how to be surprised
The painter and the poet like the scientific inquirer know the delight of discovery.
– John Dewey1
At one point, Polanco repeatedly submerges an electric shaver (plugged-in and running) into a bowl of porridge.2
It’s the sort of experiment that my kids Owen and Adam, when they were 8 or 9 years old, used to have in mind when they’d ask “Can we make an experiment?” They’d proceed to mix dish soap, dirt, worcester sauce, sticks, rusted nails, baking soda, cumin, and in the springtime grass, into a large pot, watching and laughing and exchanging observations. Sometimes we would heat it up, and sometimes we’d put it out on the frozen, snowy back porch.
These kinds of experiments, using various elements, occur frequently in Julio’s world – later in the novel, another experiment, for which the shaver and porridge is the model, will involve a canoe and a lawn mower engine. With great sobriety and sense of purpose, a character will imitate the scientific attitude.
Childhood and beginner’s mind call precisely for an experimental attitude, an attitude of not knowing ahead of time what will happen, of setting familiar elements (“heterogeneous objects” as is said of the porridge and the shaver) into motion in unfamiliar relationships or mixtures and discovering what arises.
Julio was not against the scientific spirit [Ù4, 33]. The universe of Roberto Arlt, one of the Argentine authors whose forming influence he acknowledged, is populated with amateur scientists and inventors. Julio thought invention and science were so central to Arlt because he lived through the beginning of Julio’s century—an era when science, via capital, would realize nightmares (Arlt would have been eighteen at the end of the First World War) and also provide the only escapes from them.3
But I should specify that what I think draws Julio to the scientific is the experimental spirit. It is not the potential mastery of nature for good or evil. It is not the exactitude of method. It is not the quest for truth or knowledge. It is the experimental attitude toward the world.
This explains why there are no successful scientists in Julio’s universe. If his scientists pretend to master nature for their own ends, Julio gently mocks them with failure. If his scientists pretend to be rigorous and exacting in their experiments, Julio lets us know that this just goes with playing the role, like an accent or a costume. But he never mocks the experimental vision and energy with which his scientists dive into the swirling world of things. My friend Bill Paulson reminds me that something like Julio’s stance here is a good thing for us “culture” types to remember.
This experimental fever shows itself more in the shapes of Julio’s books than in the cast of characters. This may be because it is not the scientist as scientist that is interesting to Julio, but the fire of experimentation that burns within the scientist, as it does within any great artist. John Dewey: “. . . one of the essential traits of the artist is that he is born an experimenter. Without this trait he becomes a poor or a good academician.
The artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes aesthetically dead. Only because the artist operates experimentally does he open new fields of experience and disclose new aspects and qualities in familiar scenes and objects.”4
That Julio was “a born experimenter” you can see from the variety of genres in which he worked: short story, critical essay, novel, play, mixed media collage. But at least as significant is the experimental variety that he introduced into each of these genres. Thus, Hopscotch is already a different novel than The Winners, but it is also different than any other novel. Ultimo Round is a different collage book than Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, but it is also different than any other collage book.
From one perspective, experiments—especially the kind favored by Julio, Owen, and Adam—may seem like a pointless waste of time, energy, and materials. They lead to no immediately or broadly useful knowledge or technical application. Plus, they are messy and amateur scientists have a way of not cleaning up after themselves [Ù11, 20]. So no, they are not practical in the utilitarian sense.
But they are practical perhaps on a different, though no less vital dimension. For they exercise my capacity for perceiving the experimental possibilities in all situations, even the most well-grooved and familiar. To cultivate and strengthen this faculty leads me, in turn, to open my self up to the possibility of newness and of renewal and can likewise help to subdue my fear of change, and my attachment to the usual states of things.
Far from an exclusively private and spiritual improvement (of which so many are offered these days in our world) this sort of exercise is an indispensable precondition to undertaking changes in the material circumstances of my life and society. To live peacefully with the flux of being alive, and to change my habits (the position of my bookcases, my partner, my job, or the relations of production) require me first, consciously or not, to grasp the possibility of change, of mixing things that ought not be mixed, of separating things that ought not be separated. Even more importantly, to gain practice in accepting, and even rejoicing in, that variety of change that we call “surprise,” especially when it is brought by others.
Discover joy, then, in what happens when you start to put shavers into porridge, when someone eating a chocolate bar accidentally bumps into you as you stroll down the street with a jar of peanut butter:
“Hey! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”
“Hey! You got peanut butter on my chocolate!”…
And discover joy also when a stranger becomes a door through which the new and never imagined bursts into your life.
1 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 138.
2 Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1973), pp. 141-145. In Spanish: 62: Modelo para armar [1968] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), pp. 144-150.
3 Julio Cortázar, “Roberto Arlt: Apuntes de relectura” [1981] Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 257.
4 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 144 [en español: El arte como experiencia (México: Fondo de cultura económica, 1949)], mi traducción