Sasha Frere-Jones
In Julio Cortázar’s surrealism, a displacement of the real.
A Certain Lucas, by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa,
New Directions, 121 pages, $15.95
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A Certain Lucas was one of the last books Julio Cortázar wrote, published in Spanish in 1979 as Un tal Lucas and then in English on April 12 of 1984, two months after he had died from leukemia. ACL, newly reissued by New Directions in its original translation by Gregory Rabassa, is a collection of brief pieces split into three sections, classified by the author as a novel. I would suggest, respectfully, to ignore this and look at it as a late-period memoir. Some context here might be helpful.
As he wrote A Certain Lucas, Cortazar was two years into a relationship with Carol Dunlop, his second wife and coauthor of The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a travelogue of the couple’s trip along the A6 from Paris to Marseille. The Argentine had also been traveling to Nicaragua and writing the essays that were ultimately published in 1984 as Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce. Profits from that book went directly to the Sandinistas. (The English version was translated by Kathleen Weaver and published in 1989 with a defanged title: Nicaraguan Sketches.) All of this is to say that the Anglophone perception of Cortázar tends to reinforce the idea of the cosmopolitan Parisian, something Cortázar was only in part (he moved from Buenos Aires to Paris at the age of thirty-seven). Michael Wood’s 1985 review of A Certain Lucas for the New York Review of Books presents Cortázar as a writer of “epigrams, memories, poems, fantasies,” whose novels read like “notebooks, full of gags and quotations and fugitive ideas.” The condescension is seeping in at the edges and goes full bleed later, when Wood posits that Cortázar’s “socialism was so full of mischief and so romantic that his critics often wondered whether it was socialism at all.” The straw men catch fire here. Who thought this? How many Anglophone artists—other than the Clash—were dedicating their work (and the profits thereof) to the Sandinistas? (Nicaraguan Sketches is literally dedicated “For the FSLN.”)
But Wood is right that this alleged novel, ACL, is more like a notebook of Cortázar’s life in the ’70s. His dreamlike logic is present in everything he wrote and was discussed at the time as a version of the “fantastic,” often mentioned along with Borges and Márquez. Cortázar’s surrealism feels more like a displacement of the real rather than a grasp for some unconscious desire, especially in his discussion of the concert hall. Cortázar was a dedicated fan of jazz and classical music, so what does it mean that his alter ego, Lucas, is getting booted from venues for crawling around on the floor? “At concerts things were going from bad to worse for him until there was a gentleman’s agreement between Lucas who stopped going and the ushers and part of the public who stopped kicking him out.” Perhaps the answer is right here in the text, which describes “the dragging of Lucas with his face on the floor to his final liberation at the curb of the calle Libertad” (emphasis mine). Maybe Cortázar’s increasing commitment to liberation struggles, beginning with his support for Cuba, alienated him from the depoliticized Surrealists of Paris.
In 1963, Cortázar delivered a talk titled “Algunos aspectos del cuento” at Casa de las Américas in Havana, published later that year by the house journal. He said that the “revolutionary writer” who decides “to write fantastic or psychological literature” is committing “a revolutionary act even though his stories aren’t concerned with the individual or collective forms the revolution assumes.” Cortázar was no fan of programmatic political fiction and avoided overly clear parables for the revolution. He also did not settle entirely into a single position on the political. Only four years later, he wrote in a letter to his friend, “I no longer believe, as I once could, so comfortably, that literature of mere imaginative creation is sufficient to make me feel that I have fulfilled myself as a writer.” This writing that values the “pleasure of the intellect or the senses” is not justified “if at the same time it is not open to the vital problems.”
This is a dialectical pickle for someone with an allergy to Soviet-style realism. A Certain Lucas, in this way, captures Cortázar’s thinking as he increases the breadth of his view. One of the few pieces that courts an openly political reading is “A Small Paradise,” lodged in the highly experimental second section (the first and third are explicitly about Lucas/Julio). In this fantasm, “the inhabitants of the country governed by General Orangu” are having their blood filled with “little gold fishes.” Is Orangu meant to be General Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the dictator against whom the FSLN fought? Draw your own conclusions, but Cortázar tells us the fishes “aren’t gold but merely gilded,” whose leaps reflect “an anxious urge for possession.” Fishes are injected when residents reach the age of eighteen, and “their families surround them with the joy that always accompanies great ceremonies.” Cortázar dissects his own allegory when he tells us that “the inhabitants are happy because of imagination rather than direct contact with reality.” The dreams are being tagged as such when the daylight of reality is mentioned inside the dream. The “joy” the fishes bring is dampened by the fact of their death, which leads to the dead fishes clogging the citizens’ arteries and making breathing difficult. The cure? An antidote ampule sold only by the government that costs “the equivalent of twenty dollars, which presupposes an annual income of several million.” Shades of Luigi—a very relatable nightmare.
Lucas’s more mundane exploits involve his love of meat tarts and Max Roach, as well as several trips to the hospital, where he and his spouse, Sandra, must pay for their own towels. (Carol Dunlop died in 1982 from bone-marrow failure at the age of thirty-six.) The first and third sections are really only fantastic at the edges—they read, especially the second time, as something closer to the travelogue of Autonauts. This is clear in the delightful “Lucas, His Shopping,” which has the vertiginous twists of Cortázar’s most famous novel, 1963’s Hopscotch. Lucas, meaning well and behaving here like Chance in Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, a passive target in the surrealism of real life, goes out to get matches and ends up in someone else’s ambulance. (Lucas at least is prepared when a “little old toothless lady” approaches him at a bus stop and asks for a match.) These moments of solidarity and slippage are where Cortázar stows his politics. As allergic as he was to yoking the imagination to a political platform, he was equally devoted to flattening the high and low within his stories and cresting the truly fantastic: a classless world in which all suffer equally.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).