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POPULISM, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICS
FOR CORT?ZAR AND FOR US: HOUSES TAKEN OVER
BY BRETT LEVINSON
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
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ceased mixing among friends or family; and they have withdrawn from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
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.
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
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
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.
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
statement on the fantastic with little political inclination, one that stands
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
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
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
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
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
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
Interpretation, then, reflects not only the truth but the desire of
empowerment. The reader makes a determination across a limit that
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).
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
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
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