inventing change
The island at noon is the dream of Marini, an airline steward. It is also what he sees on his thrice-weekly route from Rome to Teheran. The island at noon is Xyros, a golden turtle barely emerging from the deep blue waters of the Aegean. Marini’s life consists of repetition: the same airline routes, the same women in different cities, the meals he eats, even his periodic sightings of the island at noon as he flies overhead.
Soon the island assumes the force of a possible future. Marini begins to plan a visit. Before long, the island crowds out his habitual satisfactions and he finally borrows money to make the voyage, initially just for a vacation. But we might already suspect that deep down, another part of him knows he’ll never leave it. It’s just that it can be so hard to make decisions when it seems that the whole future is staked on them. Once he’s there though, he can admit to himself that he’ll never leave. He gets to know the fisherman who inhabit the island and expects that soon they will accept him as one of their own.
Lying among the rocks near the beach, the sun hot overhead, his reverie is interrupted by the sound of an approaching airplane. He knows that it is his plane, the plane he used to work on and he closes his eyes against the past. When he opens them again, the plane suddenly veers into a nosedive and plummets toward the sea.
By the time he reaches the beach, only the tail of the plane remains visible, 100 meters from shore. Marini swims out to the wreckage where he manages to grab a drowning man, dressed in the white uniform of an airline steward, and pull him to shore.
But the man is dead of a gaping throat injury “that called to Marini, yanking him from his little happiness of so few hours on the island, it shouted to him between gurgles something that he could no longer hear.”1
In the next scene, the fishermen run to the beach and discover only the mangled body of a dead airline steward. They don’t understand how he was able to make it to shore on his own with such a terrible injury seeing as how they were, as always, alone on the island.
Somehow then Marini-alive-and-enjoying-the-island becomes Marini-dead-on-the-beach [Ù37, 40]. I think this fantastic transformation begins the moment that Marini, having arrived at his plan for staying on the island, looks at his watch and then, “with a gesture of impatience, rips it from his wrist and puts it in the pocket of his bathing suit. “It wouldn’t be easy,” he reflects, “to kill the former man, but there up high, tense with sun and space, he felt the enterprise was possible.”2
Right there I begin to suspect that things will not end well for Marini. If only he knew how language tends to become reality in Julio’s universe, if only he knew he were a character in one of Julio’s stories, he wouldn’t be so careless with his wishes! For he’s falling into a trap that is almost always fatal in Julio’s universe: the trap of purity [Ù27, 57]. Not content with the slow gray transformation of his life, impatient for the clean break that seems to lend itself to easy analysis, the steward fails to understand that whatever transformation is possible in Julio’s universe can only come through a gradual invention of existing elements.
The violence of eradicating the old, of cutting it out like a cancer, that sort of permanent transcendence can’t happen in Julio’s world, in Marini’s world. The struggle to invent your self never ends.
But Marini doesn’t get it. Understandably he’s tempted to look at the plane in which he use to fly, maybe to second guess his decision. But instead of accepting the impulse, he tries to repress it as a stain on the new: “it would not be easy to kill the former man.”
Who knows what would have happened if he’d never closed his eyes to the past, if he hadn’t needed to “kill the former man” in order to invent a new one. I know from reading Julio that if the inventor – the person who would discover something new – pretends that the past, the old, the given, doesn’t exist, then she deprives herself of the only resources available for invention [Ù34].
If Marini believes he needs to kill the former man to make a new one, then he will be left with no man at all. And this is what happens. He looks in spite of himself and it is precisely then that the plane, carrying “the former man,” begins to crash. It all happens as if he caused the plane crash by his unhealthy desire to kill “the former man.” Of course, there might be something understandably desirable in Marini’s determination not to look back with nostalgia on his past. But he allows this determination to pass over into violence, into a disavowal of something that exists and works, whether he wants it to or not, within him. He lacks balance.
And this intolerance for the grays that suffuse even the most dramatic revolutions in our lives and worlds can’t, in Julio’s universe, go without consequences. Marini is something like the chaste priest who erupts into pedophilia or the political revolutionary who assumes a brutal ascetic stance – like Valentin before he is transformed in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman – harshly crushing every evidence of the complexity of desire in him.
In Julio’s universe, Marini’s pathological, dualist purism, his absolutist belief that his two “selves” could in fact be separated (how else could he actually wish to kill the old self) materializes briefly (as he drags his own body to shore) and then collapses in on itself, as though the universe were granting him his horrifying wish to kill the former man.
Making something new, for Julio and for those subject to the ethical laws of his universe, can only be seen as a process without end. The two young women in “Story With Spiders” learn this the hard way. They confidently set out for a Caribbean island, looking to leave the past behind them: “If that comes back we waft it away like a puff of smoke, the slight movement of a hand that clears the air.”3 But by the end of their stay: “we know everything was useless, the running away, the trip, the hope of still finding a dark hollow without witnesses. . .”. Useless not because one can never make something new. Useless rather because the process of trying to make something new without inventively engaging the past dooms one to be haunted by it.
Hence his insistence in political fora, for example, on the unexamined and untouched pockets of reaction among the revolutionary contingent [Ù59]. Those pockets of reaction consist not of desire, but of unacknowledged desire, of desire against which violence has been done in the service of a colorless destination. If he relentlessly sought out those pockets of unexamined reaction, it was not in the belief that they could ever be fully eradicated, but as a knight come to rescue desire from the minions of seriousness. In the end, Julio wrote and lived as if any revolution worth the name comprises nothing more than the endless activity of releasing desire from the forces that would block and crush it.
1 Julio Cortázar, “The Island at Noon,” All Fires the Fire, Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 98. In Spanish: “La isla al mediodia,” Todos los fuegos el fuego [1966] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 569.
2 Julio Cortázar, “The Island at Noon,” All Fires the Fire, Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 97. In Spanish: “La isla al mediodia,” Todos los fuegos el fuego [1966] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 568. Gustavo Pellón reads the story differently in “Cortázar and the Idolatry of Origins,” Julio Cortázar: New Readings, Ed. Carlos Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 125-126. Terry Peavler provides an introductory summary of the story set in the context of a discussion of the fantastic in his Julio Cortázar (Boston: Twayne, 1990), pp. 36-37.
3 Julio Cortázar, “Story With Spiders,” We Love Glenda So Much, We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Aventura, 1984), pp. 17-29. In Spanish: “Historia con migalas,” Queremos tanto a Glenda [1980] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 338-345.activity of releasing desire from the forces that would block and crush it.