preface
I want to tell you what you might expect from the pages to follow. But just a little bit, because I believe that part of the enjoyment of those pages will depend on you not knowing what’s coming next; just as part of the enjoyment for me in writing the pages that follow depended on me not knowing what was coming next.
In a chapter of his famous book Voice of the Masters, the eminent critic of Latin American literature, Roberto González Echevarría, uses the occasion of some reflections on Julio Cortázar to ask whether a holistic criticism is possible. In other words, he asks, is it possible to “read Cortázar instead of engaging in a series of isolated exegeses of his works? And if it is worth attempting such a reading, how does one avoid turning it into a thematic gloss, a formalistic reduction or a biographical narrative?”1
I like that this question establishes a difference between two activities: one is “reading Cortázar” and the other “engaging in a series of isolated exegeses of his works” (which means simply to interpret the meaning of works, individually, one by one). And I like that because it seems to open the possibility that professional criticism (what I do for a living) might open itself out to a way of talking about reading that’s closer to the way non-professional readers like my brother or mother talk about about what they have read. They talk about reading “this author” or “that author” and they rarely engage in a series of isolated exegeses of this or that author’s work.
However, González Echevarría also points out three dangers of this admittedly attractive non-professional way of reading. He calls them “thematic gloss,” “formalistic reduction,” and “biographical narrative.” There’s some more trade jargon there, so let me try to rephrase in a simpler way. “Thematic gloss” means talking only about what the author talks about; “formalistic reduction” means talking only about how the author talks about it; and “biographical narrative” means talking only about the author.
So now the question on my mind is if there is a path between these three dangers, on the one hand and, on the other, isolated exegeses of individual works? If there is, I think it might lie in recognizing and engaging that which emerges, in the course of reading, when we do not separate out from one another all these different elements (theme, form, life, individual text and context). Having devoted many pages to isolating these elements, professional literary critics and theorists have also devoted many pages to hand-wringing worry about how they might possibly be reassembled. But perhaps the answer is right there in front of them: in the experience of reading an author whole. In other words, reading “the author” whole would be little more than a (possibly) more intensive and (possibly) more self-aware version of what my brother or mother do when they read.
González Echevarría’s answer to his own question, at the very end of the essay, serves agreeably enough to encapsulate my own guiding thread as I wrote. He says that Cortázar “must therefore be read whole, establishing no generic distinctions nor privileging either the fictional or the expository texts. Each text must be read as if it were the totality of his production.2” Like González Echevarría I believe Cortázar must be read “whole” (indeed, I believe, he cannot not be read whole, no matter if one reads only a page) and like him, I also feel that the “whole” that one reads is distributed immanently in every “part.” I mean that Julio’s work functions like a holographic image (rather than a photographic one). If you tear a photographic image in two, you have two halves of a single image. But if you divide a holographic image, you wind up with iterations of the same original image. Each fragment of a holographic image contains the same quantity of “information” as the original whole.
One of the implications of this for this book is that writing on Julio, writing with Julio, will be either very short or endless. And one of the implications of that, in turn, is that beginnings and ends will be abrupt and arbitrary. It really doesn’t matter where you start and it really doesn’t matter where you finish–at least not apart from whatever particular aims and interests you bring to the text (Julio’s or mine). That said, for readers who wish to know how I made the arbitrary decisions of where to start and where to finish, and of how to move from one thing to the next thing, I tell that story toward the end of Chapter 49, and there are a few more, explicitly methodological reflections, in Chapter 98, as well as scattered here and there throughout [5, 14, 16, 29, 30, 61, 62, 63, 78]. 3 Finally, for readers with an interest in particular threads (such as love, death, communication or any number of others) or given texts or intertexts, the indexical essay in Chapter 100 should provide guideposts for laying down a path through the whole based on such interests.
Here, though, I mainly want to limit myself to saying that as I made my way through these texts, the word “invention” as it appears in Julio’s work became very important to me. So that what you’ll find in the 99 meditations that follow can be read as the tracings of the effects of that term in various contexts. I don’t think the term “invention” explains or exhausts his work. It is not, in my opinion, a master key to decode its meaning. If it is a key, then it is one of the many keys a person could use to start the peculiar machinery that is Julio’s work. It gets certain things going, it releases certain effects. These were the effects I was most interested in at the time of writing.
You might think, alternatively, of “invention” as a gust of wind: it does all kinds of things – stings your face, cools you in the hot sun of the beach, blows leaves around, makes riding a bicycle difficult, or easy, depending on your relationship to it. All these effects are different, but the wind causes them all (and the wind of course has causes of its own; among which we sometimes find the earlier effects of its prior iteration). In these pages, I try to move along in the currents and eddies provoked by the wind of Julio’s invention. Thus bouyed, spurred, challenged by the flows of Julio’s work, I will write about death, fear, love, friendship, politics, communication, art, and, of course, reading and writing. These are large and old topics. I won’t be trying to say anything exhaustive about them. I won’t be trying to say anything new about them. I’ll just be saying what seems most pertinent to the occasion [63] provided to me by my appearing, at a particular place and time, at the intersection of Julio’s text, the world, and my existence, where each are informed by the past and opened toward a future.
Of course, I am no naïf and don’t wish to pass myself off as one. I am a trained professor of Latin American literature and the inclinations and tools implied by that are part of what I bring, mostly but not always happily, to my reading and writing of Julio Cortázar. Living Invention, I want to say, blends my earlier, exclusively scholarly interests in and approaches to modern Latin American literature and culture with my longstanding, but only recently rediscovered, desire to read literature (and to teach the reading of literature) as equipment for living more fully present, more joyful, and more compassionately engaged lives.
So, this may be a book about Cortázar about the idea and practice of “invention” in his writing. As such, I hope it profits other literary scholars. But equally, and to my mind more significantly, it is a chronicle of the experience of attentively reading as a life-sustaining activity with the potential to transform all our relations from the most intimate, private, and personal to the most broadly public, and political. In this sense, my deepest wish for Living Invention would be that it provoke an honest, challenging, and liberating reconsideration of customary practices and habits among both academic and lay readers—though each probably in different ways—who are interested in reading and the questions of why it matters and what it might be good for.
In Living Invention, in short, I describe and argue for, but above all try to exemplify first, a way of reading viewed as just one practice inseparable from the many other practices making up my life, and second, a way of writing this experience that feeds directly into the lives of others.
Please start wherever you like. Please stop wherever, and whenever you like. And please try to let enjoyment be your guide.
1 Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters (Austin: University of Texas Pres, 1985), p. 98, emphasis added.
2 The Voice of the Masters, pp. 108-9.
3 Throughout the text, I will use the notation “[X]”, where “X” is a chapter number in this book, to indicate other chapters that offer related or alternative approaches to the issue or text I am discussing. The reader is invited to use these notations as off ramps and via them to swerve onto a different reading path.