inventing socialism
In December of 1969, Julio wrote an essay for the Uruguayan cultural periodical Marcha that put invention to work in exploring the relationship between literary style and political commitment. In this essay, he was invited to respond to Oscar Collazos, who in an earlier issue published his view that the authors of the Latin American so-called new novel (Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, plus Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Donoso) had a neurotic, dependent relationship with European literature. And, moreover, that this relationship prompts them to imitate the technical innovations of their European heroes and thus keeps them from responding to their own Latin American reality; an assertion that would become an unquestioned commonplace in leftist criticism of the so-called Boom’s (as if the authors collected in this name were identical) “liberal imagination.”1
Julio replies that no novelist he knows worries about European writers. On the contrary, the very fact that they don’t compare themselves with European writers (favorably or not) makes the Latin American novelist “capable of inventing, taking advantage of, or perfecting the most varied techniques totally naturally and authentically.”2
Cortázar’s compatriot Jorge Luis Borges had already taken a similar stance, some forty years earlier, faced with critics who felt he was neglecting what they called “his reality.” In that essay, “El escritor argentino y la tradición”, Borges argued that the ease of appropriation of so-called foreign techniques (to which Cortázar also refers) derives from Argentina’s eccentricity in relation to the European tradition—its position at the margins of the cultural center, looking in.3 Thus the Irish, or the Jews, Borges writes, are able to approach traditional canons with inventive ease because those traditional canons (mainly the English and German in these cases) have never really belonged to them, at least not in the sense that these canons have rewarded an investment in them with any kind of cultural, let alone political power.
Gilles Deleuze makes of this eccentricity (he calls it “becoming minor”) the very essence of style. “A style is managing to stammer in one’s own language. It is difficult, because there has to be a need for such stammering. . . . Being like a foreigner in one’s own language.”4 He’s talking, like Borges, of writing within your language, but from the sidelines, or from underground, as if it were foreign, as if you were an alien, or alienated from the benefits of the native.
For his part, Julio explains that “The good writer is that person who partially modifies a language. It is the case of Joyce modifying a certain way of writing in English.”5 Invention is at work, I would argue, in that the language is made new not because you actually go out and learn a new language, but simply by adjusting the relationships among elements (you, native tongue, native land).
Now, Julio once attempted to distinguish between the task of the writer in bourgeois societies – to which, he writes, “the good writer is almost invariably in opposition” – and that of the writer in revolutionary society: “within which the writer must situate himself constructively, criticizing to edify and not to lay low.”6 But already in that essay, already in 1969, Cortázar confessed that this differentiation of the writer’s tasks had caused and would probably continue to cause him “no few conflicts.” If so, maybe that was in part because those terms, plugged into that essay and following the prevailing vocabulary of the time, were already too neat and rotund, too abstracted from the particulars of daily life as experienced by human beings around the world — whether the nation states of which they are citizens or residents call themselves “socialist” or “bourgeois”, “free,” “democratic,” “capitalist,” or “communist.”
In a little book written 1959, the year of the Cuban revolution, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, at the time living in Detroit, Michigan, was able to write the following: “In one department of a certain plant in the U.S. there is a worker who is physically incapable of carrying out his duties. . . . The workers in that department have organized their work so that for nearly ten years he has had practically nothing to do. . . .this is the socialist society.”7
I know it means taking a brief detour from Julio, but look more closely at what James does to the term “socialist society.” First he fills the term up with an ongoing process that pushes all the static “thingness” out of it. Then he sticks that process into the middle of the nation state, which perhaps epitomizes the anti-socialist society and thus drains “socialist society” of its connotations of all or nothing Manicheism. Perhaps the names and concepts Cortázar used obscure the actual facts of daily life that might contradict, or at least, complicate those names.
If so, this would be a problem of thought and discourse and vision. Yet as such, it parallels closely the problem of politics that C. L. R. James describes so plainly in Facing Reality. There too, abstract representations (unions claiming to represent worker desire, political parties claiming to represent popular will, states claiming to represent people or citizens), like the abstract representations “bourgeois” and “socialist” used by Cortázar (and like the abstractions against which William James cautioned [Ù50]), prevail over complex, dynamic processes far too rich in detail and variation to lend themselves to representation, at least by any of the representational devices available at that time.
Of course, C. L. R. James can still see that there are, by and large, two different kinds of society, two different ways of organizing the activities necessary for the production and reproduction of life. But he prefers narrative to theory, verbs to nouns.
So, one way of organizing is characterized by authoritarian, top-down decision making structures, by manipulation and deceit, where brute force is necessary to ensure submission to the regimes dictated by those in power. This way of organizing is found, James points out, in the national governments of the world (however they may style themselves), in trade unions, official party organizations. The leaders or representatives in this regime, from shop foreman to US president, operate by abstracting themselves from the material processes of daily life, instead dictating to others upon whose freedom and autonomy they thereby encroach and the results of whose work they thereby take.
The other manner of organizing, that event that James calls socialist society, is present wherever we see cooperation and self-organization in the production of goods for use; it is present whenever we hear dialogue and witness experimentation; it is present in every affirmation of autonomy from abstract programs and dogmas [Ù60].
In other words, for C. L. R. James, wherever you open your eyes, look deeply at a particular situation and see these values and forces operating there you have what ought to be called “socialist society.” This event or process called “socialist society” bursts through the abstracting, regimenting forces of bourgeois society. In “socialist society,” representational relationships are eluded in favor of more direct and immediate – to say nothing of practical – forms of organization, expression and activity.
In the same way, James’ vision, his thought and discourse elude the abstractions that briefly snared Julio preferring instead the narration of particulars, Cortázar’s usual realm. Julio always said he knew nothing of politics. In this sense, he was right (though not in the sense usually intended by those observers who think that Cortázar’s leftist sympathies are evidence that he knew nothing, and so, that he should have restricted himself to writing fantastic fiction).
For James, this was the new society, the future in the present, the struggle for happiness, as he elsewhere named this process. It was constant and in constant motion. You couldn’t see it if you were looking through the lens of large, blocky, static and abstract concepts like nation-states, or “the” revolution.
“Theories,” Jane Jacobs advises, “are powerful tools only in the limited sense that the Greek mythological giant Anteaeus was powerful. When Antaeus was not in intimate contact with the earth, his strength rapidly ebbed.” 8 James’ “socialist society” resembles the roiling surface of boiling water: bubbles surface here, vanish, and reappear elsewhere, but there’s always a bubble somewhere. It’s hard to say with much certainty, even with an intimate knowledge of the depth and surface conditions, where or when the next bubble will appear. So the most we can do, James thought, was first, to be sure to notice and report the fact of the bubbles, and their attendant conditions, in all their complex, dynamic particularity and second, nourish the conditions for their proliferation in any given instant. Keep up the heat.
Maybe James’ vision of a constant and fleeting and darting revolutionary process makes it easier to understand what Julio tried to express to Collazos (and elsewhere) about the politics of his writing, about what he tried to affirm in his writing. Julio’s time and place and his own experiences didn’t furnish him with a political vocabulary of sufficient subtlety. So often in this period, Julio seems – especially to the aficionados of his rich, dynamic prose and of the complex ambiguities of the thought deposited there – like a clumsy, lumbering-if-well-meaning cloddish child, or worse, like an adolescent puppet stridently channeling the “extremist” voices of his time.
But I suspect that Julio sensed, somewhat inarticulately, that the socialist society he committed himself to was exactly what C.L.R. James described. Maybe the difficulty of situating his life and writing in political terms stems, thus, from the untimeliness of his understanding relative to the available positions and vocabularies of his situation.9 (James, for that matter, remained a left-wing outsider his entire life.).
If you doubt that Julio’s vision of “socialist society” meshes with what James describes, then consider, as you read and reread his fiction, the ways in which the values put forth in James’ vision come through and suffuse Cortázar’s invented world. This world includes, of course, many kinds of processes, many kinds of characters, many attitudes. But I believe one can see that as a writer he almost invariably affirms autonomy, experimentation, and “self-realization, creativity” (James), and rejects (sometimes by satirizing and sometimes by dramatizing the violence, or sadness, or futility of) egotism, competition, authority, and conformity to external powers.
Cortázar turned up the heat on that pot of simmering water by practicing and encouraging others to practice “invention that is born, as the fabulous animals were born, from the faculty of creating new relations between elements that are dissociated in daily life.”10 Thus Cortázar describes the task of the revolutionary writer in relation to his or her reality in a way very similar to C. L. R. James. Both believed that task to be extending the socialist society by forging connections (in language and via other media) between otherwise isolated instances. Cortázar called this revolutionary rearrangement of the given—here and elsewhere—invention. Cortázar would later describe this revolutionary idea of invention as the seed of 62: A Model Kit in two brief essays, “Broken Doll” and “Glass with Rose”—the very novel critics like Collazos condemned as an escapist, formalist detour.11
1 For example, see Jean Franco, “The Crisis of the Liberal Imagination,” Ideologies and Literatures 1.1 (1977): pp. 5-24.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura: algunos malentendidos a liquidar” in Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literature, Ed. Oscar Collazos (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), p. 40. In a 1956 letter to Octavio Paz, upon reading the latter’s work The Bow and the Lyre, Cortázar spoke of the importance of this stance: “Octavio, I think you’ve displayed in your book what seems to me to be the most profound characteristic of the Latin American thinker and essayist. . . . I’m referring to that possibility we’ve been given (and which we until now have made little use of) of knowing and exploring a theme from all its angles, without the inevitable reduction to a single way of thinking, to a given culture, that is the fatal sign of European thinkers.” Julio Cortázar, “A Octavio Paz” July 31, 1956, Cartas 1: 1937-1963, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), p. 337.
3 Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición” in Obras Completas I (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1996), pp. 267-75.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 4.
5 Julio Cortázar, Cortázar por Cortázar (México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978), p. 21 and Julio Cortázar, Conversaciones con Cortázar (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1979), p. 66.
6 Julio Cortázar, “Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura: algunos malentendidos a liquidar” in Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literature, Ed. Oscar Collazos (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), p. 53.
7 C. L. R. James, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1958), p. 33.
8 Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. ix.
9 There is no single letter in the extant correspondence that supports this view in full. However, throughout the correspondence of 1968 and 1969, in particular in letters to Roberto Fernández Retamar and Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist whose rift with the Cuban revolution grew beginning in 1968, Julio seems to be struggling to articulate his relationship – at once simple and complex — to the most pressing political questions of his time. See Julio Cortázar, Cartas 2: 1964-1968, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000): pp. 1217-1303 and Cartas 3: 1969-1983, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000): pp. 1323-1370.
10 Julio Cortázar, “Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura: algunos malentendidos a liquidar” in Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literature, Ed. Oscar Collazos (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), p. 55.
11 Julio Cortázar, “Broken Doll” and “Glass with Rose” in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Trans. Thomas Christenson (San Francisco: North Point, 1986).