Cortázar: Time, Sacrifice, Jazz and Humor

Cortázar: Time, Sacrifice, Jazz and Humor

• There is a conflict between weak reason and lucid irrationality. In 'Far', Alina Reyes in Buenos Aires imagines a ragged, black-haired woman on a bridge in Budapest and lives to make that transfer of personality or guilt; she lives to finally become the tattered woman who sees the bridge away from Alina Reyes. The character of 'The Night Face Up' will not know until the last minute that he is not an inpatient from a motorcycle accident, nor a dream or a Florida casualty of war, but a prisoner about to be sacrificed to dreams in a strange machine, walking the streets of an inexplicable and unknown city. In 'A Yellow Flower' and 'End Game', someone also renounces immortality itself—the human being is found by accident and murdered, their continuity ended.

• In addition to the obsession with the fragility of time, another relentless issue arises in these stories. In 'Continuity of Parks', the character enters a circular, unstoppable machine and never stops being a victim; never stops being killed. In 'The Maenads', the enthusiastic audience devours the Master as the only way to express their support and to share his glory, literally. In all these stories, the important thing is the ceremonial idea, never the "why" of events or the logic of the outcome. Thus, sacrifice is the great Cortazarian theme.

  Cortázar stages a singular exaltation of irrationality conceived as the end of assurances. "We are each the illusion of one another." The world is always a matter of perspective. In reading Hopscotch, the linear and progressive method of knowledge is subject to mockery and satire. The literature of reputations and cronopios becomes a battle between inclement, banal rationalism (famas) and freedom without social prestige (cronopios).

  In 'The Tracker', the musician—Charlie Parker—lives toward the abolition of time, so to speak. He is a victim, like La Maga Oliveira, driven by a desire to perfect himself in a self-destructive vocation, distant from the aspiration to satisfactory success. He states: "And just what is elusive and hard remains," "That I'm playing tomorrow."

• Humor and leisure: salvation can be reached through humor. This recurring idea suggests that laughter and play offer a form of liberation from the oppressive logic of time and fate.

• Cortázar admired jazz and tango. It is curious: Cortázar admired both jazz and tango. The tango is a kind of primal nostalgia, lamenting the lost world. Cortázar liked to think that his work is a series of endless "versions"—attempts on a single theme—sounding and rolling with the persistence of an inexorable jazz melody; therefore, he concludes that all is questionable.