I understand the theme of the piece to be the difficulty in the attempt to “live” fully and expressively in the moment (and also how un-seen and unappreciated that struggle can be/is by others, especially within any bourgeois context), and how this is at odds with all practical considerations of society and the desire to see oneself and one’s culture within historic development. The piece and its characters are as compromised, paradoxical, and difficult as the thing it attempts to reflect, as imperfect as lived life, which is always at a distant remove from the work of art that exists as a touchstone into deeper and other dimensions, and souvenir. (Borges’ Menard’s “Quixote” is an example of the impossibility of anything being “constant.”)
The piece is steeped in references to psychology, semiotics, Christianity, European literature and poetry, dedicated to Charlie Parker, and with epigraphs from The Apocalypse/Revelations and Dylan Thomas. (The schematic presentation of the life and death of the lead character is chiefly an imaginative blend of Parker and Thomas.)
The section in which Johnny is identified by the critic/narrator as the “pursuer” was, for me, particularly evocative of the struggle around expression and art. The critic/narrator is as paradoxical a character as Johnny, marvelously awful yet inescapable. The story of the history of art is itself problematic, any idea of development seems to imply limitation in that what has come before must stay put, to be appreciated as “historic,” but no longer capable of speaking immediately, let alone that any notion of aesthetics necessarily derives from a particular cultural point of view.
This story resonates with Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and ideas of permanence in opposition to lived life. Perhaps this applies to some extent vis-à-vis the essays regarding Latin American Literature—I am too under-exposed to the topic to have any opinion worth mentioning. The only thought I have about all of this is a reflection on a well-known line from Yeats, “Players and painted stage took all my love, and not those things that they were emblems of.” Johnny and the critic seem to speak of these two extremes—the numinous and the instantiation.
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As you point out the story raises complicated issues and, in this, as you point out, Cortazar shows himself to be following in the footsteps of Borges. (In his essay, Vargas Llosa points out in his essay that Borges helped Latin American writers break free from an inferiority complex that prohibited them from dealing with serious existential topics).
ReplyDeleteI would add to what you've written, that this is a story about the relationship between the creator and the critic. If Johnny pursues an existential breakthrough, Bruno is pursuing Johnny. One is, the other comments on the former's being.