Questions of the Liminal in the Fiction of Julio Cortazar

Domenic Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198738
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"The great Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar (1914-84) was immersed in one of the most vibrant and revolutionary intellectual scenes of the last century, the Paris of the 1950s and 60s. Yet his often highly cerebral work has never received the close philosophical attention it deserves. Moran's book fills this critical lacuna. Rather than indiscriminately applying 'theory' to Cortazar, it aims to show that his work both engages with and often foreshadows many of the problems which were to become central to so-called poststructuralist philosophy and poetics. This study demonstrates that Cortazar remains enduringly, problematically modern."

Chapter 1

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Rayuela and the Re-righting of Metaphysics

Yet the indistinct intimation of a lost freedom or of a freedom to be regained—Arcadia behind us, Utopia before—hammers at the far threshold of the human psyche. This shadowy pulsebeat lies at the heart of our mythologies and of our politics. We are creatures at once vexed and consoled by a summons just out of reach.

GEORGE STEINER

The Point of it All

Elias Canetti once speculated that

past a certain point in time, history has not been real. Without realizing it, the whole human race seems suddenly to have left reality behind. Everything that has happened since then would no longer be true, but we wouldn’t be able to realize it. Our task and our duty would be to uncover this point, and, until we did, we would have to persist in our present destruction.¹

Rayuela is a fervent quest to identify something like the ‘point’ described by Canetti. Chapter 147 provides the most explicit diagnosis of the cause of the fateful errancy, and metaphorically proposes a solution:

¿Qué epifanía podemos esperar si nos estamos ahogando en la más falsa de las libertades, la dialéctica judeocristiana? Nos hace falta un Novum Organum de verdad, hay que abrir de par en par las ventanas y tirar todo a la calle, pero sobre todo hay que tirar también la ventana y nosotros con ella. Es la muerte o salir volando. (R, 354)

According to this prescription, this point could not simply be that of a single careless deviation from some identifiable via recta. Rather it would at once inaugurate and elude all of the inherited metaphysical, ethical, historical and aesthetic topographies which might seek to isolate it, since it would effectively lie on the threshold of Judaeo-Christian metaphysics and whatever might foreshadow or exceed it. Hence it could not, as the quotation indicates, simply be a question of rearranging the furniture in the house of history, or of removing it all to attempt a complete refurbishment of an unquestionably ‘given’ space, but of completely reconceptualizing the ideas of spatiality and location, building and dwelling (perhaps something more even than this, for are not these notions themselves germane to metaphysics?), a reconceptualizing that would demand nothing less than the seemingly impossible emptying effected by throwing a window out of itself. What is required is a complete deperspectivization or de-framing, which would permit either (and this will prove critical) a return to some lost, unimaginably intimate kernel of truth or being prior to the arrival of Judaeo-Christian metaphysics, or an escape to an intuited but as yet uncharted realm, unblemished by its categories and discourses—that is, to an absolute outside.

Morelli is aware of the enormity of the undertaking, as evidenced by his demand for ‘un contacto con una realidad sin la interposición de mitos, religiones, sistemas o reticulados’ (R, 489). That is, an immediate, original sense of being, undistorted by any strategies of interpretation and representation which would hammer it into false shapes or offer it to us by proxy only, leaving reality ‘itself’ either behind or still in the distance, veiled and expropriated by the very structures which seek to uncover it. Critics of Rayuela unanimously agree that the novel aims to rediscover and restore some primal realitas. They tend not, however, sufficiently to question the feasibility of its attempt to do so, or provide any sustained critique of the ideas of the (lost) origin or the (desired) outside, silently assuming that these are intrinsically attainable, if still unattained ideals.² The aim of this opening chapter is not only to show that this is far from apparent, but also to trace the peculiarly double-edged nature of Rayuela’s rejection of, but simultaneous adherence to, the very metaphysics that it so yearns to abandon. It is, I will suggest, only a thinking of this complex and irreducible ‘double-bind’, rather than any naïve proclamation of its resolution, that might permit a reading of the novel which does not simply succumb to the metaphysical assumptions which it seeks to renounce.

The Impositions of Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger was the first philosopher to question systematically the foundations of Western metaphysics. There is evidence that Cortázar was acquainted with his work, and was influenced by it. Heidegger is referred to directly in Diario de Andrés Fava (DAF, III), and his concept of Sorge (‘Care’) is mentioned in Teoría del túnel (TT, 65); Andrés, the central protagonist of Libro de Manuel, and the fulcrum of its politico-existential theorizing, is a ‘lector de Heidegger’ (LM, 355). It would no doubt be possible to produce a purely Heideggerian reading of Rayuela, given the many similarities between its existential inquiries and those of Being and Time. However, I will limit myself to drawing certain parallels between the two only in order to make visible those unstable junctures at which the trajectories of both works begin to go ‘astray’ and thereby reveal the workings of a very different logic to any which they might have hoped to (re) discover.

For Heidegger, the entire metaphysical tradition, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, has stemmed from and endlessly compounded a forgetting of Being, a forgetting so heedless that its traces are now hardly perceptible.³ Beginning with Platonic idealism and Aristotelian analysis, metaphysics has busied itself with defining, classifying, quantifying and subsuming the world of beings (of objects present-at-hand and their relations) under some transcendental principle or other, but has taken the prior ‘isness’ of this ‘world’, that which previously and latently allows all ‘presencing’ to occur, entirely for granted.

Along with this ontological amnesia there occurs the rise of the ontical sciences—local bodies of knowledge (the physical and so-called ‘human’ sciences) which take as their object discreet fields of beings without thinking them in their Being (BT, 21—35). According to Heidegger, these sciences (which ‘do not think’)⁴ violently ‘set upon’ the world in a process that he calls Ge-stell—‘im-position’ or enframing. This is no accident, but rather the outcome of ‘a fatal continuity between the assertive, predicative, definitional, classificatory idiom of Western metaphysics and [the] will to rational-technological mastery over life’.⁵ That is to say ontical en-framing is the necessary accomplishment of a metaphysics the most obdurate project of which is to effect a total circumscription of the world of beings, to produce an unambiguously delineated ‘inside’. Heidgger’s own ‘fundamental ontology’ aims to investigate the unspoken presuppositions of these sciences, and to show that the question of Being is more ancient both than they and than the purely metaphysical ontologies of which they are part (BT, 31).

Heidegger refers to this undertaking as the ‘destruction’ [Destruktion] of metaphysics. The term is by no means intended negatively. Indeed, its thrust is a regenerative one, since it throws into relief the deleterious effects of the great forgetting and purportedly brings about the re-creative demolition of what he saw as an already crumbling edifice (BT, 41—9). In the first place, it separates man as subject from the world of objects (Being must ‘be’ prior to this division), such that ‘in a certain manner, it excludes man from the world and places him before the world’.⁶ I will return to what Heidegger means by ‘world’ presently. He stresses that whilst the animal is im-mediately ‘in’ the world (or the ‘Open’—he is discussing Rilkes fascination with animalian immediacy in the eighth Duino Elegy here), man’s calculating consciousness leaves him stranded before it, on some tantalizing threshold (‘What Are Poets For?’, PLT, 108). The consequence of this exiling is that man turns to representing the ‘world’, and is thereby rendered incapable of letting things encounter him (as Morelli too desires) ‘without mediation’.⁷ This ‘fall’ into the ‘purposeful self-assertion’ of representation converts the Being of beings into ‘the calculated value of a market’ and the ‘world’ into a ‘world-market’ (ibid., 127, 114–15). This illusive metamorphosis ushers in the gravest of dangers:

What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that [he], by the peaceful release, transformation, storage and channelling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition […] tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. But the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed continuing resdesness of the fury of self-assertion. (‘What Are Poets For?’, PLT, 116)

For Heidegger, the ‘ideal’ of a technological utopia produces a fatal dissolution of all values into ‘the uniformity of production’, thus annihilating ‘the very realm from which any rank or recognition could possibly arise’ and stagnating in the directionless circulation of hollow simulacra—‘Ersatz’ (‘What Are Poets For?’, PLT, 116). ‘History’ becomes a depthless masque, in which everything ‘unique […] rare […] simple’ is made to don the featureless garb of ‘the ordinary and the average’.⁸ The insidiousness of this is clear—man is bent on rearranging the furniture of the ‘world’ or substituting it for ‘better’ models, but is unaware that these contrived refurbishments are causing the house of Being to collapse around him. Hence Heidegger urges that ‘any salvation by makeshift, however well-intentioned, remains for the duration of his destiny an insubstantial illusion for man’ (ibid., 118). No reshuffling is adequate—what is required is a rethinking of the essential presuppositions of technology and a more primordial, pre-metaphysical re-posing of the question of ‘Being-in-the-world’. There is, therefore, a radical nostalgia about Heidegger’s thinking, and a dream of a certain, if ‘unfamiliar’ repatriation, the persistently ontotheological (even biblical) resonance of which should not be overlooked:

Travelling in the direction that is a way toward that which is worthy of questioning is not adventure but homecoming. (‘Science and Reflection’, QCT, 180)⁹

Morelli too sees an intimate connection between metaphysics and techno-scientific Ge-stell, proclaiming that ‘Desde los eleatas hasta la fecha el pensamiento dialéctico ha tenido tiempo de sobra para darnos sus frutas. Los estamos comiendo, hierven de radiactividad’ (R, 407). Ironically juxtaposing Leibniz and Rimbaud, he claims that the ‘más que podrido principio de razón suficiente’ is, far from a means of understanding the ‘world’, the reason that ‘no estamos en el mundo’—it banishes us and reduces that which is to the rank of image or product: ‘nuestros gigantes padres nos han metido en un curso a contramano del que habrá que salir si no se quiere acabar en una estatua ecuestre o convertido en abuelo ejemplar’ (R, 390). Oliveira also sees the mechanisms of pragmatic reason and totalizing strategies of representation not as man’s greatest achievements in the world, but as barriers which shield him from its awesome, primitive ‘thereness’:

La razón sólo nos sirve para disecar la realidad en calma, o analizar sus futuras tormentas, nunca para resolver una crisis instantánea. Pero esas crisis son como mostraciones metafísicas […] un estado que quizá, si no hubiéramos agarrado por la vía de la razón, sería el estado natural y corriente del pitecántropo erecto. (R, 180)

This schematic, qualitative levelling is destined to end not in a bang, but in the most bloodless of whimpers:

Y no es que el mundo haya de convertirse en una pesadilla orwelliana o huxleyana; será mucho peor, será un mundo delicioso […] sin ningún mosquito, sin ningún analfabeto, con gallinas de enorme tamaño y probablemente dieciocho patas […] con cuartos de baño telecomandados […] contelevisión en cada cuarto, por ejemplo grandes paisajes tropicales para los habitantes de Reijavik, vistas de igloos para los de la Habana […] Es decir un mundo satisfactorio para gentes razonables. (R, 392–3)

Or rather the bang will be disguised as a whimper—a far more pernicious danger in this comfortingly mediocre world of simulation and substitution.¹⁰ Morelli, like Heidegger, scathingly warns of the insufficiency of ‘makeshift’ solutions, especially that of evasion:

por dejar a las espaldas los aviones a chorros, la cara de Nikita o de Dwight o de Charles o de Francisco, el despertar a campanilla, el ajustarse el termómetro y ventosa, la jubilación a patadas en el culo. (R, 389)

This response Morelli ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction: In medias res
• 1 Rayuela and the Re-righting of Metaphysics
• 2 Frames of the Text
• 3 Sexual Extremes
• 4 The Limits of Science and the Horizons of Man
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index