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Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics for Cortázar and for Us: Houses Taken Over

Author(s): Brett Levinson


Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 32, No. 63 (Jan. - Jun., 2004), pp. 99-112
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
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POPULISM, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICS
FOR CORT?ZAR AND FOR US: HOUSES TAKEN OVER

BY BRETT LEVINSON

In this essay I want to analyze Julio Cort?zar's "Casa tomada"


[House Taken Over] as an extraordinary text that allows us to glimpse,

through the force of literature, the very conditions of our intellectual life,
some fifty years after the work was written. I am betting on an amazing

possibility, whose door Cort?zar opens: if we?retrospectively?can


discover what Cort?zar was doing back then, then he?proleptically?
will reveal to us what we are doing right now. In the name of this

possibility, Iwill first conduct a political reading of "Casa tomada," then


an aesthetic one, and finally a third exegesis that examines the stakes of
casting literature as either aesthetic
object or political vehicle: of reading
in terms of the value of the political, the value of the aesthetic, or in terms
of the competition between such values, in terms of value itself.1
"Casa tomada" narrates the life of two middle-aged siblings,
unmarried and childless, who dwell within a large Buenos Aires house
that they haveinherited from the generations preceding them. The
brother, who is also the narrator, ventures from the residence only
occasionally, to shop and to visit bookstores in search of recent French
literature. The sister appears never to abandon the home. The hours of the

pair are consumed by cleaning chores?which, to judge from the


account, amount to a full time job?cooking, and hobbies.
The "action" of the narrative turns on the take-over of the house,
which is a two part process. In the first, the back portion, which includes
the library and dining room, is usurped by unnamed, unseen, noiseless,
perhaps imagined figures. The siblings lock the door dividing the abode
so as to impede further incursion. In the second, the front section is
appropriated: without putting up the slightest resistance, as if they were
100 latin American Literary Review

yielding not to trespassers but to new owners, the proprietors abandon the
dwelling. Onto the street with no possessions or currency, they bolt the
entrance and toss away the key as the tale closes.

Perhaps the easiest and most interesting entrance into the text is the
one taken by numerous previous critics: political context. I am of course
referring to the rise of Peronism in the 40s, the subsequent politicization
of the Argentine working class, and the destablization of the bourgeoi
sie.2 The narrator hints at the issue as he explains how it is possible to live
in great material comfort without an income-earning job: "We didn't
have to earn our living, there was plenty coming in from the farms each
month, even piling up" (12,108).3 The siblings are landlords; they do not
simply receive money but accumulate wealth. This accumulation, in fact,
has numerous parallels within the narrative. The sister amasses, without
ever using, the sweaters and socks that she incessantly knits. The family
accrues books and stamps. Also, the brother stockpiles cash, which
fittingly he fails to retrieve as he is shut out of the home in the final scene.
The protagonists, then, compile while barely exchanging or putting
their gains into circulation. By circulation I refer not to monetary
expenditure. In fact, the siblings scarcely pass around the city; they have
ceased mixing among friends or family; and they have withdrawn from
any sexual economy?save, perhaps, from their own possible incestuous
relation. It is as if the narrator and his sister had fallen so far out of a public
circulation that, as they were meticulously dusting the living room, they
missed a small detail, one which has only now come to their attention: a

populist overturning of the state's entire political structure had taken


place.
Now, these topoi of accumulation and circulation, at least when
situated within a narrative about a twosome which so obviously embod
ies the Argentine bourgeoisie, conjure the base of Marxist theory. And
in either gleaning ormaking this association a reader implicitly identifies
the figure who takes over the house. He is the worker and/or the migrated

campesino, politicized by Peronism. The laborer's efforts, in some


fashion, yielded and have upheld the abode. Therefore this laborer, as he
takes over, does not actually do so from the outside. Already a fundamen
tal component of the residence, he has always dwelled by right within.
Yet only now, with the advent of Peronism, is his "inhabitation" and/or
cohabitation experienced.
These last points would explain an odd absence within the house:
that of a servant. The
typical bourgeois Argentine family of the period
surely would not conduct, by itself, all the cleaning and cooking duties.
Itwould utilize an employee to perform some of these tasks. The fact that
Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics 101
for Cort?zar and for Us

the brother and sister do not make such a hire, choosing to occupy their
daily lives with chores?and the narrator makes sure to use the language
of the workplace in his description of the toil: for instance, he emphasizes
his sister's punctuality?points up a desire to keep paid workers outside
the household. For via the exclusion, the pair can present its household/
social status not as bound
to other positions?for example, to other
classes?as or relative, hence as historical
relational and mortal, but as
one that lies beyond such ties, indeed, which transcends every bond,
boundary, border, or contaminant, and which is invulnerable due to this
fact.

Hence, it is the resistance to circulation which breaks down when


the back part of the house is taken over, when the siblings find themselves
not in but as a relation: with others, within circulation itself. But why is
this significant? A not-yet-mentioned component of "Casa tomada"
permits us to answer. I am alluding to the story's intentional or uninten
tional deployment of Freud's notion of the uncanny.4 Freud, it is to be
recalled, commences his analysis of the "Unheimlich" by defining the
term as both the "familiar" and "unfamiliar," the "homely" and "for
eign." And just as the word signifies the opposite of itself, so too, for
Freud, can the essence of the ego be its very opponent. Herein, indeed,
lies the essence of the uncanny. When the ego experiences an alien entity
as its replica, and that double as its repressed essence or secret truth, it
encounters the uncanny.
It is not then a particular odd image or foreign being that, for Freud,
is uncanny. No object is objectively uncanny?or any could be. For when
doubled the ego confronts the fact that, because it can be duplicated,
because a perfect substitute exists, it is dispensable not necessary. The
true self, in fact, desires to endure as dissimilar from any copy. Only as
absolutely distinct from this contingent entity does he prevail, stand as
necessary, the inviolable itself. The uncanny dispels the illusion; ownmost
and most alien, the unheimlich is not the double as such but the self's
death, which doubling, repeatability, and encounter mark.
Thus, uncanny doppelgangers abound throughout "Casa tomada."
The rightful occupants are doubled by the outside entities that appropri
ate this ownership, also by right. Idleness stands as the mimicry of work,
the public as the fundament of the private, the bourgeois owners as clones
of servants, siblings as the copies of spouses, the campo as omnipres
ent?in the form of dirt or tierra that, as the brother complains (13,108),
ceaselessly falls upon the furniture?within the metropolis. Death in
circulation and circulation as death haunt the house's?and the
bourgeoisie's?very foundation. The encounter with, and the subse
102 Latin American Literary Review

quent deployment, appropriation, and overcoming of the popular or

public, the withdrawal into a safe private home, is how the bourgeoisie
came to be. And the same circulation among others, now recalled,
announces in "Casa tomada" this class' dispossession: the end of a
childless family line, the mortality of a certain social structure.
This political reading, if satisfactory, nonetheless puts itself into
question as it presents "Casa tomada" as an allegory: of Peronism or

populism. For if Cort?zar's sole intention were to expose the vulnerabil


ity of the bourgeoisie within Peronist Argentina, and if, as we shall see,
a main embodiment of this class is the high French literature that the
brother covets, it is unlikely that the author would deploy the most

literary or artificial of tropes, allegory, in order to carry out this disman

tling project. Or is it?


The pre-capitalist nobility, we know, is defined by blood, by nature.
The nobleman is noble due to lineage, not culture, wealth, or even
character. The bourgeoisie's status, quite to the contrary, is not given. It
is gained and it therefore can be lost. In other words class, as modernity
emerges, is not fixed but earned and forfeited, constructed and transitory.
The bourgeois may have obtained his position, as have the siblings in
"Casa tomada," through inheritance, ancestry, and prior social struc
tures; but neither pedigree nor assets can guarantee the sustenance of the
niche.
The bourgeoisie thereby attaches to itself certain public forms by
means of which it seeks to preserve its standing. These, because set off
from others sorts of production?domains such fashion, popular forms
of expression, work itself?emerge as the site of "culture," ultimately of
a national culture: as in "being cultured." The bourgeois
culture stands
as the elite, protracts his class, by appropriating this "high" domain. For
as appropriated, as public object turned private property, turned propri

ety, culture materializes as natural, as the essence and ground not only of
a class but of the State and even of Being. It thereby permits the

bourgeoisie, having claimed Being or essence, to situate itself in the same

place, albeit in a distinct manner, as the one occupied by the nobility: as


natural and as superior, as naturally superior, clear of any potential

plunge.
But what distinguishes the high from low, culture from other
productions? The response appears to lie in permanence. "Casa tomada"
testifies to this possibility by positing books, in addition to the house
'
itself, as the representatives of the family s position. One of the brother's
statements speaks directly to the point: "One can reread a book but once
a pullover is finished you can't do it over again, it's some kind of
Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics 103
for Cort?zar and for Us

disgrace" (11-12, 108). The classic's value and utility, we see, do not
decrease as the book circulates, as it is read and reread.
This fact renders the brother's initial reference to books as crucial
as it is paradoxical: "I took advantage trips to make
of these the rounds
of the bookstores, uselessly asking if they had anything new in French
literature.Nothing worthwhile had arrived inArgentina since 1939" ( 11,
107). The narrator desires both the new ("novedades") and the valuable
("valioso"). For him, the worth of the great work is tied to novedad?
to originality but also to modes and styles: to the novel. But unlike style,
the tome must also persist, stand as other than a novedad, as everlasting
value.

The great book, over against a great painting or opera, circulates

widely throughout public space. It is fingered and passed down, dupli


cated and discarded, cited and recited. Indeed, literature as the embodi
ment of "high culture" came into being precisely due to its public
appearance, its publication: to the advent not of the printing press but of

literary salons and cafes. Yet because it circulates alongside and even
inside other forms, such as fashion, but then vanquishes them?fashion
dies off and is replaced; a novel, while also new and fashionable, can
subdue its own replaceability take on as great
and mortality, book the
merit of culture as the modern rendering of classical art?the literary
surfaces as the marker of the eternal merit of the bourgeoisie, as value
which goes public, profits from, but then surmounts its engagements so
as to stand as a worth beyond others and without opposition, as priceless
(in "Casa tomada," as an invaluable private collection)', as the true worth
that transcends, therefore founds, the crassness of money, of capital. The
loss of access to the library during the first take-over stage in "Casa
tomada" is therefore, for the bourgeois protagonists, the mark of the
forfeiture of this, their non-transient value.
However such claims, which smoothly suture the political and the
aesthetic, bypass the already-signaled contradiction. Allegorizing
Peronism rather than addressing this political movement less obliquely,

through, say, a social realist text, Cort?zar in "Casa tomada" calls upon,
seems to need, the literary as such. The
political component conse

quently falls to something than a necessity,


less less than essential.
Indeed, the form and/or style of "Casa tomada" raise the question as to
whether the narrative's main concern is Peronism at all. Could the story
not just as well be one about allegory, about literature itself? Might not
the few Peronist allusions found in the tale represent an alibi or aside for
an account that is primarily a literary recitation: a ghost story, a yarn
about perversion, an intertextual dialogue with Poe, Kafka, Borges, a
104 Latin American Literary Review

statement on the fantastic with little political inclination, one that stands

culpable, in need of an alibi, precisely due to this insufficient political


engagement?a deficiency, imagined or real, for which Cort?zar never
ceased to feel guilty, and about which he never ceased to write?
To respond, we do well to underscore still another metaliterary
component of the tale. Any reading of "Casa tomada" must base itself on
the brother's report. The reader seemingly has no other testimony to go
on: the meaning of the text turns on this sole, nameless authority. Yet the

authority of this authority in fact dwindles as the story draws to a close.


Indeed, when the account ends?one might say, when its door is finally
slammed?meaning is entirely entrusted to the reception of the reader.
The narrator, as vehicle of the author, of his authority, forfeits control and
is "silenced" the instant the house,
the saga, shuts down.

Reception theory might argue that this is true of any narrative. The
moment a text concludes, it yields rule to its receiver. The death of the
author is the birth of the reader. But in "Casa tomada" the idea seems

especially pertinent since the brother's deadpan narration "authorizes"


or empowers almost no reading at all. Or rather, the narrator offers hints
that might lead to numerous visions but no "solid information" that
would help us resolve once and for all the fundamental question of the
tale: who or what invades the home and why? This intruder in fact stands,
by the anecdote's finish, as a blurry figure that can be clarified by a dense
quantity of speculations and opinions, all of which are more or less

supported by the text?as is the Peronist reading put forth above?but


none which can be proved central.
Here, we return to the issue of reception. Perhaps we should say that
the house in "Casa tomada" is the story itself. The trespasser is thereby
the reader. At the threshold as he interprets, both proper
of the text/home
and exterior to the housequa tale (as is any threshold), unheimlich, this
reader gradually assumes a mandate as the story develops. Eventually,
the "old" authority is locked out and the reader is at liberty to take over:
to name the assailants and shed light on their obscurity. And said receiver
is free to perform the act not once but many times. Indeed, at the tale's
termination the narrator indicates where he has discarded the key: in the
sewer. The it time and again so as to enter and reenter,
reader can retrieve
claim and reclaim
proprietorship of the mystery: the truth.
The "death of the author," when first proclaimed, referred to a break
from authority on the part of the subject-reader, and therefore to a certain
notion, abstract or not, elitist or not, of liberty and transgression. Thus,
as "Casa tomada" gives itself to the receiver, authority hands its power
to the previously unlicensed or unauthorized. Here again, a possible
Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics 105
for Cort?zar and for Us

Peronist interpretation sneaks through the sealed entrance of the

metaliterary one: the reader's take-over of the dead authority figure


parallels the worker's or Peronism's subsumption of the dying bourgeoi
sie, of the class in power.
Yet, as "Casa tomada" illustrates, the "death of the author" is

actually about this sort of freedom only in amost complex manner. In the
account the reader is indeed freed the instant the text's speaker is closed
out. Yet inmaking a claim on or about the house's invader, in naming it,
this interpreter does not actually exercise his self-determination. In fact,
"Casa tomada" has interpellated the reader by extending to him a series
of choices?none thoroughly authorized but none that is uninvited
either?which, when selected, inscribe this reader precisely into the
discourses of authority from which he supposedly liberated himself. For
the sake of brevity, I have been emphasizing only three such slots, all
thoroughly institutionalized. One is the political interpretation, which
keys into the narrative through an appeal to Peronism. The second is the
metaliterary analysis, which unveils "Casa tomada" as an account about
the relation of writer and reader. A
third exegesis views the story as

political allegory, concerned evenly with


politics and allegory, historical
context and aesthetic principles. Meaning in the first perspective is

grounded in the value of politics; in the second, in the worth of the


aesthetic; in the third, in the merit of tolerance, neutrality, balance, and
rigor. Ascribing to different, yet equally traditional ideological, intellec
tual, and moral positions, each of these interpretations testifies to the
authority of that tradition by ascribing to its modern foundation, as
capitalist as it ismetaphysical as it is aestheticist: the reduction of being
to value and calculation.
Thereader of "Casa tomada" is not compelled, by some autocratic
figure, to adopt his stance. He does so of his own desire, through his self
determination. Picking among meanings the reader in fact opts for none
of the above but for the highest value, the value of value, self-determi
nation itself: himself as a free subject, transcendental via this very right
to select. The overt focus of the scholar
may wellor consumer
be
structure, truth, theory, consciousness-raising, or simple enjoyment, not
value. Yet the choice of any of these materialize as value, maximum
value, because the individual selects among them, because choice
qua a subject position qua power is itself that very value.
The reader, we noted previously, is in "Casa tomada" one conceiv
able usurper as he moves from the text's threshold at the outset to an
authority 'or inside personage, one with the power and freedom to fill in
the story s blank. Yet now we see that the moment the reader locates the
106 Latin American Literary Review

key, enters the tale in this manner?as empowered but somewhat


grimy?he as liberating invader surfaces simultaneously as the sullied
invadee. For once he discloses the tale's truth as either/or political or
aesthetic, the reader exposes his
subjectivity and will to power as that
truth. The certainty will thus be broken down
by future readers and
readings?precisely because
the interpreter, by averring authority, puts
that authority in circulation where, one subjective speculation and

spectacle among others, it is consumed and perishes.


One might therefore contend that the "winner" upon this ideologi
cal and literary field of horror that Cort?zar constructs in "Casa tomada"
is neither the reader nor the narrator, the worker nor the bourgeoisie,

politics nor aesthetics, balance nor bias, but absolute authority itself. For
this authorial position, in the last instance, is not embodied by the brother
who is tossed outside his domain; and it is not represented by the reader.
The power is held by Cort?zar who?as he so often does?has woven the

interpreter into his narrative net. The reader as transcendental subject


who takes over in the wake of another authority's death ultimately
succumbs to the author's scam, as he is blinded by his own will to
selfhood.
Among the most horrible of all of Cort?zar's ghost stories, "Casa
tomada" is therefore a ghastly ambush that induces each reader to enclose
or house himself within
himself, to seek that self, via the tale as mere
medium, in a drive for an uninfringeable position, in a self-identification
with, and self-affirmation of a figure of absolutism that this reader seems
to displace and subvert but actually, in the end, constitutes.
The fall of a single and central authority, such as the author, does not
then inevitably liberate. Fundamental to a shift from one method of
domination and restraint to another, decentralization only obliges the
citizen or non-citizen, now turned consumer, to select: not automatically
to select this or that but just to select. The subjectivity that is gained
through such choice, by its own logic, sets up every relation to the other,
hence any politics or poetics, as unnecessary since what is here neces

sary, essential, is the subject himself, the absolute as embodied by reader


or author.
Across the author's
demise, intra-active or readerly interpreta
tion?not unlike TV talk shows?thereby
intra-active easily backs non
commitment to any outside or alternative, to the world itself, as that
world's foundation and ideal. Indeed, it is the consumer/citizen's intra

activity, not his passivity, that stands in opposition to engagement:

soliciting the participation of the individual or collective I, intra-activism


constructs the value of non-engagement and non-engagement, unadul
Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics 107
for Cort?zar and for Us

terated might without potential praxis or poeisis, as this value. Stated in

contemporary Latin Americanist terms, the production of a variety of

meanings and the demand for preference, which surface in the wake of
the despotic authority's slippage, only reinforce the newest form of rule:
the neoliberal consensus qua the market, which induces every subject to
desire, therefore reproduce, the Same, the Subject himself.
Is "Casa tomada" in fact an allegory of Peronism? The base of

populism proper, of course, is a figure, such as Juan or Eva Peron. This


site lures the diverse sectors of the public into locating in the state their
own proper place. The state is good for many choices, many ideologies.
It, and only it, offers each a state position, a site of self-determination.
The populist thus materializes as the absolute power that authorizes also
alternative forces and freedoms. He/she appears, in short, as a totalizing
field that precludes the very freedoms that he/she stimulates. Peronism,
in "Casa tomada," thus emerges as the scene of the convergence of left
and right, of the reduction of the one to the other in the figure?the empty
territory to be populated, the imaginary free and exterior-to-capital space
upon which all capitalist enterprises call?in the figure, literary like all
figures, of power.
Drawing the reader into affirming the structures of authority through
his liberty to fill
in its vague invader with himself, "Casa tomada"
therefore less describes as performs populism. Populism or Peronism
names a political operation that is both too centered and decentered, and
that is thereforethe logical precursor of its historical aftermath in
Argentina: the too strong state of dictatorship and/or the too weak state
of the neoliberal marketplace.
Indeed, like the figure of Peron, the figure of modern allegory
(Kafka's insect in "The Metamorphosis" is a prime example) stands as
the hazy core that extends an invitation to amultitude of identifications.
It is at once a given text's authorial center and the vacant, passive area
over which the spectator, the crowd, the reader, assumes dominion.
Perhaps, therefore, we should not discuss "Casa tomada" as an allegory
of Peronism but posit Peronism as the literary performance of the
political, as itself an allegory.
In the beginning of this essay it seemed that every aesthetic view of
"Casa tomada" would end up supporting a political interpretation. Now
it appears that every political take on the text will prop, via the notion of
the figure, an aesthetic or metaliterary analysis. The allegory of Peronism
switches, almost by itself, into an allegory of reading or a reading of
allegory. In truth the "more political" readers of "Casa tomada" appear,
the more they affirm as a trope, hence the more
necessary they fore
108 Latin American Literary Review

ground the aesthetic components of the tale. Likewise, the more the
scholar on the literary value of the text, the more
insists he discloses
literature as the political tool of either class difference or its overturning,
of the right or left.
Cort?zar desired texts to be themselves,
his without historical
referent, literary precedent, or future followers. Cort?zar sought, in other
words, to be absolutely modern, to devise a total break, from history and
even from literature, well aware that he came too late, as do all Latin
American artists, forthat very modernity. Conversely, as loyal if anoma
lous leftist Cort?zar sought to address the historical positions and social
institutions intowhich the very act of writing and publishing flung him.
His texts, struggling to stand as pure creations, devoid of aesthetic or
material history, and as historical testimonies and recitations, replete
with an eerily unpretentious rather than arty mood?Cort?zar's short
texts are penned across the schism between these two. They take place
upon the fault between aesthetic drive and political aspiration, a split that
is neither: not politics and not aesthetics but the impossibility of their

conjunction and disjunction.


The Cort?zar reader, then, cannot select either aesthetics or politics
without conjuring both and neither. The choice between the two, indeed,
is no choice since the claim to one, uncannily, must call upon its opposite
as an alternative foundation
that displaces and decenters it. This pick, in
other words, cannot be grounded in a reasonable assertion but only in

ideology since, by that reason, the selection of one overdetermines the


other: when the qualitative difference between aesthetics and politics
surfaces as an unbearable demand, ideology and subject positions call
upon quantitative distinctions, value conflict, so as to break the tie and
affirm themselves as truth. "Casa tomada," in other words, will not tend
a ground for any (but itwill for every) interpretation; each such exegesis
is literally groundless, situated over a rift. The individual exposition of
the tale is thus a willful assertion without support?not because "Casa
tomada" is meaningless but because its sense stretches a divide,
across
takes in its other side, materializes as more than itself, as one truth too

many.
Yet if the scholar does in fact opt for aesthetics the instant he decides
for politics, and vice-versa, if his choice is no choice (he cannot take one
without taking the other) and if the production and invitation to selection
are the means by which the transcendental subject emerges as the
consumer who backs a pure consensus?if this is all true, then the
reader's drive to authority is also an exposure to the limit of choice itself:
of a market that reduces meaning and sovereignty to free selection, and
Populism, Aesthetics, and Politics 109
for Cort?zar and for Us

of the transcendental ego who liberates and empowers himself merely by


reproducing and ascribing to these options.
Because Cort?zar's own authority in "Casa tomada" could not
come about if not accompanied by a demand for the reader participation
that the demand itself cannot dictate, the story exposes reception and
doxa, exchange, and deauthorization as proper to
thereby mutability,
very essence, as literature's and culture's double: the very
power's
double from which the bourgeoisie and literature as ruling sites?
their value as autonomous,
to affirm as essentially unbound to
striving
publication and the public, meager tastes, and subjective evaluations?
must withdraw in order to stand.
Now, one name for this boundary or liminal space that binds
authority to uncertified response, and by extension, culture to fashion,
the bourgeoisie to the public, the aesthetic to the political, is desire. For
one cannot control the force of desire; nor can one select, as would a
can certainly repress desire, substitute
subject, the object of desire. One
the object of desire for an object choice, the pleasure for the reality

principle. Yet repression only displaces or compresses, in any case


the desire itself. In maintaining one reading over another
proliferates,
when every such claim enjoys only itself as foundation, in asserting
himself as subject, the reader exposes his interpretation as this very

exposure: of his own desire.

Interpretation, then, reflects not only the truth but the desire of
empowerment. The reader makes a determination across a limit that

"inseparates," renders "unselectable," politics and/or aesthetics. His


of his desire, of the manacle on authority which he
pick is the disclosure
has had to disavow in order to emerge as a power, as chooser. Desire is
the frontier that opens Self to Other, to the ecstatic, incestuous eros that

pervades the entirety of "Casa tomada."


"Casa tomada" thereby represents not just an assault on but an
affirmation of power. The tale makes public its signs and representations,
hence lends its hand to the taking of ideological positions. And it bears
responsibility for these appropriations, be they by the left orright. Yet the
narrative also communicates on or between
the border powers, the fix
between self and other for power renders not visible but
that the drive
readable: desire as the rift that is the condition of politics and art, but that
cannot come forth in either a political claim or an aesthetic object. This
bind is in fact the partition that, while making categories conceivable, is
not one of them, is not itself a choice but an obligation, a responsibility.
You cannot not have it. As interpreter you might opt for reading A over
reading B but, either way, you must decide for the interval, discontinuity,
110 Latin American Literary Review

the sharing that joins and disconnects the positions. Yes, the bond of
forces, the communication between author and reader, teacher and
student, colleague and colleague, politics and aesthetics, is also the hard
boundary or dis-joint that generates selection, hence the positioning of
subjects: the institutional empowerment, the consensus without negotia
tion, contact, or contract, the market that erases in advance unions,
desires, engagements, communities, simple dialogue, indeed, plain
courtesy. However, this linkage is at the same time the communication
that hitches self to other, that casts strict separation as an
impossibility
that yields to possibility, to engagement as such.
"Casa tomada" conveys this double bind as the dual nature of
power, and as the two components of both literature and society. The
story is composed of signifiers that yield the subjects of representation
and self-representation. Yet these signs also communicate the borders
and edges which thrust each subject into an intimate relation with an
Other: they communicate communication itself, encounter?ecstatic
and erotic like all genuine encounters?as the core of every commitment,
artisticor political. Moreover, this communication of limits or limit of
communication is the condition of the transgression and freedom of
which Cort?zar remained forever capable, of any powerful engagement
with or refusalof the institution, since without limits?limits to power?
there is no such crossing, trespassing, or force: no liberation, break, or
break in, no strength or affirmation, but solely the resentiment of the will
to a boundless and ideal I, individual or collective (itmakes no difference).

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON

NOTES
1
The original point of departure of this study was the extreme diversity of
previous critical readings of "Casa tomada." While the political component is
marked in essays such as Claudio Cifuentes's "Un personaje ausente en la
fantasticidad de dos relatos de Julio Cort?zar: La ley de la propiedad privada" in
Coloquio internacional: Lo l?dico y lo fant?stico en la obra de Cort?zar, II
(Madrid: Fundamentos, 1986), 89-95, Maguelina Soif er treats the tale as a strictly
metaliterary and aesthetic work in Revista letras 35 (1986): 173-184. Still others,
such as Renato Mart?nez in "Fonema o grafema? El Boom y la deconstrucci?n de
Derrida," Torre de papel!, no. 1 (1992): 54-63, locate in "Casa tomada" a prototype
for deconstructive reading practices. Other essays which spurred my work, given
the remarkable difference of their points of view, are: Fernando Moreno Turner, "El
Aesthetics, and Politics 111
Populism,
for Cort?zar and for Us

en movimiento del texto: Nuevo asalto a 'Casa tomada" de


texto y los movimentos
Julio Cort?zar" in Acta literaria 23 (1988): 69-80; "La casa de los sue?os: sobre
'Casa tomada,' de Julio Cort?zar," Coloquio internacional: Lo l?dico y lofant?stico
en la obra de Cort?zar, //(Madrid: Fundamentos, 1986), 97-109; Mar?aRosenblat,
"La nostalgia de la unidad en el cuento fant?stico: 'The Fall of theHouse of Usher'
'Casa tomada'" in Los ochenta mundos de Cort?zar, ensayos, ed. Femando
y

Burgos (Madrid: EDI, 1987), 199-209; Bernard Terramorsi, "Maison occupp?e de


Julio Cort?zar: Le demon de la solitude," CCERLI9 (1984): 33-41 ;Jose H. Brandt
Rojas, "Asedios a 'Casa tomada' de Julio Cort?zar," Revista de estudios hisp?nicos
7 (1980): 75-84.
2 in his El habla de la ideolog?a (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Andres Avellanada,
Sudamericana, 1993), offers an excellent summary of (and contribution to) the field
of criticism that addresses "Casa tomada" as a political narrative about Peronism.
Other scholars that tackle the issue include Juan Jos? Sebrieli, Buenos Aires.
Vida contidiana y alienaci?n (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veinte, 1965), 102
105; An?bal Ford, "Los ?ltimos cuentos de Cort?zar" inMundo Nuevo, no. 5
( 1966), 81-83; Nestor Garc?a Canclini, Cort?zar. Una antropolog?a po?tica (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Nova, 1968); and Ant?n Arrufut, "Pr?logo," en Julio Cort?zar,
Cuentos (LaHabana: Casa de lasAmericas, 1964), ix.While I am indebted to these
texts, I want to emphasize that my essay differs in focus from them. The above
studies are efforts to demonstrate that Cort?zar's politicization, above all his
critique of the bourgeoisie, emerges with his earliest tales. (This thesis contrasts
with those who argue that Cort?zar does not become "politicized" until after the
Cuban Revolution.) My essay?which, by the way, does not view "Casa tomada"
as solely a critique of the bourgeoisie; it is also a critique of that critique?is not
about this particular position but about the political ramifications of taking a
position at all when reading. What are the political ramifications, for us
today, of taking one position over the other, in particular a political or aesthetic
position, when analyzing? In short, the present essay does not investigate, much less
set out to "discover," the relation of Cort?zar's narratives to Peronism. It is only

marginally about Cort?zar and Peronism, and is therefore not actually a dialogue
with the important criticism just cited.
3
All quotes are from the English Blow Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul
Blackburn (Pantheon Books, New York: 1967). Citations include first the page
number from this translation and are followed by the page number from the Spanish:
Julio Cort?zar, Cuentos completosll (Santanilla, S.A. Madrid, 1994).
4Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1957), 152-170.
112 Latin American Review
Literary

WORKS CITED

Avellanada, Andr?s. El habla de la ideolog?a. Buenos Aires: Editorial


Sudamericana, 1993.
Brandt Rojas, Jos? H. "Asedios a 'Casa tomada' de Julio Cort?zar" in Revista de
estudios hisp?nicos 7 (1980): 75-84.
Cifuentes, Claudio. "Un personaje ausente en la fantasticidad de dos relatos de Julio
Cort?zar: La ley de la propiedad privada" in Coloquio internacional: Lo
l?dico y lofant?stico en la obra de Cort?zar, II. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1986,
89-95.

Cort?zar, Julio. Blow Up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn (Pantheon
Books, New York: 1967).
Cort?zar, Julio. Cuentos completos/l (Santanilla, S.A. Madrid, 1994).
Ford, An?bal. "Los ?ltimos cuentos de Cort?zar" inMundo Nuevo, no. 5 (1966), 81
83; Garc?a Canclini, Nestor. Cort?zar. Una antropolog?a po?tica. Buenos
Aires: Editorial Nova, 1968.
Arrufut, Ant?n. "Pr?logo," en Julio Cort?zar, Cuentos. La Habana: Casa de las

Americas, 1964, i-x.


Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny," in The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, vol.
4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1957), 152-170.
Mart?nez, Renato. "Fonema o grafema? El Boom y la deconstrucci?n de Derrida"
in Torre de papel 2, no. 1 (1992): 54-63.
Moreno Turner, Femando. "El texto en movimiento y los movimentos del texto:
Nuevo asalto a 'Casa tomada" de Julio Cort?zar" inActa literaria 23 (1988):
69-80;
Rosenblat, Mar?a. "La nostalgia de la unidad en el cuento fant?stico: 'The Fall of
the House of Usher' y 'Casa tomada'" in Los ochenta mundos de Cort?zar,
ensayos, ed. Femando Burgos. Madrid: EDI, 1987, 199-209.
Sebrieli, Juan Jos?. Buenos Aires. Vida contidiana y alienaci?n. Buenos Aires:
Siglo Veinte, 1965, 102-105.
Soifer, Miguelina. "Cort?zar y la est?tica" in Revista letras 35 (1986): 173-184.
Terramorsi, Bernard. "Maison occupp?e de Julio Cort?zar: Le demon de la
solitude" in CCERLI9 (1984): 33-41;

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