Notes on "Carta a una senorita en Paris" ("Letter to a Young Lady in Paris")
This isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 93 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris"
93. The Deadly Disavowal of Invention in "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris"
"Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" is a suicide note. Its author is a man who has been staying in the empty Buenos Aires apartment of his friend Andrea, who lives in Paris. He's only stayed there for a few weeks. It seems to be a nice apartment. So what drives him to destroy himself?
Is it the live bunnies that, as he explains to his friend, "it occurs to him from time to time to vomit"? But it's never been a big deal. "It's no reason," for example, "not to live in any house, it's no reason that one should be embarrassed and be isolated and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut." After all, it only happens every four to six weeks, he can keep them on the terrace of his apartment, where he grows clover, and then give them to his landlady who merely thinks of rabbit breeding as an odd habit. Even when he first arrives at the apartment, as he's riding the elevator, and he vomits a little bunny, he doesn't see a problem. He's got things under control, bunny vomiting and all. As he explains, "Habits are concrete forms of rhythm, they are the quota of rhythm, they are the quota of rhythm that helps us live. It wasn't so bad to vomit rabbits once one had entered into the invariable cycle, into the method."
But the cycle is variable and in fact, it does vary. After that first one in the elevator of her apartment, that very night he vomits another, "And two days later a white one. And the fourth night a little gray bunny." Before long there are ten of them. He keeps them in the wardrobe. The housekeeper suspects nothing because he spends every minute of his waking hours (the bunnies are diurnal, so he's not getting much sleep, though at least he can clean up after them at night) putting things back in order. "Andrea, I don't know how I stand up under it. You remember that I came to your place for some rest. It's not my fault if I vomit a bunny from time to time." But he consoles himself that there are ten and no more, that after the first flurry he's gone fifteen days with no more bunnies. "Only ten, think of that little happiness I have in the middle of it all, the growing calm. . . .". He's begun to adjust.
But the cycle is variable and in fact, it does vary. He finishes his letter the next day. "I've written this because it's important to let you know that I was not all that responsible for the unavoidable and helpless destruction of your home. . . . I'm not so much to blame, you'll see when you get here that I've repaired a lot of the things that were broken with the cement I bought in the English shop, I did what I could to keep from being a nuisance." It seems that one more has come and his confidence in the invariability of the new cycle is shattered beyond what he can repair. "Ten was fine, with a wardrobe, clover, and hope, so many things could happen for the better. But not with eleven, because to say eleven is already to say twelve for sure, and Andrea, twelve would be thirteen." So it is the bunnies - or rather, their uncontrollable proliferation - that drive him to kill himself. But the question now is: what drives the acceleration of his bunny production?
Here it is important to resist the temptation to ignore the bunnies, to see through them and assign them some kind of purely symbolic or representational function. The bunnies are not poems, they do not stand for anything. If we are listening to the narrator mindfully, we ought to be as matter-of-fact about the bunnies as he is. There's nothing extraordinary here, nothing to be ashamed of, as he says. He just vomits bunnies from time to time. Some people have irritating laughs, other people have irrepressible gas. So the question is not what the bunnies are, nor what they mean. They are bunnies and they don't mean anything. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari say of what they call a "desiring machine": "It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works." So the question they recommend is what does it do? And how does it work? That's the way to look at it: this man is a rabbit-producing machine, the machine has gone into overproduction. What does it do? "They've nibbled away a little at the books on the lowest shelf, you'll find the backs repasted, which I did so that Sara [the housekeeper] wouldn't notice it. That lamp with the porcelain belly full of butterflies and old cowboys, do you like that very much?" That's what it does: the rabbit-producing machine that this man has become destroys his friend's apartment.
But why? He keeps insisting toward the end of the letter that it's not his fault, not his fault that he vomits bunnies, not his fault that the apartment will be a mess. That's because it "offends" him "to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel's quartet." It "hurts" him "to come into an ambience where someone who lives beautifully has arranged everything like a visible affirmation of her soul, here the books (Spanish on one side, French and English on the other), the large green cushions there, the crystal ashtray that looks like a soap bubble that's been cut open on this exact spot on the little table, and always a perfume, a sound, a sprouting of plants, a photograph of the dead friend, the ritual of tea trays and sugar tongs."
Now, why again? Why is it so painful and offensive to him to even enter, let alone tamper with, a closed order? Listen to him again: "How much at fault one feels taking a small metal tray and putting it at the far end of the table, setting it there simply because one has brought one's dictionaries and it's at this end, within easy reach of the hand, that they ought to be. To move that tray is the equivalent of an unexpected horrible crimson in the middle of one of Ozenfant's painterly cadences, as if suddenly the strings of all the double basses snapped at the same with the same dreadful whiplash at the most hushed instant in a Mozart symphony. Moving that tray alters the play of relationships in the whole house, of each object with another, of each moment of their soul with the soul of the house and its absent inhabitant. And I cannot bring my fingers close to a book, hardly change a lamp's cone of light, open the piano bench, without a feeling of rivalry and offense swinging before my eyes like a flock of sparrows." "Alters the play of relationships in the whole house." What's at issue here is invention. He enters a closed order, with the relationships fixed, and it is intolerable to him to invent. But this would not be a problem for anyone unless that someone, like our narrator here, wants to invent, desires invention. That's the problem. He desires invention (wants to move the tray, the book, the lampshade, the piano bench), but he fears it or its consequences and so disavows his desire.
Now the functioning of this rabbit production grows more clear. It is nothing more than the narrator's desire for invention. What do the rabbits he vomits do? They "alter the play of relationships in the whole house." Where do they come from? Himself, or his insides. He may say it is not his fault, that he did his best to the control the damage, and that is true insofar as it goes, insofar as it is a question of ego. But that's not very far. To the degree that his excuse fails to account responsibly for, let me say to embrace, the production of his own desire his denials are not only false, but a reproduction of the mistake that got the whole machine started in the first place: the disavowal of desire. He can say he didn't want to come to the apartment at all, he can say he didn't mean to mess it up, but everything happens as though he did. Yet to his last moment he persists in the fatal flaw of disavowing his desire and its effects. Indeed, with his last words, in which he describes the results of his suicide precisely in terms of an alteration of an established order, he worries mainly about the mess: "I don't think it will be difficult to pick up eleven small rabbits splattered over the pavement, perhaps they won't even be noticed, people will be too occupied with the other body, it would be more proper to remove it quickly before the early students pass through on their way to school."
Understanding that he is unable to take responsibility for this desire for invention and its effects, and believing that desire will produce effects, one way or the other, that it will always find a way to work, it's easier to see now why the man became intolerable to himself. He had turned into a machine for producing the materialization of his own worst fears: invention. Then, instead of accepting the marvelous expression of his own desire for invention, instead of surfing the wave or riding the thermal of this productive force, he grows ashamed and is everywhere trying to cover it up: to erase the effects of what he has done, even as he is claiming that he didn't know he was doing it.
According to Deleuze, for Baruch Spinoza, "that individual will be called bad , or servile or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses everytime the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one's own powerlessness and resentment everywhere, one's own sicknesses, indigestions, poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself."
Julio Cortázar, "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris," Blow-Up and Other Stories , Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), pp. 35-44. In Spanish: "Carta a una señorita en Paris," Bestiario [1951] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 112-118.
Though the highly respected Cortázar scholar Jaime Alazraki seems to see them as such in his "Introduction" to Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), p. 12.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 109.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy , Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 23.
