Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortazar

Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.

Julio Cortazar's pieces collected under the title "The Instruction Manual" are one of my favorite creative writing prompts. Like "How to Wind a Watch" above, they employ the structures of an instruction manual with mordant humor and the language of profound things. Sometimes they are extended jokes, like "How to Climb a Staircase"; sometimes, like "How to Kill Ants in Rome," they are absurdist vignettes. Students pick up quickly on how Cortazar uses the structure to ground his more fantastical images in the everyday, and they're able to make passing imitations without much study--which I think is a testament to how well the gimmick works. But until now, I'd never read the collection, Cronopios and Famas, of which "The Instruction Manual" is a part.

Cronopios has four parts; "The Instruction Manual" is first. It's followed by "Unusual Occupations," a series of scenes about a strange family who build a gallows in their yard, take over the post office and tar and feather the mail, keep a tiger. The third, "Unstable Stuff," is a hodge-podge of unrelated shorts, which showcase Cortazar at his most experimental. Some work, and others are--rarely--a little too one-note.

The final section is the title section, "Cronopios and Famas," about the title--people? Figures? Animals? Cortazar never stops to define the neologisms; we learn little about what they refer to except that cronopios tend to be wet, and green. By their interactions we begin to learn their characters: the famas are outgoing and rigid, the cronopios hapless but sensitive. They are joined by a third group, the cruel esperanzas, doing things like getting mad at famas for dancing in one way rather than another. What emerges from these pieces is a sense of a caste system, in which people or things are slotted into narrow social roles by their disposition; there are echoes, perhaps, of the racial classifications you see in fantasy novels--proud elves, grumpy dwarves, wise wizards.

One might build a considerable interpretive apparatus on the backs of these short tales of cronopios and famas--something about social conditioning, or human psychology, or something like that. But to do that would risk missing how fun these stories are, how playfully game-like an uninhibited. It might turn you into a fama--or worse, an esperanza.

Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotls. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls," begins Julio Cortazar's collection Blow-Up, "...Now I am an axolotl." The narrator of the story describes how he had become obsessed with the axolotls--eerie salamander-like creatures from Mexico--at a Paris aquarium. He visits them every day, certain that they have a human consciousness like his own hidden behind their coin-like eyes and impenetrable expression, and that this human consciousness is beset by suffering. He's sure about this even though he dismisses the idea that the axolotls are able to communicate or connect with him, or vice versa; the consciousness of the axolotls, like the consciousness of the man, touches only the limits of itself.

And when sure enough, he suddenly finds himself looking through they eyes of the axolotl in the tank, condemned to the "liquid hell" he suspected the axolotl endures, his suspicions are confirmed. The funny and frightening thing about "Axolotl" is the way it asserts that solitude is an essential part of consciousness, and yet there is no solace in recognizing this fact; it doesn't bring humans closer to each other or allow them to enter into each others' interiority any more than it does humans and axolotls. When the transformation happens, it happens with "no transition and no surprise," the horror of one consciousness swapped for another without passing each other on the way.

Something similar happens in the story "The Distances," in which a young Argentine woman believes that she has another self who lives as a beggar in Budapest. She begs her fiance to take her to Budapest for their honeymoon, and sure enough, she meets her other self on a Hungarian bridge, and when they embrace she finds herself in the body of the beggar watching the wealthy Argentine walk away. The point of human connection, the embrace, is only a shuffling of loneliness, just as it is for the man and the axolotl.

Cortazar's stories are all about the inadequacy of the mind to meet anything beyond itself, whether that's another person, or reality itself. Many, but not all, of these stories explore this anxiety in the magical realist mode, more Borges than Garcia Marquez, as in "Axolotl" and the terrific "Bestiary," about a young girl invited to summer at an estate where a tiger is always loose. But as the collection progresses--I think the stories, separated into three previously published sections, are more or less chronological--Cortazar moves away from this mode toward a purer realism that acknowledges that the "real world" is already uncanny enough.

The best piece here is probably the novella "The Pursuer," narrated by a jazz critic worried about his friend and subject, a heroin-addicted saxophonist named Johnny. "The Pursuer," like Young Man with a Horn, which it resembles, is about genius, but both Johnny and Cortazar insist that there's nothing otherworldly about Johnny's talent. Music is easy, Johnny says; living is hard: "To look, for instance, or to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the big things, the big difficulties." Jazz, in fact, because it is non-representational--it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, or words, or anything other than itself--seems the perfect flight from the difficulty of being in the world. But that doesn't prevent Johnny, the titular pursuer, from driving himself to death looking for something that, precisely because it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, can't be described or understood.

The companion piece to "The Pursuer" is "Blow-Up," the title story and the inspiration for the Michelangelo Antonioni thriller. "Blow-Up" is about a photographer who captures a tense moment in a public square--a beautiful woman chats up an uncomfortable young man while another man watches from a car. The blown-up photograph haunts the photographer, not because it offers a solution to the perplexity of the moment--in Antonioni's film, the photographer believes he's captured a murder--but because it offers no real insight into the world whatsoever. The photograph, even though it claims to be a representative, creates its own universe, which becomes slowly but aggressively more real than the photographer's own, and threatens to shut him out. "Every looking oozes with mendacity," Cortazar writes, "because it's that which expels us furthest outside ourselves." Like a quantum physicist, the photographer knows that looking at something changes it, and that when we look at the world we are really only looking at ourselves.

One thing I enjoyed about Cortazar's story is how close they seem to a 19th century sort of realism, even as they're horrified by their own ability to capture the real, unlike someone like Borges, who sort of throws his hands up at the problem and takes it as permission to write about the fantastic. Cortazar's stories are like the mansion haunted by the tiger that everyone would rather pretend isn't there, but which they forget about at their own peril.