en un cuento de A. B. Casares /

A Theme of Fantastic Literature in A. B. Casares’ Prose

Abstract: In many parts of his work, George Berkeley, the English philosopher of the eighteenth century, expresses the idea that the ontological consistence of the objects and beings in the real world depends of their quality for being perceived by an exterior and superior intellect. Berkeley concludes that the perception made by the divine intellect forms the ontological support of our Universe. From here it would result that all that occurs in the world is not other thing that a “mental projection” (the term “perception” may be understood as “mental projection”) the author of which is God himself, engaged in an eternal process of creating and maintaining of the material Universe. The Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares uses this theoretical support in a fantastical story entitled “En memoria de Paulina” (“In the memory of Paulina”), in which appears a secondary character, Julio Montero, having the supernatural gift of projecting and materializing persons and objects by the force of his intensive mental concentration.

Keywords: Argentinean Literature; A. Bioy Casares; G. Berkeley; Ontological Reality; Mental Projections.

La idea de que el universo en que vivimos podría ser el producto de una mente superior plantea, desde luego, graves e inquietantes preguntas. Esta idea ha constituido objeto de meditación para los cerebros humanos más profundos, desde los tiempos más antiguos hasta nuestros días. En función de la respuesta dada a esta interrogación esencial, concerniente a la naturaleza del universo, tanto los creadores de los mitos fundamentales como los filósofos, arquitectos de edificios teóricos impresionantes, se dividieron en dos grupos antagónicos que se enfrentaros permanentemente a lo largo de las épocas históricas: los materialistas, que afirman la preeminencia de la materia y los idealistas, que afirman la preeminencia del espíritu. Un representante del segundo grupo fue el filósofo inglés George Berkeley[1], conocido en la historia de la filosofía como autor de la célebre fórmula esse est percipi, “ser, significa ser percibido”. El afirma que el mundo sensible no puede existir fuera de una percepción, que la esencia de la existencia de este mundo consiste en ser percibido por una mente (“mind”), sea humana o divina. Esta idea le aparece al filósofo inglés fuera de cualquier duda:

“Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture to the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have not existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible and involving all absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit”.[2]

Estamos plenamente habilitados, considera Berkeley, a hablar de “ideas de los sentidos” e “ideas de la imaginación”. Ambas son de la misma índole, se distinguen sólo por su intensidad.[3] El filósofo inglés niega categóricamente la existencia objetiva de la materia, postulada por Descartes y por otros filósofos materialistas, sin que ello suponga, empero, una negación de la existencia real de las cosas.[4] La única pregunta que se plantea es la concerniente al sujeto o autor de esta percepción que constituye el soporte ontológico del universo, por cuanto se trata de una voluntad o espíritu superiores a los humanos.[5] Para el obispo Berkeley, representante destacado de la Iglesia y defensor del dogma cristiano, no puede haber sino una sola respuesta: el sujeto de la percepción mental es Dios, “the Author of Nature”, como lo llama él, el supremo espíritu en que nosotros todos vivimos y nos movemos y del cual extraemos la esencia de nuestro ser, la causa espiritual última que está detrás de todas las cosas.[6] En lo que concierne la relación entre las cosas sensibles y la mente humana, Berkeley considera que la existencia de las cosas viene estrechamente relacionada a la aparición, como por decreto divino, de una inteligencia capaz de percibirlas.[7]

Por consiguiente, no nos parece extremadamente azarosa la hipótesis de que Berkeley coloca el signo de igualdad entre los dos tipos de percepción, la sensorial y la mental o imaginativa, por cuanto el Ser Supremo percibe el mundo sensible no a través de los sentidos sino por la mente, la razón (“Mind”). Y la percepción mental supone, al mismo tiempo, proyección mental, ya que las cosas adquieren existencia por el esfuerzo mental de este Ser, indiferentemente de su naturaleza, es decir de si fuese racional, imaginativo o simplemente, como consideran desde los tiempos más antiguos algunos poetas y filósofos, onírico.

En la obra de Adolfo Bioy Casares, amigo de Borges y su colaborador suyo en la realización de muchos volúmenes firmados en común, el tema del mundo como proyección mental aparece en dos de sus cuentos más conocidos: “En memoria de Paulina” y “El otro laberinto”.

El primero, escrito en la perspectiva narrativa de la primera persona, presenta, en clave fantástica, una emocionante historia de amor, describe, desde las primeras líneas, en un tono lírico-romántico, como una unión mística, hasta la identificación, de las almas de los dos enamorados:

“Yo comprendí que mi felicidad había empezado porque en esas preferencias podía identificarme con Paulina. Nos parecíamos tan milagrosamente que en un libro sobre la final reunión de las almas del mundo, mi amiga escribió en el margen: Las nuestras ya se reunieron. «Nuestras», en aquel tiempo, significaba la de ella y la mía”.[8]

Desgraciadamente, la aparente armonía perfecta de las dos almas se ve puesta en peligro por la aparición del tercer personaje en el triángulo erótico. Julio Montero hace su aparición en la casa del protagonista con motivo de una fiesta. El, como la mayoría de los personajes de Bioy Casares, es un intelectual, tiene veleidades de escritor y hace alardes de ello en los momentos más inoportunos. De su visita en la casa del narrador (cuyo nombre no conocemos), Montero recuerda dos detalles que más tarde tendrán una importancia decisiva en el desarrollo de la intriga: un jardín diminuto que “sugiere la misteriosa imagen de un bosque en el fondo de un lago” y “una estatuilla china de piedra verde” que representaba “un caballo salvaje, con las manos en el aire y la crin levantada” y que “simbolizaba la pasión” (9). La perspectiva de una beca de dos años en Inglaterra para el protagonista, cambia totalmente los datos del problema: los dos enamorados deciden aplazar el casamiento. Además, la aparición inopinada de Montero como pretendiente a la mano de Paulina, complica aún más la situación. En este momento, el narrador introduce en el texto una primera mención libresca, sobre el tema del amor y de la separación para siempre. Otro episodio importante ocurre en el final de la fiesta, cuando el narrador regresa, justo cuando se preparaba para acompañar a Paulina a su casa, para traerle la estatuilla china que había olvidado en su habitación. Montero acompaña a los dos, provocando de este modo la ira del otro. A lo cual se añade el desprecio, por cuanto lo considera a Montero un escritor fracasado. En este punto de la intriga aparece la segunda alusión libresca o intertextual, ya que nuestro héroe tiene, él también, intensas preocupaciones intelectuales mientras espera a su amada: “Dormí la siesta, me bañé lentamente y esperé a Paulina hojeando un libro sobre los Faustos de Müller y de Lessing” (12). Mas una amarga desilusión y una tristeza infinita le invaden cuando Paulina le confiesa que se enamoró de su rival, de Montero. La ruptura de las relaciones, aunque dolorosa, parece sin remedio. La situación equívoca se mantiene, sin embargo, a continuación, debido a la actitud ambigua de Paulina. Esta le hace a su antiguo amante, justo antes de su salida hacia Europa, una visita “a escondidas” y le dice que le ama:

“Me sentía alejado de ella, pero cuando la vi me enamoré de nuevo. Sin que Paulina lo dijera, comprendí que su aparición era furtiva. La tomé de las manos, trémulo de agradecimiento. Paulina exclamó:

— Siempre te querré. De algún modo te querré más que a nadie” (14).

Esta visita tendrá consecuencias incalculables, ya que Montero, preso de unos celos injustificables, había perseguido a la chica escondido en el jardín de la casa. El narrador describe la cara desfigurada por el odio y los celos de su rival, como en una novela de horror: era de noche y la lluvia caía sin cesar. Este detalle de la lluvia que cae en el momento del encuentro de los dos, adquiere, igual que en las novelas policiales una importancia decisiva para la solución final del enigma.

Una vez en Inglaterra, el narrador se esfuerza en olvidar a su ex amante. Este esfuerzo viene contrarrestado y, en cierta medida, aniquilado por la persistencia de la figura de Paulina en el sueño. Al cabo de un año consigue cancelar incluso la imagen del sueño. Mas el regreso a casa, en Argentina, le trae otra vez el recuerdo de Paulina.

Si hasta aquí la narración se desenvuelve en registro mimético, como una banal historia romántica de un amor imposible, a continuación se pasa, casi sin transición, al registro fantástico, el cual se le revelará al lector sólo desde la perspectiva del final. Así que el pequeño cuento aparece dividido en dos partes. Esta segunda parte empieza con una inesperada visita de Paulina que, desde luego, le produce al ex amante una infinita felicidad. La emocionante aparición de Paulina es pretexto de una escena de un patetismo extremado. En esta escena aparece otro detalle, que más tarde va a ser revelador, cuando ella le ruega que le tome la mano. Todo parece haber vuelto a la situación inicial, con un amor romántico, compartido, descrito en términos de una mística comunión espiritual. Otro detalle importante es la lluvia que se oye caer fuera. A partir de este momento, las extrañeces empiezan a aglomerarse. Primero, la impresión extraña, de que tiene que ver con una nueva persona, una especie de doble, una persona contaminada con ciertos rasgos de carácter propios de Montero. Tiene la sensación de que Paulina es una persona distinta de la conocida dos años atrás. Sigue la salida de Paulina, igual de brusca e inesperada como su llegada, bajo pretexto de que la está esperando su marido, Julio. Más que una salida es, en realidad, una desaparición sin huellas. El narrador, contrariado, sale en su búsqueda y observa un detalle sin sentido: a pesar de la lluvia, “la calle estaba seca” (17). Entusiasmado por haber reanudado las antiguas relaciones y, al mismo tiempo, para aclarar el misterio de estas no concordancias, decide pedir informaciones sobre su amante a un amigo de los dos, Luis Alberto Morgan. El esfuerzo de reconstituir, en plano mental, la imagen de Paulina fracasa. Pero se acuerda de un pormenor chocante: la estatuilla china, cuya imagen había visto reflejada en el espejo, durante la conversación con Paulina. Le asombra sobremanera la inexplicable presencia del objeto que no debía encontrarse allí. Una posible hipótesis a la que recurre, en busca de una explicación razonable, es la de que podría ser víctima de una superposición de recuerdos pertenecientes a diversas épocas. Esta explicación viene inmediatamente aniquilada por el detalle de que la estatuilla nunca había estado en el dormitorio con espejo. Igualmente extraño es el hecho de que no reconoce su propia imagen reflejada en dicho espejo. De la charla que tiene el día siguiente con Morgan llegamos a saber cosas increíbles, y es que, primero, Montero está en la cárcel; Morgan le cuenta al protagonista el drama que había ocurrido justo antes d su salida a Europa, la discusión de los dos enamorados y el crimen de Montero, que, cegado por los celos, mata a Paulina “de un balazo” (21). Ante estos hechos, una primera conclusión a la que llega el protagonista nos sitúa de lleno en medio de un tema fantástico bastante banal, es decir, una aparición fantasmal, desde la tumba, de su ex amante, atraída por la fuerza de su amor. Mas esta conclusión es inmediatamente rechazada, por cuanto no ofrece la explicación de los hechos misteriosos que tuvieron lugar con motivo de aquella visita. En estas circunstancias , la revelación de lo ocurrido le golpea “como una fulminación” y la explicación que ofrece nos lleva hacia la idea de la proyección mental. Desde esta perspectiva, no menos fantástica y “horrenda”, los hechos se le aclaran plenamente. Así, nos cuenta que la persona que lo había visitado no fue el fantasma “natural” de Paulina sino un fantasma “artificial”, producido por la mente, enferma de celos, de su rival. Este, hallándose en la cárcel, imagina a Paulina con tanta fuerza que consigue materializarla, objetivarla e imponerla al otro como una presencia material, palpable. Aplicando los principios de la filosofía de Berkeley (esse est percipi), resultaría que Paulina puede existir a continuación en el mundo material mientras esté percibida por alguien (en este caso, por su ex marido Montero), con una fuerza sobrehumana. En este caso, esta fuerza se alimenta, como de una fuente de energía, del odio y los celos enfermizos acumulados en el alma de Montero:

“Lo imaginé en su cárcel, cavilando sobre esta visita, representándosela con la cruel obstinación de los celos. La imagen que entró en casa, lo que después ocurrió allí fue una proyección de la horrenda fantasía de Montero” (22).

Igual que un detective, héroe de novela policial que consigue resolver con éxito el enigma de un crimen, el protagonista nos ensarta, al final, en un tono frío, objetivo, dejando de lado todo sentimentalismo o declaraciones patéticas, los indicios o argumentos en que se funda para su explicación. Estos serían los siguientes:

– el ruido de la lluvia: se trata de una lluvia inexistente, que en realidad no había caído, siendo la calle seca. Este ruido, igual que los demás pormenores extraños, es una reminiscencia de la memoria de Montero, el cual, esforzándose en proyectar una imagen la más fiel a la realidad, materializa ciertos detalles vividos y observados por él durante sus visitas anteriores en casa del narrador.

– la estatuilla china: “Otro indicio es la estatuilla. Un solo día la tuve en casa: el día del recibo. Para Montero quedó como un símbolo del lugar. Por eso apareció anoche” (23).

– el hecho de que casi no reconoce su propia imagen en el espejo:“No me reconocí en el espejo, porque Montero no me imaginó claramente”. Lo impreciso de otros detalles se debe, igualmente, a ciertas omisiones de Montero. La imagen misma de Paulina, a la que Montero no llegó a conocer verdaderamente, aparece contaminada espiritualmente por éste: “Ni siquiera conoció a Paulina. La imagen proyectada por Montero se condujo de un modo que no es propio de Paulina. Además, hablaba como él” (23).

A todo ello se añade la amarga desilusión expresada por el protagonista en el final del cuento, e el momento en que se da cuenta que Paulina no lo quiso en realidad. Este hecho le es sugerido por otro detalle: la escena en que Paulina (la falsa, la proyectada por Montero) le ruega que la tome de la mano. Desilusionado, el narrador apenas ahora se entera de que ese ruego era el eco de otra escena, protagonizada no por él sino por su rival y que éste había sido, en realidad, el verdadero amor de Paulina:

“Urdir esta fantasía (es decir, la proyección mental, n.n.) es el tormento de Montero. El mío es más real. Es la convicción de que Paulina no volvió porque estuviera desengañada de su amor. Es la convicción de que nunca fui su amor. Es la convicción de que Montero no ignoraba aspectos de su vida que sólo he conocido indirectamente. Es la convicción de que al tomarla de la mano – en el supuesto momento de la reunión de nuestras almas – obedecí a un ruego de Paulina que ella nunca me dirigió y que mi rival oyó muchas veces” (24).

La similitud de este cuento con la novela más conocida de Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel, nos parece fuera de cualquier duda, por lo menos en lo concerniente al tema o temas principales: una emocionante historia de amor y su solución en clave fantástica. La distinción consiste en el tratamiento del tema fantástico que permanece, sin embargo, centrado en torno a la idea de proyección de una o varias imágenes, sólo que en la novela la proyección mental viene reemplazada por una holográfica, realizada por un aparato, invención de un ingenioso sabio, lo cual acerca dicha novela al área de la literatura de ciencia ficción.

Bibliografía

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Historias fantásticas, Alianza Edtorial, S. A., Madrid, 1991.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel. El Gran Serafín, Ed. Cátedra Letras Hispánicas, S. A., Madrid, 1984.

George Berkeley, Philosophical Works, Introduction and Notes by M. R. Ayres, Dent, London, Rowman and Littefield, Totowa, NJ, 1975.

George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1913.

G. Jacquemin, La littérature fantastique, Paris, Natham, 1974.

Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique , Paris, Seuil, 1970.

Suzanne J. Levine, Guía de Bioy Casares, Ed. Fundamentos, Madrid, 1982.

Irène Béssière, Le récit fantastique, la poétique de l’incertain, Paris, Larousse, 1974.

Luis Sáinz de Medrano, “Cien años de literatura fantástica”, en AA.VV., El relato fantástico en España e Hispanoamérica, Ediciones Siruela, S. A., Madrid, 1991.

Trinidad Barrera, “Complicidad y fantasía en Adolfo Bioy Casares”, en AA. VV., Ibid.

Teresita Mauro, “A. B. Casares, los laberintos de la imaginación”, en A. B. Casares, Premio “miguel de Cervantes”, Editorial Anthropos, Barcelona, 1991.

Franklin García Sánchez, “Orígenes de lo fantástico en la literatura hispánica”, en vol. colectivo El relato fantástico. Historia y sistema, Ed. Colegio de España, Salamanca 1998.

Oscar Hahn, “Trayectoria del cuento fantástico hispanoamericano”, en vol. colectivo Ibid.

Notas

Zoica Ghiţan

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The Metamorphosis of Marquezian Nights in

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Abstract: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, has focused his unusual way of exploration into the inner side of literature on simultaneous realities. As a result of this new and catchy way of writing about life and death, Marquez has become a notorious name in literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, surely one of the most entertaining books ever written, does not surrender all its meaning in the first reading; rather, it demands a second reading which is in effect the real one. After having done this, you, as a reader, have the tremendous feeling that life has changed, that death is getting closer, that night is falling apart. This paper aims to identify the less known part of this novel. I focused on the Metamorphosis of Marquezian Nights. There are six important nights in this novel and each of them tries to emphasize those steps from life to death (the Night of Beginning-Utopia and Magic Places, the Night of Dream and Memory, the Magic Night-Remedios’ Death, the Night of Insufficient Physiologies, the Night of Splitting Up the Universal Spirit and the Night of Mirrors).

Keywords: Argentinian Literature; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Metamorphosis; Death; Destiny.

Motto: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to always tell the difference”. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5)

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel of extraordinary destinies, of a psychological war, of powerful characters which have the strength to face fierce forces. It’s the novel of Ursula and Buendia family, of decline and guilt. It’s also an epic of life and death, of desperate perpetuation and the need to recover. But, probably, one of the most important ways to read One Hundred Years of Solitude is through the magic of nights. It’s a novel about day and night, about sunrise and sunset, about never ending nights, and never coming days. It’s a novel which extraordinarily resembles life through the light of sunset which might seem to make things, people and places -everlasting. In order to identify and decipher the key of Buendia family, we have to get familiarized with the labyrinth of the novel. Buendia family lives the absurd game of darkness. In the heart of darkness its destiny turns into a continuous failure and into a struggle within itself and the others. Between the two principles, the one of life and the one of darkness, evil forces and dark seem to be always on the first place. A destiny which is going to be forgotten, which fights to keep memory alive, a destiny which was lost before it began to start, a hide and seek game between negative meanings and metamorphoses of night.

Metamorphosis, as a concept, has to be defined taking into account all those terms used to define change. In Physics, Aristotle tries to define metamorphosis, using the pair of movement and change, the contradiction principle and the intermediate category. Movement is defined as being something which has to do with a change from one subject to the other one, whereas change has to do with passing from one subject to a non-subject or from one non-subject to a subject, meaning both generation and destruction. Aristotle makes use of three different pairs which are also very important in defining the nowadays metamorphosis. The first dichotomy which is used by Aristotle draws the distinction between the thing which moves, the thing to which it moves and the thing from which it moves. Aristotle seems to focus on, specifically, the thing to which it moves and the thing from which it moves, defining change “the thing to which it moves rather than the thing from which it moves”[1]. The second dichotomy which is used by Aristotle has to do with the relationship between subject and non-subject. If the first pair emphasises those changes that might appear according to substance, quantity, quality, place, time and relation, all these being called changes by accident or by mistake, because they are “a part of all things, anytime and anywhere”[2], the second pair has to do with those changes which take place “not anywhere, just in opposite things, the intermediate ones, the contradictory ones”[3].

Reading carefully Aristotle’s Physics we can draw the conclusion that there are two main types of changes: the first one is the change from a subject to a non-subject which is called destruction or change from existence to non-existence and also a change from a non-subject to a subject which is called by Aristotle “generating through contradiction”[4], for example the way in which non-white turns into white, or non-existence turns into existence. These are the most important pairs which are mainly used to describe the nowadays metamorphosis. According to Aristotle there are two main changes, but we have only one shape, this belongs to a thing which is created through the initial chaos, because of all those essential changes. We haven’t mentioned all these pairs at random; all of them have to do with the main topic of this paper. They have an impact on the magic of marquezian nights, because all of them are built up using the relationships between change and movement. But, besides mimesis, which means of course copying reality, Gabriel Garcia Marquez also makes use of the art of revealing and creating through imagination, simultaneous realities. The traditional psychological analysis is replaced by illogic, discontinuity and incoherence and all these happen because of metamorphosis. Sartre stated the idea that we have to face “the maiming of time”, as an immediate result of the way in which metamorphosis functions in a novel.

Under the labyrinth’s wings we are witnessing the birth of a new world which is going to fight for more than one hundred years with the continuous timeless presence. As related to the destruction and disfigurement of time, Emil Cioran said the following:

” Time has just become inaccessible to me. Without being able to follow it, I just have to hang up on it or just watch it, but I can never find out myself in it: it’s not my element. My impotence to catch a little bit from the time which is open to everybody is useless”[5].

We are introduced to a world where absurd and unusual create the continuous crisis, a crisis which is also determined by the metamorphosis of nights. This typical crisis spreads itself not just on the physical and material level of society, but it’s also a crisis on the spiritual level. Each character is guilty because they are not able to fulfil their own existence in the immediate reality. Each character, except Ursula, lives the drama of his or her own existence. They have the consciousness of their own self destruction. They do not live in truth because they cannot find their own equilibrium and all the necessary answers to all their questions which seem to tighten them as in circle of fatality; they cannot explain their own destiny: Why do they live? What do they live for? What do they have to do to find the real balance needed for their life? Where are they going to?

The solitude becomes more and more powerful during all these nights. The twentieth century novel brought up two great solitary writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka. Both of them struggled with solitude which turned into an evil power, condemning characters and placing them into an unwelcoming world, a world of absurd instances. Kafka is the one who proved this solitude in the pages of his Journal, saying the following:

” I have been invaded by the sufferance of my solitude, so deeply that I have felt that all my power that I gain when writing, scatters, that power which, to be honest, I have never wanted being pointed this way”[6].

Solitude – for both of them – becomes smothering, making the characters to act in a crazy way. Solitude brings fear, concern, anxiety and desperate efforts. Both marquezian and kafkian characters are trying to escape from this world full of evil sources. These characters are working desperately and hopelessly. Both characters are products of destinies lived boundlessly as a painful tearing, between vaguely perceptible things and obsessive dilemmas.

Between solitude and metamorphosis, Marquez placed the image of the dirty man, of that man who won’t recover anymore, of that man who is continually crawling. Those pages in which Aureliano Buendia is described as a man who is afraid of fighting against life are very important. Colonel Buendia, the one who was almost intangible all his life can no longer escape. His fears are the result of not being able to live authentically. He hasn’t managed to find out the real sense of life, that’s why he dies in such a tremendous way, in a state of almost complete madness. The hero, the one who was awarded so many prizes, the one who died and resurrected when people needed him, the one surrounded by too many people, dies because he realized that life can no longer deserve to be lived because he was born from the very beginning with the desire to feel free, with the eyes open wide, with the strength of powerful characters and now he is enhanced forever. But in a solitary world you cannot live if you don’t accept the fact that you have to surrender when necessary. This is what Aureliano Buendia hasn’t managed to understand; the hero, the conqueror dies as a victim, as a punished man who gave up fighting with all those fierce forces of evil. It’s a strange and cold world which denies everything and is continually hiding the very basics of life. The one who is part of this world is a solitary person, abandoned by everybody. His scream is a scream of powerlessness, of impossibility of setting yourself free; it’s a scream against the world’s absurdity. In such a world, metamorphosis will function in an irreversible way; it’s a mortal perspective which fascinates all the novel’s characters. The character is not just a part; it’s an outcrop of all those parts, which exist in a totality. It has to do with the so-called: homo omnis creatura.

The mechanical part is also added to all these incomplete physiologies, but at the same time it turns into a powerful tool which might be used to dominate from beyond the external limits. Each character in One Hundred Years of Solitude wants to be free, that’s why all of them make use of mechanical: making gold fishes, the flying carpet and the daguerreotype laboratory. The characters cannot be free because their freedom does not exist authentically; they are set free but just into death. The characters turn into living corpses who are given just a chance: to commit suicide or to disappear without any explanations. Their death is rarely a tragic one; it’s an exhaustion state that is shared by Jose Arcadio, by Aureliano Buendia, by Ursula and Amaranta.

This novel exists because there is the heart of writing which is supported by the magic of the six nights we are going to talk about. Each of these magic nights designs existential destructions which bring the imminent failure and death:

1. The night of beginning-Utopia and magic places
2. The night of dream and memory
3. “This is happening: flowers rain from the heavens”
4. The night of insufficient physiologies
5. The night of splitting up the universal spirit
6. The night of mirrors

The Night of Beginning. Utopia and Magic Places

One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the magic night of beginning. Darkness turns into the light of foundations, when human beings are born, the worlds split up, the limits disappear and the magic appears.

Macondo has its own world; it’s a crepuscular world which fights within itself and with the boundless limits in order to be given the right to exist. Macondo is more than a real world; it’s a world which seems to refuse the dark side of life. It’s a place bathed in light and warmth, an island in which the common representations and imagination are melting together. Magic is not just the environment of Macondo but also the lack of consistency of the name of Macondo. Macondo, product of Jose Arcadio’s imagination or not, because the text does not specify exactly, has the resonance of beginning but also of the imminent end and death. We are invited to suppose that Macondo is on an island, surrounded by waters, so that’s why all those plans to set up Macondo in a more suitable place, the lack of dead people, the unusual inventions, the alchemy laboratory, the making of gold fishes, too much light and the richness which cannot be explained, make us to believe that Macondo is a place where Utopia is at home.

And as it happens with places surrounded by utopia, Macondo has to die one day. The foundation of Macondo is done during night, as something unusual, following Jose Arcadio’s dream between the limits of deep sleep and wakefulness, when the human beings are senseless:

” the night on which they camped beside the river, his father’s host had the look of shipwrecked people with no escape, but their number had grown during the crossing and they were all prepared (and they succeeded) to die of old age. Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamed that night that right there is a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day, he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot pot on the bank, and there they founded the village”[7].

The night of Macondo’s foundation is the night of the metamorphosis of a dream into an ultimate reality.

There are two places where Marquez emphasizes the role played by metamorphosis in the inner structure of the novel: the mirrors and the dream. All those houses with walls made up of mirrors send to the imminent death of characters. As it usually happens with all the mirrors which split up into thousands of pieces, the same happens with Buendia family’s destiny. The night of beginning is a night in which metamorphosis turns into a willing entity which creates worlds, unites destinies and opens new ways. The rapport between seeing and being is given birth, grows up, ceasing the place to the double-faced nights of life.

According to the Dictionary of Symbols, the mirror is an object which helps you to get to the real knowledge which best reflects ”the truth, the sincerity, the inner side of heart and consciousness”[8], but, at the same time, the mirror helps you to play with metamorphosis, with opposite images of immediate reality. At the beginning of the novel Jose Arcadio Buendia has a dream, those houses with walls made of mirrors symbolize two things: first of all, the darkness of the material world, the one which was created in immemorial times from the word’s chaos, and secondly, the birth of a new world which is going to reflect the purity of soul in darkness. The dream with these houses is in fact the first metamorphosis which is going to be spread all over the novel. The inhabitants of all these houses are going to die. They are going to be lost in the continuous game of life and death, playing the last tricks with the destiny. The metamorphosis of the very beginning is the one of a world which has just lost its identity because everything came up as a result of an immaterial, spontaneous and hysterical dream. Each dream has a meaning and a final goal, and in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the final goal has to do with extreme solitude and death, beyond the bearable limits, eternal deaths which happen again and again.

The night of beginning is in fact the metamorphosis of a dream, the only one which is quite real in the novel, which is trying to be recognized in a world which has nothing else than one hundred acts and one hundred characters who suffer and die because of loneliness.

The Night of Dream and Memory

In the eternal course of nights which are going to be lost and die in the eddy of the time, the second night is the one of dream and memory. With this night we are invited to get to the second stage from where the drama of Buendia family starts. It’s in fact the first real night which brings metamorphosis into reality as related to marquezian destinies.

All their dramas and their inexorable way to death start to appear as soon as the night of dream and memory is getting closer. As soon as insomnia appears, the memory starts to play games, to change the real into dream and the dream into real existence, thing which mainly determines the blending between different plans and the impossibility of finding out:

”Jose Arcadio Buendia found himself rolling over in bed, unable to fall asleep… they did not sleep a minute, but the following day they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night…They did not become alarmed until the third day, when no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone more than fifty hours without sleeping… In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did they see the images of their own dreams, but some saw the images dreamed by the others”[9].

Insomnia is going to be spread and turns into a plague and you cannot fight against it; it’s difficult, if not even impossible. All those unusual ways used by Aureliano Buendia to keep memory alive are useless. He is playing with words, but the magic of words will soon disappear. The fight to keep memory alive is a tiring one, because the immediate reality is replaced gradually by simulacra of action and thinking, by an imaginary reality in which characters have nothing else to do than to give way to.

Insomnia freezes memory and stops the access to the spiritual side of life. The only element which is going to help them to recover, although temporarily, is Melquiades. He is the one who plays the game of life and death on the chess table. Memory wants to fight against being forgotten, but this is not possible. It’s trying to recapture the past, but the limits of present don’t allow this. Everything is useless if the last stage is nothing else than death. There is fragment in a novel written by Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities, which best reflects this point of view mentioned above, the continuous search, the hopeless one during a lifetime, by the end of which you are able to realize that you have just lost the bet with life:

”the hell of the living ones is not a thing which is going to be; if there is one, then it is the one which is already here, the hell we are living in nowadays, the one which is being built up by our joining forces. There are two ways to avoid sufferance. The first one is at everybody’s hand: to accept the hell and be a part of it, until you won’t see it anymore. The second one is uncertain and requires attention and untiring learning: to look for and know how to recognize who and what, in the middle of hell, is not hell and to make it live forever”[10].

The text suggests that the best way is the second one, the continuous search in this game with the essences of life. We might assume that Melquiades is Pablo, the main character in one of Hesse’s novels? Character and stage manager at the same time, he is the one who initiates in the magic theatre so that his world might turn into a visible one. Melquiades might be considered a wanderer; we should say that he is the one who brings the invisible into visible and perceivable. At this point we could ask ourselves: isn’t the insane state of mind the beginning of wisdom?

Melquiades sees and knows everything, gives without asking for anything back, his only desire is to keep secret the parchments which seem to be intangible. He is acting in the novel as a shaman who directs a world which has no longer any other determinants. He is the one who brings inventions and alchemy, the secret drink which saves memory and the necessary skills for Aureliano Jose in order to decipher the secrets of the parchments.

There are two main characters in the novel who don’t suffer of solitude: Melquiades and Ursula. Whereas Melquiades’ greatest achievement is that he has managed to be a winner in his fight with solitude, Ursula Iguaran de Buendia is the invincible heart of the novel. Both of them seem to be crazy a little bit because their behaviour gives you the feeling that something is going wrong with them. In the order of the actual they seem to be crazy and insane but in the order of the possible, they are just acting as they should, because the freeing of imagination can lead to unusual meaning. But, nevertheless, nothing seems crazier than the wisdom for the one who doesn’t know any other rules except the good sense.

“This is Happening: Flowers Rain from the Heavens”

Too many postponements, a place without a cemetery, a society in which the patterns and those too many voices determine the absurd, all of them had to be shaken by something terrible indeed: the first real death. Until Remedios’ death, the novel had its own linearity, without too many events; with her death, the novel, with places, characters and destinies, is moving, step by step, to the imminent death. Time is lost and is no longer patient with neither places nor people. Time is demanding for its own existence as a real time, in which the fatality circle is getting stronger and stronger and the demonic magic of nights doesn’t pardon anyone.

According to the Dictionary of Symbols, night has created sleep, death, dreams and fears, kindness and cheating. One Hundred Years of Solitude seems to be an invitation to a demonic fairy tale in which we, as readers, are sent back in those immemorial times when the initial chaos was melted with monsters and nightmares. Usually night renders two main meanings: the first one has to do with darkness, with the dark side of life and the other one with preparing for the coming of dawn, when the light of life is going to appear. From this point of view metamorphosis might be: ascendant and descendant according to the way in which it’s used as a reward or as a punishment or according to the final goals. In the case of our novel there are descendant metamorphoses of nights because all of them seem to be ruled by an unseen hand which is trying to punish each generation for Ursula and Jose Arcadio’s mistake of getting married (they were cousins). Remedios’ death is a magic one which happens late, in the middle of the night. She is the only character who has unusual mortal powers. She dies in an unusual way, through levitation, an unusual death which is specific to saints:

” Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her”[11].

The supposition that Remedios the Beauty possessed powers of death was then borne out by four irrefutable events: four men died because of her magic beauty and power. Her death is the result of the way in which number four resonates in the novel’s structure. Number four suggests according to the Dictionary of Symbols, the initial chaos, the dark side of life. Number four designs those special steps you should follow in order to initiate yourself into the deepest meaning of life. She has managed to identify these special steps; probably that’s why she is saved from a common death. She has risked everything, without knowing that she will be the chosen one and Ursula, the most lucid character in the novel, was the first one who realized that. The strange beauty, the shining light from her eyes, her demonic innocence made her the best representation of alienation in the twentieth century novel. Metamorphosis fails as related to Remedios because she is already under the metamorphosis’s impact; she is a fabulous character, a composite one who combines mechanic, human, animal and vegetal into a single unit. As Carlos Fuentes has pointed out in the Introduction stage of this novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the perfect combination between Utopia, Epic and Myth. The three of them emphasize a special time. As we all know Utopia focuses on the nostalgic time of the very beginning, when everything was in a perfect harmony, when everything might have happened, Epic, generally speaking, focuses on the things that really happened whereas Myth is born, after the other two die and time is focused on this is happening. And related to Remedios’ death: she died in Utopia, she also died in Epic, but moreover, she is dying in Myth because, as we all know, the characters who were born in mythic times have the tendency to act unusually: Remedios dies on simultaneous realities because this is the main reason of acting mythically; her character will not be made clear until the final part of the novel when we are allowed to discover the real meaning of Melquiades’ parchments; the city of mirrors turned into a city of nightmares, and the chronological time is replaced by the instant, as it happens in Kierkegaard’s writings.

The Night of Insufficient Physiologies

Aureliano Buendia is the exceptional character in the novel. Designed from the very beginning for the tragic side of life, Aureliano is desperately looking for an escape from time and space. He has the power to be conscious that in such a world he won’t be allowed to find the real way of freedom .That’s why he is going to be stuck and trapped. The marquezian character is a wanderer who is struggling with himself on the unknown road of life, but he cannot move on because he has the feeling of a complete paralysis. He doesn’t understand the mechanism of reality. Although the characters are capable to rationalize till excess, their conclusions are most of the time irrational. He cannot find his own place and because his solitude is getting worse and worse, the marquezian character fails into a dirty state and then into a metamorphic state of mind and body.

Aureliano Buendia lives the absurdity of life, from birth to death. The destiny of a man, whose life has been built up of illusions and who, because of the impossibility of finding a real place in the world, is lost in the eddy of the inexorable time.

Colonel Aureliano Buendia is the character born to be in a continuous fight with life. He is both executioner and victim of a sombre destiny which brought him to the final failure. Aureliano Buendia will die, but not because of his seventeen sons who had been killed, not because that absurd war that cannot be won, not because of those dead people who were asking for revenge, he dies because he wasn’t able to find out the real meaning of his life: Why did he live for? Why did he have to fight? Why was his life so unfair with him? He dies in the way he lived, without being able to explain the reasons of his existence:” he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence”[12].

Chimerical nature, Colonel Aureliano Buendia suffers of persecution mania. He is the one who fails from the moment of his birth; the image with the amazed child who has the eyes open wide, intangible, questioning about the world is meaningful:

” He was silent and withdrawn. He had wept in his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head from side to side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of the people with a fearless curiosity. Then, indifferent to those who came close to look at him, he kept his attention concentrated on the palm roof, which looked as if it were about to collapse under the tremendous pressure of the rain”[13].

He seems to be one of Kafka’s characters who lose everything in their life; he is no longer that famous colonel appreciated for his deeds, awarded many decorations for his courage; he is forgotten and he has to step backward in a lonely place, his father’s atelier, where he is looking forward his death. His life is that one lived beyond the bearable limits. Aureliano Buendia suffers of a consciousness metamorphosis, he is stray and strong headed and also refractory to all that comes from the other ones. Aureliano Buendia lives the end of his life by being alone, incapable of love. He realizes he is a stranger in this world and this revelation takes place in an endless night when he has the perception of his own absurdity as a human being:

” He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years later”[14].

This is the moment when he realizes that it’s the time to withdraw; he has the same fate as the one shared by Gregor Samsa, the main character in Metamorphosis written by Franz Kafka, in the shell of his life, realizing amazed that neither war nor life has brought him any satisfaction. He is alone and incapable of offering love. He is fighting against unseen forces, makes mechanic gestures and listens to imaginary orders, because war destroyed his last shivers of love. He turns into a living corpse when he signed that truce, which would have never been signed otherwise, but, now, having the proof of his own uselessness, a simple signature is no longer valuable. He hasn’t managed to live authentically, his sons were killed one by one and his memory has been destroyed. So, Aureliano Buendia dies in a night, after confessing the other ones who were trying to praise him for his courageous and brave actions that he was just a simple manufacturer, whose only dream was to die of tiredness and in the misery of making the gold fishes. The grieved desert of the glory he had one day brings him in front of death. He is melting himself, as it happened to Gregor Samsa, in a house which becomes stranger and stranger, further and further. He dies in a cold night in October, understood by Ursula, who, no matter her age, is the only one who remains lucid till the end of the novel. He has the fate of his father’s, dying under the same chestnut tree, not before being attracted by the circus which just appeared in Macondo. Similar to the circus’ world which creates the illusion of happiness and good will, the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendia has been an absurd game in which he, the main character, has been played by destiny in a perfect combination between lights and shadows.

The Night of Splitting Up the Universal Spirit

Ursula Iguaran de Buendia is the most lucid character in the novel. She had to face for more than one hundred years death, life, children with all their problems, Jose Arcadio’s insane and all the other things which turned her into the strongest woman of the novel. She is the only character who doesn’t cry: she does not cry when her child is killed, she does not cry when her family is almost in ruins, she does not even cry when she had to face the cruel destiny, she does not cry when she has to face death. She seems to be everything in the novel because she is always there when you need her; powerful, a woman of unbreakable nerves who never says no who ever gives up, she is the strongest character in the novel. If she had been killed as a character by Marquez from the moment when it started to rain and all that came after, such as flood and all the other ruins, this novel wouldn’t have been a masterpiece today. Her strong capacity of work, the fact that she was always active and severe made her the universal spirit of the novel.

As long as she lives and she is a part of her family, everything around her goes according to the plan; after dying everything changes into a metaphor of imminent ending. The first symbol which shows us that Ursula is going to die has to do with rain. After raining for more than “four years, eleven months and two days”[15], Macondo turns into a shambles, just ruins, remains of furniture, animal skeletons, and abandoned houses. Blind and in a terrible state of confusion, Ursula recovers perfectly, after being almost dead during the season of rains, after loosing almost all her senses, being just a living body which no longer reacts to any stimulus that come from outside. She was used as the most amusing plaything by her nephews: Amaranta Ursula and little Aureliano. As I have already mentioned she is the most lucid character in the novel, although she gives us the feeling that she is just a wanderer. She tried to recapture the most important events of her life but in such a way that we, as readers, have the feeling that everything has to do with simultaneous realities; time changes all its perspectives and the absolute present time of the myth is born – this is happening. She confuses things, events and deeds, present times with remote periods in her life, she also thought that little Aureliano was her son; she invented imaginary visits “with beings who had not only been dead for a long time, but who had existed at different times”[16].

But her madness is just a trick because she seemed to preserve enough of a margin of lucidity, to keep one of the most important secrets of the novel till the end of her life; the real owner of the buried gold.

Ursula Iguaran de Buendia was a strong woman, the strongest of all; none of her descendants had inherited her strength; all her life she planned carefully the most important things, all of them into details and she has also planned her own death. After the rain stopped, she recovered unusually and the fever of restoration finally brought her to life again. But it was just temporarily because she was too old to keep in touch with the chronological time of the novel. She dies on a morning of Good Friday, in silence, after playing for the last time the endless game with life and death. The permanence of the cosmos was the most important thing that she wanted to share her family. She dies but her spirit never leaves this world, because the power of memory repeats the models and everything is continually reborn.

The Night of Mirrors

This is the night when utopia, epic and myth turn into a single reality, the one of Buendia’s family final destruction. It’s the moment when, for more that one hundred years, finally, the mystery of those parchments is deciphered for the first time, but this time in the real world. This is the moment when we are given the proof that we are in front of a simultaneist novel when everything seems to reshape again and again as in a continuous circle of life and death. Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano are the last exponents of a family whose destiny seemed to be cursed by an unknown entity that was just looking for the right moment to catch and destroy them.

These two last characters who seem to reiterate a little bit the destinies of the ones whom they borrowed their names, or at least, as far as we are concerned with Amaranta Ursula, she borrowed the strength of the first Ursula, the power of character, and also the strong sense of reality and the margins of lucidity, whereas Aureliano is a strong character from the point of view of his unusual skills:“ His gift for languages, his encyclopaedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering all the details of remote deeds and places without having been there”[17]. But, step by step, as the end of Buendia’s family is getting to an end, both of them lost their sense of reality, the notion of time and also all the rhythm of their daily habits. Everything turns into an unusual and strange way of living life in such a way as if the world were repeating itself, were continually reborn, again and again till the end.

The time of epic and the time of utopia mix together into a continuous combination of strong forces which are going to change the time of “this really happened” with “this might have happened” into the time of myth – this is really happening, right now, when Amaranta Ursula is giving birth to her son and when Aureliano is deciphering the real meaning of all those parchments. The curse is going to be fulfilled because their son has a pig’s tail. From now on, Aureliano turned into a state of mixture between madness and lucidity when he saw the child:

” And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging towards their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralysed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquiades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: the first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants”[18].

This is the moment when he realises that he will be allowed to decipher the parchments. The first of the line who was tied to a tree is in fact the first Jose Arcadio, one of the most enterprising people in Macondo at the very beginning, who dies in a strange way, his presence being noticed for more than one hundred years, he is turning into a shaman who sees, perceives and understands everything although he is dead; the last is being eaten by the ants is the new born baby who is killed by ants because the curse had to be fulfilled and accomplished. As soon as he realized this, Aureliano deciphers the parchments and enters the myth which is best expressed in these lines:” Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes, in such a way that they coexisted in the instant”[19].

The terror of giving birth to a child with pig’s tail turned into reality, the terrible rain from the very beginning of the novel which determined the failure of Buendia family is replaced by that terrible wind which was first of all warm and full of voices from the past but which suddenly turns into a tremendous force which destroys everything around it:

”Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”[20].

The fact that the second opportunity is refused to all those who had nothing else to do than fighting with solitude is mainly related to the fact that the time of myth can not be repeated. The chronological time of the epic really existed in the novel, these things really happened, in the way in which they are recorded by Melquiades in writing, the nostalgic time of the utopia with the things that might have happened disappear, everything is given in return to myth. When Melquiades stopped recording, Macondo and its people disappear. Myths can no longer record deeds that happened or are going to happen: just things which are happening now. So the mirror is broken by the fact that too much solitude was being taken into account, that the curse fulfilled, that Melquiades really died in the chronological time, that the original flood and wind and chaos after all emerged into myth.

***

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel of a brilliant mind who probably wanted much more than just writing. It’s the result of an unusual way of thinking and living. Marquez’s destiny is similar to that of Tagore’s, the famous Indian poet. Both of them recognized the fact that they were meant neither winning nor leaving the game of life. But they were meant to play the game of their own destruction. That’s why they sacrificed everything and if they were going to lose the last coin, they did it because they wanted to sacrifice themselves; and this is the moment when they were both winners; to be a winner throughout your final destruction in writing.

References

Aristotel, Fizica.Traducere şi note de N.I.Barbu. Studiu introductiv, note, indice tematic şi terminologic de Paul Apostol. Studiu analitic asupra Fizicii lui Aristotel şi note de Alexandru Posescu (Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1966)

Emil Cioran, Silogismele amărăciunii (Bucureşti: Humanitas 1992)

Franz Kafka, Pagini de jurnal şi corespondenţă. În româneşte de Mircea Ivănescu cu o prefaţă de Alexandru Al. Şahighian ( Bucureşti: Editura Univers 1984)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. With an introduction by Carlos Fuentes (Everyman’s Library 1998)

Italo Calvino, Oraşele invizibile. În româneşte de Sanda Şora (Bucureşti: Editura Univers 1979)

Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, Dicţionar de simboluri (Bucureşti: Editura Artemis)

Notes

Doru Pop

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

About the cinematic adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera

Notes on Cinema and Literature

Abstract: The author discusses the relationship between literature and cinema, using the lifelong “love and hate affair” Gabriel García Márquez has had with the motion picture industry. The discussion is based on an analysis of the filmed version of Love in the Time of Cholera and the problems that emerged from the production, distribution and reception of the movie. One central hypothesis of this article is that the cinema and magic realism cannot come together. The author discusses the problem of the Writer and the issue of transforming a literary work into a cinematic production. While analysing the problem of adaptation in the case of Love in the Time of Cholera, the author tries to pinpoint the intricate relationship between magic realism as literature and the magic of reality in cinema.

Keywords: Gabriel García Márquez; Cinema; Love in the Time of Cholera; Magic Realism.

Gabriel García Márquez’s short stories and novels have been subject to numerous television adaptations in Latin America, and Márquez himself has written several screenplays using his literary works as a basis for future cinematic transformation in Europe and Latin America. The first movie made after his works was in 1979, when the Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo made the motion picture María de mi corazón (Maria my Dearest). This was followed by the screen adaptation of the novel The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. The movie, called Erendira, was directed by Ruy Guerra and was broadcast in 1985. For a long time, this was the only literary piece the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author had allowed to be transformed into a movie.

A key issue comes from this reticence and apparent disdain of “Gabo”: are literature and the cinema two opposite art forms or do they have any common ground? André Bazin placed the evolution of the cinema at the moment of the “decadence of literature”[i] and many writers, starting with Baudelaire, considered the “technologies of photography” as technical means that brought about a corruption of the arts. Others were even more radical, as for Leo Tolstoy the cinema was an “attack” on literature and its methods.[ii] Is this the case with Márquez, does he consider less of the movies and more of the “high-levelled” cinema?

When Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff bought the rights for Gabriel García Márquez’s book Love in the Time of Cholera, this was acclaimed as “the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by the Nobel Prize-winning writer”. The story of the production of this movie was as exciting as the love story between Florentino and Fermina and the seclusion of the author from the movie industry was even more appealing. Apparently, the producer of the movie, Scott Steindorff, had tried for more than three years to persuade García Márquez to sell his rights to Hollywood. The persuasion process ended with a contract for about $3 million for the author and his right to be present at every stage of the production of the movie. But, the news story goes, García Márquez was persuaded by the fact that Steindorff insisted that he actually “was” Florentino and could not give up the task of making a movie out of this fictional work.

The movie started as a grand production, putting together all the ingredients for a great success and a masterpiece of the genre. The director was Mike Newell, known for his works Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Donnie Brasco – so this should have guaranteed the grand visual effects of a professional. Newell, who was consecrated as a television director, and had worked mostly for British television programs, had a movie set in a perfect location. In a superproduction type of attempt, the producers of the movie were trying to give “realism” to the movie. This was done by shooting it in Colombia’s “natural” setting, the town of Cartagena being identified as a perfect replica that would give the picture its necessary authenticity. The cathedral was “real”, the streets were “real”, and the producers of the movie had accepted the critical and theoretical speculation that the city near Magdalena River from the book was indeed the place where Márquez has spent several years in his youth.

Another “ingredient” was to bring the Oscar-winning scriptwriter Ronald Harwood (who had done the adaptation for The Pianist) to write an adaptation for the Márquezian masterpiece. Harwood did his best to reduce the multi-layered text into an understandable chronological epic. The cast of the movie followed the same logic. Distributing Javier Bardem, nominated for an Oscar and winning multiple European awards, in the role of Florentino, the Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Fermina and Benjamin Bratt as Urbino, the producers had a multinational crew and famous faces in their motion picture. Let’s not forget that Shakira was to sing the main musical theme of the movie, so all things seemed to be falling into place.

None the less, Time magazine has reviewed this movie as “a serious contender [for] the worst movie ever made from a great novel”.[iii] Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwartzbaum has depicted the movie as „peevishly disappointing” and one in which “literature is poorly served”.[iv] Finally, the movie, having a budget of over $ 45 mil., did not make more than $ 4.5 mil in the first month of viewing. What is wrong, then, with this movie? Why was it a box-office disaster and why did the movie critics comment on it in a dismissive way?

One of the problems of the theatrical representation of Love in the Time of Cholera was identified early by the critics. For example The Los Angeles Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, has described the efforts of the producers as “an enormously daunting task to adapt a book at once so sweeping and internal, so swooningly romantic and philosophical”. This is one of the central problems facing literature turned into cinema: most of the times the dramatic setting of the book does not evade the melodramatic component of movie making.

In short, the story is the same as in the book. In Colombia after the Great War, following the funeral of a man, another man comes to the widow to confess his undying love, which she dismisses angrily and sends the man away. From this we enter the recollection of 50 years that have passed since the day when Florentino Ariza, a telegraph boy, fell in love with Fermina Daza, the daughter of a mule trader. Florentino writes to Fermina, and she writes back to him, but she ends up married to Urbino, a medical doctor. While Florentino, still in love with Fermina, finds comfort in the passing love of more than 600 women, Fermina has a long term, stable marriage.

But García Márquez has built more than a love chronicle that covers both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, he has developed an entangled narrative structure that brings together literary myths (such as the myth of Don Juan, the myth of eternal love), social epic (the background of the love between Florentino and Fermina is one of the most difficult in Latin America) and everyday life – in one word, creating a masterpiece of literary magic realism.

The term “magic realism”, as defined in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh, was meant to describe the new post-expressionist art form. Latter this artistic term came to define a paradoxical artistic expression, which combined both realist and fantastic approaches to everyday life.

Following this line of thought, one of the possible answers to the problem of literature and cinema is that the literary and cultural concept itself – which Alejo Carpentier called “real maravilloso” – is incompatible with cinema. On the other hand, for Márquez cinema is “the most important discovery of our world” and “Gabo” himself has always been involved in cinema production, in directing and even in screenplay writing. He studied in the Italian Cinecitta School, where he met Cesare Zavattini and became his affectionate fan. His first important screenplay was “Tiempo de morir”, written for the young director Arturo Ripstein, in Mexico 1965. This screenplay, based much on Sophocles, and especially on Oedipus King, has influenced the Colombian writer, as it is clear in the novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Not only did Márquez study cinema in Rome, but his departure to Europe was due to the institutional creation of a film institute in Colombia. After finishing his work at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CRC), he worked for the cinema industry, and was the head of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation.

Márquez was involved with Latin American movie production, wrote for Amores dificiles, a co-production for the television, and was declaredly impressed by the Italian Neo-Realism (his early review of the Bicycle Thief is a proof of that).

García Márquez himself has complained several times about the lack of control the screenwriter has in the movie business, and has commented extensively on the role of the “Writer” in the movies. Influenced by his relationship with Zavattini, Márquez was disappointed by the dismissive role of the writer in the movie industry. While Márquez considers that “cinema was a more complete means of expression than literature”, the question remains intact – in what respect does cinema take over literature’s mechanisms and how does fiction come into place in this new medium. We have a hint of the challenge literature faces in cinema in the interaction between the Nobel winning writer and the movie producers. As Scott Steindorff has confessed, after reading the screenplay, Márquez said to the producers of Love in the Time of Cholera that they were too faithful to the original book, and that they “laughed about this”.

But actually this is one of the main issues in literary adaptations, and most of all in this particular adaptation. Love in the Time of Cholera has too close a connection to the “literal” meaning of the book, and by this it does not give space to any of the “natural elements” of cinema to come into place. This question was treated by Bazin[v] from the stand-point of the destination of movies, its effectiveness of message and meaning production. When we ask, with Bazin, “what is Cinema”, we look for the answers in the spectator. Bazin says that cinema has a “digest” nature, it provides the viewers with a narrative that is completely different from that of literature, because it is designed for the spectator and not for the reader.

Cinematic narrative deals more with the ability to give the spectator a freedom within reality and less with the intricate construction of a multi-layered narrative. This implicit oversimplification does not mean a reduction of complexity, on the contrary. The mechanisms of cinematographic art are adjacent to the other arts in the sense that – as it is for Bazin – cinema is realistic in its very nature and the fact that the camera is mediating this reality brings forward an objective reality. And, going back to the concept of magic realism, while in literary terms, myth and reality can be inseparable, writing in itself being an elaborate process of continuous fictionalisation, cinematic mythology is making mythology out of the very reality.

In the movie transformation of Love in the Time of Cholera we witness the ways by which the spectacle is degrading the story by the absence of the Narrator. Tomas Taraborrelli has addressed this outcome.[vi] While in “magic realism” the all-knowing narrator is at the centre of the story development, intermediating – as it happens in One Hundred Years of Solitude – frequent time shifts between past, present and future, the only way to substitute this presence in the cinematic language is by altering the consistency of fantasmatic projection. While the mix of fantastic projections and reality closely observed is possible through cinematic mechanisms, the mythical, magical, fantasmatic world of magic realism, living in a close contact with reality, where extraordinary events mingle with plain representations of life, when translated, becomes too blatantly realistic.

Another dimension of the question whether cinema and magic realism can cope together is generated by the fact that, as defined by Pierre Nora, cinema is an instrument of memory, a technological means to capture events and the main assumption should be that cinema is “techné”, a technological effort to compose the imaginary. The “poetry of cinema” contends that moving images imply writing on the imaginary, while literature, and magic realist literature even more so, is a way of writing with the imaginary. In this respect, since magic realism entails more than re-writing the real world, it means directing the reader’s involvement within this process, each reader being able to re-construct the real on his own terms. Magical images are used to re-draw the lines of everyday existence, for the characters and for the readers.

Along these lines, one of the issues following this argument is to be found in Love in the Time of Cholera. Although the images are graphically built, no matter how “real” they seem, finally they lack their intrinsic magic, not their ability to recreate a world, but the ability to give the viewer the capacity to construct his or her own reality. In this sense, the cinematic representation of the Márquezian universe is limitative and restrictive.

Coming to terms with mythology, while being in and of itself a form of mythology, cinematographic treatment of fictional works faces another obstacle. Marcela Beatriz Soza deals with the problem of discursive strategy of rewriting.[vii] The problem, defined by Genette as transmodalisation, means the conversion of a narrative text into a dramatic text, and then the transfiguration of this into the spectacular text, one that comes from the logic itself of cinema. Working with a limited number of scenes, a reduced number of characters, the interaction of the main and secondary roles, the cinematographic work is inherently devoid of collateral evolution.

This is explicit in the treatment of the myth of love without age, which becomes in the movie a poor realistic depiction, presenting us with a fundamental cinematographic impotence. Florentino’s “622 long-term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures” are briefly disposed of in a quickened narrative, without keeping the nuances of the book. For example, we are deprived of the scene where Ausencia Santander’s exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every item while she and Florentino are making love, or the fact that a girl Florentino picks up at Carnival turns out to be a homicidal escapee from the local asylum, or the scene where Olimpia Zuleta’s husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint, or even the scene when the widow Nazaret and Florentino are frolicking during a bombing, are all fast-forwarded in a race into time which the book does not indulge.

Another dramatic result of this cinematographic “sketch” is the fact that the 51 years, nine months, and four days that the main character famously waited in the novel for his true love were depicted by means of bad make-up and facial transformations that are not credible and hardly acceptable. The problem of cinema on how to change the age of a character, by keeping its physiognomic traits is, at the end, the problem of realism conflicting with the imaginary. The same goes for the scene when Florentino sees for the first time the naked and old Fermina, followed by the final love scene, when the two old impassioned partners make love on the cholera flagged ship, where the real pervades the imaginary. Basically we end up with what Robert Scholes has called “metafiction”, where the chronological development of time and the linear representation of space cease to exist.

Another observation must be made, following the suggestions of Fredric Jameson.[viii] Jameson contends that magic realism generates a “transfigured object world”; elsewhere, he suggests there is a dialectic of visuality that cannot transgress the bias of cinematic technique.[ix] The main problem for Jameson is the ideological component of cinema, and this kind of a lack of political content becomes more obvious in movies like Love in the Time of Cholera. The scenery of the movie is void of any social implications, while the presence of social strata, of ideological conflicts and of exploitation and differentiation – ominous in the book – is vaguely sketched. All the political significations of the book are lost in the cinematographic representation and the only conflict visible is that of class – the father of Fermina Daza wants a social marriage for his daughter – but no further development on this is followed. None of the postcolonial social tensions are explicit in the movie, and it is as if the fifty-year-long love between Fermina and Florentino, although having a heavy visual background, had no historical context.

In this respect, the theoretical problems of literary criticism are ignored by the movie making industry. Magic realism was conceived as an alternative to the dominant discourse of the Western culture, a discursive instrument to project not a transfigured reality, albeit a reality of transfiguration. Whereas in the book death is everywhere, fatal diseases, epidemics, and wars are combined with love, in a projection of Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, the movie has only one scene that could give away all this, and this scene is fatally mimicked from the book. During the war Florentino breaks his chastity vow to Fermina and loses his virginity to the widow Nazaret from next door, and none of the convoluted dimensions of this loss appear.

One final remark about the movie, all the characters speak English with an awful Spanish accent. The producers may have intended this as a compromise between the global market of the movie business and the need for an authenticity put forward by the Hispanic context. All that we see at the end is just a low-end masquerade of a social space that does not adhere to this logic.

References

Aguilar, Eduardo García. García Márquez: la tentación cinematográfica. Mexico City, Mexico: Filmoteca UNAM, 1985.

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Foreword by Jean Renoir, vol. I.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

McMurray, George. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980.

Menton, Seymour. Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981. New Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1983.

Stam, Robert & Alessandra Raengo (eds.). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un Deicidio. Barcelona-Caracas: Ed. Barral, 1971.

Williams, Raymond. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Edith Gelu

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

Macondo – El ombligo del mundo /

Macondo / The Navel of the Earth

Abstract: This article attempts to reverse the critical perspective of Macondo as a paradisiacal place that goes through a slow, inevitable process of decay. I suggest that Macondo is an ambivalent place, both a Garden of Eden and a Garden of Evil, presented as such from the very beginning of the novel. The first part of the article offers a very brief excursus into a few Postcolonial terms to show that the critically perceived inadequacy of terms that deal with the Postcolonial realities seems to make Gayatri Spivak’s theory a more plausible approach albeit a pessimistic one: “the subaltern cannot speak.” García Márquez knows that the subaltern cannot speak – but he wants the subaltern and the reader to know that as well. In the following two thirds of the article I try to show that García Márquez’s intention for his characters is simply to trade the solitude of oblivion with the solitude of awareness. The journey has to be made in time (a hundred years) not in space – all that enters or leaves Macondo is not meant to destroy directly but to shed light on the ongoing destruction.

Keywords: Latin-American Literature; Gabriel García Márquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Self-awareness; Solitude; Ambivalence.

The richness of critical texts written on One Hundred Years of Solitude is nearly as overwhelming as the novel itself. While the narrative seems to lend itself to numerous diverging hypotheses, there seems to be a consensus as far as the character of Melquíades is concerned. He facilitates access to history and story. His participation in the narrative is that of a benevolent character who mirrors the very narrator of the novel not only in the craft of writing but also in the attitude towards the protagonist, the Buendía family, as well. “… Melquíades’s parchments are a history of the family, (and) they are also its prophecy; they predate the actions they describe. Melquíades is seen at intervals working on them, but more often giving certain members of the family clues to their interpretation.” (Mcnerney, 20) Kathleen Mcnerney reads further a comparison between “Melquíades’s creation and that of García Márquez.”(21). However, she is not the only one making this connection. In the collection of essays edited by Harold Bloom, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, several authors consider the parchments as “an alternative novel to the one we are reading… but also an alternative history”(Spiller, 62); a “metafiction” (Landau,119) or a labyrinthine symbol for the effort of reaching a place of harmony and escaping solitude (Hall qtd. in Hedeen, 71). Ultimately, the characters involved in the deciphering of the parchments are “much like the reader of Cien años, also, no doubt, sitting in an isolated chamber, busily deciphering this manuscript of García Márquez’s that for many readers might as well have been written in Sanskrit…” (Baldo, 107).

In reading the parchments as a dynamic between recording history and prophesying story, critics seems to overlook that the clairvoyance does not belong to Melquíades, but to Nostradamus and to José Arcadio Buendía. Melquíades finds the prophecy in the work of Nostradamus and José Arcadio Buendía dreams about “a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. “ (26)[1] Melquíades is then only the instrument of introducing this prophecy in Macondo. My contention is that Melquíades, far from aiding the Buendía family in their search for the antidote of solitude, is an agent of a fatal awareness. Macondo is a paradisiacal place and a real place at once and Melquíades is a Lucifer-type character, who, in Romantic tradition, is the agent of knowledge who destroys the Garden of Eden, but brings about the knowledge and with it, truth and solitude. My reading is framed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak explains any attempt to give voice to a “subaltern group” as re-inscribing the very oppressing move that formed the category of the subaltern in the first place, since the only language and methodology available are structured by oppressive categories. “Knowledge of the other subject is theoretically impossible…. Part of our “unlearning” project is to articulate our participation in that formation – by measuring silences, if necessary – into the object of investigation” (2204). Eventually, regardless of particular categories- women, colonized people, the subaltern cannot speak.

I suggest that García Márquez deliberately invests Melquíades with the power of destruction, or deconstruction rather- he wants to replace the solitude of oblivion with the solitude of awareness or lucidity. García Márquez knows that the subaltern cannot speak- but he wants the subaltern and the reader to know that as well. His interviews and his Nobel Prize lecture attest for García Márquez’s need of awareness for the raw realism where the First World reader sees magical realism.

“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

Consequently, the first part of my essay will set up a dialogue with Post-Colonial critics who analyze García Márquez, and not only him, in the larger context of Latin American efforts to dismantle the imperialist oppression. The key terms of my inquiry are truth, reality and history within the magical realism cultural movement. The first part of my essay will show that García Márquez’s underlying agenda in One Hundred Years of Solitude is the pessimistic rendition of the Latin American solitude as the acknowledgment of the impossibility to avoid an on going imperialism. Then, I will look at the novel itself in the following two parts of my essay. First, I read Macondo in the light of the bakhtinian chronotope as a space where people are trying to escape time and reality, seeking oblivion, a Garden of Eden but a fake one, rather, a Garden of Evil described as such from the very beginning of the novel. The village is at the center of the narrative -only two short episodes take place outside its borders- but its borders both physical and immaterial are heavily pervious. The entities going out and the ones coming in establish reciprocal relationships. Most of the time, the ones either returning or entering first time are perceived negatively and they do contaminate the place, but I suggest they infect Macondo with reality. The second part of my reading approaches the novel from the perspective of family with its correlatives-community, nation, and solitude with its correlatives amnesia/ oblivion and awareness by looking closer at the trajectory of a few representative characters: Úrsula and Melquíades, and, briefly Colonel Aureliano Buendía Aureliano Babilonia and the last few pages of the novel.

Context: Essentialism vs. Heteroglossia[2] in Post-Colonial Studies

The hypotheses advanced by the critical corpus that revolves around García Márquez grapple with a structural contradiction- as long as he is perceived as an author who gives voice to Latin American cultures then specificity falls victim to essentialism. If he is rather the Colombian writer and the specific detail serves to concretely rebel against imperialism then some oh his tremendous power is lost. A rather compelling metaphor synthesizes the contradictory trends in critical studies- hybridity. My purpose in the following theoretical excursus is to show how struggle for the appropriate metaphor for the Post- colonial writing demonstrates that “the subaltern cannot speak.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude is the writing of a homogenized Latin American cultural space- a kind of a representational defense against the colossus from the North- even if the unified, criollo subjectivity García Márquez presents nearly erases the Native American and African presence throughout the region.”(Johnson, 388)

This type of assertion is predominantly present in the critical corpus written on García Márquez. While, acknowledging the absence of other identities, critics still vote for his representativity, the main argument consisting in his inverting the hierarchy of oppressor (Imperialist discourse) and oppressed (the subaltern’s discourse). In the same article, Johnson continues,

“García Márquez plays with many of the typical North- South stereotypes in part by turning center-periphery models inside out, with Macondo becoming the center of the universe around which the rest of the world- even Sir Francis Drake- revolves.”(389) [3]

Furthermore, García Márquez operates within the larger move of “decolonization” which entails “instances of reconfiguration and relocation of cultural and critical energy, reversal of center and margin, production and consumption, dominant and emergent forces…” (Mitchell, 13) Seductively appropriate for One Hundred Years of Solitude, the center- periphery discussion illuminates García Márquez’s emancipating project for many commentators. In his article “Culture and Colonization: The Imperial Imperatives of the Centered Circle”, William V. Spanos employs Enrique Dussel’s ideas of the “decentered periphery [which] becomes the condition for the possibility of an authentic philosophy of liberation.” He highlights the “indissoluble link between ‘ontological imperialism’ and ‘territorial imperialism’” (141). Failing to recognize the former in the “knowledge production” deems futile any emancipating attempt.

The famous essay, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America”, informs most of the critical debate revolving around this type of dichotomy. Josefina Saldaña builds part of her own argument on Fernandez Retamar’s suggestion “that the entire history of Latin American cultural production can be viewed through the lens of these binary forms of consciousness. Rather than subvert this binary construction, however, he replicates it by simply inverting the hierarchy of its terms…” (Saldaña, 87). Retamar’s essay has engendered long lasting critical discussions since 1971. Despite his still fascinating metaphor, the more recent arguments have moved away from his formula of the reversed power dynamics. Moreover, the geography of the debate has been dislodged. The South becomes the U.S. southern regions and Latin America, for instance in Look Away! The U.S. South in the New World Studies, with a unique distinctiveness that “consists in what might be called the South’s literally uncanny (unheimlich) hybridity.” Taking into account the differences that do not simply allow the “assimilation of the U.S. South into the Caribbean”, Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn introduce the anthology claiming, “Rather, what generates the South’s peculiar cultural tension is its position as a space of degrees of overlap between…” (8) the new metaphor is extremely beneficial since

“As Yeager puts it in her introduction to The Geography of Identity, ’social geography’s insistence on the interstitial, hybrid nature of place- its refusal to conceptualize location as either ethnically or ideologically bounded- also offers an important antidote to some of the dead-end binarisms within cultural studies.’” (12)

Nevertheless, the hybrid metaphor does not dissipate completely the compelling inherent tension of resisting the colonizer that often takes shelter in a “strategic essentialism”.[4] I find a slightly more productive trope in Brett Levinson’s discussion on ‘undecidability’. “between global capital and local politics, state and people, cultural representation and hard reality, text and fact, displacement and place, transnationalism and nationalism, and deconstruction and other methods, no choice is just right or plain wrong. What is right is structurally undecidable.” (185) An implicit contradictory quality makes ‘undecidability’ a more comprehensive metaphor in my view- “Things are [also] undecidable because one has already decided. The very making of the categories such as deconstruction/ nation or local/ global, about which one is making a decision, already constitute a decision, an institutional marking out of the range of possibilities.” (Levinson, 186) This intense search for new and “better” terms intended for unbiased discussions of Latin American literature seems symptomatic for the acute consciousness that Spivak may be right. What if the subaltern cannot speak? Then indeed “the current international application of the term postmodernism to Latin American fiction represents a type of discursive recolonization.” (Irvine, 127)

Space, Time- Chronotope. Transgressing the Borders of Macondo.

The overwhelming majority of critical texts on One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to operate under the assumption that Macondo undergoes a slow decay; that there is a progressively dismantling of the pure Macondo revealed in the very first pages of the novel and recurrently referred back to as pure in the beginning. The reader implicitly associates the beginning of Macondo with the beginning of Buendía family and the end of the village with the end of the family. Consequently, the degenerative process disperses over the destiny of the family too.

“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” (1)

The very first page of the novel resembles a maze and the reader is bound to confide in the authorial voice that seems omniscient and reliable. Macondo is revealed as being at the crossing of the perfect space and the perfect time- the inceptive, mythical time; in other words a privileged chronotope. Bakhtin’s description of the term fits Macondo perfectly.

“The chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied… // Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins…. Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel’s abstract elements – philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect – gravitate towards the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work.” (250)

The abundance of distortions in García Márquez’s novel conceals a crucial misrepresentation of Macondo. I suggest that the narrator purposefully deceives the reader into perceiving a progressive decay of the village. Macondo displayed as a Garden of Eden inhabits the most valuable location in the book from a narrative perspective: the first page. Recurrently, this paradisiacal construction is convoluted in later pages. José Arcadio Buendía “discovered, without ever revealing it, a way to make them live forever.”(43) His resemblance to God in his patriarchal image is subtly inserted when Melquíades tells him about the prediction of a Macondo “where no trace remaining of the race of Buendía” will be left. José Arcadio Buendía thunders his reply as a churchly dictum: “and there will always be a Buendía, per omnia secula seculorum.” (58)

Furthermore, the most accurate description of Macondo as paradisiacal utopia occurs over a few paragraphs within the first ten pages of the novel. José Arcadio Buendía is undoubtedly the center of the community who gives “advice for the raising of the children and animals, who collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community.” The biblical metaphor becomes conspicuous when people are building their homes. “Since his house from the very first had been the best in the village, the others had been built in its image and likeness.”(9, emphasis added) But most importantly, in Macondo there is no death. “It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died.” (10) A few other instances perpetuate this image of Macondo as the perfectly harmonious place still untouched by evil. Don Apolinar Moscote is received suspiciously and José Arcadio Buendía explains that in Macondo “…we don’t need any judges here because there’s nothing that needs judging… We are so peaceful that none of us has even died of a natural death.” (61)

Nevertheless, a closer look at the sequence of events reveals insidious discrepancies among what the reader is led to believe is a chronological change and what the narrator actually presents from the very beginning: Macondo is an ambivalent village. The very first image of the novel is the firing squad- death and the second is the remembrance of ice- brought in by the gypsies who will later be clearly associated with infecting the atemporal village with products of the outside world and with historical time. These two images occur before the paradisiacal descriptions of the village. Similarly, José Arcadio Buendía’s change is almost immediate. On the same page of the novel he is first the emanating living center of this paradise and a few paragraphs later, the one whose “spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets… There were many who considered him the victim of a strange spell.” (10) Already in Chapter 3 the narrator confesses, “Macondo had changed.”

Consistent with the heavenly image of the village is the journey undertaken by José Arcadio Buendía and his fellows in search for “civilization”. Time and space beautifully wrought together again in perfect example of the “a center for concretizing representation,” deny the patriarch the possibility of transgressing. They proceed north, since the east “can only lead to the past”. Their journey becomes allegorical; they travel “before the original sin” through a “universe of grief.” (11) Transgressing the borders of the mythical Macondo means becoming aware- of their “most ancient memories” and the pain of the world. José Arcadio Buendía desires to escape, but he does not know how. When he decides to move “Macondo to a better place” he literally wants to move the privileged space instead of following through with the inner journey he has started in the jungle. On the other hand, Úrsula moves easily across the border. Her purpose is what decides the difference between the two. She is a mother searching for her son. She is aware; she does not want to escape reality, but to reinstate it.

The ambivalent Macondo, both Garden of Eden and Garden of Evil, is described as such from the very beginning of the novel, which supports my contention of the mythical perspective on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Among many other critics, Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría claims, “The blend of mythic elements and Latin American history in Cien años de soledad reveals a desire to found an American myth.” (23) Although the mythological elements are undeniably fecund in discussing this particular novel, I read the Janus-faced Macondo as the chronotope of failing awareness. García Márquez premeditatedly presents Macondo as a chimerical nostalgic picture of the village in the perception of the Buendía family- and, at the same time, as the place that goes through harsh realities. Nevertheless, with the exception of the few characters aforementioned, the Buendía family, and thus the reader experience these harsh realities somehow assuaged. The author’s objective is to lead this family to the awareness of their own condition.

Macondo is not the Garden of Eden; it is rather the Garden of Evil. The illusion of paradise is the founders’ construction in their attempt to eschew reality. Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía are involved knowingly in an incestuous relationship that leads to a cold-blooded murder that keeps haunting them. The final pair to repeat this scenario, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, is usually considered responsible for bringing the bloodline and Macondo to an end. However, the child with the pigtail at the end of the novel, the grotesque symbol of the apocalyptical end of the family and of the village, is but a repetition of another Buendía born with the tail of a pig, who would have lived a long life, had somebody not tried to rid him of the tail. The Buendía family founds Macondo on the illusion of escaping reality and the microbe of oblivion is passed on genetically, as is their obsession with leaving, escaping, crossing the borders of the village outwards.

Thus, the concatenations of events that seem to bring Macondo down are actually meant to raise the Buendías’ awareness about their own desperate condition. The gypsies bring in marvelous inventions from all over the world, but most importantly, they bring in Melquíades. The symbolism of the objects infiltrating Macondo is by itself a completely new chapter of discussion within the frame I am trying to set up for this essay. They all connect to the idea of chronotope and broaching lucidity. For instance, one of the first things they bring in are maps (Portuguese to be noted – as a colonizing allusion) and navigation instruments – that end up leading José Arcadio Buendía to wander in time rather than space (he finds the Spanish galleon). The astrolabe exasperates him into concluding, “The earth is round, like an orange” (5) -a sentence usually associated with heresy. Objects mesmerize José Arcadio Buendía and he is acting contrary to what a god like figure should. In arguing with Úrsula about moving Macondo entirely, she uses the life argument- their son was born in the village, but José Arcadio Buendía replies, “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” (14)

Not surprisingly, Úrsula is resolute in keeping Macondo where it is. “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die.” (14) Her purpose seems to be again, awareness. She diverts her husband’s attention from the idea of leaving to his own sons- to reality. José Arcadio Buendía’s former oblivion is transparent in his looking at the children with

“the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Úrsula’s spell. Something occurred inside of him then, something mysterious and definitive that uprooted him from his own time and carried him adrift through an unexplored region of his memory.” (15, emphasis added)

Indeed, under her spell, he becomes fleetingly aware, but then the next step he takes is to pass down his passion for “the world out there” to his sons.

Actually, the novel is strewn with people and entities permeating Macondo’s borders. A close reading reveals crossing in or out every other page, with the exception of the last third of the novel. The constant bustling in and out consistently molds the village and its inhabitants through the means of a trade not always material, but at all times affecting specifically the Buendía family in terms of solitude, oblivion and awareness. Whenever the gypsies come in they transform the village and the people are fascinated and seem to respond to other types of reality than the one they have before the gypsies. “In an instant they transformed the village. The inhabitants of Macondo found themselves lost in their own streets, confused by the crowded fair.” (17) When Mr. Herbert brings in the hot air balloon, the people are not impressed at all “because they considered that invention backward after having seen and tried the gypsies’ flying carpets.” (243).

Invariably, the entities that come in cause confusion and oblivion, loss of memory or of sense of reality. The center of awareness is Macondo, but the trip to the center has to be done in time- it takes a hundred years for the Buendía race to become aware in the person of Aureliano Buendía. In a similar manner to his father’s, José Arcadio leaves Macondo to avoid reality- he does not want to be a father. When he comes back, he is completely changed and he “did not succeed in becoming incorporated into the family.”(99) Most importantly, when his brother fails to reestablish his connection with José Arcadio Buendía “life at the sea had saturated his memory with too many things to remember.”(100) Visitación tries to escape the insomnia plague, which is later associated with Rebeca, but the old Indian woman knows that the plague actually followed her into Macondo. Prudencio Aguillar manages to find the “town unknown to the dead until Melquíades arrived and marked it with a small black dot on the motley map of death.”(84). He brings to Macondo madness for José Arcadio Buendía. Later on, Cataure, whom Úrsula mistakes for Melquíades, brings death.

Indeed, the prevalent visitor of Macondo is death. Death comes in, mysteriously, in the shape of the three life-size saints filled with gold- and it waits patiently until José Arcadio, Fernanda’s son comes back from abroad entirely corrupted and then kills him. When Fernanda di Carpio comes in as a mock queen, she immediately associated with “The rifle shots [that] drowned out the splendor of the fireworks and the cries of terror drowned out the music and joy turned into panic…. There were many dead and wounded lying in the square…” (218) Later, Fernanda’s father comes in as a mock gift- he sends his own corpse through the mail in a coffin for Fernando’s children to open for Christmas. Death is personified as an old woman whom only Amaranta can see. The seventeen Aurelianos come in Macondo only to die a brutal common death. Ghosts, invisible doctors, “the traffic of the dead” affect the people in Macondo tangibly. Immaterial Melquíades concretely facilitates the process of the deciphering of the parchments, and the invisible doctors leave an ugly scar on Fernanda’s stomach. The list can become overwhelmingly lengthy. My emphasis is on death – because I see it as an agent of reality, a transmitter of the disease of lucidity carried in by Melquíades. The technological intruders are also much commented upon. The foreignness of things – the train, the banana company, the English language, the pianola and Pietro Crespi – is not to be ignored as another agent of reality, rather than evil in themselves. They are unavoidable evils; integral parts of reality that the Buendías seem to be doomed to ignore.

Reversely, the crossing of the borders from the inside out, most of the time motivated by the fascination of the world out there, where science happens, and ‘wonderful things’ and the miraculous adventures of Jose Arcadio that sound like romance quests and fairytales; is almost exclusively not narrated. When Úrsula wants to deflate the drama sparked by the perceived rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca, she takes Amaranta on a trip – and there are no details concerning that trip. Jose Arcadio Segundo leaves and without any account of his experience outside the borders of Macondo, he comes back with the only boat to dock on the river in the village and with the matrons. Meme and José Arcadio leave for school all the way to Europe. The explanations for what is going on with them come from the letters that keep going back and forth, but the reader has access to them in Macondo and we know they are a collection of lies. Towards the end of the novel, again, we have limited access to Europe and America through the entire collection of postcards sent in by the wise Catalonian and by Aureliano Babilonia’s friends.

Besides, the people who leave Macondo and do not come back, actually die outside its borders without our having access to what happens to them “out there”. Again, death is the agent crossing the borders of the village back and forth. Once Melquíades infects the town, death infiltrates every crease. Remedios the Beauty leaves Macondo in a flutter of expensive sheets in what everybody seems to accept as her assumption to heaven, since she “was not of this world”. Meme leaves and dies in silence in Europe. Melquíades dies his first death out of Macondo. Colonel Aureliano Buendía shoots himself. And Amaranta calmly uses the opportunity of her leaving the village to take letters and messages for the other world.

Family, Community, Nation. The Solitude of Amnesia and the Solitude of Lucidity

Returning to the theoretical discussions of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the context of Post-Colonial Studies, I connect the motif of transgressing the borders of Macondo to the idea of nation. Critics recurrently consider García Márquez’s work as representative for any Latin American nation. Clearly, one cannot avoid but read his novels as telling a relatable story, beyond variants, just as we read any other masterpiece in terms of universalities. Nevertheless, I wan to suggest that García Márquez embedded ambivalence in the construction of the Buendía family as representative for the small rural community and as representative for the process of coagulating the Latin American nation. Choosing to escape reality (be it murder, incest or other conjectural phenomena) and choosing to live in a closed circle (be it Macondo or the limits of one family) doom one to tragic failure, to amnesia and solitude and “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” (448)

Particularly in the context of efforts for decolonizing the nations of Latin America, the idea of nation and national identity is compellingly powerful. The newly decolonized nations have developed the narratives of overthrowing the hegemonic discourses of the oppressor; narratives “which became disseminated through ‘imagined communities’ of speakers and listeners (or writers and readers)” (Anderson 1983, qtd. in Ashcroft, 152). Walter D. Mignolo provides an engaging discussion on “community building discourses” in his dense article “Afterword: Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests–The Politics and Sensibilities of Geocultural Locations”. Responding to Spivak’s question “why is magic realism the third world style?”, Mignolo describes magic realism as an ontology rather than a style: “Latin America is magic-realistic.” (207) Mignolo’s article makes a potent connection that informs the cluster of terms I am using in my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “geocultural locations are not necessarily bound to given theoretical practices… the place one is from and the place one is in are part and parcel of what one imagines and constructs.” (171)

Considering Mignolo’s concept ‘loci of enunciation’ as structuring one’s identification process, I read Macondo as metaphorical locus where García Márquez is trying to dismantle the binary of center and periphery, and where he admits that it cannot be done. The Buendía family constructs its identity through a long process of accepting reality, of becoming aware that the image and the identity of a family, and further of a community, or a nation is bound to collapse if its only means of resisting outside pressure is self-preservation. The recurrent invasions of outside elements that occur in Macondo are undoubtedly malignant most of the times. The banana company ruthlessly devastates the village –the physical space mutates into desolation; the weather eerily manifests the volition of the oppressive class of foreigners; the people working for the company and their families are killed in a massive attack, but most importantly, it affects the lucidity of the community- three thousand people disappear on the train of oblivion.

Aside ephemeral instances of awareness, towards which the characters named Aureliano seem to be more particularly prone, two characters stand out as the closest to lucidity and truth: Úrsula and Melquíades. They also live the longest (if we consider Melquíades’ postponing the moment when he has to go to his “final death”) and are involved with all the successive generations. For both of them Macondo is a circle of influence on the family as long as they are in it. They are the agents of change from the solitude of oblivion- for the characters who chose to identify self- reflexively against outside pressure/ the hegemonic colonizer- to the solitude of lucidity – for those who chose to self-identify as hybrids. The latter category is living at the spaces in between, representing the community and the nation partially and being aware that it is impossible to do it otherwise. The subaltern cannot speak- the language he decides to use for rebellion is structured with binary oppositions. Power is at the center and decentering means lack of power for everyone. Only now I can assent to equating Melquíades’ creation and project with the García Márquez’s and add Úrsula in the same category- as the only lucid characters of Macondo.

However, their roles are complementary. Úrsula reads reality non- mediated. She represents oral culture, which she opposes to Melquiades’ manuscripts, and his foreign written, complicated culture. “When the gypsies came back, Úrsula had turned the whole population of the village against them. But curiosity was greater than fear…” (8) She represents the notion of nation as Homi K. Bhabha is proposing it in his article “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”. He links the emergence of the nation to mass migration “The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of the communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor.” He focuses on the “nation as a form of living the locality of culture.” His quoting Lyotard allows me to read the character of Úrsula as disseminating

“the social narrative… [defined] as the privileged pole of the narrated, ‘where the one doing the speaking speaks from the place of the referent. As narrator she is narrated as well. And in a ways she is already told.’ The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’, and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject.” (Bhabha, 301)

This ingenious perspective resonates with my reading of Úrsula not only as one of the few characters that are aware of reality, but as the built- in first critic and interpreter of the novel, of the narrative that describes the life of her family. Chapter 10 opens with the birth of Jose Arcadio, Aureliano Segundo’s son. The choice of name has Úrsula meditating on the typology of characters in the novel/ in her family, although her voice blends with the narrator’s voice.

“Úrsula, on the other hand could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family, the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign.” (197)

Concomitantly, the ghost of Melquíades reappears. While Úrsula does the hermeneutics internally, Melquíades “tried to infuse him [José Arcadio Segundo] with his old wisdom.” (200)

Melquíades secretively and selectively imparts his knowledge, while Úrsula embraces others into the family. She raises Rebeca as her own daughter. She takes in Visitación and Cataure, Santa Sofia dela Piedad. She gets excited when people come in the house and disturb Fernanda’s strict coded order. She goes outside Macondo without coming back infected with oblivion although moving further away physically from this place, means forgetting and being lost. When she starts her search for José Arcadio, “She kept getting farther away from the village until she felt so far away that she did not think about returning” (37). Similarly, José Arcadio cannot be reintegrated in the family after “He had been around the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a crew of sailors without a country.” (99)

While Melquíades writes and teaches the Buendías how to read the text as reality, Úrsula reads reality as a text. The trickle of blood that comes to “tell” Úrsula that her son, José Arcadio, died or the pot of worms that tells her of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s suicide attempt reflect in a mirror image “the letters [that] looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing” (200) read by Aureliano Segundo in Melquíades’ room. Ursula reads through the haze of oblivion to reality that seems to follow her family. One of the numerous times when Colonel Aureliano Buendía leaves Macondo, Arcadio his nephew is left in charge with the well being of the town, but he proves to be a cruel and despotic ruler. For a while, his actions have a serious impact on the people of the village, but when Úrsula gets mad, she overthrows him as if he had been playing a childish game and he had been a naughty child. The seriousness of reality narrated up to that point is humorously subverted. “Whipping him without mercy, she chased him to the back of the courtyard, where Arcadio curled up like a snail in its shell.” and “The boys in the squad scattered, fearful that Úrsula would go after them too.” (115)

García Márquez supplies the first critical interpretation of his novel in Úrsula’s eight page reflective musings that open chapter 13. She summarizes and explicates the events through “a progressive breakdown of time” (263) She loses her sight and gains vision- learns to read reality again in new ways, by odors and by the position of the sun. García Márquez literally writes her as the only one being aware of her (im)mediate surroundings. “But that day she began to realize something that no one had noticed and it was that with the passage of the year the sun imperceptibly changed position and those who sat on the porch had to change their position little by little without being aware of it.“ (266) Úrsula’s genuine connection with reality and her constant intention of influencing her family into being lucid is visible again when she manages to get José Arcadio Segundo out of Melquíades’ room in spite of him and she realizes that “he was in a world of shadows more impenetrable than hers, as unreachable and solitary as that of his great-grandfather.” (362). Moreover, her death disturbs reality like an earthquake- birds die and the monstrous creature of the Wandering Jew is sacrificed- in a sort of craze.

On the other hand, when Melquíades dies for the first time he is “wiped off the face of the earth” together with the entire tribe “because they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge” (43). This is a conspicuous allusion to Melquíades inheriting something of the tradition of Lucifer from Milton and Goethe- the fallen angel, the evil but sympathetic character whose major sin is knowledge beyond the limits he permitted. The beginning of the novel sees him as “a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind… That prodigious creature, said to posses the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with spread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of centuries had skated.” (6)

His consistent influence on the male members of the Buendía family seems ambivalent. On the one hand, he is always bringing in apparent decline and secrecy- the Buendías seem to cross the borders of Macondo with his aid, but the journeys are not in physical space. José Arcadio Buendía

“When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion f space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.”(4)

On the other hand, although his presence in the novel is not as pregnant as Úrsula’s, his influence is constantly reverberating lucidity or awareness (through the Buendías who enter his room and approach the parchments). His knowledge of the end of the race of the Buendías is rooted beyond time. I read his role in the narrative within the frame of subalternity. He knows from the beginning that in the city of mirages the Buendía’s no longer exist. He tries to warn them, to make them become aware of their own fate, even to help them avoid the prophecy but he fails. The Buendías are enmeshed in the mythical Macondo- the space supposed to protect them of themselves; the space that allows the solitude of the oblivion to overtake everything.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía is the one that embodies the struggle to become aware the most. He starts in the laboratory and then becomes active in the reality – but he loses all the uprisings. He goes physically too far from the village-, his mother believes they lost him forever as does his sister, Amaranta. Only Aureliano Babilonia will become fully aware of everything. He is the one that lives through the complete change – from the solitude of the oblivion to the solitude of lucidity. Thus, I concur with Hedeen’s opinion that

“Ultimately One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revolutionary novel.” García Márquez pushes the solitude of the individual to the “solitude of a culture, of striving humanity.” Hedeen also fittingly quotes Paz “solitude, and still later it becomes awareness.” (72)

García Márquez’s project with One Hundred Years of Solitude is to reveal, “the subaltern cannot speak”, at least not if his actions are self-reflective and to reveal that the oppressor cannot listen but in English. If the Latin American writers take shelter in a “strategic essentialism” (Spivak) in order to make the subaltern voice more powerful, they also need to acknowledge that the language available is the language of the imperialist, the colonizer. Thus, accepting Postmodernism and magic realism as valid tools in interpreting the Latin American novel is “a type of discursive recolonization” (Irvine, 127). A true displacement of the language of the empire happens, as Mignolo suggests, in Gloria Anzaldua’s work “To read her Borderland/ La Frontera is to read three languages and three literatures at the same time, in the same book- a book that is not only trilingual (Spanish, English, Nahuatl), but also, of course, tricultural.” (189)

Gene H. Bell-Villada, among other critics, emphasizes for instance “the chaotic warfare of chapters 5-9 is, by admission of the author, based concretely on Colombia’s nineteenth- century conflicts.”(103) The purpose of One Hundred Years of Solitude as “truth bearing document” (Echevarria, 15) is not emphasized enough. Especially since García Márquez himself gives the key to “The whole disaster of Macondo- which is a telluric disaster as well- comes from this lack of solidarity- the solitude which results when everyone is acting for himself alone. That’s then a political concept, and interests me as such- to give solitude a political connotation I believe it should have. “ (qtd in Hedeen, 80)

García Márquez’s narrative of the family who took too long to become aware of their own condition is also an allegory for the First World community. Reality is still absurd and magic in Third World Macondo. If the powerful choose the solitude of oblivion, for a hundred years, they might not get “a second opportunity on earth.”

Notes:

Anda Ionaş

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

L’éros dans les récits de Julio Cortázar /

Eroticism in Julio Cortázar’s Narrative

Abstract: Born Argentinian, reared within Latin-American prose, Cortázar succeeds in encapsulating a glimpse of life in his kaleidoscopic maze of mirrors, perceiving the mysterious essence lurking beyond reality. One of the means through which this peculiar mystery unveils itself within human frame is the eros. This item is of a double nature in his writing: on the one hand, it seems to lie intrinsic within the human being, but on the other hand, it belongs to an unknown inexplicable universe. Due to the latter, this experience determines the person to live life in a perpetual attempt of ordering the unexpected, of taming its chaotic dynamics, of dominating this ”alter-ego”. With Cortázar, the mystery of the eros, as theme, is of psychological nature. It bursts forcefully within, often catching the character unawares, but it enables the person to reveal oneself in the way of touching the reality of the phenomenon. The eros is present in Cortázar’s prose under various instances, depending on the way it conjoins with other favourite themes as the game, time, the unexpected, death, illusion versus reality.

Keywords: Argentinian Literature; Julio Cortázar; Eros; Mystery; Death; Time; Illusion.

Dans la préface roumaine de 1969 du volume La fin du jeu, Dumitru Ţepeneag, important théoricien de l’onirisme, remarque les multiples transformations que l’œuvre de Julio Cortázar souffre au décours du temps, comme effet, d’une part des tentatives de l’auteur de se trouver soi-même, de se créer un équilibre intérieur et, d’autre part comme résultat de son exigence esthétique particulière, qui le détermine à expérimenter une série d’espèces littéraires (à partir des vers de facture mallarméenne jusqu’à ses contes si originales, que l’ont fait célèbre).[1]

La prose de Julio Cortázar, a été comparée suivant à celle de Jorge Luis Borges. On dit que celui-ci a exercée une grande influence dans la création de l’univers fictionnel et dans l’option pour le conte fantastique, spécifique à l’œuvre de Cortázar. Il est sur que l’influence de Borges ne doit pas être ignoré, mais, comme Dumitru Ţepeneag dit, elle a eu plutôt ,,une action de catalyseur”, à cause du fait que déjà, Cortázar était familiarisé avec le fantastique de facture romantique (par l’intermédiaire de l’œuvre de E. A. Poe), avec les textes absurdes de Jarry ou avec les expérimentes surréalistes.

D. Ţepeneag surprend une série d’éléments qui font la différence entre la prose de Cortázar et celle de Borges. Ainsi, Borges a un style ,,concis’’, ,,elliptique’’, parsemé de maximes et de rappels livresques, en temps que Julio Cortázar est plus naturel, utilisant un langage familier, en étant préoccupé de la concrétion de l’image qu’il transmette aux lecteurs:

,,En effet, Borges est un poète didactique et baroque. Tempérament de prosateur a Cortázar. Surtout plusieurs patience : Il met en scène l’idée, où plus exactement l’image centrale, il crée l’atmosphère, il laisse l’action s’envelopper et se développer. Et puis, Cortázar est plus réaliste (même dans les contes fantastiques) pas dans le fait présenté mais dans la manière dont il raconte, il est plus concret, il a la volupté du détail révélateur, la capacité de créer des personnages vivants, avec une psychologie à leurs, avec une appartenance sociale, donc des gens comme on dit en chair et en os.’’[2]

La préoccupation de Julio Cortázar de surprendre la vie dans son jeu kaléidoscopique de miroirs, le besoin d’illustrer le concret existential mais aussi de suggérer le fond mystérieux, caché derrière la réalité, détermine le critique Paul Al. Georgescu à affirmer la binarité de la création narrative de l’auteur sud-américain en deux lectures, liées par un parcours épistémologique commun. Ainsi un premier type de récits qu’on peut saisir dans la création de l’auteur en discussion , proposent une lecture mantique -existentielle du monde, basée sur l’idée du fond mystérieux qui surgit dans la réalité, en accablant l’être humaine dans une manière agressive, tragique et suivant absurde. L’homme devient impuissant devant les forces sombres qui le transforment dans un simple objet.

Le deuxième type de récits de Cortázar sont orientés selon Paul Georgescu vers une lecture poétique -humaine du monde, ayant comme thème ,,le destin humain significatif “, la raison d’être de l’homme, sa force de réfléchir le monde, de choisir et de se créer soi-même, de créer des sens et des valeurs. ’’[3] La position de l’homme dans l’univers, n’est plus marginale, mais elle devient centrale, il étant capable de conduire son propre destin et de participer dans une manière créative à l’édification du monde. Paul Georgescu parle d’une ,,recherche“ propre au textes de l’auteur argentin, un besoin ,,d’incorporer l’ontologie froide et destructive dans une anthropologie créative, d’humaniser le mystère existential, en le transformant avec tout le risque d’une telle interprétation dans un destin humain.”[4]

Une des formes de manifestation dans le plan humain du mystère, des forces inconnues et sorcières est l’éros. D’une part il paraît émerger d’un autre univers, inexplicable, d’autre part, il est intrinsèque à la nature humaine, en conférant sens à la vie.

La double nature de l’amour—qui en apparence est l’apanage de l’homme, mais qui souvent échappe aux essayes de l’expliquer et de le contrôler—est responsable du tourment et parfois de l’échec affectif de l’individu qui passe sa vie dans un perpétuel essai de mettre ordre dans l’hasard, d’apaiser la dynamique chaotique de l’inconnu, de dominer ce ,,autre du sien” (alter-ego) dans le sens heideggérien.

La plupart des récits ayant comme sujet l’éros, peuvent être encadré dans la deuxième typologie énoncée par Paul Al. Georgescu, à cause de l’accent met sur l’homme, sur les infinies nuances de son âme et sur les métamorphoses intérieures de celui-ci. Ces textes sont pus réalistes que les autres, en surprenant le fait banal et le détail apparemment insignifiant mais qui confère relief et consistance à la réalité en illustrant des situations concrètes de vie. En ce cas, le mystère est de nature psychologique, en étant une résultante de la sensibilité humaine, de la manière inédite de se rapporter au monde et à l’altérité. Il surgit donc de l’intérieur, de la profondeur de l’être humaine en surprenant souvent même l’individu, qui se découvre soi-même dans la manière dont il prend contact avec la réalité phénoménale. Les narrations auxquelles notre exposé va se rapporter en soutenant ces idées font part des volumes Les faces de la Médaille et Comme nous aimons Glenda. Nous les avons choisis à cause de l’attention accordée à la problématique du couple.

Plusieurs fois, les événements prennent une évolution imprévisible, le passage de la réalité logique, cohérente, subordonnée à la volonté humaine, vers celle étrange, ineffable, incontrôlable, se réalise insensiblement, plusieurs fois sans que les lecteurs (et les héros aussi) se rendre compte où c’était produit le déclic. Tout le temps, l’expérience affective, érotique représente une initiation, un passage vers un autre ordre des choses.

L’amour peut représenter une aventure du connaître soi-même, commencée par l’intermédiaire du jeu et de l’évasion dans un espace exotique, comme dans le récit Les vents alissées, où Mauricio et Vera représentent le couple soudé, ancré au banale quotidien et aux événements stéréotypes qui les tiennent prisonniers dans un cercle vicieux. La seule modalité d’évasion, de se libérer de la tyrannie du prévisible, est le geste fou de refuser le vieux rituel de passer le congé chaque année, de décider à vivre une expérience inédite en prenant chacun un autre avion pour la même destination. Ils acceptent ainsi de participer au jeu de l’hasard en lui laissant le privilège de les faire se rencontrer comme s’ils se verraient pour la première fois.

La liberté d’action, la nouveauté de choisir d’autres touristes comme partenaires, la tentation de la dissimulation, les offrent la chance de se redécouvrir soi-même et aussi l’un l’autre à la fin des vacances, quand, sans des reproches, sans des regrets les deux conviennent de revenir à la maison avec le même avion, en s’imaginant ensemble, une possible rencontre entre Anna et Sandro, leurs passagères partenaires pendant le congé, qui pourraient prendre aussi le même avion, en créant à leurs tour un couple.

Le caractère elliptique et étrange de la fin du récit peut suggérer une union au delà de la mort, car les protagonistes avalent quelques mystérieux flacons bleu avec de whisky, en s’abandonnant puis au sommeil qui avait les trouver embrassés.

Un autre texte où les deux expériences, celle passagère de l’amour se conjugue avec celle définitive de la mort, est Endroit nommé Kindberg. Symboliquement, la route au cours de laquelle Marcelo connaît Lina, une autostoppeuse, est son dernier chemin. Les images des cadavres vus dans un polar, qui obsèdent la fille, aussi comme l’endroit et le moment de la rencontre (,, la sortie de la forêt’’– espace de passage et ,,le crépuscule’’— temps du déclin existentiel) représentent des motives tannaïtiques, préfigurant l’accident du final dans lequel Marcelo perd sa vie. La rencontre des deux personnages est seulement le caprice de l’hasard, Marcelo, se rappelant que ,, s’il ne s’arrêtaient pas pour boire quelque chose, 8 km en arrière, l’ourse (comme il appelait Lina dans son imagination), était maintenant dans une autre voiture où le même endroit, à la frontière de la forêt “ [5]

Bien que, pendant sa halte au temps de nuit, à l’hôtel, Marcelo s’abandonne à la volupté, le lendemain, il se rende compte du caractère éphémère d’une telle initiation par l’intermédiaire de l’amour, en refusant la continuation de l’aventure et en abandonnant Lina à un carrefour, où elle pourrait trouver facilement une autre voiture. C’est difficile à dire si le personnage pressent son final tragique, en essayant de protéger la fille, où il comprend qu’il y a une autre expérience, plus profonde qui l’attend (celle de la mort) et à laquelle il veut se dédier complètement.

La même métaphore de la vie comme un voyage vers la mort, on peut retrouver dans le récit La barque où une nouvelle visite à Venise. Valentine, le personnage principal, envisage ses vacances en Italie comme une évasion hors du banal quotidien et une modalité de se retrouver soi-même. Le hasard lui fait connaissance avec trois possibles compagnons sur lesquels, elle exerce une attraction spéciale.

La première personne qu’elle rencontre est Dora, avec laquelle Valentine se lie d’amitié à une agence de voyage, les deux femmes décidant un itinéraire commun et partageant la même chambre d’hôtel. Dora se rend compte dès le début que l’attraction pas commune, même illicite qu’elle sent pour Valentine, n’est pas réciproque, mais elle est contente de le savoir auprès d’elle.

Quand entre Valentine et Adriano, un autre jeune touriste, rencontré à Rome, se naît une idylle, Dora devient jalouse, en craignant que Valentine l’abandonne pour continuer son voyage auprès de celui-ci. Mais les choses ne se passent pas de cette manière car l’amour est ombré par l’aigle de la mort que Valentine croit reconnaître dans la chute de l’hirondelle morte sur le balcon de la chambre d’Adriano. La liaison d’entre les deux avait évoluée rapidement Valentine se sentant de plus en plus attachée par le jeune homme si peu connu, mais la perspective d’un amour avec un final certain qui laissera un vide profond dans son âme lui fait peur. Même le fait qu’elle s’est abandonnée dés le début à Adriano, s’explique par son désir de conférer une note de superficialité à leurs liaison refusant aucune implication affective.

Quoique Adriano lui propose de renoncer à son itinéraire dans la compagnie de Dora et de le suivre, Valentine ne croit pas dans l’avenir de leurs amour, parce qu’elle sait que bientôt elle devra revenir à Buenos Aires où l’attendait son enfant, le fruit d’un mariage antérieur échoué.

Elle se rende compte que le moment de séparation, ” tuerait quelque chose en elle, il arracherait une parte de soi-même”[6], ce que le pousse à établir une corrélation entre Adriano et la mort, en pensant que ,,tout ce qui est possédé symbolise la mort parce qu’il annonce la dépossession, met en marche le vide qui va venir.’’[7]

Le tourment intérieur, le conflit entre le sentiment qui commence à prendre contour et le besoin de se libérer, le détermine à anticiper la prochaine halte de leurs itinéraire, en partant tout seul pour Venise, quelques jours plus tôt que Dora et Adriano.

Pendant le voyage, elle essaie de comprendre son peur et de s’expliquer le sentiment qui l’éloigne du bonheur :

,, Il ne restait que l’énigme de sa crainte intérieure, comme si Adriano, le pauvre Adriano serait été le diable même, comme si la tentation de tomber amoureuse de lui serait été le balcon ouvert au-dessous du néant, une invitation de faire un saut— qui ne peut plus être arrêté – en vide. Valentine a pensé qu’elle fuait plutôt elle-même que Adriano.[8]

La Venise découvre à Valentine une autre expérience érotique, mais tout à fait voulue, connue par l’intermédiaire de Dino, le gondolier qui porte les corps des morts vers l’autre rive, où se trouve le cimetière. Comme personnage symbolique, il rappelle le batelier Caron, de la mythologie grecque, celui qui menait les âmes des morts sur l’autre berge de l’Acheron, dans l’empire des ombres.

Bien que Valentine fuit Adriano, (parce qu’elle associe le caractère éphémère de l’amour avec celui de la vie), elle est tout de même inexplicablement attirée par le mystère de la mort auquel Dino est lié par l’intermédiaire de son occupation.

La fin ouverte de la narration est représentative pour l’osmose eros-thanatos, pour le destin de l’héroïne et dans une vision plus générale, pour le destin humain. Sur un des ponts, auprès d’Adriano, qui l’avait rencontrée à Venise, la fille regard le cortège funéraire et entre les gondoliers, elle reconnaît Dino. Elle sent à ce moment-là qu’elle-même est portée par Dino dans le cortège. En comprenant que se sera impossible de s’esquiver, elle accepte l’initiation, le passage vers autre chose (que ce soit l’amour où la mort), l’abandonne de la protection de soi en réitérant de destin de l’hirondelle.

L’image de Valentine de la fin du récit, en regardant quand à Adriano, quand à Dino, est une mise en abîme de la condition humaine, c’est le portrait de l’homme situé entre deux expériences fondamentales : celle de la vie (y compris l’amour) et celle de la mort.

Mais les personnages de Cortázar, ne fuient tout le temps l’amour. Il y a des cas quand elle le cherche, rêvent, imaginent un univers où le rencontre avec la personne aimée sera possible. C’est le cas de Lucienne, du récit Echange de lumières, qui tombe amoureuse d’une voix, celle de Mauricio, qu’elle entende souvent dans les pièces de théâtre radiophonique. A cause de cela, Mauricio est pour elle, avant de leur rencontre proprement dite, seulement une image façonnée subjectivement. Les lettres que Lucienne lui envoie, le détermine de projeter à son tour sur la fille, une image idéale qui va rester dans son cerveau tout le temps que les deux vont développer une relation. A cause de cela il va essayer de faire fusionner les deux images, celle idéale et celle réale, en le déterminant de teindre ses cheveux, en lui achetant une chaise

en osier sur lequel elle pourrait s’asseoir dans la lumière de crépuscule, avec un regard mélancolique, comme il l’avait rêvée. En ajournant sans cesse de lui avouer l’incongruité entre le portrait mental qu’il avait construit pour sa mystérieuse admiratrice, et la réelle Lucienne, Mauricio découvre à un moment donné que sa partenaire vivait la même dilemme, parce qu’il le voit bras dessus bras dessous avec un homme de haute taille et de cheveux bouclé, comme elle s’imaginait Mauricio avant de le rencontrer. Le récit relève l’incompatibilité entre l’illusion et la réalité, en étant une méditation sur l’amour comme chimère en la recherche de laquelle l’homme erre toute sa vie.

Dans le récit Contretemps, l’amour perdu peut être retrouvé dans une forme idéale par l’intermédiaire de la création. Les mots sont les seules qui puissent rendre à Aníbal la joie de l’enfance passé dans son village natal, Bánfield et en même temps l’image de Sara, la soeur aînée de son ami, pour laquelle le garçon en train de devenir adolescent sent un amour intense et sécrète.

Devant la page blanche de papier, Aníbal ranime en écrivant, le portrait de Sara, la douceur avec laquelle la jeune fille veillait son petit frère Doro quand il était malade et surtout le moment quand, salis de boue après les jeux, elle les avait regardée, lui et Doro, nus, à la douche, au temps qu’ils se lavaient. La honte et aussi la tristesse de découvrir que Sara le regarde seulement comme un enfant avait le suivre longtemps. Parfois, les nuits, il rêve les yeux ouverts qu’il est malade et que Sara vient le veiller comme elle faisait avec Doro.

Grâce à l’écriture d’Aníbal, le monde de Bánfield et son premier amour prennent contour, les mots devenant des véhicules plus puissants que celui qui tient le stylo, en le portant imperceptiblement vers la fiction, d’une réalité vécue, appartenant au passé, vers une réalité qui tiennent du possible. Dans celui-ci, le personnage- narrateur rencontre Sara, malheureuse dans son mariage avec un mari ivrogne, et les deux s’avouent la réciprocité des sentiments si longtemps caché. Le décalage temporaire qui les séparait s’efface à la maturité.

Bien qu’il sache que ses mots sont menteurs, Aníbal choisit d’écrire sans interruption, de corriger par l’intermédiaire de la fiction les inconvénients de la réalité objective. C’est la seule possibilité de retrouver Sara, en défiant le temps qui n’a donné aucune chance à son amour.

La prose Au nom de Bobby a aussi comme sujet la crise pubertaire, envisagée du point de vue de l’étrangeté du rêve. Jusqu’à la fin du récit, la cause des cauchemars de Bobby, un enfant de dix ans, qui associe en régime nocturne sa mère à une personne qui lui fait mal, reste inconnue. Parmi les multiples interprétations vers lesquels s’ouvre le texte, se situe l’hypothèse freudienne sur les instincts refoulés par l’éducation, mais qui dominent le subconscient.

La relation mère-fils est aussi le sujet du récit Elle s’est assise auprès de toi. Cette fois, c’est une relation parfaite, parce que la mère, Denise, est en même temps le partenaire de jeu pour Roberto, l’amie et le confident, en lui offrant les premiers conseils sur l’amour. Elle comprend que c’est le moment où son fis sent le besoin d’une présence féminine dans sa vie, autre que celle de sa mère. Denise a la sagesse et la maturité de diriger Roberto et de céder peu à peu, avec une infinie tendresse et amour maternelle, sa place à Lilian, la fille des leurs amis de famille, qui passaient leurs vacances le même lieu.

Sur le mystère féminin et l’impossibilité de comprendre l’être aimé se penchent les récits Les faces de la Médaille (du volume homonyme) et L’orientations des chats (volume Comme nous aimons Glenda). Dans la première d’entre eux, les forces obscures qui désorganisent la vie psychique, émergent de l’intérieur de l’individu sans que celui-ci puisse les contrôler. Il paraît que pour Mireille et Javier, ni l’attraction physique, ni la passion commune pour la musique classique ne sont pas suffisantes pour que leur relation soit parfaite. Il est difficile de comprendre la barrière que Mireille impose dans leurs rendez-vous, l’impossibilité de se dédier totalement et le fait que chaque tentative érotique échoue, leur amour restant pour toujours au niveau platonique.

La même impossibilité de saisir le mystère de l’être aimé se retrouve dans la prose L’orientations des chats, écrite à la première personne, dans une confession pleine de poésie de l’époux amoureux de sa femme Alana, si amoureux qu’il sent qu’elle lui échappe, qu’elle se métamorphose sous ses yeux, qu’elle appartient à un territoire que lui reste inaccessible. Il lui paraît qu’entre Alana et les choses que l’entoure (soit que ce soit son chat Osiris, ou les tableaux qu’elle admire dans une exposition) il y a une complicité que le fascine, une osmose dont le mystère est ineffable.

Chaque récit de Julio Cortázar exprime une nouvelle expérience de vie, en créant des types humains vifs, des psychologies et des situations inédites. Il détient l’art de transmettre au lecteur l’illusion de la réalité, pour le déterminer de participer affectivement aux événements décrits et de vivre intensément l’atmosphère étrange de chaque conte. Les finals ouverts de ses textes invitent le lecteur à méditer lui-même aux multiples interprétations possibles, à faire une corrélation entre les symboles.

Dans un dialogue avec les écrivains cubains, reproduit dans L’anthologie de la critique hispano-américaine, Cortázar explique que dans son opinion les exigences d’un bon récit sont celles de ,,signification’’, ,,intensité’’ et ,,tension’’. La première d’entre eux se rapporte à la choix du thème qui doit ,,irradier au delà d’elle-même jusqu’à ce qu’un épisode banal […] se convertisse dans le résume implacable d’une certaine condition humaine où dans le symbole ardent d’une ordre sociale où historique’’[9]. Les concepts ,,d’intensité’’ et de ,,tension’’, envisagent la modalité de traiter le thème, de créer l’atmosphère, de solliciter la participation affective du lecteur.

A son avis chaque détail est significatif, car à cause de l’espace narratif plus réduit que celui du roman, dans ses récits tout le matériel est calculé avec attention et l’action est dosé de telle manière qu’elle impressionne et éveille la curiosité. La grande provocation est que la réalité décrite se soustrait tout le temps à l’entendement.

Le mystère n’est pas chez Cortázar un artifice introduit gratuitement, pour impressionner, mais il a une valeur ontologique, en étant l’expression des limites de la condition humaine et de la connaissance de type subjectif. En accord avec cette idée l’éros se constitue dans un levier par l’intermédiaire duquel l’homme essaie de transgresser la censure, d’évader vers un « au-delà » qui parfois s’avère inaccessible. C’est le motif pour lequel ses textes sont méditatifs, en se constituant dans une véritable musique de la vie, des partitions parfois espiègles, joyeuses, autre fois des notes stridentes, absurdes, mélancoliques.

Notes

1. Cortázar, Julio, Sfârşitul jocului, prefaţă de Dumitru Ţepeneag, Editura pentru Literatură Universală, Bucureşti, 1969, p. 6-7.

2. Idem, p. 9-10.

3. Paul Alexandru Georgescu, Literatura hispano-americană în lumină sistemică, Editura Scrisul românesc, Craiova, 1979, p. 103.

4. Idem.

5. Julio Cortázar, Cât de mult o iubim pe Glenda, Editura Alfa, Bucureşti,1998, p. 58.

6. Idem, Feţele medaliei. Câştigătorii, Editura Cartea Romanească, Bucureşti, 1991, p. 64.

7. Ibidem.

8. Idem, p. 66.

9. Antologia criticii hispano-americane, traducere de Ruxandra Maria Georgescu şi Paul Georgescu, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1986, p. 224.

Bibliographie

Antologia criticii hispano-americane, traducere de Ruxandra Maria Georgescu şi Paul Georgescu, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1986

Cortázar, Julio, Cât de mult o iubim pe Glenda, Editura Alfa, Bucureşti,1998

Cortázar, Julio, Feţele medaliei. Câştigătorii, Editura Cartea Romanească, Bucureşti, 1991

Cortázar, Julio, Sfârşitul jocului, prefaţă de Dumitru Ţepeneag, Editura pentru Literatură Universală, Bucureşti, 1969

Georgescu, Paul Alexandru, Literatura hispano-americană în lumină sistemică, Editura Scrisul românesc, Craiova, 1979

Ruxandra Cesereanu

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar – Entangled in the Sprawling Cities

Abstract: Buenos Aires and Paris, these are two cities that obsess two famous Argentine authors: Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar (the two of them spent enough time in both places). For the former, Buenos Aires is the total metropolis (because it is twofold: physical and psychical, above ground and underground); for the latter, Paris is the total metropolis because it is circumscribed in a never-ending quest both for love and for an inner, intangible, not to be found Grail.

Keywords: Ernesto Sábato; Julio Cortázar; City (metropolis); Subterranean ground; Initiation quest; Blind people.

Sabatizing

The verb “to sabatize” does not exist and if I am inventing it here and now is only in order to honor in this less usual linguistic way Ernesto Sábato, the author of the masterpiece On Heroes and Tombs and of the two other famous books from his trilogy, The Tunnel and The Angel of Darkness. It is possible that Sábato’s name come from Sabat, or maybe it comes from sabado (which in Spanish, as you can easily see, means Saturday). However, I like to believe that the verb “to sabatize” which I created contains the way of writing of the grand Argentine writer, with its ritual techniques used to portray nightmares, with hallucinations in narrative vortex and, especially, with the post-Kafkian charm of hybridizing the solitude, the estrangement from the world and the soul’s depths.

I met Ernesto Sábato in the flesh at Buenos Aires, on the 1^st of September 2006, in his house outside the metropolis in a neighborhood called Santo Lugares (Sacred Places). I was there with Corin Braga whose master in prose writing, besides Kafka and Bulgakov, is Sábato himself. We were in front of a house hedged in by a “crazy”, not labyrinthine, but still wild (or anyway miming wilderness) garden with huge rhododendrons and white cedars. A house with plenty of rooms and in one of them, sitting at a desk, dressed in blue jeans and a red shirt, the writer was waiting for us. He knew that we were Romanian and he also knew that he was (for at least one of us, if not for both of us) a master of the 20^th century prose.

It is necessary to state that the 95-year old Sábato we had access to was a human being that did not wear anymore the mask of glory or of any other travesty for the media. He was a man beyond glory and writer’s triumph in the solitude of his old age and of his assumed dumbness that was every now and then interrupted by a nice (interrogative and at the same time approving) hmmm, by nods (Sábato’s face was always oldish, so that his oldness did not affect his traits) every now and then when he pronounced a word with difficulties or when he cast the word in the world rapidly, though obstinately.

What should one do when meeting a very important old writer who closed himself up in dumbness (precisely because he accepted his old age, but not the visible deterioration which is its consequence) and who, nonetheless, receives “apprentices” (even if rarely) and admirers? What is to be done when the master, but even more the apprentices, would like to communicate in a way or another, even though not the grand words are those fit for the communion? Nor pure dumbness. We followed the advice we were given and it was us, the visitors, who spoke! It was a great opportunity not only to see Ernesto Sábato, but also to be able to speak to him and to be listened. But this speech had to be clear and faultless. I have to admit now that my speech, even if orderly, was somehow delirious since I put in it some of the eagerness of telling Sábato what I understood from his novels and from his nightmare’s techniques and how his writing formed me as a prose writer (especially in my stories marked by an alluvial pavor nocturnus). I don’t know how much Sábato understood from my tribute which was at the same time a poetical confession but, lucky me, he looked at me with interest and gaiety. The same unruffled and enduring hmmm that accompanied me also accompanied Corin’s speech, a simpler and more precise one, just because of the two of us he was the “apprentice”.

The 95-year old Sábato does not look like a patriarch, but like a partially wise, partially witty elf, even if this can only be inferred. The few words he utters come out of his mouth with a bird-like sonority first, and only afterwards, with a human-like one. It is an instinctual manner of preserving his candor and his curiosity about the world down here. Since it is on such a world from down here (let’s say that of the blind people from On Heroes and Tombs, but that of other dark and ontic “criminals” as well), the writer offered enough confessions related to the art and to the layers of his creative unconscious in El escritor y sus fantasmas. The world of fantasies haunted him once as a supplying reality for a writer who created terrifying fictions. It constituted, admits the writer in The Angel of Darkness, a third world between the world from here and the beyond: “And even if I did not abandon this battle against my monsters, even if resisted the temptation of going back in an observatory like a warrior in an abbey, sometimes I did it in a shameful way, taking refuge in the ideas about fiction – half way between the blood’s pounce and the abbey”.

A ramified and ample Oedipus complex marks the mentality of Sábato’s characters, as if they concentrated all the unconscious guilt that psychoanalysis has been trying for a century to expose in the human beings. That is why the novels of the Argentine writer (ideologically and creatively opposed to the even more famous Jorge Luis Borges) should be understood as a progressive form of ceremonial exorcism.

Argentine’s book-like fantasy

Sometime before arriving in Argentina I started rereading On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sábato’s masterpiece, and I put down the key places in the novel to film not only a real, nowadays Buenos Aires, but also a fantastic one. The multitude of streets and places from Sábato’s novel did not inhibit me at all, but made my ear familiar with the city. So: Lezama Park, Balcarce Street, Colon Park, Retiro Park, Garay Street, Isabela Catolica Street, Admiral Brown Street, Pedro Mendoza Avenue, Belgrano Street, Pueyrredon Street, Leandro Alem Street, the 9th of May Square, Callao Street, Immaculate Conception Street, Luna Park, General Paz Avenue, Corrientes Street, Cangallo Street, San Martin Square etc. I also put down various possible questions for the meeting with Sábato, the only Argentine writer out of the four “prose heavyweight boxing champions” as they are called (i.e. Borges, Bioy Casares, Cortázar and Sábato himself) who was still alive, he himself at the considerable age of 95. First, I wanted to ask Sábato what Argentine-ness was, since in On Heroes and Tombs the writer tried to define the great city (that now has, according to some, 13 million inhabitants, or 17 million inhabitants, according to others, if we take into account the suburbs too). Sábato made a synthesis of the city through its clouds, through the statues of the Lezama Park at dusk, through the streets from the southern neighborhoods, through the roofs of houses. What is this, Argentine-ness? Pampa, gauchos, nostalgia, sentimentalism, the violence of the military Juntas from the second half of the 20^th century? Then, why did Buenos Aires look more like Venice (as Sábato claims in On Heroes and Tombs) and less like New York, since the metropolis is nothing else but a new Babylon (in fact, I came to ask this question to Sábato in the flesh, but the writer only answered through a long hmmm). Why is Borges seen in a pretty ironical perspective both in On Heroes and Tombs and The Angel of Darkness? Is Sábato’s trilogy (The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs and The Angel of Darkness) a sort of exorcism in prose? Sábato often makes the distinction between the authentic writer and the manipulator of words, the latter being an impostor. The authentic writer is the one who follows his own obsessions irrespective of the talk of the town, irrespective of the accusations of mannerism.

Besides the obsession of meeting Sábato, the other writer we trailed through Buenos Aires was Julio Cortázar, whose novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) touched and stirred me in a peculiar way as an adult, when I finally read it. If Borges was my literary obsession when young, and Bioy Casares – a sailor in prose only through The Invention of Morel, if Sábato influenced me, as a prose writer, in a rather unconscious way, the one that I know acknowledge as a master, so to say, is Julio Cortázar. Another genial Latin American influenced my prose-writing in the past, and probably it is influencing it nowadays too. I’m referring to Gabriel García Márquez, but since the latter is a Columbian and not an Argentine, the master Gabriel’s story does not fit into this one, but in another one, should it ever be that story.

One of the things that impressed me in Buenos Aires was the number of beautiful young people on the metropolis’ streets. Very European faces since Buenos Aires is a Babel Tower of immigrants from all over the world, but especially Europe. Not only beautiful faces, but also intelligent, vivid faces that belonged to inner intellectuals, if I may call them so. Paris or New York did not offer me this new sensation that Buenos Aires did. This was the city where I would have wanted, had it been possible, to spend my faculty years. It was here that I would have wanted to be a student twenty years ago, if I could only turn back in time. Probably that it had something to do with the place where we started hanging around, namely Lezama Park (it is here that the story in On Heroes and Tombs starts) and then Recoleta space where we could find a hippie atmosphere as in the 70s, with plenty of stalls (postmodern jewels, miniature sculptures, CDs, etc.), the smell of mate (the Argentines’ national tea) and roasted peanuts covered in chocolate.

What impressed me a lot was the great number of huge bookshops on avenues and famous streets and the fact that they were filled with people. Bookshops where small cafes and (non-smoking) tea shops can be found and where the readers can really enjoy their time. Bookshops for gourmands and gourmets, but also for common people. Here, in Argentina even the waiters know about Borges (even if they do not understand his texts) or they heard something about Sábato and Cortázar. On Buenos Aires’ streets one can feel the smell of pudding and chocolate, and of books. Nowhere have I found something similar. Everybody seems greedy for books. Almost everybody reads. In one of the big bookshops (there are three huge networks of good quality bookshops, Ateneo, Cuspide and Distal) we even watched an important photo documentary on Cortázar. But the icing on the cake was the important bookshop Ateneo on Santa Fe Street, since this was housed in a former theater, so that in the boxes and in the balconies there are books, thousands of books as spectators. The luxurious theatrical space transforms that bookshop into a real delight.

We looked a little bit, in Buenos Aires, for Borges as well. We looked for him at the almost imperial building of the former National Library whose director the writer had been for a long time. Then we looked for him at the house where he lived and that was afterwards sold instead of being transformed into a museum. We tried to see a tango show, but we only got to a variety show where, truth be told, they played the tango very passionately, but they did not dance. We loitered in the residential neighborhood San Isidro, where hacienda-type villas, but also British-style, red brick houses were scattered all over. We went to the famous Recoleta cemetery and paid a visit to Evita Peron’s and Bioy Casares’ tombs. We caught our breath in the famous Plaza de Mayo where there still are protests related to the unpunished torturers who were involved in the Los Desaparecidos affair (“the disappeared”, victims of the military Juntas). And still, our trip was more than anything else under the sign of the coveted meeting with Sábato, having as a leitmotif one of the writer’s key sentences “We sleep, we close our eyes and thus we get transformed into blind people”.

At Don Ernesto’s

The success of our Argentinean trip was thus due to the visit that we managed to pay to Ernesto Sábato who lives, as I have already mentioned, somewhere outside the great Buenos Aires. The way to Sábato was a Kafkian one, there were labyrinths and we got lost, but in the end we got there. First our eyes laid on an almost wild garden. We were received in a guest room where we identified in a terrible photo a young, strange woman: then I thought that that woman could have been the model for Alejandra, the demonic Alejandra from On Heroes and Tombs. Then, we were invited in Sábato’s room. He was waiting for us, sitting at his desk, but his back turned to the desk. Thin, rather small, well-groomed. He muttered approvingly when he saw us, his speech limited to a continuous hmmm. I first explained to him my name, the sonorous difference to Alejandra, then I talked about what I was writing, the obsessions in prose (the nightmares, for instance), I took up the idea of exorcism, but I also talked about the blinding of the body and of the spirit. It is a great chance to be able to talk to an important writer about you, because generally the important writers do not have the time to listen to anybody, especially to their admirers. Or, here, at Sábato’s place we were privileged. Then it was Corin’s turn. He spoke in a less delirious way than I did about his three masters he learned almost everything from when it came to prose, i.e. Kafka, Bulgakov and Sábato himself. He thanked Don Ernesto for his writing which sprang from the bowels and for his nightmares from which he learned a lot.

Back in Buenos Aires, we headed towards the church the Immaculate Conception and its square, because there, according to Sábato’s masterpiece, is the entrance in the blind people’s world. A church like any other church, and a very common small square, with hippies, beggars and homeless people. The passage to the underground is not accessible anymore. It is in a restaurant in whose cellar bottles of wine are stored. The presupposed underground ways from the past (terrifying in An Account on the Blind, Fernando Vidal Olmos’ testimony from On Heroes and Tombs) are locked by walls nowadays. The entrance passage from the past is no longer there, had it ever been there and had it not been only another fantasy.

Sprawling cities (above ground and underground)

The metropolis Buenos Aires, depicted by Sábato in On Heroes and Tombs is double: on the one hand, the city above ground, and, on the other, the underground city. But, even if the real, geographical city is airy and spacious, the novel’s reader feels cramped up and supervised, forced to sneak on streets and avenues that come one after another in avalanche. The streets seem to be somehow syrupy. Probably that’s why the author makes the strange comparison between Buenos Aires and Venice (the comparison belongs to Bruno – a character who twins the two cities only on account of their damp air). It is as if, metaphorically speaking, the metropolis in On Heroes and Tombs had changed into a lagoon with narrow lanes which if they are not really (physically) damp, then they are psychically humid, mentally slimy. Buenos Aires is, however, a metropolis doubled by the blind’s clammy underground labyrinths (on which Fernando Vidal Olmos gives an account in his famous paranoid manuscript). Only in this enciphered and symbolic sense is the city “Venetian”, being doubled by a sub-city, an underground region controlled by the blind. The visible city has an underground mollusk (the blind’s underground region), and one of this mollusk’s tentacles got roots above ground in Alejandra’s strange house. Vidal Olmos family house is the very concentration of the blind’s underground region, a tomb-dwelling inhabited by strange beings, a space impregnated with fear. It is a layered house (like a sick palimpsest, but also like an onion). At another level and to another extent, the blind’s underground region is one of insidious, intersected brains, it’s a brain map well hidden near the church of the Immaculate Conception. We deal with a horizontal Russian puppet, an underground, fragmented worm. When comparing the city’s underground with its surface, the visible metropolis appears, according to Fernando Vidal Olmos (the declared anti-hero, the one who willingly or unwillingly wanders in the Inferno, a Siegfried of the nether world as he himself claims to be), to be just a trompe l’oeil, a deceit. The key point seems to be the fact that the character’s passing through the blind’s underground region seems to be symbolically related to the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, but with a macabre ending. More precisely, it is as if Oedipus had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries so that in the end, as a supreme revelation of the initiation, his eyes would be pulled out. And the things do not stop here: there is a second revelation – the blind’s underground region is continued by the sewage pipes of the metropolis, with all the inherent dejection!

And still, there are other urban spaces in On Heroes and Tombs, non-demonized ones which shrink from perversion: the parks, for instance (i.e. Lezama and Retiro) are regions when one can breathe freely, deprived of constraints, outside the slimy and fatal streets. They are meditative oases, of memories and memories’ stocks (they are related to the small solitary places on the river’s bank). Lying on relatively incontrollable surfaces, they withstand the supervised streets (walked by somnambulist-like beings) or the dark underground regions. Still, the parks are, every now and then, visited by agents of the nether world or by beguilers (Alejandra) who cannot shrink from the dark lights that control them. However, the parks host especially meditative raisonneurs (Bruno, for instance), and dreamers or vulnerable and bewildered beings who do not have a grasp of their own self. And there is another spatial element especially outlined by the author in his urban geography: the multitude of cafes and pubs from Buenos Aires. These are places of beguilement and evasion, in the midst of the tumultuous streets and still hidden within, as if walled in them.

If for Sábato Buenos Aires is a double city (above ground and underground), the Paris in Rayuela (Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, is also a double city although it is inscribed only on the above ground surface (we will see that this surface has a double meaning). In the first part of Cortázar’s novel there is a subjective, concentrated map of Paris: Rue de Seine, Quai de Conti, Pont des Arts, Le Marais, Boulevard Sébastopol, Parc Montsouris, Place de la Concorde, rue des Lombards, rue de Verneuil, Pont Saint Michel, Pont au Change, Chatelet, Tour Saint Jacques, rue de Cherche-Midi, Boul’ Mich, Carrefour de l’Odéon, Montparnasse, Porte d’Orléans, Boulevard Jourdan, rue de Médicis, Belleville, Pantin, rue Scribe. The previous list is that of streets and Parisian spaces enumerated in the first chapter of the novel: but what’s the point of this enumeration? All these places contain and embody Maga, Horacio Oliveira’s mistress. All these journeys are exclusively linked to the image of the beloved woman, to the search for her and to the waiting for her, to her gestures, rethought by the man who loves her and who lost her (as we will find out at a certain point). Can Paris be perceived through a woman’s broken portrait? Cortázar proves that the answer is affirmative. That is why the first part of the novel is a long love and sad letter, prolonged and descended in the Parisian streets and places. There is an entire “Maga-world” and the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the bookshops contain her in a memorial manner. All that Maga breathes, eats or smells is stocked in these spaces, i.e. all the cigarettes she smoked, all the kisses she gave, since the journey is a sentimental one and then each place (not only the streets, but also the street corners, the entrances etc.) has an embedded memory.

There is no point in quoting all the Parisian streets and spaces the author mentions. I transcribed only the names of those to be found in the first chapter, because otherwise, similarly to a makeshift topographer, I should have quoted a fifth of the Parisian places! Horacio Oliveira’s love can be remembered, re-gestated and stocked only through the streets’ mediation: it is a genesis’ act. The sprawling city can be tamed exclusively through the male character’s love. The pilgrim’s bohemia also helps. The mental wanderings in Paris (after the physical ones took place sometime in a lost reality) are a genesis effort of re-creating Maga and, especially of re-making, virtually at least, their love. The musical background of the first part in Hopscotch is purposefully picturesque and aphrodisiac (jazz rhythms and classical sonorities, too).

For Horacio Oliveira (who shelters in his character’s skin, without any disguise, Cortázar himself), Paris is a city identical to Buenos Aires: “In Paris everything was for him Buenos Aires and vice versa: in the most passionate region of love loss and oblivion suffered and were subdued” (En París todo le era Buenos Aires y viceversa: en lo más ahincado del amor padecía y acataba la pérdida y el olvido). The two cities overlap, but not in a palimpsestic manner, since emotionally speaking they are one and the same. The fabulous Paris, as Oliveira calls it, especially Paris at night, is a city of entangled stories, is a saga. It is an epic city similar to Buenos Aires (we can infer). And not only narratively towards itself as a city; it is a metropolis that stimulates narration (the life stories). Oliveira’s wanderings in Paris have an initiatory-erotic meaning too: the character sets up vague dates with Maga, in a neighborhood or another, at various hours. Missing out on a date (in a semi-aphrodisiac, but postponed, purpose) leads to a more intense scenting of the metropolis, to its ritual tasting. The journeys are purposefully labyrinthine, so that they might entangle the wandering lovers. Only on the streets of Paris can the two lovers be one and the same, can they unify as they cannot in the closed spaces. On the metropolis’ streets they can even make love, without really making it – the physical, carnal act takes place in various rooms, but the essential, psychic act takes place on the street. That is why the obsessing, almost suffocating Parisian journeys are so relevant in Hopscotch.

Another character in the novel, Gregorovius, will declare that “Paris is an enormous metaphor”. The meaning of this will be inferred afterwards: Paris is Oliveira’s metaphor for the idea and the action of looking for something unknown, ineffable, fascinating and hypnotizing. But the reader already knows that Paris is Maga herself, the woman, the mistress, the lost one. Maga herself will state later on that “Paris is a grand, blind love” (Paris es un gran amor a ciegas). But why? The ineffable of this metropolis comes from the fact that it is dirty and beautiful at the same time, fit for Horacio Oliveira’s wanderings of psychical clochard. The fact that the second part of the novel Rayuela takes place in Buenos Aires is not relevant anymore, since Paris swallowed in its womb the huge Argentinean metropolis.

Bibliography:

Robert Brody, Julio Cortázar – Rayuela, London, Grant and Cutler – Tamesis, 1976

Julio Cortázar – Rayuela, edicion de Andrés Amorós, Madrid, Ediciones Cátedra, 1989

Juan Carlos Curutchet, Julio Cortázar o la crítica de la razón pragmática, Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1972

Juan Isidro Jimenes-Grullón, Anti-Sábato, o, Ernesto Sábato, un escritor dominado por fantasmas, Ed. Dominicana, Santo Domingo, Centro de Investigaciones Literarias, 1982.

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