choosing your final round
I’ve got only one book with me in Paris, and I’m tempted to leap to a section of it I know well, on which I could write easily. But the familiar section is not in front of me. In front of me, in my hands, is the book itself.1
Here. Look at it with me. See that the book is cut horizontally in two; two books, each with exactly the same number of pages, under one cover. The smaller book, call it “planta baja” or “ground floor,” fills the lower third of the book in my hands. Just above it, filling the upper two thirds, sharing the same cover but otherwise disconnected from the “ground floor” is the “primer piso” or “first floor.” Notice that Ultimo round, the physical object, was produced with deliberation and care, and, apparently, without much thought for the profit to be gained by printing it thus. Siglo Veintiuno, the book’s original publishing hosue, still publishes Ultimo round. But for some time now, the book appears in two slim pocket volumes, volume one corresponding to the “primer piso” and volume two to the “planta baja”. Talk about the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction [4, 11]!
I pause for a moment before I turn the next page. How should I read this book? It’s not just that the book braids words and images. Lots of texts do that. It’s that I am literally holding two books within one binding. Do I read page 1 of the top book and then turn it to page 2? Or do I read page 1 of the top book and then go down to page 1 of the bottom? Do I flip through combinations at random? Or do I invent some elaborate system for determining my moves and then just set it in motion and follow what it dictates? Join me please in going ahead and pausing to consider the possible ways of combining these two paths that wind along next to each other, surprising each other along the way with their consonant or dissonant juxtapositions of texts and images.
Go ahead and pause – both at once … and get used to it, because this sort of moment is all over the place in Julio’s work [36, 67]. It’s typical Cortázar: he’d rather cause us to experience choice than read about it. It is all his work contained in a single moment, not even a single moment of reading, but rather a moment of experience still outside of reading. We’re only in the doorway remember. Typical for that very reason too: because with Julio, the point of reading is always what happens to us when we aren’t reading, when we are on the threshold of book and life. But these effects can only be reaped when we pay deep attention–as these pauses force us to do–to the reading. Julio keeps the windows of literature open, makes it, if you will, a living system, a cell, “a stable structure with matter and energy continually flowing through it.”2 [9, 29, 35].
1 Julio Cortázar, Ultimo round (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969).
2 Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor, 1996), p. 171.