Reading Notes on "Axolotl"
this isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 37 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "Axolotl"
37. Inventing Without Subjects and Objects in "Axolotl"
"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl." In this story something passes across the glass wall separating two entities.
"I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss": a man remembers what he saw as he looked through the glass wall of a terrarium at the zoo. Now read the next sentence in that description: "It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot." Now an axolotl seems to be explaining their stillness.
There was a time when I thought a great deal about what I called the "switch" moment in Julio's stories; the precise spot in a piece of his writing when the ordinary passes over into the extraordinary. I had felt the extraordinary effect and in looking to pin down the switch moment I think I was driven by the same kind of impulse that makes other people figure out how their car or radio work. Or that makes someone look up "axolotl" in an encyclopedia. We feel wonder at something and so, I think, as a way of getting closer to it we want to know how it works and to know how it works, we think, we need to take it apart. This is practical for certain purposes. It is certainly a venerable tradition in the West: to take something apart (to analyze, even, more recently, to deconstruct) as a way of gaining knowledge, and so proximity, to something. But I also think we should be careful with this impulse. After all, it's hard to take something apart - at least a living thing, whose life depends on connections - without wrecking it.
Lately I've been feeling less strongly the desire to find the "switch" in Julio's writing. Or rather, I like to find the switch but then I'm less inclined to take it apart as a means of understanding the production of a certain effect. Lately, I've been more interested in the effect itself and in transmitting it. I like to stand back in wonder now and perhaps also, via some indication or another, to pass that wonder on to another. I'd like to be able to combine both attitudes - wonder and understanding - smoothly in a single gesture, like this one: "Now I am an axolotl."
"My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil: I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood."
The strange beauty in Julio's writing comes from how gracefully he leads me into the universe of such sentences as "Then my face drew back and I understood." It is, on the face of it, an ordinary sentence. But ordinarily, the "my" would lead us to assume that the "face" belonged to the "I"; that the "I" somehow is speaking from inside or behind the "face"; that the "I" draws back and understands together with "my face." But in Julio's writing this sentence becomes weird because the "I" and "my face" have split off from each other, divided now by the pane of glass. Like Rimbaud's "I is an other" these sentences of Julio's, when I clumsily wrap my tongue - especially my mind - around them, move me, or me mudan , they mutate and move me. But it's not merely that I clumsily wrap my tongue around them, as though I were made to feel foolish learning a new dance step in the presence of an arrogant instructor. It's the opposite. Under the spell of Julio style I too become gracefully protean. I become what I am and always have been. My "self" becomes what it is: a more or less tenuous thing made of language and so also capable of being unmade, changed, split, multiplied in language also [ Ù 16, 31, 44, 78]. In this way, the story is like an exercise.
When I say exercise you maybe think of something contrived, abstracted from an organic, lived situation: grammar exercises, musical exercises, practicing a jump shot. Maybe they don't exactly feel like the real thing. But they have the virtue of making a space for practice. I've come to feel that what I think of as the real thing consists entirely of practice. So that I must sink myself completely into the practice at hand for its own sake , while another part of me remains aware of the larger picture of which the exercise forms a part. It's not a question of richness. Richness is equally present in life and in the exercise (so long as I attend mindfully to the latter). Through focus and repetition I cultivate a new and fragile skill. Then, when the complex, dizzying pressures of the game begin, the fundamental skill has become second nature and I can begin to riff off it as a particular, given situation may call for. In this particular story, as in other of his writings, Julio gives me a chance to practice speaking a language without subjects and objects. Or, better yet, he gives me a chance to speak a language built around subjects and objects, but to speak it now as though it didn't have them.
It's like the little narrator of "The Poisons" inventing a running that is like flying [ Ù 8]. Or it's like the little game my son and I used to like to play. He'd say to me "Daddy, you are a poopy face" or something like that. And I'd say back, "Adam, I really don't think you are a poopy face." Then he'd begin to smile and say, " I'm not a poopy face, you are." I'd get very serious: "I know I'm not a poopy face, but I don't think you are either." Adam: "No Dad, listen, I said ' you are a poopy face'." "I know," I'd tell him, "I'm not deaf. I heard you perfectly well. I'm just saying that I don't agree. You are not a poopy face." Before long, the game slides into "say this Dad: 'I am a poopy face'" and I'd reply "this Dad I am a poopy face" and "no, no, no, no!" and laughter. The glass that separates subject from object may be there, at least in language, but we can act as though it weren't. And, as with all invention, this one produces real effects. I am here writing and you are here, too, reading these words. Now say that out loud. Who is talking? Who is I?
Julio Cortázar, "Axolotl," Blow-Up and Other Stories , Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), p. 3. In Spanish: "Axolotl," Final del juego, 1a ed. [1956] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid Alfaguara, 1994), p. 381. For a provocative contemporary reading of the tale, see Brett Levinson's chapter "The Ends of Literature as Neoliberal Act" in his The Ends of Literature: The Latin American 'Boom' in the Neoliberal Marketplace (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 10-30. For other readings of the story see Terry J. Peavler, Julio Cortázar (Boston: Twayne,1990), pp. 37-38, Ana María Amar Sánchez, "Between Utopia and Inferno (Julio Cortázar's Version)" in Julio Cortázar: New Readings , Ed. by Carlos Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 28-31.
