OF JULIO CORTAzAR`S `BABAS DEL DIABLO`

Romance Studies, Vol.
18
(I), June
2000
DEATH AND THE PHANTASM: A READING
Published by Maney Publishing (c) University of Wales Swansea
OF JULIO CORTAzAR'S 'BABAS DEL
DIABLO'
DAVID MUSSELWHITE
University of Essex, UK
The model of the phantasm, developed first by Laplanche and Pontalis out of the work of Freud
and then by Gilles Deleuze in his Logique du sens, will be used to construct a theoretical
framework for a reading of the work ofJulio Cortazar. This begins with a close reading of the short
story (Babas del diablo' and then proceeds briqly to consider the model of the phantasm in relation
to the other short stories in the volume Las arm as secretas, to Cortazar's notion of the figura, and
to the novel 62: Mode1o para armar. The article concludes by considering what implications this
discussion might have for Cortazar's project as a whole.
'Babas del diablo' is probably Cortazar's best known short story, and in spite of the quite
extraordinary amount of commentary dedicated to it,l it still remains one of his most
problematic,2 quite apart from the notoriety that accrued to it from being the text on
which Antonioni based Blow-up. There are many things that are confusing: the hesitancy
as to the person of the narrator, the grammatical permutations, the mixture of first and
third person narration, the double time of the narrative - first the original scene at the
parapet of the Quai de Bourbon and then the recurrence or repetition of the scene in the
fifth floor apartment of the writer/photographer
Roberto-Michel - the rotation of the
subject positions taken up by the boy, the blond woman, the man in the grey hat and
Roberto-Michel himself - and finally the 'dead' (and alive?) status of the narrator at the
end of the story. It is true that many of these structural and narrative effects or devices are
to be found in many of Cortazar's other short stories - indeed there are times when his
resort to them seems almost formulaic - but they are to be found in 'Babas del diablo' in
a peculiarly dense and complex form. A reading that succeeded in offering a more
comprehensive and theoretically convincing account of the dynamics and complexities of
'Babas del diablo' might then go some way towards providing an interpretative model that
would not only facilitate readings of other texts by Cortazar but might also provide some
clue as to the obsessions and problematics that lie at the heart of his work as a whole.
Address correspondence to David Musselwhite, Department of Literature, University of Essex, Wivenhoe
Park, Colchester, Essex c04 3SQ
©
2000
University of Wales, Swansea
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58
D AVID
MUSSELWHITE
The theoretical model on which I propose to base my reading is that of the theory of
the 'phantasm' as first elaborated by Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis in their seminal
article of 19643 and further developed by Gilles Deleuze, first in his Difference et Repetition
and then more extensively, in Logique du sens.4
The model of the phantasm seems to me to be particularly suggestive and powerfuls
but, as far as I am aware, and in spite of Burgin's 1986 book, it is not as well known as it
deserves to be. In any case I have found it nowhere cited in the body of commentary
dedicated to the work of Cortazar and so, because it is the primary aim of this paper to
juxtapose the work of Cortazar and the phantasm, I hope I will be forgiven for first
dedicating a perhaps disproportionate amount of space to a summary of the Laplanche and
Pontalis essay.
Laplanche and Pontalis begin by distinguishing their account of the phantasm from all
those which tended to regard it as something merely 'imaginary' as opposed to the 'real'.
The phantasm is not so much a 'fantasy' that one has, as a structure wherein one is placed;
' ... the phantasm,' they say towards the end of their article, 'is not the object of desire, it
is a scene' (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1964, 1868).6
Freud had explored the nature of the phantasm with his early interest in the so-called
'scene of seduction'. Freud had found that many of his patients suffering from neurotic
symptoms recounted under analysis that they had been subject to some form of sexual
aggression at an early, infantile, period. The early experience had not of itself been
traumatic and, indeed, had hardly been registered at the time: the traumatic response came
later, at a post-pubertal moment, when, again often through an anodyne or indifferent
experience, the memory of the earlier event was triggered by some associated trait and
provoked a pathogenic response. In the event, it is well known, Freud had to abandon his
'seduction theory': on the one hand it proved impossible to discover any 'real' event
behind the phantasm and, on the other, it was theoretically difficult to explain how an
infant in its 'innocence' could have registered - even unconsciously - the first event,
without somehow already 'knowing' what it was all about: i.e. you would need something
like a 'sexual-pre-sexual'
child.
The 'seduction theory', however, had been important for Freud. In the first place it
explained the connection between sexuality, trauma and defence: it could explain why
repression bore exclusively upon sexuality. Moreover,
and just as importantly,
the
seduction theory seemed to account for the temporality of human sexuality situated
between the 'too early' of birth and the 'too late' of puberty: the trauma of sexuality was
occasioned by a 'delay'. The advent of sexuality to the human being was not coincident
with itself but the product of a deferral, of a resonance established between the original
scene and the recollected memory.
In 1897 Freud abandoned this theory in favour, for a time, of the notion of an
endogenous infantile sexuality for which the phantasms of seduction would be no more
than disguises for infantile autoerotic activity. The discontinuities of the phantasm theory
gave way to the continuities of biological realism. Ironically it was at just about the same
time that Freud discovered also the 'Oedipus complex' - which was to become the
phantasm par excellence - in his own analysis: for a time 'Oedipus' and 'infantile sexuality'
struggled to hold primacy of place in Freud's thinking the latter for a long time
predominating
and risking the loss not only of the 'Oedipus complex' as the nuclear
complex but also the abandonment of the phantasm as the specific object of psychoanalysis.
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DEATH AND THE PHANTASM
59
In fact Freud continued to explore the nature and structure of the phantasm. He was
beginning to find that phantasms were not simply the materials offered for analysis but
also, at times, the result of analysis itself - so that the phantasm was to be found at both
the latent and the manifest levels of consciousness. Further, Freud found himself
increasingly confronted by what he began to characterize as 'typical' phantasms phantasms that recurred from patient to patient and which clearly revealed structural
features transcendent to the experience of the individual. Among such phantasms figured
what Freud would later characterize as the 'primal scene' - the witnessing of parental
intercourse - as well as phantasms of castration and the already familiar phantasm of
seduction. Freud had, in any case, never desisted from attempting to locate and establish
the 'origins' of these phantasms. For a time he was attracted by the notion of a
phylogenetic heritage - these typical phantasms being inherited memories of real events
in the distant past (but this only reproduced at a higher level the difficulties of locating a
specific 'real' in the experience of the individual).
What makes the phylogenetic theory untenable, however, is that certain features of the
recorded phantasms make it impossible to assimilate them into a purely transcendent
scheme. Freud recalls the case of a paranoiac who believed she was being observed and
photographed while in bed with her lover: she had heard a 'small noise', the click of the
camera. Behind this scene Freud found the typical phantasm of the primal scene: the noise
is the noise of the parents which wakes the child, and also the noise the child is afraid of
making, which would betray her listening. In some ways the noise seems a purely chance
occurrence but Freud goes on to say that it is hardly accidental for the noise constitutes a
necessary part of the phantasm of 'lying in wait' (etre aux ecoutes) which is a typical feature
of the 'parental (i.e. Oedipal) complex'. The noise invoked in the present by the patient
reproduces the very characteristic of the primal scene that allows the whole subsequent
elaboration to take. 'In other words the origin of the phantasm is integrated into the very
structure of the phantasm itself'(p. 1853).
At this point Laplanche and Pontalis draw attention to the particular importance Freud
gives to the role of hearing: for the noise that impinges on the phantasm may not just be
brute sound, but also might be the 'familial noise' (bruit familial) which carries the histories
or legends or traditions of parents, grandparents and, indeed, the whole tribe. The noise,
then, is both interruptive and interpellative and it is a critical component of the phantasm.
'Phantasms are produced by an unconscious combination of things lived and things
heard'(p. 1854).
Moreover, what these typical phantasms refer to are origins: in the primal scene it is the
origin of the individual that is figured; in the phantasm of seduction it is the origin of
sexuality; in the phantasm of castration, it is the origin of the difference of sexes. What
the phantasm is, above all, is the interface of biology and culture, of the purely
physiological and the quintessentially human - the phantasm is the very mechanism by
means of which the human itself is constituted:
What does the primal scene figure for us? The conjunction of the biological fact of conception
(and of birth) and the symbolic fact of filiation, between the 'naked act' (acte sauvage) of coitus
and the existence of the triad of mother- child-father. (p. 1855)
The phantasm, then, is the site where desire is separated off from need, where sexuality
distinguishes itself from hunger, where the cogitans separates itself from the res, where
60
DAVID MUSSELWHITE
some measure of mental articulation takes the place of merely inchoate feeling. The least
sophisticated account of how this 'jump' takes place is that which sees the phantasm as a
merely imaginary and auto-erotic compensation for the loss of the real. What Laplanche
and Pontalis are at pains to point out, however, is that the object of the auto-erotic phase
in the evolution of human sexuality is not a real object, but a lost or virtual object - not
the breast as supplier of food but the breast as the object of desire:
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The 'origin' of auto-eroticism will be that moment when sexuality detaches itself from every
natural object, sees itself handed over to the phantasm (se vait livree au phantasm e) and by virtue
of that very fact constitutes itself as sexuality. (p. 1866)
Laplanche and Pontalis immediately add however:
one could just as well say, on the contrary, that it is the eruption of the phantasm which
provokes that disjunction of sexuality and need. (p. 1866)
We have seen earlier how the phantasm is a combination of things lived (choses vCcues) and
things heard (choses entendues) and it is now necessary to understand a little more clearly
exactly how the 'heard' impacts upon the 'lived', how the semiotic (rumeur' registers on
the somatic mass.
In the first place there can be little doubt that initially the rumeur - the chorus of
legends, traditions, institutional inscriptions - that will later contribute to the formation
of the phantasm are just as confused and indiscriminate as the brute noise of the body
itself Bit by bit, however, we can imagine their insistence and repetitiveness resolving
themselves into increasingly significant clusters. It is at this point that one can begin to
envisage the phantasm being born. What first attracts and beguiles the child are clusters of
unstable, agrammatical, barely discernible, nonsensical (10rt! da!') frequencies and intensities. The 'heard' does not arrive in the shape of fully formed propositions and grammatically
correct pronouncements. To the extent that the nebular clusters of the nascent phantasm
make sense, they can only offer the unformed subject a sense of decentrement and
dispersal. Not only will there be a decentering with respect to space, but so too with
respect to time: without doubling and repetition the mere noise of the heard would be as
meaningless as the noises emerging from the body. There can be no simple 'now' in the
phantasm - the sense of sense can only be a secondary sense, an after-sense, a sense after
the event (a 'double take': we can now see that the 'delay' or 'after-effect' of the
'seduction theory' was no more than this hiatus peculiar to the phantasm writ large). One
can see that this orrery-like (an orrery without a centre) structure is made possible by the
very lacks and displacements that constitute it: without these it would have no meaning.
It is in this sense that the phantasm is not a response to loss - to the loss of either the real
or the virtual object. Instead, it is the constitutive matrix of such losses - the lacunae,
the gaps, the absences - that make desire and meaning possible.
At this point we can begin to look at the phantasm in relation to the subject or, rather,
the position of the subject in relation to the phantasm. We began by remarking that the
phantasm was not so much a 'fantasy' that one had as a structure in which one was placed.
We have also noted in passing that the phantasm can be found both as a material to be
analysed and as the product of analysis - that it can be found, that is, both at the
unconscious level and the conscious level of daydream, both in the umbilical of the dream
and spread out across the faqade of the secondary revision. However, though the same
DEATH AND THE PHANTASM
61
elements might be found at both latent and manifest levels, the way in which those
elements are structured differs greatly:
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At the pole of the day dream, the scenario is centred essentially on the first person, the place
of the subject marked and invariable. The organization is stabilized by the secondary process,
anchored in the 'ego': the subject, one might say, lives his dream. The pole of the original
phantasm, on the contrary, is characterized by an absence of subjectification which goes hand
in hand with the presence of the subject ill the scene: the child for example, is one of the
many personae among many others ... (p. 1860)
In other words, at the conscious level, the phantasm will have all the coherence of a
standard narrative (what Freud would call a 'family romance') centred on a subject with
all positions stabilized in accordance with normal narrative practice. At the deeper level,
however, those same elements will find themselves scrambled and the subject will not be
found as an anchor to the scene but will itself be dispersed among the elements of the
scene as a whole. Laplanche and Pontalis give an example:
'A father seduces his daughter', this might be for example the summary of a phantasm of
seduction. The mark of the primary process is not here the absence of organisation, as is
sometimes said, but the particular character of the structure: it is a scenario of multiple entries,
in which nothing says that the subject will find itself in the first place in the term' daughter';
one might equally find it establishing itself in the father or even in seduces. (p. 1861)
What we have to imagine is that the phantasm will first register at the level of the
unconscious, and here it will be a chaotic, nebulous heap of all kinds of heterogenous
materials without rhyme or reason: at this level subject and object, noun and verb, past
and present, here and there are just tumbled on top of each other. 7 As this raft of elements
slowly rises up through the layers of the consciousness it will become increasingly
organized, changing from a mere heterogeneity, through varying degrees of ambiguity
(passive/active, sado-masochist, permutations for example), until, as it emerges into the
light of full consciousness, it assumes clarity and unambiguity of expression. The series
might go, for example, in the case of 'Babas del diablo', from 'til la mujer rubia eran las
nubes que siguen corriendo delante de mis tus sus nuestros vuestros sus rostros' (Cortazar,
1990: 123) to 'el muchacho fue seducido por la mujer rubia y amenazado por el hombre
del sombrero gris'. Unscrambled, 'Babas del diablo' reveals itself to be centred in its
entirety on what Freud calls the 'parental complex' - Oedipus.
Although I have not particularly biased my summary of Laplanche and Pontalis's article
toward a reading of 'Babas del diablo' it must be becoming clear by now that Cortazar's
short story presents us with an almost text-book example of a phantasmic structure and,
when we see it as such, much of its complexity, if not perplexity, becomes clear.
First and foremost, there is the double narration - the repeating of the first incident
that took place on the parapet, in the revised versions of it recounted a week later. The
first scene, moreover, is clearly a scene of seduction - one of Freud's typical Jantasmes
originaires'. But as it is retold with its varying of subject positions and nuances, we become
aware that it is not only a scene of seduction but betrays features and details that reveal it
to be also a version of the 'primal scene', and of the phantasm of castration.8 As far as the
primal scene is concerned we have the classic instance of the interruptive noise - the
'clic!'ofthe camera betraying the 'lying in wait' (etre aux ecoutes - the 'acechando', 'estar
al acecho' of the Spanish) of the primal scene - and in one of the permutations of the
personae of the scene we have the classic Oedipal triangle:
62
DAVID
MUSSELWHITE
El payaso [el hombre del sombrero gris] y la mujer se consultaban en silencio: hadamos un
perfecto triclngulo insoportable [my italics], algo que tenia que romperse con un chasquido
['chasquido' here being the equivalent of the 'die']. (Cortazar, 1990, 134)
There is, too, the moment when it is the woman who finds herself in the position of the
victim - the primal scene often construed as an act of violence against the mother:
me pareci6 que la mujer, de espaldas al parapeto [in the position formerly occupied by the
boy], paseaba las manos par la piedra, con el c1asico gesto del acosado que busca la salida.
(p. 134)
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As far as the phantasm of castration is concerned
impotence inflicted on the narrator:
there is, first, the dreadful sense of
De pronto el orden se invertia, ellos estaban vivos, moviendose, decidian y eran decididos,
iban a su futuro; y yo desde este lado, prisionero de otro tiempo, de una habitaci6n en un
quinto piso, de no saber quienes eran esa mujer, y ese hombre y ese nino, de ser nada mas que
la lente de mi camara, algo rigido, incapaz de intervenci6n. Me tiraban a la cara la burla mas
horrible, la de decidir frente a mi impotencia ... (p. 138)
The threat is reinforced towards the end of the story when the man in the grey hat turns
on the interfering narrator and seems, in fact, to obliterate him.
Once we understand the phantasmic nature of the episode(s) recounted in the story
many of the incidental details make more sense. There is, for example, the irritation and
impatience with the notion of'ahora' ('que palabra, ahora, que estupida mentira') (p. 127).
We have seen earlier how there can be no 'ahora' in the phantasm: the phantasm is
essentially split, divided, double. Significantly, we are told at the very beginning of the
story that it is based upon an 'agujero' (p. 123) - a hole, an absence. Linked to this
aporetic effect, too, is the decentred structure of the phantasm: when the narrator reviews
the scene of the episode on the parapet, as it has been captured in the photograph he
hangs on the wall of this room, it dawns on him that he is now looking at the scene from
a different point of view due to the off-set of the camera lens:
... entonces se me ocurri6 que me habia instalada exactamente en e1 punto de mira del
objetivo. (p. 129)
The focal point of the phantasm, like its time, is always elsewhere, ever adjacent, never a
here or now. We are told, too, that, ideally, the whole story might have been best told by
a machine:
Puestos a contar, si se pudiera ir a beber un bock por ahi y que la maquina siguiera sola...
seria la perfecci6n. La perfecci6n, si, porque aqui el agujero que hay que contar es tambien
una maquina ... y a 10 mejor puede ser que una maquina sepa mas de otra maquina que yo ...
(p. 123)
The 'machinic' qualities of the story lie in the impersonal, transcendent, structures of the
phantasms, their typicality and generality, 'something which transcends at the same time
both the individual experience (le vecu individuel) and the imaginary (l'imagine)' (Laplanche
and Pontalis 1964, 1850). The quasi-machinic qualities of the phantasm are perhaps best
conveyed by the French term 'agencement' which seems to be something between a
structure and a process, and for which I can find no equivalent in English. Finally there is
the perplexity as to why the narrator remembers the body of the woman rather than her
image - whereas he remembers the image of the boy rather than his body (Cortazar 1990,
DEATH AND THE PHANTASM
128): could it not be that whereas the boy is primarily a cipher in the dream for the
narrator himself the woman is precisely an element of the 'naked ace (the (acte sauvage')
that the phantasm seeks to translate from body to image? Perhaps this, too, explains, why
she is accredited with such subhuman - animal, even inorganic - attributes:
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... sus ojos que caian sobre las cosas como dos aguilas, dos saltos al vacio, dos dfagas de fango
verde. (129)
This is not even the primeval mother - it is lower, beneath the threshold of humanity, a
viscous, bilious, original slime, a glimpse of that on which not even the phantasm can take
purchase. Indeed there is a visceral revulsion here that perhaps threatens the very decorum
of the story.
The phantasmic structure also explains the switching of narrative voices between first
and third person narrative as well as the narrator's inclination to 'bifurcate' himself so
readily (' ... Michel se bifurca facilmente', p. 128) his name is already a double name Roberto-Michel; he has dual nationality - Franco-Chilean; he has two jobs - translator
and photographer; both jobs suggest modes of translation - from one language to
another, from the 'real' to the 'image', this last particularly close to the analogous function
of the phantasm. We have mentioned earlier the two poles of the phantasm: at the one
pole there might well be a first person narrative, but at the other, deeper, pole there is an
absence of subjectification or, rather, the subject becomes dispersed among the manifold
subject positions of the phantasm. We have already suggested that the boy is a mere cipher
of the narrator. There is a clue to their identity in the shared detail of having their gloves
in their pockets: ' ... guarde los guantes en el bolsillo; ... llevaba unos guantes amarillos ...
era gracioso ver los dedos de los guantes saliendo del bolsillo de la chaqueta' (p. 127 and
p. 129), but there is some sense, too, in which at different points in the story the narrator
is identified with all the narrative positions - the boy, the blond woman and the man in
the grey hat - or even the Contax 1:1.2 ('entonces gire un poco, quiero decir que la
camara giro un poco .. .' p. 138) or the Remington typewriter. The 'self' (moi), we might
say, is a 'dissolved self' (un moi dissous).
We can now understand why the narrator is dead (and alive ..) (yo que estoy muerto [y
vivo, no se trata de engaiiar a nadie]) (p. 124), for what the phantasm provokes is the
dissolution and 'death' of the singular self In this sense the effect of the phantasm is
explosive (a 'blow-up' in a sense quite different from that intended by Antonioni) for not
only is the self scattered among the various subject positions of the phantasm, it is also
dispersed among the different phantasms themselves - here the phantasms of the primal
scene, seduction, castration, and perhaps too, a phantasm of death, though in many ways
the phantasm of death is the phantasmic structure itself One can imagine that finding
itself so scattered, so bifurcated, so strewn across so many scenarios and occupying in each
scenario so many, not always compatible, positions, the self must finally collapse under
such a strain. Such a collapse would be akin to some form of psychosis and I sense this is
what is revealed at the end of 'Babas del diablo' and one might go further and suggest that
this psychosis might well be a result of a failure to cope with an Oedipal overload.
It is perhaps worthwhile at this stage to compare what I have just said about the
conclusion of 'Babas del diablo' with Susana ]akfalvi's comments on the close of 'Las
armas secretas':
DAVID MUSSELWHITE
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En este movimiento de superposici6n de varios yos (en este caso dos) el ego pierde sus limites
e ingresa en una constelaci6n que Ie posibilita Ia realizaci6n multiple del ser, pero al final
fatalmente repite el camino hacia la muerte, con 10 que esta busqueda de una dimensi6n
suprareal queda trunca.9
The conclusions to the two stories are so similar because they are both phantasmatic
structures. 'Las armas secretas', like 'Babas del diablo', is again structured around two
events, the first consisting of the violation of Michele by a German soldier at Enghien,
and the second, the 'repetition' of this event seven years later during the visit of Michele
and Pierre to Michele's parents' home at Clamart. The story clearly recounts the traumatic
consequences not only of a violation but also of the clumsy, but, we see now, unsuccessful,
attempts to eliminate that event from consciousness by the killing of the original
perpetrator. The 'return' of the dead man in the shape of the luckless Pierre recalls Lacan's
remarks on the effects of 'foreclosure': what is expelled from the symbolic - that is, not
negotiated in consciousness - returns in the real, in hallucinatory form. to There has been
a failure, we might say, to accommodate the event, via a phantasmatic reworking, to the
regulative proprieties of the 'family romance'.
The first story in the volume, 'Cartas de mama', has an almost identical structure: the
precipitate and inadequately digested - that is affectively digested - dispatch of the sickly
Nico means that he returns in a hallucinatory form, to haunt the life of Luis and Laura in
Paris.tt
'Los buenos servicios', another of the stories in the same volume, also has a phantasmatic
structure. Again we have a structure of repetitions where a second scene, in the funeral
parlour, repeats and reworks a first scene, the party at the house of the Rosays' and the
looking after the dogs. Again this double structure is centred upon an absence or a lost
object - this time it is the figure of the dead Bebe or M. Linard - around which swirl
a welter of affects and repressed emotions, a web of hysteria and taboo. What makes for
much of the fascination of this story is that due to the limited perspective or consciousness
of the narrator, Mme Francinet, we can only guess at what might be the real nature of
the dramatic events - homosexual jealousies, business rivalries, blackmail - that lie
behind the events we are allowed to witness. There is a sense, too, that we are not dealing
here with just 'human' affects: the first scene with the dogs clearly suggests some kind of
repressed unconsciousness consisting of non-human sexuality and affective promiscuity.
The folding of an animal affectivity upon the ill-defined behaviour of a human group,
which is the effect of the phantasmatic juxtapositioning of the two scenes, alerts us to the
fact that we are here dealing with a realm beyond mere human psychology and with
constellations of affects and traits transcendent of the individual.
It is at this point that I want to suggest that the phantasm, as I have attempted to
describe it in the foregoing, comes very close to providing a theoretical account of what
Cortazar attempts to formulate with his notion of the 'figura':
La noci6n de figura va a servirme instrumentalmente,
porque representa un enfoque muy
diferente del habitual en cualquier novela 0 narraci6n donde se tiende a individualizar a los
personajes y a dades una psicologia y caracteristicas propias. Quisiera escribir de manera tal
que la narraci6n estuviera llena de vida en su sentido mas profundo, llena de acci6n y de
sentido, y que al mismo tiempo esa vida, esa acci6n y ese sentido no se refieran ya a la mera
acci6n de los individuos, sino a una especie de superaci6n de las figuras formadas por
constelaciones de personajes ... Quisiera llegar a escribir un relato capaz de mostrar c6mo esas
DEATH
AND
THE PHANTASM
figuras constituyen una ruptura y un desmentido de la realidad individual, much as veces sin
que los personajes tengan la menor conciencia de elio.12
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This ambition famously recurs among Morelli's notes in chapter 62 of Rayuela:
Si escribiera ese libro, las conductas standard (incluso las mas ins61itas, su categoria de lujo)
serian inexplicables con el instrumento psicol6gico al uso. Los actores parecerian insanos 0
totalmente idiotas. No que se mostrarian incapaces de los challenge and response corrientes:
amor, celos piedad y as! sucesivamente ... Todo seria como una inquietud, un desasosiego, un
desarraigo continuo, un territorio donde la casualidad psicol6gica cederia desconcertada, y esos
fantoches se destrozarian 0 se amarian 0 se reconocerian sin sospechar demasiado que la vida
trata de cambiar la clave en y a traves y por elios, que una tentativa apenas concebible nace en
el hombre como en otro tiempo fueron naciendo la c1ave-raz6n, la c1ave-sentimiento, la c1avepragmatismo. Que a cada sucesiva derrota hay un acercamiento a la mutaci6n final, y que el
hombre no es sino que busca ser, proyecta.ser, manoteando entre palabras y conducta y alegria
salpicada de sangre y otras ret6ricas como esta.13
This, in turn, becomes the programme for 62: Modelo para armar.14
62: Modelo para armar is clearly a text which is susceptible to interpretation as a
phantasmatic text. The whole is a kaleidoscopic permutation of repetitions where a
number of apparently discrete episodes are no more than transcriptions one of the other,
so that, in a sense, all the events become versions of but one event, without anyone
event, however, being accorded the status of being the 'original'. As in the phantasm,
these repeated events seem to be motivated and linked by a series of absences and fractures,
which circulate from episode to episode: the 'mufieca rota', the 'muchacho muerto', the
'chica inglesa'. As the series of events unfold, practically all the major personae, at one time
or another, occupy this 'default' or 'virtual' position of the lost or broken object - Juan,
Helene, Celia, Nicole, Austin - so that rather than stable identities, there is a migration
of affective states and conditions: pursuers/pursued,
pitied/feared, attracted/repelled,
killing/killed - a transcendence, that is, of discrete identities and all the old psychologies
of the traditional novel. The 'free-floating' status of the odd figure of 'mi paredro' and
also of the paredroi figures of Calac and Polanco, are indicative of the fortuitous and
arbitrary nature of identity in the phantasmic structure. Whenever, for example, Juan, in
the famous opening episode in the Polidor restaurant, comes up with a formula that seems
to approximate to the experience triggered by the 'comensal gordo' asking for a 'castillo
sangriento'(p.9)
- 'contradicci6n instantanea'(p. 10), 'fulgurante unidad'(p. II), 'viviente constelaci6n'(p.12),
'coagulo fulminante', 'explosi6n silenciosa'(p.13),
'plenitud
instantinea'(p. 14) - such formulae are precisely of the kind one might use to describe
the phantasm.
It is clear from his comments on the potential of the figura, and even more from
Morelli's notes in Rayuela, that Cortazar hoped to achieve some kind of epistemological
or ontological break-through through this pursuit of a schema that transcended the old
psychological and philosophical categories of humanism and individualism - to achieve
some kind of completely new human, and even non-human, condition. Nevertheless
62 :Modelo para armar, like 'Los buenos servicio', 'Babas del diablo' and 'Las armas secretas'
ends inconclusively, or even in death and failure. Austin's nightmarish murder of Helene
is like the hallucinatory return of the 'muchacho muerto,15; like the return of Pierre at
the end of 'Las arm as secretas', or of Nico at the end of 'Cartas de mama' it is the return
of an event or an experience - a residue - that refuses to be accommodated within, or
surrender itself to, or be resolved by, the phantasmic structure.
66
DAVID
MUSSELWHITE
I think, in a sense, that this was Cortazar's failure.16 Cortizar had a strong sense of the
liberatory potential of the phantasm but there was a residual incapacity within himself to
surrender to it. Malva Filer describes the impasse well:
Published by Maney Publishing (c) University of Wales Swansea
Sin duda, pues, la idea de un yo liberado de la individualidad y, por 10 tanto, ubicuo y
susceptible de diversas encarnaciones, ha atraido poderosamente a Cortazar. Pero su intento de
darle vida y forma se ve frustrado por una evidente imposibilidad de llevar el concepto no
individualista del yo hasta sus ultimas consecuencias.17
What Cortazar seems never to have realized is that the explosive disjunctions of the
phantasm, the dispersal of subject positions, the dissolution of the singular subject, the
scattering and shattering of identity across a multiplicity of impersonal traits and affects,
the vertiginous annihilation of time through recuperative repetitions - that all these had
an affirmative as well as a destructive potential. For what the phantasmic structure sets in
play with its doubles and duplications, its repetitions and its lacunae, is a kind of vertiginous
pendular movement whereby the dissolved self 'is' and 'is not' all the positions it occupies,
and the repertoires it traverses at the same time. It is this that leads Deleuze, for example,
consciously building on and extending the work of Laplanche and Pontalis, to speak of
the 'royal splendour' or the 'glory' - the 'radiancy'18 to use a term he borrows from
Lewis Carroll - of the phantasm, and to see in it the triumph of the eternal return. With
the experience of the eternal return,
I deactualise my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series
must be passed through ... At the moment the Eternal Return is revealed to me, I cease to be
myself hie et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others.19
In 62: Modelo para armar Juan's perpetual sense of being part of a larger movement which
seems to exclude him at the very moment that he becomes capable of thinking it - 'todo
a punto de explicarse sin explicaci6n posible' (p. 179) - is very similar to Klossowski's
gloss of Nietzsche's experience ('I am one if those machines which can EXPLODE.'20) at Sils
Maria in August 1881:
What is my part in this circular movement in relation to which I am incoherent, or in relation
to this thought that is so perfectly coherent that it excludes me at the very moment I think it?21
In fact the ambiguity as to whether the narrator at the end of 'Babas del diablo' is dead or
alive, seems to me to represent a genuine dilemma in Cortazar's thinking as to the nature
of death and its relation to the phantasm, a dilemma which perhaps finds its finest and
most evocative formulation in Blanchot's writing on the 'double death' in Rilke:22 on the
one hand there is a death which is merely a physical end and a removal from life, while
on the other there is the death which can never be mine, because in death, as in the
phantasm, the very notion of the 'mine' or the 'I' is wrested from us in a vast, vertiginous
and liberating impersonality:
death as an abyss, not that which provides a foundation, but the absence and loss of all
foundation ... it is the inevitable but inaccessible death: it is the abyss of the present, the time
without present with which I have no relation, that towards which I cannot launch myself
(m Clancer), for in it I do not die, I am deprived of my power of dying, in it one dies, one never
ceases and never finishes dying.23
J
1 For a recent bibliography see Frederick Luciani, 'The Man in the Carlin the Trees/behind
the fence:
from Cortazar's "Blow-up" to Oliver Stone's JFK' inJulio Cortazar: New Readings ed. Carlos J. Alonso
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 205-07.
Published by Maney Publishing (c) University of Wales Swansea
DEATH AND THE PHANTASM
2 Susan Jakfalvi, 'Introducci6n'
to her edition of Julio Cortazar, Las armas secretas (Madrid: Catedra,
1990), p. 43 All quotations from 'Babas del diablo' are from this edition.
3 Jean
Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis 'Phantasme originaire, phantasmes des origines, origine du
phantasme', Les Temps Modernes 19 (1964), 1833-68. English translation: 'Fantasy and the origins of
sexuality', The International Journal if Psych oall alys is 49, I (1968), I - 18. A further edition of this translation
is to be found in Formations if Fantasy ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London:
Methuen, 1986), pp. 5-34.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris: P.U.F.,
1968); Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1969).
5 As, indeed, it did to Michel Foucault: see his comments on the phantasm in his review of Deleuze's
two texts, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in Language, Counter-memory,
Practice ed. Donald F. Bouchard
(Ithaca: Cornell, 1977), p. 180.
6 The translations from the French are my own.
7 There are two examples of just such jumbled
elements to be found at the beginning of 'Las babas del
diablo': 'yo vieron subir la luna, 0: nos me duele el fondo de los ojos' (Cortazar 1990, 123).
8 That different phantasmatic scenes might be 'successive registrations'
and translations of each other is
discussed by J. Laplanche in his New Foundations if Psychoanalysis trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989), p. 114, where he refers to Freud's correspondence with Fleiss, 6 December 1896,
where this notion is first proposed.
9 Jakfalvi, 1990, p. 52.
10 Laplanche and Pontalis, 1964, p. 1849, n.]2.
11 Deleuze
1968, p. 25: 'Is it not true that the only dead that return are those who have been too
quickly and too deeply buried, without according them the necessary rights, and that remorse testifies
less to an excess of memory (memoire) than to a powerlessness or failure in the elaboration of a
remembrance (souvenir)?'.
12 Quoted in Harss, 1966, p. 288-89.
13 Julio Cortazar, Rayuela,
ed. by Andres Amor6s (Madrid: Catedra, 1994), p. 524.
14 Julio Cortazar, 62: Modelo para armar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana,
1968).
15 Cortazar 1968, p. 266.
16 By 'failure', what I have in mind is that, instead of surrendering
himself to the explosive potential of
the phantasm, Cortazar found himself pursuing another aim which was couched in the many metaphors
of 'otro lado' or the need to break through a 'puerta cerrada' to find a 'mas alli' or 'centro' or 'kibbutz
de deseo' (Harss, 1966, 269). This alternative version of what might be a model of transcendence is
developed at length in 'EI perseguidor', the one remaining story of the volume Las armas secretas which
I have not discussed - precisely because it does not conform to the phantasmic structure.
17 Malva Filer, 'Las transformaciones
del yo', in Helmy F. Giacoman, Homenaje aJulio Cortazar (New
York: Las Americas, 1972), p. 276.
18 Deleuze, 1969, p. 256 and p. 280.
19 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche
and the Vicious Circle trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: AtWone, 1997)
pp. 57-58.
20 Klossowski, 1997, p. 55. The italics are in the original.
21 Klossowski, 1997, p. 64.
22 Cortazar's admiration for Blanchot is well documented.
See Julio Corcizar, La vuelta al d£a en ochenta
mundos (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1967) p. 136.
23 Maurice Blanchot, I:espace litteraire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1955) p. 201.
Bibliography
Blanchot,
Cortizar,
Cortazar,
Cortazar,
Cortazar,
Deleuze,
Maurice, L'Espace litteraire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1955)
Julio, Las armas secretas, ed. by Susan Jakfalvi (Madrid: Catedra, 1990)
Julio, La vuelta al d£a en ochenta mundos (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1967)
Julio, Rayuela (Madrid: Catedra, 1994)
Julio, 62: Modelo par armar (Buenos Aires: Editorial sudamericana, 1968)
Gilles, Difference et Repetition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969)
Published by Maney Publishing (c) University of Wales Swansea
68
DAVID MUSSELWHITE
Filer, Malva, 'Las transfonnaciones del yo', in Helmy F. Giacoman, Homenaje aJulio Cortazar (New York:
Las Americas, 1972)
Foucault, Michel, 'Teatrum Philosophicum', in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. by Donald F.
Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977)
Harss, Luis, Los nuestros (Buenos Aires: Editorial sudamericana, 1966)
Jakfalvi, Susan, 'Introducci6n' to her edition of Julio Cortazar, Las armas secretas (Madrid: Catedra, 1990)
Klossowski, Pierre, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997)
Laplanche, Jean, New Foundations of Psychoanalysis, trans. by David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
Laplanche, Jean, and ].-B. Pontalis, 'Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme', Les
Temps Modernes 19 (1964), 1833-68 (English translation: 'Fantasy and the origins of sexuality', The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 1 (1968) 1-18. A further edition of this translation is to be
found in Formations of Fantasy ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen,
1986), pp. 5-34)
Luciani, Frederick, 'The Man in the Car/in the Trees/behind the fence: from Cortazar's "Blow-up" to
Oliver Stone'sJFK',
inJulio Cortazar: New Readings, ed. by Carlos]. Alonson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 205-07