Reading Notes for "La puerta condenada"
this isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 44 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "La puerta condenada"
44. Opening (Or Not) "The Condemned Door" to Ethical Engagement
Petrone is a Buenos Aires businessman who comes to spend a week in Montevideo closing a deal. On a tip from a friend he takes a room in the "peaceful, almost deserted" Hotel Cervantes. Everything about his stay is routine: the room is clean and ordinary, his business progresses smoothly, and he even has leisure time for the newspaper and a cabaret, though neither is remarkable enough to arouse his interest. Everything is normal and satisfactory, except that he can't sleep because of the soft cry of a baby in the room next to his.
Something has disturbed his sleep. Something has awakened him. This basic situation is repeated in countless variations throughout Cortázar's work, but it is especially nicely distilled in this story - particularly from the point of view of Zen Buddhism - because the routine is figured as sleep and the exceptional as awakening. This happens four times in the story. The first time occurs "in those first minutes in which persist the remains of night and of dream" and "he thinks that at some moment he'd been disturbed by the cry of some creature [ Ù 27]." Petrone's sleep is disturbed by the cry of a baby that (he later is told) doesn't exist. But the cry exists because it keeps him up at night. So it is real, even if there's no baby there because, just like the Silvia invented by Alvaro and the other children in "Silvia," it produces undeniably real effects [ Ù 8]. Among the effects it produces is helping me sketch the profile of "the one who dismisses or flees from the imaginary baby's cry." Sometimes this is me.
Petrone's responses to being awakened: to dismiss the cry as a dream; to dismiss as a deception the manager's assurance that there is no baby; to dismiss the baby as a hallucination of the "hysterical" solitary woman who occupies the adjacent room - in short: to explain the phenomenon rationally and thus clear the way for going back to sleep. Finally, when each of these explanations melts away before the heat of the persisting phenomenon, he flees in terror. Here, he's different than that woman - whom he has bullied into abandoning her room - because she accepts the baby's cry (he can hear her trying to comfort the child, though it is not hers and does not exist anyway). For her, the extraordinary awakening of the suffering, non-existent baby provokes compassion.
The "condemned door" behind the wardrobe in his room, the ghostly door that carries the memory of the building that the hotel now occupies, the door: "at one time people had entered and exited through it, banging it shut, leaving it ajar, giving it a life that was still present in its wood that was so different from the walls." Petrone hears the baby crying from behind the door, he's awakened by the cry from the other side of the door, but he never tries to open it, to pass through it. Even though, or maybe because, he glimpses the presence of that past life embedded in the grain of the wood; even though, or because, that door demands he assume some kind of responsibility, Petrone still treats it like an ordinary non-functioning "condemned door." This door isn't so much a symbol of or a metaphor for something as it is a metonym, a piece, a tip of the iceberg of an entire way of perceiving and experiencing being in the world that Petrone - ordinary businessman who just wants to sleep - does not want to accept.
Gilles Deleuze observes that
the kind of physical movements you find in sports are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where there's a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports - surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding - take the form of entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to "get into something" instead of being the origin of an effort.
Maybe this helps explain the difference between Petrone, or someone like him, and La Maga (or the woman in "La puerta condenada") and people like them. The apparently exceptional in Julio's universe works like the wind or the motion of the waves, even like gravity. When people like Petrone become aware of that force or movement, their thoughts and deeds strive to apply energy and resistance, opposition, to subdue it. But the woman in the story, or La Maga, or the children in Silvia, they are different, they surf, or hang-glide, they seek to enter into that surprising order of things.
This brings to mind Henry Miller's admonition against viewing the creative process as the egocentric imposition of order upon a chaotic world (this would be Petrone's stance) and, conversely, Miller's call for a humble art of self-effacement or dissolution in which we allow ourselves to sink or submerge or participate into the order of things (the stance of the woman in the story [ Ù 23]). Or, it calls to mind shi , the Chinese concept that refers to the tendencies inherent in a situation and also to the ability of that individual who naturally follows, and so may exploit, these tendencies [ Ù 76]. John Dewey described this ability as essential to the philosopher [ Ù 31]. Whereas in traditional philosophy, as Dewey saw it (I know you may have heard this once already but it bears repeating), "knowing is viewing from the outside," for the pragmatist "the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course of events" so that "it follows that the self becomes a knower. It becomes a mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of events. The significant distinction is no longer between the knower and the world; it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things."
Here, when affinities appear yet again between pragmatism and the dynamics of Julio's universe, I want to pause to acknowledge that in conversations at least Julio lent the weight of his opinion to the conventional view among scholars that his fanciful, inventive writing stood as an antidote to the dominance of what one critic called "razón pragmática" or "pragmatic reason." Before countering this point of view, I want to recognize its value in underscoring those qualities of Julio's writing that resist or elude being put to narrowly instrumental purposes. This point of view does draw our attention to the strong critique throughout Julio's writing of the reduction of all phenomena to their utility in supporting the status quo . To be sure, given the demand for his services and the dominant forces of his day, which sought to reduce the qualitative variety of everything to the measurable values of efficiency and profit, it's easy to imagine an elusive, leaping, resolutely useless Julio, dancing with Basho, the perfectly useless banana tree of Japanese poetry, and laughing like a sprite.
It's also easy, however, to imagine a pragmatist like William James dancing and laughing along with him. The seemingly useless qualities of Julio's prose that this critical perspective illuminates are not opposed to, but completely consonant with pragmatism, as William James and John Dewey defined it. Both resisted time and again the reduction of the pragmatist approach to what they dismissed as "the cash value" of thought. Julio also did not care very much about how many books he sold. He was not have been willing to purchase a mass readership at the expense of his relentless experimentation. His pragmatism does not lie, anymore than did Dewey's, in its "cash value," literal or metaphorical.
To find it, we might do better to remember instead that Julio insisted that his experimentation was aimed back out at the world, and in particular, at the reader in whom he hoped to provoke effects of all kinds. It's not that Julio has to have said he wanted to walk with John Dewey the way he wanted to walk with John Keats (though I can't help thinking that if I introduced them they would go strolling off together, even more so with William James). And I'm certainly not asking him to work for John Dewey. But the view that Julio was "anti-pragmatic" confuses more than it clarifies by failing to distinguish different notions of practicality. In so doing, it restricts the potential force of Julio's writing. Why can't Julio be perfectly useless in relation to certain aims, and profoundly concerned with practicality in relation to others? If we can't see this then we can't possibly understand the way in which Kenneth Burke perfectly captures Julio's kind of literature with the phrase: "equipment for living."
Julio Cortázar, "La puerta condenada," Final del juego, 1a ed. [1956] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 310-316, my translations. For a short reading, see Ilán Stavans, "Cortázar 'La puerta condenada' y los fantasmas," Plural: Revista Cultura de Excelsior 204 (Sept., 1988): pp. 86-90.
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations , Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 121.
John Dewey, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy," The Philosophy of John Dewey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 91.
Juan Carlos Curutchet, Julio Cortázar o la crítica de la razón pragmática (Madrid: Editora nacional, 1972).
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 293-304.
