inventing the real
Mario’s problem is that he’s hearing disturbing rumors about the girl he likes – rumors that she poisoned her last two boyfriends.1 There’s just enough ambiguity to nourish gossip, but too much for clear facts to appear. So Mario’s disbelief of the rumors seems legitimate. We know that he aspires to distance himself from the life of his family, which he considers narrow and petty. But besides that, he’s right, people could just be jealous and spiteful because after all, Delia does seem different from others in the town. The fact is, nobody knows for sure how the two former boyfriends died and rumor grows in the absence of firm knowledge.
The trick is, the narrator doesn’t really know either. In fact, the narrator remembers neither Delia nor Mario very well, though that doesn’t stop him from going ahead with the story as though he or she knew. But maybe we don’t notice this at first. Maybe we read it as the real story, not just the latest crystallized link in a chain of rumors.
But the unreliability of this narrator, the elusiveness of the facts in this story, may not make much difference finally. Rumor may well tend to grow in the absence of what we think of as more reliable knowledge. But then it is also true that in the absence of contravening facts, rumor tends to function like knowledge. It tends to produce effects in the world. It tends to shape the world after its own image.
Mario, for example, begins to suspect, somewhere inside, that the rumors about Delia are true. So when she offers him a homemade bon bon, this suspicion gets in the drivers seat and he breaks the bon bon apart in his fingers to reveal the pieces of a dead cockroach. So she was trying to poison him. So she did kill Raul and Hector. Now this could have been an innocent accident, but the rumor machine is whirring and among the effects of its operation is that Mario doesn’t even pause to consider any possibility that doesn’t conform to the knowledge that his suspicion has now become.
The fact, the only fact, is that everything in the story happens as though Delia was some kind of Circe. We witness, then, another instance of the infectious efficacy of invention. Here it takes on a dark hue, but that doesn’t matter. Inventions don’t only produce joyful effects. What matters more is that what seems to be an extraordinary tale of self-fulfilling prophecy may actually be a quite ordinary phenomenon. The people in the story know a little bit. They know that Delia is strange. They know that she had two boyfriends who died mysteriously.
Then, in the space uncovered by what they know they begin to invent stories to account for what they don’t know; stories which wind up convincing. And if they are convincing, and as it turns out, effective, well that’s only because nothing in their world – at least nothing that they can or choose to see in it – contradicts them. There’s no reason – in every sense of the word – to keep firm that line between what they know and what they invent.
Don’t things work this way for us too? This story gives us a taste of what that feels like. We depend heavily, in the dominant arrangements of our lives and world, on the apparently firm reliability of the difference between rumor and fact. But from Julio’s point of view, not only is the knowledge we derive from what we call “facts” less reliable than we tend to assume, but we turn to it with less consistency than we like to pretend. We turn to our inventions as though they were producers of fact.
Julio always seeks out the areas of our existence that knowledge seemed not to have organized yet, or at least not very well. He’s interested in those experiences – the ones we think of as exceptions to the rule – in which life and the world overwhelm the knowledge upon which we would depend in order to manage life and the world.
We might call these moments “crises” or “mysteries”: they are the ones, often times, that decisively reorient our lives. Whatever story – and it’s telling that such stories are called “rationalizations” – we may later tell ourselves about what has happened in those moments, about what has gotten us through them, if we are deeply honest with ourselves we will see that our rational knowledge has been, at least temporarily, disabled [Ù20, 31, 90].
Reason, Julio would admit, gets us part of the way. But we risk ignorance—or tragedy—if we inflate its power, or confuse it with the rest of our equipment for living; if we identify too fully with our rational selves.
Here is yet another reason for the vital importance to Julio of invention in its various forms. It’s not just that invention steps in where our knowledge breaks down. It is that at least part of what we call knowledge – separating it smugly from invention – is invention and works by the same process. Finally if, as this story and so many others suggest, we shape the world in the image of our invention, it would behoove us to invent only such worlds as we would want to live in [Ù61].
1 Julio Cortázar, “Circe,” Bestiario [1951] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 144-154.