inventing the city
A first approach to the city in Julio’s universe. Striking and maddening to many readers of Julio’s novels are his narrators’ typical presumption of familiarity with the street names and landmarks of cities, especially Paris. Horacio or Juan or Bruno or whoever it might be tells the story of wandering through the city as though every reader knows the Canal St. Martin, or the Rue de Vaugirard. It feels at first like a kind of exclusive name dropping: are you in the club that knows these place names or not?
But I feel pretty sure that Julio didn’t really think of place names this way; that he knew that his readers didn’t all know the names and that he didn’t want communication to depend upon it. He probably didn’t care one way or the other whether they did or did not.
If there is a feeling of being excluded when you read this I think it comes less from the evocation of a club of initiates and more from the absolute, intimate, singular privacy of the itineraries that those names stake out like push pins on a map. Horacio or Juan know these place names and don’t bother to explain them because they are so familiar with them and because, after all, their thoughts are their own. It works for his characters a bit the way certain clichés and commonplace phrases work in Julio’s writing to evoke for you a whole setting and situation. They work because sometimes the names do stand, richly, for something complex of which they are merely a piece. [Ù45, 50]
At any rate, these private itineraries, almost invariably unpremeditated, seem to be Julio’s preferred approach to the city and also suggest what so attracts him about cities.
The city, repeatedly engaged by way of the private stroll, holds in beautiful tension difference and repetition, the new and the familiar, the surprising and the expected. Frequently enough the routes are repeated ones, but often also some detail has changed, disappears, or appears for the first time and, even if it doesn’t, the unfolding, immanent nature of the stroll always holds out the possibility at least of something new.
Here Julio seems independently to have discovered the Situationist dérive, or drift, through the city, by which this group would plot “psychogeographies” or points of psychic, social, economic, and emotional attraction and repulsion over the conventional map of the city.1
Here also Julio invents the city by reconfiguring the relation between the walker and the city space: always the same elements, never the same results. Finally, Julio shows his obvious preference for the subjective and experiential. His characters don’t walk with maps in their hands, they don’t plot ahead of time the shortest route from A to B, often times because they aren’t trying to get anywhere and, even if they are, they seem to choose routes that offer the richest probability of delay and detour.
Despite this predilection for wandering, I can also see where a map and its view could hold some value for Julio’s vision of the city.
You enter the city through many doors, and if it is beautiful to let yourself be carried along by an invisible divining rod that gently leads us toward this or that corner, tilting us then in directions and zigzags and retreats and even into resolute boomerangs that bring us back to the starting point, there is also a more definite manner of advance, following in the footsteps of someone who has lived in that neighborhood and lets us see it through verses or crimes or hotel rooms; imagining that you’re following his steps, looking and seeing things through his eyes . . . suddenly there’s another way of seeing things, the choices become different, the reason of the route ceases to be the route of reason and becomes a pact, a date, a recurrence.2
At least a map of sorts. Maybe the city exists only as itinerary for the character whose sense and mind we tend to see it through. But the implied or actual multiplication of such individuals and their memories suggest the viewpoint of a map on which would be superimposed innumerable transparencies marking individual itineraries.
These, seen together in a single moment, would generate a web of seemingly infinite complexity. This would be a special figure to Julio because junctions – like relations in general – fascinated him, as did the attempt to discover or invent the secret laws governing these apparently chance encounters. [Ù19, 23] Maybe he didn’t need a map exactly. But I bet he enjoyed the counterpoint of the superimposed itineraries so as to situate and balance the nearly exclusively private, nearly solipsist, relation that some of his protagonists set up with the city.
There in the tension created by multiple colliding itineraries the city-as-site-for-invention shows itself most strongly. This is certainly the case with Horacio and La Maga’s chance wandering and encounters in Hopscotch. Or with the cast of 62: A Model Kit or A Manual for Manuel.
But this dynamic might be most tightly dramatized in “Manuscript Found in a Pocket” from the generally dark 1974 collection of stories Octaedro. In this story the subway – not walking – offers the itinerary. The metro offers Julio a vastly concentrated and so intensified array of individual paths and possible encounters (even though the number of people might be the same and their motivations for going one way or another equally complexly determined, the possible number of paths is limited by the tracks of the subway lines, and so the individual traveler is more likely to share a portion of a path or a terminus with another).3
At any rate, the narrator sets up a game for himself, with rules: “if I liked a woman, if I liked a woman sitting opposite me, if I liked a woman sitting opposite me beside a window, if her reflection in the window crossed glances with my reflection in the window, if my smile in the reflection in the window disturbed or pleased or repelled the reflection of the woman in the window. . . . Those were the rules of the game, a smile in the window glass and the right to follow a woman and hope desperately that her connection would coincide with one decided on by me before each trip . . . the possibility that everything would coincide some day, woman and window glass, accepted or rejected smile, train connection, and then finally yes, then the right to go over and say the first word.”4
Here the subway conspires with the rules of the game [Ù13] and the unknown motivations, desires and plans of another traveler to lay down a kind of matrix from which an encounter might be born. It serves, among other things, to emphasize the myriad tiny and large events, circumstances, desires and decisions required – always required, not just in this artificial setting – for a meeting between human beings to take place. The narrator in the story even stresses, as a kind of emotional and social backdrop, the inward, private, even aggressively private, nature of the usual itinerary.
It is as though he is asking: given that we travel alone, given that we learn with greater or lesser ease to prefer it that way, to avoid the delays and entanglements of contact, how is it possible to make contact? He is like Horacio, or the engineer in “The Southern Thruway” [Ù27, 49] He even seems to glimpse, like the engineer, the ways in which the inventions of convenience and speed characteristic of modernity diminish the possibility of human contact.
You may well feel that meeting someone can and ought to be a much more direct and simple process than what this narrator seems to require. Maybe so, at least for the healthy and balanced soul, at least in unusually healthy circumstances. But if this narrator, like Horacio, is unhealthy or unbalanced, it is at least partly in that he acts as a hypersensitive barometer registering the ill-health of the world in which he lives, that world where contacts seem, in fact, to require massively complex arrangements or set-ups, or equally massive, and mystifying, forces of chance.
Like many of Julio’s tragic heroes, or anti-heroes, he is damaged by solitude, cursed with a little knowledge of how his world exacerbates that solitude, and unable to see any means to combat the it other than through some kind of invention (in Julio’s sense of a rearrangement of the given) of those same baleful elements of the modern. Hence this narrator’s manipulation of the logic of the subway, or the engineer’s manipulation of the logic of the traffic jam, or Horacio’s of the streets of Paris.
However you may feel about its narrator and his strange game, “Manuscript” offers a concentrated picture of the way in which movement through the city gives Julio a situation through which to explore the dynamics of solitude, alienation and encounter in the intensely modern world that has eroded community as the price paid to maximize individual mobility and productivity.
Chance, in part at least, so fascinates Julio, and plays such a large role in these scenarios in particular, because chance opens a kind of door to hope. Since an element of chance – or randomness or chaos or, as Wendell Berry puts it: “mystery”5 – has of late been identified as essential to the operation of living systems, there is a very real sense in which the attempt to squeeze it out of our lives and world is suicidal [Ù2].
That is, where it appears that the operation of reason and logic, precisely in the understandable effort to minimize the random catastrophe, have led to the modern state of affairs, it is chance – the name given to the apparent suspension of rationality – that seems to offer a tear in the fabric so that a meeting might take place.6
In Julio’s world, at any rate, it is vital that the chance that works here be no deus ex machina, but rather a chance that arises, exists, and operates from within the machinery of the rational and logical regime. Because it is clear that for Julio there is no getting outside of that machine (even – as is not at all evident – if it were desirable to do so). So chance must rise like a vaporous by-product from between the cracks of some tiny desajuste – a traffic jam, a pause in front of a shop window that allows the other to turn the corner – in the regular operation of the laws that govern our solitude.
It can seem a bit passive and thus, to a certain habit of mind, risky to stake community on such apertures and opportunities. But I see it as the kind of passivity taught in the East, wu wei, the doing in non-doing, that exploits shi, or the propensity of things and situations [Ù76].7 After all, it’s hardly betting on a longshot to wait for a breakdown, albeit temporary, in the machine – they happen hundreds of times a day.
An 82 year-old Detroit suburbanite, an alumna of the University of Michigan with whom I had just shared a rain-drenched, flat-tired excursion to a closed archaeological site in Belize succinctly summed up the lesson in a shy whisper when I had asked her how she felt about our day: “I have a saying for this kind of thing, Santiago. I call them A.F.G.O.: another fuckin’ growth opportunity.” I just have to understand these crises as opportunities to establish, however briefly, an autonomous zone in the gap, a zone where community becomes possible, and then to record and retain the memory and the lesson until the next inevitable moment of opportunity.
1 Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City(Barcelona: ACTAR and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996).
2 Julio Cortázar, Paris: Essence of an Image, photo. Alecio Andrade, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (Geneva: Rotovision, 1981), no page numbers.
3 Julio Cortázar, Conversaciones con Cortázar, with Ernesto González Bermejo (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1978), p. 46.
4 Julio Cortázar, “Manuscript Found in a Pocket,” We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Aventura, 1984), pp. 253-254. In Spanish: “Manuscrito hallado en un bolsillo,” Octaedro [1974] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 65-73.
5 Wendell Berry, “Letter to Wes Jackson,” Home Economics (New York: North Point, 1995), pp. 3-5.
6 Julio Cortázar, Conversaciones con Cortázar, with Ernesto González Bermejo (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1978), p. 46.
7 Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965), pp. 22-23, 28-29; Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things, Trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1995).e where community becomes possible, and then to record and retain the memory and the lesson until the next inevitable moment of opportunity.