Reading Notes for "Silvia"
this isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 8 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "Silvia"
8. Childhood, Invention and Infection in "The Poisons" and "Silvia"
"Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness."
What should I do if I want to fly? If I dream of flying, like the narrator of "The Poisons", but reality happens and I find I really can't? I might invent a new way of running: "I ran down the alley with the cry of Sitting Bull, running in a way I had invented at that time and that was running without bending my knees, like kicking a ball. It didn't tire you and it was like flying." A little lesson in invention, as simple as making three by subtracting one from four. Running without bending my knees is like flying. I've not added any new ingredients to the situation. I've just imagined a new set of relations among the existing elements. I've always run, everyone runs, with bended knees. That's how it's done. But if I want a new running, if I want to invent a running that gives me the feeling of flying, like in my dreams, then I experiment, I rearrange the relations between tibia and femur, straightening what ought to be bent. I've also invented a new function for the muscles and joints of my legs and hips. It's still the same old junk, it's still called running. It's the same, but different; old, but new. And then I can run in my new way. In my new way, running dissolves the wall between your dreams and your reality. Henry Miller called this, in Sexus , "the art of dreaming when wide awake."
This sort of childhood invention appears also in Julio's story "Silvia," and there it starts to look and work much like writing. The children, we are told, have invented Silvia. The grown-ups explain this to dismiss her, to ward her off. But make no mistake, Silvia works, like straightening your legs, to produce real effects: "Silvia lifted him up to the sink, washed his bottom, and changed his clothes," "Silvia washed off the bump," "She plays with us," "She takes care of Renaud," she played "a little game to console him," Silvia "emerged from the darkness and leaned between Graciela and Alvaro as if to help them cut their meat or take a bite." Silvia enhances the powers of the children. She does for them and hence they don't need their parents or other adults. They've invented Silvia and, in so doing, have invented autonomy, the capacity to do for yourself, freely to direct yourself. Silvia herself, invention though she may be, "does what she wants, the same as us," the children explain. It works much like inventing a new way of running. You desire a power or a capacity, but the world as it is can't or won't allow for it, so you invent a means to produce the same effects as if you had that power [ Ù 60].
Invention, beware, has the power to infect other areas of life [ Ù 34, 35, 67, 71, 78, 81, 87]. Alvaro may have invented Silvia, but soon all the children have caught the fever so that we learn that she only comes when they are all four together. Alvaro's father calls his son's penchant for invention "mythomania" and thus diagnoses Alvaro, warning that "he contaminates everyone" ( todo el mundo , or, literally, "all the world"). Even the adult narrator of the story falls victim, seeing and desiring Silvia; writing, in fact, as he admits, "with an absurd hope of conjuration, a sweet golem of words." Childhood, then, is when we invent. This does not mean that we invent only when we are young in years. It means that when we invent, whenever we invent, there is childhood; there and then we partake of a flowing force which we may call childhood. It may be true that this force flows freely, on the surface of life, only in youth and that it then pursues its course underground, a subterranean river that will erupt from time to time, via certain individuals or groups, through fissures in the hard, crusty earth that is the adult-world of reason and renunciation, of exchange and obligation. But we're sadly mistaken if we believe that childhood happens only to children, or, if I might put it this way, that only children childhood. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. Before we know it, we might be dreaming when wide awake.
Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens , Trans. unknown (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 45.
Julio Cortázar, "Los venenos," Final del juego, 1a ed. [1956] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 300, my translation.
Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 20. See Chapter 27 below.
Julio Cortázar, "Silvia," Around the Day in Eighty Worlds , Trans. Thomas Christenson (San Francisco: North Point, 1986), pp. 186-195. In Spanish: "Silvia," Ultimo round (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969), primer piso, pp. 81-92. For scholarly readings of these two stories, see Terry J. Peavler, Julio Cortázar (Boston: Twayne, 1990), pp. 27, 65-66 and Sarah King, "Julio Cortázar: The Fantastic Child" in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar , Ed. by Jaime Alazraki (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), pp. 115-132.
Because "having the power" really isn't the point, is it? The point is to be able to produce and experience the effects you associate with "having the power." In this Julio tacitly emphasizes, alongside Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, and others, that the kind of Power ( potere , pouvoir ) you could possess like an object isn't the important one when compared with the kind of power ( potenza , puissance ) that is more like a flow or a current into which you tap in order to experience and/or produce an effect.
