the grammar of empathy
I watch as a dull, painful fog rises to envelope and separate Nicole and Marrast.1 They speak to each other tenderly, but absently. Julio here, when they are not talking, shifts the narrative perspective so that both Nicole and Marrast get to think their own thoughts in the first person.
It’s not unusual in his prose, and he certainly didn’t invent the technique. At first, the shifts give you a sense of the gap between what each is thinking in his or her head, privately, unspoken, and what they actually send out into the world with their little verbal sallies. You get a heightened sense of the lack of communication between them. That’s the matter he has represented here and it produces an effect of sadness for them, maybe frustration at their emotional paralysis, perhaps also desire for greater empathy and communication. That’s when the magic of what Julio achieves as a by-product of this manner of representation kicks in.
I remember him talking about the story “Nurse Cora” in which this technique of shifting perspectives attains virtuoso levels, switching even within a single sentence.2 He said that in that story he was just trying to see if he could pull it off. It was an experiment, an exercise.
But here, in these sad scenes between Nicole and Marrast, the technique does for me what it so effectively shows them to be incapable of doing for each other: namely, to feel the compassion that arises when I can shed the protective skin of fear or guilt and the lenses of my own perspective and slip imaginatively (but not acquisitively) into that of an other [Ù9, 16, 22, 30, 44, 81].
“Love,” writes Thomas Merton, “demands a complete inner transformation. . . . We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our being, our own self. No matter how hard we try, we resist this death: we fight back with anger, with recriminations, with demands, with ultimatums. We seek any convenient excuse to break off and give up the difficult task [Ù27].”3
No wonder. This experiment can be scary. I must accept what feels at least at first like total vulnerability (not that my sense of self could ever truly protect me). What if I am rejected? What if I am left alone here? What if through the other’s eyes I see that I must make changes? But the effect of accepting this vulnerability is the rushing feeling of tremendous growth, far beyond the dimensions permitted by a cramped and clinging sense of self.
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen monk, makes the same point in a chapter of his Teachings on Love called “True Love”: “To understand you have to become one with your beloved, and also one with your so-called enemy. You have to worry about what they worry about, suffer their suffering, appreciate what they appreciate. You and the object of your love cannot be two. They are as much you as you are yourself.”4
Elsewhere, he stresses that this is not a theoretical point to be grasped only intellectually. Instead, we must see that “Our own life is the instrument through which we experiment with truth.”5 Julio once tried to explain that sexuality becomes invention at the moment that one sees one’s own pleasure as inseparable and conditioned upon the pleasure of another.6
I don’t know if Julio himself lived this way, though everyone I’ve talked to who knew him well agrees that he did, even when they agree on little else. Certainly, much of his writing exercises this capacity, explores it, experiments with it, using and abusing rules of grammar and syntax as a means of overcoming the condition of the skinny, embarrassed cats.
It is among the qualities that drew him to Keats, the chameleonic, Keats sense of being invaded or permeated by other beings. [Ù16] I think about it this way. If I write, if I tell stories with language (and who doesn’t?), and if language is made of words that include subjects (nouns), objects (nouns) and actions (verbs), then “direct practice-realization” of the interconnectedness of beings should involve experimenting with ways of telling the same story through the senses and words of various participants.
Such experiments would then constitute an exercise in the capacity to perceive and feel and think from the position of others, outside my own. This exercise helps me to approach the complex ways in which beings are connected to each other so that I might better measure my words and deeds in relation to their effects on the beings around me.
1 Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1973), pp. 75-83. In Spanish: 62: Modelo para armar [1968] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), pp. 75-84.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Nurse Cora,” All Fires the Fire, Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 65-89. In Spanish: “La señorita Cora,” Todos los fuegos el fuego [1966] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 548-563. He discussed the story with Evelyn Picon Garfield in 1973: Julio Cortázar, Cortázar por Cortázar, with Evelyn Picon Garfield (Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978), p. 78.
3 Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers (New York: New Directions, 1960), pp. 18-19.
4 Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love (Berkeley: Parallax, 1997), p. 66.
5 Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley: Parallax, 1998), p. 8.
6 Julio Cortázar, Cortázar por Cortázar, with Evelyn Picon Garfield (Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978), p. 69.ure my words and deeds in relation to their effects on the beings around me.