The Work of Julio Cortazar

Whereas Borges commented that Cortazar just tries too hard, I find I really like this earnest aspect of Cortazar's writing. I like how "The Garden of Forking Paths" clips along like an express train. The brisk pace of the story makes it feel more urgent so that when the reader suddenly comes up on the ex-narrator in the velvet chair, it is like skidding to a halt for the end of the story to suddenly change one's mind about everything. I like that disorientation. I guess I find it fun in the same disorienting way that I enjoy roller coasters.

I find "Axolotl" to be more dreamy, but the transformation of perspectives from outside the tank to inside the tank is so subtle that by the time I, as the reader identifying with the narrator, find my self inside the tank looking out, the earnestness of the sweet little Axolotl makes the change in perspectives at once wistful and anxious. I love that disorientation in the same way that I like visiting places from the my childhood that I only dimly remember. And I love reading "Our Demeanor at Wakes" because it is at once so appalling and yet so funny, kind of like watching the Chapelle Show.

Maybe these stories are a little overly earnest, but I suppose I feel a little overly earnest, so it is easy to forgive. Who can ever write like Borges anyway? Aren't we all a little overly earnest in the shadow of his apparently effortless elegance?

So this strange disorientation that Cortazar creates with the twists and turns of his stories os how I feel every day. Sometimes I arrive at a place I have been driving, and I wonder how I got there, or I go to do something I do everyday, but somehow it feels like I have never done it before. In this way, the disorienting twists of Cortazar's stories feel familiar to me and somehow comforting. For example, in "Our Demeanor at Wakes," the idea that these people can fake-it-till-they-make-it so effectively is perversely inspiring. In many cases, this doesn't have to be a bad thing: we can talk ourselves into good things. Quotidian as it is, it is like going to the gym. I drag my feet until I am there, but once I start lifting, it is not so bad, and though I don't want to do it, I can talk very convincingly about why it is so great once I get started. Stealing some body's wake is a terrible example of this, but *funny*.

My views of compassion and sympathy are always challenged in a new way when I read "Axolotl." Actually, they are rather reinforced. I am in complete sympathy that it is through literature that we are taught to appreciate the suffering of people who are different from ourselves, or outside our experience. I find the choice of an axolotl as the vehicle for this sympathy every so poignant because they are so cute, even if they are damp. The idea of being in exile from one's home country is always so sad. I know I will never be able to return to the part of the country that I love, so I always feel a certain poignancy when reading about exile.

I agree with Borges, to an extent, that these stories have a feel of artifice to them, that they do not necessarily flow naturally. The plots are distorted, as in "The Garden of Forking Paths", and the language calls attention to itself, as in "Axolotl", but if I think of these stories as art pieces, not necessarily naturalistic short stories, then I can appreciate them the way I appreciate an Andy Warhol painting, like the soup cans.

Sure it's contrived, but what a cool contrivance, and what a cool idea. Maybe that is what I enjoy most about Cortazar's writing: it is an interesting intellectual exercise where there is a certain suspense about where things will end up.