inventing love
It’s easier for me to communicate in language the way others do with music or kisses—infectiously, in motion—when I let go of the idea that language must represent something outside itself. I want to communicate that way because communicating that way is the best way to touch others and to be touched, to come together with others in language.
Without that kind of communication, whether I am using language or music or kisses, I am alone (even if I don’t seem to be) with a whole “canefield of words” grown up between me and others.1 Horacio Oliveira and Bruno, the jazz critic in “The Pursuer”, never really took that lesson in under their skins.2 If they had, their stories might have turned out differently. They might not be stories of angels they had loved and lost, but never really touched because they spent their time chasing those angels, trying to capture them in butterfly nets of words.
Their loves, La Maga for Horacio and Johnny Carter for Bruno (never mind that Bruno and Johnny aren’t lovers in the same sense, there’s still love there), were special kinds of people— the kind that leave me feeling there’s another way I could be living. That way might not be so stable or comfortable or secure, but it would bring me instead greater measures of sensation, of emotion, of freedom, and of joy.
I would bet that Bruno and Horacio feel this too. Perhaps they want to capture the angels because they need something in hand if they are going to give up their secure ways of being. La Maga and Johnny don’t have any trouble communicating their way of living. Johnny plays his sax and takes his clothes off and talks nonsense, and La Maga makes jokes and kisses and talks nonsense. In fact, if Bruno and Horacio want what these angels seem to have, its probably partly because Johnny and La Maga have succeeded in communicating something of the delightful, or troublesome, magic they live.
But they haven’t communicated in words, and Bruno and Horacio are, above all, word men. They are very attached to their books and words and so they need to see something represented in language to feel that it is really there and theirs [Ù34]. Not only are they word men, but the world they share with La Maga and Johnny is a word world.
In that world, it is mostly privileged men—white, Western, academic—who’ve historically commanded words (and set the rules for how that command is recognized) and in that world to command words is already to begin, at least, to be able to command others who don’t.
That might be why Bruno and Horacio can occasionally knock Johnny, a black man, and La Maga, a woman, off balance by goading them to try and represent their unique ways of living in words. That’s the only time La Maga and Johnny do have trouble communicating their way of living. Then there’s a missed encounter, no communication. In the end, Horacio drives La Maga away and is thus left with nothing but his verbal picture of her, and Bruno, if he doesn’t drive Johnny away, certainly lets him slip away, into the solitary, fatal spiral of drug abuse. Either way, Bruno too is left with nothing but a biography: a verbal picture of the only “angel” he will know intimately.
But Julio, describing a certain Lucas’ theory of communication, suggests that there is another way for Bruno and Horacio and myself to communicate with our angels without giving up our beloved words:
“as rarefied as the air of his writing might be, as much as some thing can only come and go with great difficulty, Lucas never ceases to verify whether the coming is valid and whether the going takes place without major obstacles. Little he cares about the individual situation of the readers, because he believes in a mysteriously multiform measurement that in the majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and that’s why it isn’t necessary to give ground in either the coming or the going: between him and others there will be a bridge as long as what is written is born of a seed and not a graft. In his most delirious inventions there’s something that at the same time is so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy. It’s not a matter of writing for others but for oneself, but oneself must also be the others. . .”3
If we could see words this way: not as snapshots of things but as things themselves, “coming and going”, that touch people, that produce effects, the way that kisses and music make you shiver or laugh or dance, then perhaps our words would carry the germ of life, infecting and enriching our angels [Ù8, 37, 55, 83, 90]. Perhaps then, instead of caging ourselves – our angels having flown – in verbal representation, we might build bridges connecting us with our angels. Perhaps, then, we might finally come together, change together, and stay.
1 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 21, p. 95. In Spanish: Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch. 21, p. 116.
2 Julio Cortázar, “The Pursuer,” Blow-Up and Other Stories, Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), pp. 161-220. In Spanish: “El perseguidor,” Las armas secretas [1958] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 225-266. Writing to his editor in 1962, in the midst of exchanging drafts of Hopscotch, Julio, however, compared Oliveira not to Bruno, but to Johnny: “Poor Oliveira, che. What a pity for me to have found him again. And what a great guy he is. He got (without me realizing it until the end) to carry all the way to its final consequences of Johnny Carter’s attempt.” Julio Cortázar, “A Francisco Porrúa,” January 5, 1962, Cartas 1: 1937-1963, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), p. 467. Incidentally, one of the interesting impressions to emerge from Julio’s correspondence concerning Hopscotch is the often contradictory variety of characters (or particular, ideas, attitudes, speeches and deeds of characters) from the novel with he identified. [Ù48, 53] For a contemporary critical perspective on “The Pursuer,” see Doris Sommer’s eloquent ethical reading of the story in her essay “Pursuing a Perfect Present,” in Julio Cortázar: New Readings, Ed. Carlos Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 211-236.
3 Julio Cortázar, “Lucas, His Communications,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 16-17. In Spanish: “Lucas, sus comunicaciones,” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 235. ourselves – our angels having flown – in verbal representation, we might build bridges connecting us with our angels. Perhaps, then, we might finally come together, change together, and stay.