a certain julio
A thought I suspect the stiff scholar inside me wants to dismiss as unsupportable: Lucas is Julio. A Certain Lucas is his autobiography. But be gone, Professor Beelzebub!
Struggling with the authoritarian in himself, struggling with the fascist that has taken the shape of hydra heads that compel him to have his scotch at a certain time, to keep the paper in the same place, to maintain the correspondence, everywhere poor Lucas turns within himself, and despite his beautiful best intentions, he humbly confronts the fascist within.
Seven heads, one for each decade.” Julio wrote that in the 1970s, entering his sixties. Was it this hypersensitivity to the fascist within—this honest reckoning with the little tyrannies—that made him such a tireless facilitator of freedom in his world, his life, and his writing?
Lucas thinks vaguely that there must be some similarity between him and a guy who wrote a story he read years ago about a fake band in a Buenos Aires movie theater.1 Julio wrote a story about a fake band in a Buenos Aires movie theater. Aha! Take that Professor Beelzebub! Another hint that maybe a certain Lucas is none other than Julio.
What else could Julio’s autobiography have been, after all? Traditional autobiography rests on a firm belief in a stable “I” who lives (“bio”), writes (“auto”), and links the two in language (“graphy”).
Writing in that view would be treated as though it weren’t a medium that creates illusory beings we call “I”, but rather as if it were a pane of glass; a means of faithfully transcribing the pregiven bit of reality named “I”. But Julio, like Henry Miller who wrote almost nothing but fictional autobiography, knows better.
So if Julio were to have written an autobiography, and I’m not saying he did, it might look like A Certain Lucas. To write his own life, then, would be to write the life of an other—to evoke it obliquely by arranging the particular elements that, only from a distance, coalesce into the constellation called “a certain Lucas,” or “a certain Julio Cortázar”.2
1 Julio Cortázar, “Lucas, His Hospitals (II),” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 156. In Spanish: “Lucas, sus hospitales (II),” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 321.
2 It turns out I’ve just bursted through an open door with this discovery. But that’s okay. It’s part of being an academic too. In any event, Jose Miguel Oviedo – I discover after the fact — beat me to this idea by about 25 years. See his essay, “El rostro en el espejo: Para identificar a Un tal Lucas,” Inti 10-11 (1979-1980): pp. 179-87. And something like this is suggested also by Terry Peavler towards the end of Julio Cortázar (Boston: Twayne, 1990) and also, in passing, by Carlos Alonso in his introduction to the collection Julio Cortázar: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).