Julio Cortázar Writing Style

Julio Cortázar writes an exact realist surface with a piece removed, and the missing piece is the reader's work. Look at the surface first. A Paris aquarium, a green velvet armchair, a flat with more rooms than two people need, all of it reported in the level voice of somebody filing a description rather than telling a ghost story. Then a part goes missing. Usually the connection between two facts, sometimes the pronoun that says who is talking, once the ending itself. The story closes only when a reader closes it.

Hopscotch prints the choice on its first page. The Table of Instructions says the volume holds two books. The first runs from chapter 1 to chapter 56, where three small stars stand in for the word End and the reader is told to drop the rest without remorse. The second begins at chapter 73 and takes the number printed under each chapter as the address of the next one, threading the expendable chapters in among the narrative ones. Same paper, two books. A reader who takes the short path does not meet Morelli, the old novelist whose notes on how a novel should be built sit in the chapters the short path throws away.

There is a bad version of all this, and most imitations are it. A structure that asks for work and returns nothing is a crossword, and the reader who finishes it has learned that you can build a crossword. Cortázar puts the gaps where the feeling is. The chapter of Hopscotch a reader has to assemble alone is the one in which a man works out that the baby in the room has died and then says nothing about it for the rest of the night. The sentence he holds back is the sentence the book holds back from you.

Most people reading this read him in translation, and the structure is the part that survives the crossing. Chapter 73 is chapter 73 in every edition. The order holds. The withheld join holds, and so does the handover of the pronoun. What does not cross is the sound: the Buenos Aires speech, the run of a long sentence in Spanish, the invented words of chapter 68. Take the architecture from him and build the sentences in your own language, which is close to what he did himself in Paris, where he lived and worked in French and went on writing his fiction in Spanish.

The expendable chapter

Hopscotch carries a second kind of chapter, one that does not narrate at all. These are quotations from other writers, notes from Morelli's file, scraps of found print, and in the second reading order they arrive between the scenes rather than after them. Each one recolours the scene on either side. Vargas Llosa gave the mechanism a name in his Letters to a Young Novelist, calling it the communicating vessel, two episodes set next to each other so that each changes how the other reads. The tool is cheap to try and hard to place. Cut a scene, put an unrelated document in front of it, and read the pair aloud to find out whether the document altered the scene or only delayed it.

The unmarked handover

The first person changes owner while the sentences keep their rhythm. Axolotl is the specimen. A man goes to the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes day after day to look at the axolotls. By the end, the voice reporting this belongs to an axolotl watching a man come to the glass and then stop coming, and there is no line break to mark the swap and no announcement of it. The reader works out that the pronoun has changed owner by noticing which side of the glass the detail comes from. Getting this right is a matter of keeping the diction identical across the switch, because a change of register would tell the reader what to think one beat before they had thought it.

The frame that shuts

He writes a story about a man with a book and arranges it so the reading is the trap. Continuity of Parks runs about two pages. A man settles into a green velvet armchair with his back to the door and finishes a novel about two lovers planning a murder, and the lover leaves the cabin at dusk, crosses the park, climbs the stairs, and finds a man reading a novel in a green velvet armchair. The frame closes. It works because the outer story is furnished before the inner one starts moving, so the reader has already built the room the knife arrives in. Do not explain the join. The last noun is the whole of the explanation, and any sentence after it is you checking that the reader noticed.

The narrator who will not settle

The opening stalls out loud on the question of how to tell the story, before telling it. Blow-Up begins with the narrator working through whether to use the first person or the third and settling on neither, and the wobble continues through the story. He is a translator called Roberto Michel, and he has photographed something on the Île Saint-Louis that he thinks he understood. The unstable pronoun turns out to be the subject. A man who cannot say who is speaking is a man who cannot say what he saw, so a device that would be an affectation in another story is carrying the argument here, and it is worth reaching for only where the uncertainty is about the events, because a narrator who wavers about grammar for no reason reads as a writer showing his working.

The fair gap

The gap has to be fillable from what is already on the page. Umberto Eco called a narrative text a lazy machine that asks the reader to do some of its work, in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, and the qualification he attaches is the useful half, because the text hints first and then asks the reader to fill the gap. Hinting means the piece was supplied earlier in some other form. Cortázar plants the material for the inference before he takes the inference away, which is why his stories can be solved on a second reading and rarely feel arbitrary on the first. Check yours by writing down the sentence the reader is supposed to produce. Then find the two places on the page that make that sentence available, and if there is only one, the gap is a riddle.

The household register

He reports the impossible in the voice people keep for chores. The title story of Bestiario has a tiger living in a country house, and the family organises its day around which room the animal is currently in. Why there is a tiger is not a question the story entertains. The register does the persuading: routine verbs, domestic nouns, the small irritations of a household with a summer visitor in it, all of it delivered at the pitch of somebody discussing the laundry. What the flat tone buys you is permission to keep the event in the room for the length of the story. Raise the voice once, and the event becomes a set piece the reader watches from outside.

Metalepsis

A metalepsis moves something from one layer of the fiction into another. Morelli is the working example. He is a character in Hopscotch, an old novelist the others go and visit in a hospital ward, and his notebooks argue for a novel much like the one he appears in, down to its impatience with readers who only want to be entertained. Reading his objection to conventional novels inside a novel that has taken his advice puts you on two levels at once. The effect goes past decoration. Once a book contains its own theory, disagreeing with the theory becomes part of reading the book, and the reader spends the rest of it arguing.

Second-person imperative

The text gives the reader orders. Cronopios and Famas opens with a Manual of Instructions: how to cry, how to wind a watch, how to climb a staircase. The staircase piece describes an ordinary act in enough procedural detail that the act stops looking ordinary, and the reader ends up in the position of an operator. Calvino opens If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by describing the reader settling down with the book they are holding, and the contrast is exact. Calvino's you is a reader and is told so. Cortázar's you is somebody climbing a staircase, and the instructions never mention the book they are printed in. That is the colder version and the more useful one, because the task is something you already know how to do.

Circular structure

The last line sends you back to the first and changes what it was. The Night Face Up is the clean demonstration. A man crashes his motorcycle and is taken to hospital, where he keeps slipping into a fever dream of being hunted through a swamp for sacrifice. The two states alternate until the final page reassigns them. The hospital was the dream. What the device does is turn rereading from an optional pleasure into a requirement, since the first reading was performed with the wrong assumption about which layer was real. Handle it once per story. Two reversals in one piece and the reader stops assuming anything, but a reversal needs an assumption to overturn.

Paralipsis

Paralipsis withholds the thing the story is about and describes everything around it. In House Taken Over, a brother and sister share a large family house, and part of the house becomes occupied. The occupier gets no description and no name. What the reader gets is a sound through a door and the siblings' response to it, which is to close off the taken rooms and go on with the knitting and the cooking in what is left. Kafka runs the opposite policy in The Metamorphosis, where the transformation is announced in the first sentence and explained nowhere afterwards. Cortázar withholds the fact itself and lets the behaviour report it. In the last paragraph the siblings lock the front door and throw the key into the drain outside.

Building a puzzle that pays nothing back

The reader does the work, reaches the end, and finds that the reward is a diagram of the work. That is the commonest way a Cortázar imitation fails, and it fails hardest in the pieces that are cleverest about structure. One question separates the two cases, and it is cheap to ask before you build anything. Name what a reader who refuses the work would lose. A puzzle answers with its own solution. Cortázar's stories answer with a person. Puzzles are also the easiest thing to admire in a workshop, and that is most of why writers keep making them.

Blurring the facts instead of removing the join

Vagueness looks like the same move and produces the opposite result. If a reader cannot tell where the characters are standing or who touched what, there is nothing to reconstruct, and the missing connection cannot even be missed, because none of the material around it was solid. Cortázar withholds interpretation and keeps the record clean. Anyone who has read Blow-Up can say what Michel photographed on the Île Saint-Louis and cannot say what it meant, and the gap works because the first half of it is certain. Blur that half and the reader starts to suspect the draft is unfinished, which is a suspicion the rest of the story has to fight.

Offering a choice that changes nothing

Two reading orders that produce the same book are a gimmick, and readers work this out fast, so the question to ask of any alternative path is what it costs the reader who does not take it. In Hopscotch the answer is concrete, since the short reading is missing an entire register of the book and the long reading gives up the clean ending. Both readers pay. If your second order only rearranges the same information, you have built a shuffle, and a shuffle asks for effort at the exact moment it stops rewarding attention.

Telling the reader they are doing the work

A sentence that announces the reader's participation ends it. As soon as a narrator says that the meaning is yours to make, the reader is watching a technique. Cortázar's most reader-driven pieces stay deadpan. The Table of Instructions in Hopscotch is written as flat procedure, closer to a bus timetable than to a manifesto, and the instructions in Cronopios and Famas explain how to climb a staircase in the tone of somebody describing a filing system. The invitation is in the form. Say it out loud and you have written criticism of your own book and left it in the middle of the book.