inventing darkly
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
– Karl Marx, “Theses Concerning Feuerbach”1
What happens to Roberto Michel, the photographer who tells the story “Blow-Up”?2 He feels the need to relieve himself of a story, a need as natural as a bodily function because “something weird” has happened.
Michel feels the gap opened up, the parallel relationship established between the experience (the “something weird” of a boy apparently seduced by a woman on behalf of a man waiting nearby) and the representation (the telling of the experience).
Like his photography, which serves as a lens focusing the issue of language and storytelling and which serves as an escape from “la nada” but also from the “flowing of time”, mimetic production is terrifying in the paralyzing passivity to which it consigns its producer. One falls out of touch, precisely, with the world.
How can one tell actively? Michel asks himself this a propos of what he has witnessed of the story he wants to tell. How can you tell in a way that touches what you are telling, that moves it? How can you tell in a way that changes the world?
It seems, ethically and practically, to be a matter of falling in with the moving course of experience, but also of recognizing and accepting the agency involved: so that the inventor of images or figures (photographic or verbal) needs to make something new of the given experience (to blow up the elements to the point of grainy unfamiliarity, to free the boy from the frozen tableau of seduction).
There is responsibility in this active telling, and therefore also risk, and therefore also fear and anxiety. What if I fail? Or more frightening still, what if events sweep me up with such force that I change and become unknown to myself? Unrecognizable? Will I still able to find my self?
Just as Michel struggles to tell his story without becoming complicit in the detachment it implies, the protagonist of Antonioni’s Blow-Up confronts a similar crisis. In both cases, a kind of truth seems to hover just outside the frame—glimpsed, magnified, doubted.
The photographer in his adaption of Julio’s story is reckless with the power of his camera at the beginning of the film. He learns by the end to respect that power and in doing so may now actively exploit the creative power of his medium.
In between, he photographs a couple in the park. The woman in the couple gets upset with him and asks for the film. Later she comes to see him to get it and is willing to do anything to get it. He sends her off with the wrong film, and she leaves him her wrong phone number.
He develops the film of the couple in the park and blows up several images. He realizes that the couple that appeared to be hugging and so forth when he took the photographs now appear in his blow-ups to be different. She is looking off anxiously toward the bushes. In the bushes, in the grainy blow-up of the bushes, the photographer thinks he sees a face with a gun in its hand. Then, in the photo representing the moment after the woman has discovered him, the man from the couple seems indifferent about the photographer’s presence.
So why does the woman care so much? Lastly, in the photo he took of her running away to where the couple was (but now the man has disappeared), the corpse itself seems to appear lying in the right hand side of another grainy blowup. Certain that he has inadvertently witnessed and photographed a murder, one in which the woman perhaps is implicated (was her lover in the bushes, killing her husband?) he returns to the scene and does indeed appear to find the corpse, or does he? When he tries to relieve himself of his story to his friends at a party, they stop him short or sidetrack him.
The next morning he returns to the park, but the corpse is gone. Instead, some mimes have set up a fake tennis game and their “ball” has “fallen” outside the fence surrounding the tennis court. They motion to the photographer to retrieve it. He accepts their invitation, gets the “ball” and throws it back inside the court.
The soundtrack in the scene has been complete silence until this moment. But now, gradually increasing in volume, we hear the sounds of the mime’s “ball” and “racket”. As the camera pulls back for a long shot of the photographer, he disappears.
The lesson of fashion photography, towards which he assumes such a disdainful and irresponsible attitude at the beginning of the film, is that one sees what one wants to see in images. By the end of the film, he has learned this lesson, activating the possibilities of his own images. The mimes hammer home the lesson: it doesn’t matter whether they are playing with a ball or not, the effect is the same, they draw another into their illusion, which therefore might as well be real. Antonioni confirms this through the magic of film, by conferring upon their game real sounds.
This motif—of invention overtaking and transforming reality—appears throughout Julio’s work, especially in later stories like “At Your Service,” “A Change of Light,” and “Don’t Blame Anyone.” Take “At Your Service” for example.3 There a maid is asked to play the role of a grieving mother at the funeral of a young gay man who was recently very kind to her. At the funeral, amidst the awkward coldness of the deceased’s real friends, she begins to weep, just to play the role. But before long, the feigned tears awaken real feelings and these real feelings in turn make her performance perfect. And a truly perfect performance is no performance at all. She cries exactly as if she were the mother, and she might as well have been. The image becomes reality and I am grateful for Madame Francinet’s invention of a mother for Monsieur Bébé.
Now consider “A Change of Light.” Luciana and the narrator, a radio actor, first fall in love through correspondence. When they finally agree to meet, the narrator brings a powerfully detailed mental image of Luciana that, it turns out, bears no resemblance to her. It turns out that she, too, imagined him different: taller, with curly hair. At first he makes an effort to accept and adjust his visual image. But soon the visual images infect reality and he asks her to dye her hair. Then he adjusts the lamp in a room because she better conforms to his image in the half light of the afternoon sun coming through the window. In the course of this make-over, she grows distant, even as he comes to love more deeply his now materialized image of her. As the story ends, he catches a glimpse of her “holding tightly onto the arm of a man who was taller than I, a man who leaned over a little to kiss her on the ear to brush his curly hair against Luciana’s chestnut hair.”4
Be careful what you invent, Julio tells us here, for inventions have a funny way of becoming real. He’s always said something very close to this. From the very beginning he’s always insisted on the efficacy of invention, on its power to transform the world in which we live [Ù8, 34, 67].
But I notice that in “A Change of Light” or “Trade Winds” or “Summer” or in other stories from the 1970s Julio more often stresses the dark side of the lesson.5 So many of the stories seem to show invention of one sort another like the deadly sweater in “Don’t Blame Anyone”: you just want to put the sweater on because you are cold, but you get all tangled up in it and it winds up killing you [Ù38]. In the earlier stories, the materialization of invention more often seemed innocuous or playful, it seemed more like something to be grateful for.
I can only speculate as to the causes of this shift in emphasis. Julio never explained it in print. Perhaps it was the political situation, which had grown so grave throughout Latin America by the early 1970s. Perhaps it was something in Julio’s personal life. Perhaps it was age. Perhaps it was fame. Who can know for certain?
Whatever the cause, I love, even as I am disturbed by, these late stories because in them Julio accepts fully the power of invention. It’s easy to celebrate invention when it brings joy or surprise. Harder when it threatens. The real test comes when invention darkens, when it disturbs. Then the question arises: do we retreat, deny its power, reassert control? Or do we, like Julio, affirm invention’s full range—its danger as well as its beauty—and still choose to make? Julio accepted it and affirmed it. No matter what it brought, he never retreated into the businessman’s illusion that invention and reality inhabit separate dimensions [Ù9, 39].
1 Karl Marx, “Theses Concerning Feuerbach,” Early Writings, Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 423.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Blow-Up,” Blow-Up and Other Stories, Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), pp. 100-115. In Spanish: “Las Babas del Diablo,” Las armas secretas [1958] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 214-224.
3 Julio Cortázar, “At Your Service,” Blow-Up and Other Stories, Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), pp. 132-160. In Spanish: “Los Buenos Servicios,” Las armas secretas [1958] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 194-213.
4 Julio Cortázar, “A Change of Light,” A Change of Light and Other Stories, We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Aventura, 1984), p. 404. In Spanish: “Cambio de luces,” Alguien que anda por ahí [1977] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 126.
5 Julio Cortázar, “Summer” and “Trade Winds” both in A Change of Light and Other Stories, We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Aventura, 1984), pp. 149-160 and pp. 237-248, respectively. In Spanish: “Verano,” Octaedro [1974] and “Vientos alisios,” Alguien que anda por ahí [1977] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 74-80 and pp. 127-134, respectively. as well as its beauty—and still choose to make? Julio accepted it and affirmed it. No matter what it brought, he never retreated into the businessman’s illusion that invention and reality inhabit separate dimensions [9, 39].