buried alive
In “Cadaver viviente” [“Living Corpse”], Julio warns against what William James called the abuse of naming [Ù50], using “surrealism” as his case in point.
If a reader were to consider “surrealism” a name for a literary style, movement or school and then, sadly or with relief, catalogue it among other defunct “-isms”, then that reader ought to beware.
Be careful, Julio warns. That way of seeing—and those ways of being—for which the name “surrealism” ought properly to be reserved are not so easily buried. Beware, he advises those soberly inclined over the open grave of surrealism, for it stands behind you and “its joyful necessary shove may throw you in, to know for real this earth that you hate because of your refinement, because you are already dead in a world that no longer depends on you.”1
Strong words, to be sure—youthful, perhaps excessive. Less complicated by the later Julio’s acknowledgment of his own complacencies and conservatisms. But what really strikes me here are two things. First, the insistence, so typical of Cortázar, upon the potential of things to exceed their names. Second, the shift in register – just when he arrives at the crux of his argument – to the narrative mode. At that crucial moment, we get a little scene from a dark tale.
It’s as though, to make that surrealist spirit really strike his reader (just as he predicts that it will), he needed to shift into the more infectious mode of narrative invention.
1 Julio Cortázar, “Un cadaver viviente”[1949] Obra crítica/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 180, my translation.