From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar

Review by Gregory McCormick
Tags: argentine literature, Julio Cortazar

REVIEWED:
From the Observatory, Julio Cortázar (trans. Anne McLean). Archipelago Books. 83pp, $18.00.

Published in Issue 25

Having recently watched Terence Malick’s film Tree of Life, I am struck by how his sensibility as a storyteller reflects an approach and process that Julio Cortázar would have most likely appreciated. Malick and Cortázar were similarly innovative, neither relying on plot or even character to pull a story along but instead using a tangential string of images that reflect or serve as a symbolic template for their world views and questions. Superficial though this connection and approach might be (Malick is interested in a nostalgic longing for something which may have never existed; Cortázar is quixotically philosophical), it allows a certain way in to Cortázar’s work, as he is not always an easy writer to access. Born in 1914, Cortázar remained one of Latin America’s best writers until his death in 1984. Though he is often lumped into the magical realism that permeated his generation of Latin American literature, his approach to storytelling is much more nuanced and complex than this pigeonholing would ever allow for. If one permits and indulges his alternative form of storytelling (as witnessed in his many of his works, such as his 1950 novel Final Exam and his 1968 collection of short stories, Blow Up), it becomes easier to appreciate what he does as a stylist and as a storyteller.

Case in point, the never-before-translated From the Observatory. Originally published in 1972, the book is a poetic meditation which links the fluidity and motion of a series of photographs to the ceaseless motion of the sea, the undying yearning of the eel to survive in the depths and darkness of the universe with their slippery angles and solid edges. Like the connection between Malick’s and Cortázar’s storytelling sensibilities, the link that Cortázar makes between these photos — taken, according to the preface, at “the Maharajah Jai Sing’s observatories” in 1968 — is never deeply explored. Cortázar takes his inspiration from an article he read in Le Monde about eels in 1971, and the entire project is his attempt to establish some link between these black and white photographs (vaguely reminiscent at times of MC Escher) and the details on the life cycle of the eel. If scientists in the future read his pages, Cortázar tells us, “they should not see in them the slightest personal allusion: like the eels, Jai Singh, the stars and I myself, they are part of an image that points solely to the reader.”

Perhaps another contextual clue will make this unfathomable project more relatable: if the breeding habits of eels in early ‘70s Europe were the springboard to explore “man’s condition,” then our springboard, our natural imagery which many writers or thinkers utilize in a modern North American context, is the salmon of the Northwest, most particularly the salmon runs of certain Northwestern rivers. It is the salmon that I think of when I encounter a passage such as this:

First, there’s a phase of arousal, like a piece of news or a password that incites them: leave the reeds, the pools, leave eighteen years of hollow in the rocks, return. Some remote chemical equation holds the veiled memory of their origins, an undulating constellation of sargassum, salt in the throat, the Atlantic warmth, the monsters lying in wait, telephone or parachute medusas, the stunned glove of the octopus. The silent clamor of underwater currents, their inescapable veins; the sky is like that too on clear nights when the stars amalgamate in a single pressure, conspiring and hostile, rejecting a re-encounter, the nomenclatures, putting up a velvety unreachableness to the lens that encircles and abstracts them, rushing in ten, a hundred at a time in the same field of vision . . .

Cortázar’s project is to look deep into the recesses of the ocean, where the eel is said to breed, the Sargasso Sea:

Here’s how it is: Johannes Schmidt, a Dane, knew that on the terraces of a moving Elsinor, between 22 and 30 degrees north and between 48 and 65 degrees west, the recurring succubus of the Sargasso Sea was more than the phantom of a poisoned king and that there, inseminated at the end of a cycle of slow mutations, the eels who live for so many years at the edge of blades of water return to submerge themselves in the gloom of the depths four hundred meters down, lay their eggs hidden by half a kilometer of slow silent thickness, and dissolve in death by the millions of millions . . .

Prior to Schmidt’s discovery that eels swim thousands of kilometers to the Sargasso Sea every year to spawn, it was widely wondered why there were no baby eels in the catches of European and North American fishing vessels, a fact that lent an air of mystery and mysticism to the eel for many years. Cortázar takes this discovery, imagining the depths of the sea and the blackness of the silt and mud where these eels do their breeding, and juxtaposes it against Jai Singh’s fascination with the exploration of the heavens:

Lovely is the science, sweet the words that follow the course of the elvers and tell us their saga, lovely and sweet and hypnotic like the silvery terraces of Jaipur where an astronomer in his day wielded a vocabulary just as lovely and sweet to conjure the unnameable and pour it onto soothing parchments, inheritance for the species, school lesson, barbiturate for essential insomniacs, and comes the day when the elvers have entered into the deepest depths of their hydrographic copulation . . . suddenly, by night, at the same time, all rivers are downriver, all sources are to be fled, tense fins tear furiously at water’s edge, Nietzsche, Nietzsche.

For Cortázar, the photographs of the observatory are merely the conduit which allows the questions to be raised. These contextual clues serve as the concrete, Earth-bound places that connect the abstract questions on either side.

you’ll understand that none of this can be said from sidewalks or chairs or city stages; you’ll understand that only like this, eel or marble giving way, growing into a strip, then no longer being among the sargassum, there is a course, this happens: try it, like they do in the Atlantic night, like he who seeks stellar measures, not to know, not for anything; something like the blow of a wing, a drawing back, a moan of love and then now, then maybe, and then yes.

For fans of Cortázar, From the Observatory is a welcome addition to his well-established English oeuvre. It exposes the intelligence and idiosyncratic connections that reflect a unique and creative mind. For those who are new to the author, though, this may not be the best way to gain access to his work. One can revel in the language, the metaphorical connections between the deepest unknowable depths of the sea to the highest unknowable maneuverings of the heavens, but unless one has a particular interest in either side of this equation, or unless one is interested in collecting Cortázar’s entire body of work, the book will largely appeal only to obscurists. I found the cumbersome size of the book slightly difficult as well; given the photos, I can understand the impulse to make it the size of a thick magazine but this is the kind of book one should keep in a coat pocket and pull out semi-regularly to revel in the beauty of the language and consider some of the author’s ideas. With the unwieldy size, it seems destined to sit on a shelf rather than in the hand, where it belongs.

Gregory McCormick is the Director of English Programming at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal.

Published in Issue 25

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