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| Cover of Blow-up |
-Brian Mendonca
Struggling to read Cortazar's short story 'Blow-up' on my smart phone, I was delighted to discover that I actually had the story in my somewhat eclectic collection of books. It was one of the stories in an anthology titled The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories.*
Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) was an influential writer from Argentina who inspired much of Latin American writing. His story 'Blow-up' (1964) was written in the last twenty years of his life. As Eller notes it was originally published in Spanish in 1959 - the year of the Cuban revolution.
The action happens on the beautiful Isle Saint-Louts which is one of two islands which sit in the Seine.
In the opening paragraph itself he throws the usage of the pronoun into crisis. He reflects on the suitability of the sentence, 'I will see the moon rose.' He flinches from the arduous task of writing hoping the Remington typewriter will hammer out the words itself. But this is not to be. 'So, I have to write. One of us all has to write, if this is going to get told.'
Soon enough Cortazar's alias Roberto Michel, French-Chilean translator and photographer appears. The author inserts himself taking on the persona of Michel and shifts the point of view to the first person singular as he takes photos ambling along the docks of the river Seine in Paris. He recites verse by the French poet Apollinaire (1880-1918) 'and felt terribly happy in the Sunday morning.'
Michel begins to observe a teenager and a lady. The teenager's face is like an angel drawn by the early-Renaissance artist Fra Filippo (1412-1469) -- immortalized in Browning's poem Fra Lippo Lippi (1855). Michel photographs them. There is also a man who seems to be watching the boy and the woman. Later the author refers to the story as 'this biography of the boy.'
The story is powered by a uncanny sense of timing, 'I think it was the moment when the match was about to touch the tobacco that I saw the young boy for the first time.' The boy is agitated and nervous. When Michel takes the picture he uses the opportunity to run away.
The innocence of the fifteen-year-old is accentuated by Michel's conjectures about his home,
'At home (it would be a respectable home, lunch at noon and romantic landscapes on the walls, with a dark entryway and mahogany umbrella stand inside the door) there'd be the slow rain of time, for studying, for being mama's hope, for looking like dad, for writing to his aunt in Avignon.'
Michel fantasizes that the woman undertakes the initiation of the adolescent. She was playing 'a cruel game, the desire to desire without satisfaction, to excite herself for someone else, someone who in no way cold be that kid.'
Interestingly, as soon as Michel takes the photo he realizes that they have seen him taking it. The lady demands the film, but Michel politely refuses citing the rule that photography is not prohibited on the island. He is pursued by the lady and the man who was in the car: 'we made a perfect and unbearable triangle, something I felt compelled to break with the crack of a whip.' The woman runs her hand over the stone parapet on which Michel was sitting.
When he gets back Michel develops the photos and enlarges a few into blow-ups. He mounts them on his walls and keeps returning to them in between his translation work. He uses the photos to ruminate on 'untellable time.' He feels gratified that he saved the boy from doing something he was not keen on doing. He believes that 'one should not seduce someone from a position of strength.'
The story is also about the author-character's relationship with machines, i.e. the typewriter; the Contax 1.1.2 camera with its sophisticated aperture settings.
The scene shifts to a room on the fifth floor where he replays the sequence of events. In a sense the same incident is played out again like in Waiting for Godot.
Finally he is reduced to being the lens of his camera, 'something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention.' He decided to intervene and moves towards the man and the lady. From a position where he was more of a voyeur the author - the character is seldom referred to by the name Michel now - he says, 'I shut my eyes. I didn't want to see anymore, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot.'
The narrative is interspersed with his observation of avian activity like clouds, the pigeons, the sparrow, and the wind. They function as leitmotifs in the story.
The conclusion of the story is devoted to the clouds. The clouds stand for untenable time. 'What remains to be said is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very clear, clear rectangle tacked up on the walls of my room.' More elements move into the scene and the sky becomes alive once with more clouds, with rain, and with pigeons.
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*Edited by Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega (Vintage, 1998). Cover by Goodreads. Updated 26/4/24.
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