Reading Notes on "El idolo de las ciclades" ("The Idol of the Cyclades")
This isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 90 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "The Idol of the Cyclades"
90. Reason and Ritual Invention in "The Idol of the Cylades"
Somoza and Morand are old friends, archaeologists who together discovered an idol on a Greek island. That was a few years ago. Now, they still see each other but a distance has grown up between them. Somoza has kept the idol (by mutual agreement) and has, as he promised Morand from the moment they first dug it up, been engaged in an effort "to approach the statue by other ways than the hand and the eyes of science." But what does Somoza mean by this? In the two or three years since they smuggled the idol out of Greece and returned to the suburbs of Paris, Somoza has kept it in his apartment. During that time, he has sculpted countless replicas of the statue, little by little letting the vestiges of his normal life slip away.
Now, in Morand's view, the distance between them is partly attributable to the frustrated desire that he supposes Somoza to have felt for his wife, Teresa. But Morand also believes that Somoza has crossed a line in relation to the statue. He explains: "in some sense, every archaeologist identifies himself with the past he explores and brings to light. From that point to believing that intimacy with one of those vestiges could alienate, could alter time and space, open a fissure whereby one could comply with . . .". But these are just Morand's thoughts. As he admits, Somoza certainly wouldn't use those words to describe his aim. Indeed, both agree that whatever Somoza is after, it doesn't lend itself to verbal expression, "at least not in our words" as Somoza puts it. Hence the numerous moments in their conversation where language gives way to silence, the places where some impossible name has been elided. Hence also Morand's feeling that Somoza is too much poet and too little archaeologist. After all, when Somoza did talk about his relationship to the statue he seemed to speak "a haphazard language full of allusions and exorcisms moving from obstinate and irreducible levels." Somoza seems to feel that by repeating the gesture of the original sculptors of the idol he will come to reproduce the relationship with it they enjoyed. Somoza wants to know the function of the statue, not by constructing a representation in words of what it might have been, but by experiencing, with his own body, that function. In other terms, he wishes for a knowledge of the statue and its environment that would not depend upon the duality of knowing subject and known object. Participation.
Now I've read enough of Julio to expect that his sympathies probably lie with Somoza. I've seen him defend, in relation to Keats, or as part of a general poetics, or in homage to Artaud or surrealism, a mode of knowing that dispenses with the divide between subject and object [ Ù 31, 81]. I've heard Julio relate this form of poetic knowing to a kind of prelogical knowing. I know too from reading Morelli and others that this kind of knowing requires a twisting inside out of language that may get called poetry or literature. So if Somoza seems mad and out of control to Morand, he probably doesn't to Julio. But it's also not that Morand is terrible. Far from it. He's simply a reasonable man. If he's guilty of something it is a kind of parochialism that prevents him from slipping even a toe into Somoza's shoes. He's just a bit too complacent in his reasonableness, too smug in the confidence that he's on one side of a line and Somoza is on the other. But that is more than enough to leave him vulnerable to the effects of Somoza's poetry, all the more so as he tries to subsume it within the classificatory schemas of reason.
Somoza invites Morand over. He wants to communicate his achievement of a connection with the idol. The time is ripe now for the sacrifice that will reactivate the idol. Somoza explains: "The double flute, like the one on the statuette we saw in the Athens Museum. The sound of life on the left, and that of discord on the right. Discord is also life for Haghesa, but when the sacrifice is completed, the flutists will cease to blow into the pipe on the right and one will hear only the piping of the new life that drinks the spilt blood. And the flutists will fill their mouths with blood and blow on the left pipe, and I shall anoint her face with blood, you see, like this, and the eyes shall appear and the mouth beneath the blood." Morand dismisses this as nonsense [ Ù 44, 86]. But the next thing he knows Somoza has stripped naked (probably not, as Morand quite reasonably says, because it is hot in the studio) and is coming at Morand with a stone hatchet. Lucky for Morand, he succeeds in disarming Somoza and burying that same hatchet in the latter's head. Now Somoza lies on the floor of his studio and Morand sits "thinking Teresa was going to arrive any minute and that he had to do something, call the police, make some explanation." Explanation, after all, is his expertise: "it should not be difficult to show that he had acted in self-defense," thwarting the horrific fantasy of a madman.
But he hasn't thwarted it. Somoza did indeed "anoint her face with blood" and, what's more, Morand was his accomplice in doing so. The infection already courses through Morand's intact veins. "The hatchet" - we are seeing this through Morand's eyes - "was sunk deep into the skull of the sacrifice." Now Morand, who so resisted any sympathy with Somoza, has assumed Somoza's position and has picked up exactly where his friend has left off. "Leaning the hatchet up against the door, he began to strip off his clothes, because it was getting hot and smelled stuffy, of a caged herd. He was naked already when he heard the noise of the taxi pulling up and Teresa's voice dominating the sound of the flutes; he put the light out and waited, hatchet in hand, behind the door, licking the cutting edge of the hatchet lightly." Somoza begins and Morand completes the ritual. The fever has been passed on as, in Julio's universe, it always must be when poetry and invention confront a too-smug science. What can I say? That this is impossible? That it could never happen? But then, that's what Morand thought, and he's crouching naked in the dark licking the blood of the edge of the hatchet he's just used to sacrifice his friend...
Julio Cortázar, "The Idol of the Cyclades," Blow-Up and Other Stories , Trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Collier, 1968), p. 26. In Spanish: "El ídolo de la Cíclades," Final del juego, 2a ed. [1964] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 329.
A slightly different reading appears in Gustavo Pellón's "Cortázar and the Idolatry of Origins," Julio Cortázar: New Readings , Ed. Carlos Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 126-127.
