reading to be moved
To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality.
– Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander1
Morelli approvingly quotes an art historian who says of Manet’s Olympia “he is working as if modern art were going back to the Middle Ages. The latter understood art as a series of images, replaced during the Renaissance and the modern period by the representation of reality.” This, Morelli muses, brings art closer to what he considers its proper function: the creation of images.
Morelli suggests that to avoid confusion we replace “images” – which connote representations of reality – with “figures.” Because the view that art should represent reality predominates after the Middle Ages, Morelli finds most interesting those artists who are “on the margin of the superficial time of their period, and from that other time where everything conforms to the conditions of figure, where everything has value as a sign and not as a theme of description, they attempt a work which may seem alien or antagonistic to the time and history surrounding them, and which nonetheless includes it, explains it, and in the last analysis orients it toward a transcendence within whose limits man is waiting.”2
Maybe this helps clarify something about Julio’s writing. To make of writing a sign, a marker that orients us and points us in another direction. It doesn’t offer, or pretend to offer, a replica of reality. Instead, it initiates a relationship with reality we’ve not experienced before.
As for Manet, the defining quality of the artist who makes “signs” or “figures” (and not representations of reality) is the inability (or the refusal) to ignore the existence of his so-called “medium.” As Lucas says of language, “this medium is more like three quarters [Ù55].”
It’s probably ultimately not useful to get too attached to the opposition between what Morelli calls representation and what he calls figure. I don’t think that the difference he’s getting at rests on the degree to which the artist tries to portray reality for an audience. I think it has more to do with a connection between the artist’s attitudes toward medium and audience.
Morelli seems to favor a kind of artist—one I also see Julio embodying, who is interested in the medium as a device for provoking certain kinds of actions in his audience. [Ù4, 34] In this sense, and speaking exclusively of artists working in the medium of language, this kind of artist might tend more toward the rhetorician seeking to move his audience to a certain action.
There’s a limit, no doubt, to how far a rhetorician can stray from what his audience considers to be a faithful representation of reality if he is to provoke the desired action. But the key difference is this: for the rhetorician, a faithful representation of reality is simply one possible arrangement among others—one way of composing the medium to provoke action. In some cases, that arrangement might not be the most persuasive.
This seems to be the fundamental difference: whether the artist’s fundamental aim is the accurate depiction of reality or the provocation of an action in the audience. For Morelli “the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.”3
Here, to the degree that Morelli speaks for Julio, it makes sense to see Julio in the costume of the sophist and the prophet. It is said that when the great Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti read “The Pursuer” he went into the bathroom of his house and broke the mirror with a punch. “Nobody,” Julio said of this, “has had a reaction that could move me more.”4
1 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 149.
2 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 116, p. 480. In Spanish: Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), pp. 544-545.
3 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 97, p. 437. In Spanish: Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch. 97, pp. 497-498.
4 Julio Cortázar, Fascinación de las palabras, with Omar Prego (Barcelona: Muchnik, 1985), p. 69.