Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2006, 307–320
Cortázar and Bergson on the Road: Problems with Time and Rational Thought Karl Posso
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University of Edinburgh One of Julio Cortázar’s final and most overlooked works, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, appears to defy classification: part autobiography, part sociological experiment; surrealist and epic, yet far removed from the baroque brilliance of Rayuela. It is nonetheless an engaging and characteristically witty piece of metaphysical reflection and philosophical intuition. In this paper I establish various links between Cortázar’s vitalizing thought here and that of Henri Bergson, the contentious early twentieth-century French philosopher whose work has, until recently, been much neglected. Like Cortázar, Bergson is something of a maverick: a philosopher who challenges scientific interpretation, maintaining that the intuition of reality and time transcends the intellect, but whose unorthodox use of metaphor and analogy won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927. This essay focuses on the following points of philosophical contiguity between Bergson and Cortázar in Los autonautas de la cosmopista: the preoccupation with the roles of memory and perception within time as cumulative, psychological unfolding, and with space and habit, which they deem hostile to the freedom of consciousness. In the light of their mutual antipathy towards intellectual abstraction, the final section of the essay assesses Cortázar’s strategies for coping with the problem of communicating the singularity of experience in writing. One of Julio Cortázar’s final and most overlooked works, Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983), appears to defy classification: part autobiography, part sociological experiment; surrealist and epic, yet far removed from the baroque brilliance of Rayuela (1963). It is nonetheless an engaging and characteristically witty piece of philosophical intuition. In this paper I establish various links between Cortázar’s vitalizing thought here and that of Henri Bergson, the contentious early twentieth-century French philosopher whose work has, until recently, been much neglected. Like Cortázar, Bergson is something of a maverick: a philosopher who challenges scientific interpretation, maintaining that the intuition of reality and time transcends the intellect, but whose unorthodox use of metaphor and analogy won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927. Bergson’s concerns are shared by Cortázar whose narratives and essays, as Sara Castro-Klarén’s compelling article asserts (1978), constantly resort to the discourse of phenomenology to express existentialist anxiety. It is often the untamed play of consciousness and perception in Cortázar’s stories which splinters established social reality and gives way to the so-called ‘fantastic’: hence the empathetic melding of man and salamander in ‘Axolotl’ (1953); the devastation of clock time and habit through musical intuition in ‘El perseguidor’ (1959), and the perceptual diffusion of being in ‘La isla a mediodía’ (1966). In his novels, the Address correspondence to Karl Posso, Hispanic Studies, University of Edinburgh, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JX, UK. © Queen Mary, University of London, 2006
DOI: 10.1179/174582006X150948
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interest in phenomenological description is even more explicit: in Rayuela Morelli, with reference to Husserl and Wittgenstein, insists on the subject’s unmediated contact with reality (1994b: 614); a theme pursued in 62: modelo para armar (1968), where the narrative, as Cortázar subsequently claimed, unwittingly subscribes to Merleau-Ponty’s views on the primacy of perception and the notion of experience as a process of gradual, hoped-for, clarification (Cortázar 2004: 181). This desire to question the nature of experience, particularly through the disruption of convention, is extended in the political pandemonium of Libro de Manuel (1973), whose protagonist tellingly reads Heidegger (Cortázar 1997: 324). And, as a complement to the philosophical ballast of the fiction, Cortázar’s idiosyncratic essays on life and literature, from ‘Teoría del túnel’ (1947) to Prosa del observatorio (1972), all vindicate poetically intuitive gnosis over scientific inquiry. In this context, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, in which Cortázar challenges consciousness in a leisurely manner by attempting to amplify perception whilst travelling across France, can only be seen as the logical extension of a lifelong project to rupture ‘lo previsible para percibir la flexibilidad y la permeabilidad de lo real: volverse “esponja fenoménica”’ (Yurkievich 1987: 19). Cortázar’s concerns in Los autonautas, though treated in a jocular fashion, are overtly phenomenological; more specifically, they correspond to the principal preoccupations of Bergson’s philosophy: the singularity of experience and the notion of reality as change itself, as ‘becoming’; the relentless creativity of consciousness which invalidates static conceptions of being; and, the disquiet produced by the effect of language and reason on the freedom of becoming. In Último round (1969) Cortázar claims his philosophy may be summed up by Gaston Bachelard’s concept of time as ‘duration’, that is, time as cumulative, psychological unfolding (2004: 182–84). Cortázar admits there that he has only read fragments of Bachelard’s work, which may explain why he appears unaware that this particular understanding of ‘duration’ is actually Bergson’s. Bachelard wrote exhaustively on Bergson, but his aim in books such as The Dialectic of Duration (1950) is to negate the very continuity of (Bergsonian) duration which Cortázar praises. During the 1970s various critics, including Lida Aronne Amestoy (1972: 25–26) and Mireya Camurati (1975: 78–81), pointed out the Bergsonian — not Bachelardian — tenor of Cortázar’s philosophy, his conception of time and the turbulent process of artistic creation, but shied away from any extensive comparative study, acknowledging the complexity such an examination might involve. I hope here to go some way towards redressing this critical lacuna. This essay focuses on the main points of philosophical contiguity between Bergson and Cortázar in Los autonautas: the preoccupation with the roles of memory and perception within the free ‘duration’ of consciousness, and with space and habit, which they both deem hostile to the freedom of becoming. In the light of their mutual antipathy towards intellectual abstraction, the final section of the essay assesses Cortázar’s strategies for coping with the problem of communicating the singularity of experience in writing. In Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o Un viaje atemporal París-Marsella, Julio Cortázar and his wife Carol Dunlop set about exploring the Paris-Marseilles motorway. Their plan is pseudo-scientific: to travel the motorway at the rate of two service areas or lay-bys per day, keeping a journal of what they find. A page is written every day in which are recorded details such as temperature, meals consumed, and the times of arrival and departure from each of the ‘paraderos’ (the service areas or motels). ‘La razón de dar estas precisiones obedece, como tantas otras cosas en la novela, al ansia de verosimilitud y el afán de emular a las grandes expediciones del pasado’ (Blanco Arnejo 1996: 179). Cortázar and Dunlop’s aim here, however, is to discover the true nature of the
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motorway, which they suspect is an essence or ‘quality’ which remains hidden from the habitual traveller concerned with covering distance in minimum time, and who is thus oblivious to the so-called ‘empty’ process and environment of transition, which remains obscured by the lure of destination. They expect, therefore, that in their own case: ‘el hecho de habernos alejado del punto de partida y de haber perdido de vista a la vez y completamente el fin del viaje, es lo que da esa calidad’ (158). Protracted accounts of the precautions taken before and during the journey — against scurvy and Tartar invasion, for example — and the meticulous planning of the many steps involved, underscore from the outset a certain foolishness and a light mocking of the mechanics of the proposed scientific investigation. In this respect they subscribe to the contention of Henri Bergson who, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), defines comedy as the spectacle of mechanical behaviour in the human, of the non-living in the rational, where such insufficiency appears to be directly attributable to flawed reason (1980: 66–72, 97–105 & 119–27). Such a description is particularly fitting of Cortázar and Dunlop’s month-long expedition: segmenting the journey by parking in all sixty-five service areas and lay-bys between Paris and Marseilles, and spending the night at every second stop, appears to delay progress illogically and contravenes the very purpose for which the motorway was designed. Advancing at this rate creates a needless amount of steps to be surmounted, indicating an absurd commitment to repetition and monotony. Cortázar and Dunlop’s mechanical application of rules over any undertaking of the rational or meaningful activities of living, namely, achieving a goal, arriving at their destination — in other words, Bergson’s so-called automaton approach — is a humorous overriding of pragmatism. The couple are aware that their ostensibly logic-confounding undertaking will be met by laughter or at least amusement, inasmuch as these direct a return to order because they are functions of intelligence which is practical; pragmatism being imperative for the ordering and controlling of environment and life. But what Cortázar and Dunlop seek to do by implication, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, is identify as risible that thoroughly mechanical heart of science which they otherwise appear to embrace, because it causes procedure and rules to proliferate, thus inducing a turning away from life itself. Hence: ‘las reglas del juego tienen también su lado maligno, una amarga negatividad’ (134). Science — rational thought — aspires to analyse and manipulate the living, but its automaton commitment to regulation makes it, as Bergson puts it, different in nature or kind to the event of life itself. Science works toward a practical end, but it is thoroughly impractical in nature: it introduces rules and sharp conceptual distinctions which are entirely inadequate to vital reality which is a process of continuity and becoming. In order to try and grasp life, science or analytical thought must bring continuity and becoming to a halt; in other words, it only works if it kills. Consequently, scientific thought appears to be farcically beset by a fundamental irrationality. And herein lies the productive paradox of Cortázar and Dunlop’s work: by adopting a seemingly scientific approach to understanding the complex experience of displacement along the motorway they seek both to espouse rational thought and to discredit its usefulness, with a view, eventually, to leaving the amused readers of their unorthodox travelogue questioning whether they are laughing at the buffoonery of irrational behaviour or at the very folly of reason itself. Cortázar and Dunlop’s preoccupation with rational or scientific thought and its limitations is borne out through their meditations on time, space, and inevitably language. In their narrative they hint at a Bergsonian correlation between the scientific distortion of time and movement by space and that of mental life by language. What they are
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concerned with is continuity or succession in all its perceived forms: the continuity of the road itself and the problematization of succession through their cutting up of the motorway into a series of shorter stretches, contrasting with the uninterrupted motion of most travellers along the motorway. They are in fact playing, unwittingly perhaps, with the ideas that led to the formulation of Zeno’s paradoxes involving arrows in flight and the run of Achilles, which are of course born of the specious transfer of spatial properties to movement and time — to traversal. Distance, the line traced in space — here the road between Paris and Marseilles — is not coincident with transition. Transition or passage, unlike space or trajectory, cannot be broken down into points or instants: it is a whole which cannot be broken down without being destroyed. By interrupting movement, Cortázar and Dunlop’s experience of the motorway — of the same extension of space — is fundamentally different from that of their fellow travellers. This much is obvious. But they are intrigued not by factual difference in terms of clock time, but by how differences of prolongation arise and evolve within consciousness, in other words, by how waiting and playing with transition affects being. Unlike Zeno’s arrow, Cortázar and Dunlop really are at rest at various points along the route, but like Zeno they too illustrate the intellectual error of reconstituting mobility from fixed points. According to Bergson in Creative Evolution (1907), the intellect proceeds ‘cinematographically’ (312) by reconstituting time and movement from juxtaposed immobilities or points — discrete units capable of being counted or measured: this debases pure unfolding movement in relation to space. (This idea is also explored by Cortázar in relation to photography and cinema in an essay from 1962, ‘Algunos aspectos del cuento’ [1988: 137–38].) When measuring time in relation to a clock or the sun, for example, time ceases to be an autonomous dimension, it is reduced to space, it is a counting of time-space simultaneities: nothing, for example, remains of previous positions occupied by the hands of a clock. At any given moment all bodies in space — in this case vehicles on the motorway — are simultaneous; succession is not in the spatial world, only juxtaposition. (An impasse, for example, which famously troubles Borges’s character Daneri as he struggles with chaotic enumeration in the attempt to recreate poetically the simultaneity of the ‘Aleph’ in the celebrated tale which bears that name.) Things only last, that is, there is only succession, in consciousness; withdrawing the ego which thinks the so-called successive positions along the motorway (or which contemplates Borges’s Aleph) would result in there being only a single position, for nothing would be left of past positions. This implies that there is continuity of movement and change independent of mobility or immobility in the extended (physical) world — something suggested by Cortázar and Dunlop when they point out that true movement and change is only discovered when mechanical displacement ceases, in their case by stopping at the lay-bys, service areas and motels: ‘los paraderos son el lugar y la hora de la verdad, donde la vida sigue teniendo dos piernas y dos brazos, mientras los robots de la autopista yacen inmóviles, abatidos, muertos en su silencio y su impotencia’ (99). The contrast between movement in rest and paralysis in habitual or mechanical action is emphasized throughout Los autonautas; it leaves us in no doubt that: ‘What is, is a continuity of movement and change, which does not contain within itself the cause and origin of immobility, since these are supplied only by men forced to reduce movement into static forms in order to handle it intellectually’ (Pilkington 1976: 186). Cortázar and Dunlop thus interrupt movement and prolong the actual — clock or calendar — time spent along the motorway, but throughout, irrespective of whether they are driving or at rest in a lay-by, they tell us of an elusive ‘continuidad ininterrumpida’
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(26) in which movement and change endure. This corresponds to the Bergsonian notion of ‘durée’ — duration — which we become aware of in consciousness of our own mental life, and explained thus by Cortázar and Dunlop: ‘esta autopista paralela que sólo existe acaso en la imaginación de quienes sueñan con ella [... que] no sólo comporta un espacio físico diferente sino también otro tiempo. [...] El otro camino, que sin embargo es el mismo’ (56). In Los autonautas de la cosmopista Cortázar and Dunlop are transfixed by this idea of the ‘autopista paralela’, which they also refer to as ‘lo atemporal’; they are in fact intuiting duration, and are concerned with the effects exercised on the duration of consciousness by the slowing down of physical movement along the motorway. Put another way, theirs is an unconventional treatise on the metaphysics of being in time and on the phenomenology of perception. Clocks and calendars regulate Cortázar and Dunlop’s expedition, but these come to be seen as intellectual impositions on real duration — time as cumulative, psychological unfolding, or becoming. Repetition is impossible in real time or duration because the past is always growing, just as each state of consciousness is unique because of memory’s incessant swelling: duration and movement are the ever-changing reality the intellect is not equipped to handle. Thus, Cortázar and Dunlop tell us, for example, that as adventurers they inevitably imbue their present with the time (the ‘presents’) of Marco Polo, Dante, Columbus, and Shackleton, but also that of Jules Verne, and that of the children they once were, who ‘sumamente avispados y despiertos’ complete the experience of an otherwise bland journey with ‘maravilla, gusanos, hormigas y camiones con leyendas llenas de encanto’ (178). This shows how memory constantly inserts the past into the present, so that with each coming moment the past gains a new organization; in the process, Cortázar and Dunlop give us an image of time not as an ordered sequence, but as a ‘virtual whole’ (Bergson 1998: 7; see also Lawlor 2003: 81). (What is being traced out here is the Deleuzian argument that only difference returns. For Deleuze, pure, continuous difference ‘returns’ because it is divided up in relation to a specious or clock-defined present.) And so, as Cortazár’s detail illustrates, in consciousness past and present appear to be in a state of flux: memory-images and perception-images combine in a state of constant renewal or novelty (Bergson 1998: 6–7). This leads to an understanding of consciousness or duration as a process of qualitative changes which permeate one another, whereby each element represents the whole (that is, the virtual whole of the past which evolves in the shaping of each present); each element of consciousness or duration represents the whole as in a musical phrase, so that each element is not an isolated unit in reality but only through intellectual abstraction (Bergson 1996: 100–01 & 110–11). In Los autonautas this is further illustrated by the figure of Cortázar ‘escuchando música [y] dejando fluir ese tiempo fuera de los relojes’ (170) and quoting Osman Lins’s Avalovara: Hay una faz del viaje donde pasado y futuro son reales; y otra, no menos real y más huidiza, donde el viaje, el barco, el barquero, el río y la extensión del río se confunden [...] el viajero, para siempre y desde siempre, inicia, realiza y concluye el viaje, de tal modo que la partida en la cabecera del río no antecede a la llegada a su desembocadura. (45)
From the order of clock time as an unbounded line composed of units or moments which are external to one another and the same from one observer to another, we are directed to the ‘qualitative plurality’ of duration which we intuit in consciousness of our own mental life; again, isolated stages of the process of change occur not in reality but through intellectual abstraction. Furthermore, since duration unfolds in each conscious life, there must be divergent but coexistent rhythms of duration; so duration itself as a
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whole must be a virtual multiplicity, an impression given here, albeit indirectly, through the experimentation with co-authorship. The reader of Los autonautas often encounters difficulty when attempting to differentiate between narrators, and so from Cortázar-Dunlop an impersonal voice emerges. However, as the reader knows that there is more than one author (and Cortázar and Dunlop are eager to point out that others may have had a hand in creating the text), he or she is constantly made to think of the writing’s potential source or sources, especially in sections such as ‘Cartas de una madre’, ‘Comportamiento en los paraderos’, and ‘Extracto del manual de los lobos’. Often in the text, authors as characters are not presented as discrete, juxtaposed and exterior to one another (an actual multiplicity), but as indistinct components of a narrative process (a virtual multiplicity) — for the most part, within this writing, discrete individuals exist only as the potential of an impersonal voice. And so, in a roundabout way, Cortázar and Dunlop’s ambiguous narrative voice makes us reflect on unactualized or virtual difference as an all-encompassing creative flow — the ‘élan vital’ — from which the multiplicity of actual, differentiated subjects then emerges: difference and language precede the individual and his or her world. Cortázar and Dunlop’s gesturing towards this idea of number existing in potential leads us to the problem of contemplating duration in terms of a virtual multiplicity. The following passage taken from Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889), together with Deleuze’s analysis of it, may help to clarify matters: A complex feeling will contain a fairly large number of simple elements; but, as long as these elements do not stand out with perfect clearness, we cannot say that they were completely realized, and, as soon as consciousness has a distinct perception of them, the psychic state which results from their synthesis will have changed for this very reason. (1996: 84)
This leads Deleuze to conclude that ‘duration divides up and does so constantly: that is why it is a multiplicity’ (1991: 42). However, duration does not split up without changing in kind, that is, without ceasing to be what it was. Hence, in Bergson’s example, when the constituent elements of a feeling are realized or actualized in consciousness, the psychic state ceases to be what it was — it differs in kind or nature from itself. It is precisely because duration changes in kind in the process of dividing up that it is a non-numerical or qualitative multiplicity; and so, as Deleuze rightly concludes, ‘there is other without there being several; number exists only potentially’ (1991: 42). Furthermore, as a ‘virtual whole’ — or ‘élan vital’ — the flow of difference or duration is also forever dividing up into fluxes, each again different in nature, producing consciousnesses and an actual multiplicity of ‘selves’: hence the virtual multiplicity of coexistent rhythms of duration each undergoing self-differentiation (Deleuze 1991: 83–85). In the case of Los autonautas, readers’ changing perceptions of the narrative voice not only produce transformations in their own particular consciousnesses, the events of reading also cause ‘books within “the book” to flow and to disintegrate’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1984: 243), creating a virtual multiplicity of other texts without there being several. In short, difference or duration is a virtual whole which proceeds via dissociation and which is inseparable from actualization, which is why heterogeneity and continuity do not have to be opposed, and why the connection between the past and the absolutely new is not a contradiction. It is only for practical reasons that homogeneous space and time are ‘stretched out beneath [duration] in order that the moving continuity can be divided [mathematically] and a becoming can be fixed’ (Ansell Pearson & Mullarkey 2002: 33–34). (Bergson’s ‘complex feeling’, for example, a quality, when seen through extensity — when measured — becomes quantity: intensity.)
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Returning to Cortázar and Dunlop basking on the road between Paris and Marseilles ‘sumidos en este interregno en el que cosas y tiempos se difunden, se confunden, a veces se funden’ (95), we find that their disquisition of sorts on time and space then escorts us into a series of impressions regarding how perception affects the rhythm of duration and how this in turn affects creative thought and the thorny issue of language. For them, the key to ‘la alteración paulatina de la noción usual de autopista, la sustitución de su funcionalidad insípida y casi abstracta por una precisa llena de vida y de riqueza’ (97) resides in the experience of impractical languor. Sluggish peregrination is a question of space: it relates to the distance covered in relation to other motorists; it also affects perception which is where matter (and its property, space) and duration (consciousness) combine. The average motorway driver travels as fast as possible but not so fast that perception of the surrounding world is impaired, disabling effective and productive action: driving and reaching a destination. The driver’s intellect orders or abstracts perceptions, slowing down the flux of movement to give a world of things upon which he or she can act. In the process, the brain prevents consciousness from being inundated by countless perceptions and recollections, and only lets in those related to the required action. Speeding down the motorway limits being to automatic activity, to habit, which stands opposed to the self as free creative activity. (Notably, in one of Cortázar’s most celebrated stories, ‘La autopista del sur’ (1966), it is the resumption of conventional speed, the return to habit, that thwarts self-fulfilment.) For Cortázar and Dunlop habit represents the way most of us live: a life focused on action, therefore a life impoverished or censored by the intellect and the demands of practical achievement. The stark environment of the motorway limits distraction, it facilitates the focusing and limiting of perception with a view to driving, enabling greater speed: it is space cleared of interesting objects, that is, space primed for action. For maximum impact, therefore, this is the site selected by Cortázar and Dunlop for their experimentation with relative inertia. They hinder action by playing with perception, not by limiting it through perilous acceleration, but by slowing down dramatically, by slowing down to the point of occasionally having to stop: a difference of degree or quantity which leads to striking qualitative differences of duration in consciousness. Or so we are told; it is only logical to expect that this radiant transformation can only then be defiled by writing. However, before turning to language, there is the ‘matter’ of perception. As Bergson writes in Matter and Memory (1896), pure perception is utilitarian, but ‘perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it’ (1991: 133). The images of pure memory enter into perception, but recollections are not weakened forms of perception, they are different in kind not in degree: the perceived object is present as an object of an intuition of the real; in recollection the object is absent (1991: 236 & 244). Perception in its actual form is an interpenetration of pure perception and recollection: in this synthesis there is therefore a combination of matter and mind — the mind contributes memory-images which complete the object of perception by giving it a recognizable or significant (signifying) form (1991: 13, 66 & 237). According to Bergson, this synthetic or actual perception is the point where mind and matter intersect with a view to action (1991: 228). In the case of Cortázar and Dunlop, retarding progress along the motorway allows motorway space to be perceived in its minutiae, which transcends practicality; furthermore, their myriad perceptions are indulged, they are subjected to fascinated contemplation. Memory-images — not the habit-memory enabling action, but pure-memory, the involuntary recall of images — flood in, and not just to enable interpretation:
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‘flashbacks en cualquier momento inesperado [...] un creciente aumento de la acuidad, de la forma en que se recortan las cosas y los sucesos, la «lenticularidad» de las imágenes’ (309). In this mode of relaxation, memory-images do not just complete what is perceived, they compete and play with it, making the perceptual flow in and for itself in ‘una vasta ondulación que respira al ritmo de nuestra locura’ (300). Tarmac, tennis balls, slugs, paintbrushes and flowers, for example, are not merely apprehended in terms of their individual fixed — that is, external or spatial — identities, but rather as a continuum of intensities of colour, of movement and change: color que se extiende sobre los pétalos como si fuera la cosa más natural del mundo, y que es a la vez textura, consistencia, luz y sombra, calor [...] no se podía hacer otra cosa que quedarse ahí, entregarse a la sed de ese color, de esa textura. (191)
Being drawn in by the intensity of colour leads to self-dissolution which is then described as erotic: ‘amarse era como hacerlo en un calidoscopio, proteiformes y huyentes’ (252). There is a desire to shift from a narrative of perceptions firmly located within two perceiving characters, to an impersonal art in which affects and percepts are freed from individuated bodies and their respective points of view. Bodies and the surrounding world dissolve into a series of impersonal affective connections as the narrative tries to undo the ordered flow of experiences into singularities; the complex flow of language ceases to be a representation of the ‘actual’ world in order to present or become the creation of a world: the flux from which the spatial world of discrete objects, meanings and emotions are then abstracted (Colebrook 2002: 97). Cortázar and Dunlop wish to turn from the physical world to the iridescent chaos of transformative flow in which distinct characters (an actual multiplicity of selves) have not yet been fixed. Consequently, within this linguistic surge glimpsed-at selves are only appreciated as mere effects — the tenuous coding or contraction — of a flow of affects and percepts. Los autonautas thus strives to tell us that change is not grounded in the human, but rather that change is the power through which the human becomes: a process of transformation of impersonal memories and perceptions organizes consciousness as a mere effect within the virtual whole that is the flow of difference. The intrusions of past within the narrative present, the profusion of images disrupting the narrative sequence, the mood (awe) and rhythm of the language attempt to induce awareness of duration itself — the virtual whole or continuum of transformation (differing difference), of unremitting singularities (uniqueness) from which the actual world is contracted. Images here ‘no longer present events to which bodies (either those of characters or [readers]) respond by habit’; images are ‘disengaged from action, presented as images’, as affects which both characters and readers have to organize (Colebrook 2002: 160). The protracted descriptions of colour, for example, cannot be fixed automatically by the brain as standard representations due to a learnt pattern of response; their intrusion in the travelogue disarms the reader, thwarts his or her habits of interpretation. By slowing down, Cortázar and Dunlop are transported away from the actual concerns of the motorway to the singularity of experience ‘[lo cual] supone una alteración profunda en esa caja de resonancia que es el inconsciente con respecto a lo que recibe a través de los sentidos’ (311). The difference in degree of speed, and the consequent different rhythm of perception, produces a difference in the nature of being: it redirects being from enslavement to the habit of intellect — and its exigencies of action and practicality — to the intuition of duration ‘que nos permite vivir con esa intensidad que sólo puede dar el hecho de no estar haciendo nada, sensación cada día más ignorada en la
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vida corriente’ (118). But a problem hinted at earlier — a very fundamental problem — has been haunting everything claimed so far, and that is the fact that Cortázar and Dunlop want to convey the singularity of experience or becoming through language. When the authors ground transformation in colour, for example, and describe it in terms of luminous intensity, the unique qualitative impression of consciousness is again being substituted with the quantitative interpretation given by understanding, thereby marking a return to spatial properties (Bergson 1996: 51). Writing presents a twofold problem: it distorts unique experience by resolving it into, or attempting to reconstruct it with, ready-made concepts; and, moreover, it violates the ludic journey along the motorway inasmuch as it rationalizes its pointlessness by accruing to it a practical end — that of communication. Cortázar and Dunlop would like to write of heterogeneous life on the motorway, but language, as Bergson writes in Time and Free Will, ‘requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects’ (1996: xix). Discursive thought and language require that Cortázar and Dunlop break up their uninterrupted flows of consciousness into discrete, numerable states (snap-shots or episodes) which succeed each other in time, represented as a homogeneous medium. Language keeps us outside reality; it fails to grasp things because it can but describe aspects of them in ‘lifeless’ repeatable terms (Bergson 1996: 133). Language can only lead therefore, to a relative knowledge in contrast to the intuition of duration, which according to Bergson gives absolute knowledge of life by following it in empathetic identification, enabling what intelligence cannot: it brings us into life as it is, making us coincide with what is unique and inexpressible in an object, irrespective of utilitarian considerations. Which is what Cortázar appears to be arguing in passages such as the following: Basta ese abandono, esa salida de sí mismo [...] para ser un poco el árbol, vivir el árbol y dejar de verlo como de costumbre, eso-árbol [...] basta ser-en-el-árbol para saberlo de otra manera, si saber quiere decir todavía algo. (122)
In practice, however, transactions between intuition and intelligence are inevitable (Bergson 1999: 23–24 & 29–31), and singularity remains inexpressible in language which is pre-given. Language mechanically tramples over life, giving rise to the overwhelming facetiousness of Los autonautas de la cosmopista whose aim is to communicate the logic of turning back from the pragmatic, from the hegemony of the intellect upon which its very existence depends. Intelligence appears to be employed in its own outdoing by Cortázar, here at his most perfidious in the company of Dunlop. But ironically, to this end, they are not unlike Bergson himself. For Bergson’s philosophy uses the intuition of duration with a view to telling its results, something he must do in language, which as A. R. Lacey explains: ‘can only freeze the results into concepts and so distort them out of their proper nature [giving] us something other than what we were supposed to be given’ (1989: 166). Bergson informs us about the intuition of duration and how to achieve it; he cannot, however, provide intuitive knowledge. As Lacey concludes: Bergson’s books ‘do not give us the experiencing of red or duration but tell us that the experiencing of these is different from anything that science could tell us. They tell us to enter the Promised Land but do not lead us into it’ (1989: 166). Surely, it is only this that Cortázar and Dunlop are also guilty of? Only perhaps that their literary unruliness brings us closer to intuition than the dry intellectual discourse of philosophy ever could. Cortázar and Dunlop thus
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apostrophize their reader as a ‘co-expedicionario’ (19), and claim to be writing ‘con la esperanza, oh paciente acompañante de estas páginas, de que nuestra experiencia te haya abierto también algunas puertas, y que en ti germine ya el proyecto de alguna autopista paralela de tu invención’ (44). Los autonautas de la cosmopista is fraught and infatuated with contradiction: a story of outdoing habit via exaggerated routine during a pointless journey whose pointlessness is destroyed through the translation into a travelogue, into language, the very medium in which the continuity and singularity of the experience cannot be conveyed. It labours between the futile and the practical: a text which can only hope to succeed in communication by failing to communicate. The authors are in fact taking us for a ride. Cortázar and Dunlop can only involve or affect the reader by brushing aside the utilitarian aspect of language: practical communication, the concern with coherent meaning. They move outside the habit of language which the ear and mouth have been trained to use; that is, language as motor or bodily habit — a disposition to respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus (Bergson 1991: 109–17). Furthermore, as Leonard Lawlor discusses at length (2003: 71–72), particular languages are relative to communities; they mediate our experience with the general ideas of those communities. To move outside habit and the blindness of communal generalities, Cortázar and Dunlop, convinced that ‘la imaginación puede realmente tomar el poder si se olvida de las rutinas’ (320) attempt to work language from the affective transformations of duration. The result is not — nor ever could be — entirely new, for nothing could be communicated otherwise. This process, however, ravages language, makes it stammer, rupturing representation: from the playful neologistic interference of the title, and the glut of zeugmatic constructions (‘caer más allá de su, tu, mi lengua y del vértigo de los caminos’ [298]), to the senseless passages which, either individually or in sum, end up as something ‘heteróclito, absurdo, contradictorio, ilógico’ (322). In other words, at times Cortázar and Dunlop flirt with the asignifying: a creative shifting between sense and nonsense, between the grammatical and the agrammatical, to disclose a virtual dimension, immanent within language, consisting of unstable ‘states’ or possibilities of meaning that precede or disrupt established social meaning: ‘todo es calor, sombra y árbol’ (118); ‘refugiados en un caracol que viaja sobre el dorso de un pájaro sin alas’ (298); ‘los relojes son alcauciles renovables’ (347). The wild-artichoke clocks refer to a passage in Cortázar’s infamous collection of wild improvisations, Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962), where he ‘explains’ that with a wild-artichoke clock ‘el tiempo no puede medirse, y en la infinita rosa violeta del centro el cronopio encuentra un gran contento, entonces se la come con aceite, vinagre y sal’ (2000: 134). (The cronopio is loosely defined as a joyful, metamorphic essence, in sharp contrast to the rigid order of ‘Chronos’ to which its name seditiously alludes.) The use of metaphor and simile here is not intended to clarify through the production of specific meanings: metaphoric connection ‘is essentially metamorphosis and indicates how two objects exchange their determinations, exchange even the names that designate them, in the new medium that confers the common quality upon them’ (Deleuze 2000: 48). This common quality, as Deleuze explains in relation to Proust, is a singularizing essence unfolding in the world, self-differentiating difference expressed through varying degrees of generality; this world does not originate from the author/s, for they are merely components of that world that becomes-other. Images in Los autonautas do not belong to the common world of universal or habitual communication; the narrative moves from
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the representational to the metamorphic. Nevertheless, while common distinctions and ordinary representation break down, elements of meaning subsist. The text performs its revelatory function by occasionally leading us from standard signification toward the production or emergence of meaning itself, making us aware of the productive flow of difference, the virtual domain of sense — that virtual surface of language which does not express actual meaning, but is rather the tendency or power to become meaningful. In understanding we do not start from the individual word; understanding requires a leap into meaning or sense (Deleuze 1990: 28). As Bergson suggests (1991: 118): A word has an individuality for us only from the moment we have been taught to abstract it. What we first hear are short phrases, not words. A word is always continuous with the other words which accompany it and takes different aspects according to the cadence and movement of the sentences in which it is set: just as each note of a melody vaguely reflects the whole musical phrase.
In order to understand we leap into sense and the general past (memory) and then into a specific region of the past which directs the actual perception of language (in the process the past and sense are added to and reorganized). Sense or meaning is the condition for the emergence of language as well as its effect: ‘It turns one side toward things and one side toward propositions. But it does not merge with the proposition which expresses it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things’ (Deleuze 1990: 22). Like memory, sense is a virtual whole, an immanent and real whole that is never actually given: sense and memory limit and direct perception of the actual and constantly expand and evolve with the addition of each new perception. But for Deleuze this virtual whole is a multidirectional field of nonsense within which ‘good’ or ‘common’ sense is only limitation. Cortázar’s wild-artichoke clock, for example, has sense, just not ‘good’ or ‘common’ sense: it is an absurd object ‘without a home’ — beyond actual being, yet with a distinct position within this outside. The function of the wild-artichoke clock is to designate both a fused mechanism-vegetable and incorporeal sense. It is therefore not just in designating this unlikely composite — coupled actual, sensible, objects — that the term ‘wild-artichoke clock’ fulfils its function, for in the text it also contracts or unfolds a series of incorporeals — joy, duration, nourishing, life. The wild-artichoke clock (nonsense) exists simultaneously in these series of objects and incorporeals, but it is never given at any point; it is an unfixable element within the field of sense from which determinate elements (good sense), that is, possible meanings, arise and proliferate. In other words, it is a figure for, but not a description of, selfdifferentiating difference: unstable; without a single, fixed identity (Bogue 2003: 25–26). By disrupting the habit of everyday language, the wild-artichoke clock and the oddity of expressions such as ‘bebo el azul de esos árboles’ (189) violently unfix commonsense coordinates of time, identity and representation, and alert us to singularity; they are instances of writing in communion with the heteroclite, sense events of unfolding difference which (may) produce incorporeal transformations in the reader. Symbolic expression is not being used here primarily to represent or communicate something from an external perspective (it is not a description of, nor a metaphor specifically denoting, self-differentiating difference); instead, the expressions themselves give rise to the experience of singularity in reader — an experience which is different to that of the authors on the road, yet nonetheless analogous to it by dint of being singular, hence a continuous event of self-differentiating difference. As Lawlor explains, if there is alterity
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in experience, it is going to be dependent on a person’s own interior life, on his or her memory and on his or her individual sense. So, if Cortázar and Dunlop’s writing affects or produces an experience of alterity, this is coincident with my own becoming-other, with my own duration: the rhythm and peculiarity of their language is a function of my own rhythm and consciousness — it is not so much a case of alterity from transcendence, but of alteration from immanence (the virtual multiplicity of my own duration) (Lawlor 2003: 82). If we reflect upon what we feel as we read Cortázar and Dunlop: We shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing. It was, for us, a brilliant and vanishing vision, lost in the crowd of those visions, equally brilliant and equally vanishing, which become overcast in our ordinary experience like ‘dissolving views’ and which constitute, by their reciprocal interference, the pale and colourless vision of things that is habitually ours. (Bergson 2002: 252)1
Ultimately, the feelings which Los autonautas produces in its readers are infinite and incommunicable — singular; these feelings do not initiate action or lead anywhere outside themselves. Cortázar and Dunlop’s art affects us into thinking divorced from practical concerns. Our dynamic involvement with their writing leads us to grasp ‘our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing in common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space’ (Bergson 1996: 231). For Bergson, to grasp oneself as ‘becoming’, and not as its objectified external projection — as spatial being or social representation — is the only way to intuit freedom. (For any attempt to prove or define freedom leads to determinism and the interpretation of time in spatial terms.) In becoming there is no succession of a being from one state to another: the virtual whole of sense and the virtual whole of the past (memory) transform — ‘the emergence of the new changes the past [not the actual past] but the balance between actuality and the virtuality in the past’ (Zh izhek 2004: 12). The virtual intrudes into, and slows down, perception; it unfastens us from the immediacy of action, making us pause and think: in the process an actual world — the self included — and the virtual emerge as new. Our social or historical ‘selves’ are mere effects of the creative freedom of becoming. As Claire Colebrook neatly summarizes (2002: 168): ‘the virtual is positive: always transforming, open and as productive of the actual as the actual is of the virtual. Freedom is not, then, a human power set over and against a world. It is not a separate judgement of the world; freedom is the very becoming of the world.’ And it is this freedom — pure becoming without being — which we intuit, but never actually read, as we follow Cortázar and Dunlop down the motorway.2 WORKS CITED Ansell Pearson, Keith, & John Mullarkey, 2002. ‘Introduction’, in Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey (New York & London: Continuum), pp. 1–45. Aronne Amestoy, Lida, 1972. Cortázar: la novela mandala (Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro). Bergson, Henri, 1980. ‘Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic’, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP). 1 In this passage Bergson is discussing art in relation to Corot and Turner. 2 An earlier version of this paper was presented on 20 November 2003 at a research seminar of the Department of Hispanic and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham.
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——, 1991. Matter and Memory, tr. N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone). ——, 1996. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, tr. F. L. Pogson (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger). ——, 1998. Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover). ——, 1999. An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett). ——, 2002. ‘The Perception of Change’, tr. M. L. Andison, in his Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey (New York & London: Continuum), pp. 248–66. Bachelard, Gaston, 2000. The Dialectic of Duration, tr. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press). Blanco Arnejo, María Dolores, 1996. La novela lúdica experimental de Julio Cortázar (Madrid: Pliegos). Bogue, Ronald, 2003. Deleuze on Literature (New York & London: Routledge). Borges, Jorge Luis, 1995. ‘El Aleph’, in his El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza Editorial), pp. 155–74. Camurati, Mireya, 1975. ‘El absurdo, la risa y la invención a la aventura: “Instrucciones para subir una escalera”’, in Estudios sobre los cuentos de Julio Cortázar, ed. David Lagmanovich (Barcelona: Ediciones Hispam), pp. 73–81. Castro-Klarén, Sara, 1978. ‘Ontological Fabulation: Toward Cortázar’s Theory of Literature’, in The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar, ed. Jaime Alazraki & Ivar Ivask (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), pp. 140–50. Colebrook, Claire, 2002. Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, NSW.: Allen and Unwin). Cortázar, Julio, 1979. ‘The Southern Thruway’, in his All Fires the Fire and Other Stories, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine (London: Marion Boyars), pp. 3–29. ——, 1988. ‘Algunos aspectos del cuento’, in his La casilla de los Morelli, ed. Julio Ortega (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores), pp. 131–52. ——, 1992. ‘El perseguidor’, in his Las armas secretas, ed. Susana Jakfalvi (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra), pp. 141–205. ——, 1994a. Cronopios and Famas, tr. Paul Blackburn (London: Marion Boyars). ——, 1994b. Rayuela, ed. Andrés Amorós (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra). ——, 1994c. ‘Teoría del túnel’, in Obra crítica, i, ed. Saúl Yurkievich (Madrid: Alfaguara), pp. 31–137. ——, 1995a. ‘La autopista del sur’, in his Todos los fuegos el fuego (Madrid: Alfaguara), pp. 13–41. ——, 1995b. ‘La isla a mediodía’, in his Todos los fuegos el fuego (Madrid: Alfaguara), pp. 107–15. ——, 1996. 62: modelo para armar (Madrid: Alfaguara). ——, 1998. ‘Axolotl’, in his Final del juego, in Cortázar: cuentos completos, i (Madrid: Alfaguara), pp. 381–85. ——, 1997. Libro de Manuel (Madrid: Alfaguara). ——, 1999. Prosa del observatorio (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen). ——, 2000. Historias de cronopios y de famas (Madrid: Suma de Letras). ——, 2004. Último round (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino). ——, & Carol Dunlop, 1996. Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o Un viaje atemporal París-Marsella (Madrid: Alfaguara). Deleuze, Gilles, 1990. The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, tr. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP). ——, 1991. Bergsonism, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone). ——, 2000. Proust and Signs, tr. Richard Howard (London: Athlone). ——, & Félix Guattari, 1984. Anti-Oedipus, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone). Lacey, A. R., 1989. Bergson (New York & London: Routledge). Lawlor, Leonard, 2003. The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York & London: Continuum). Pilkington, A. E., 1976. Bergson and His Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Yurkievich, Saúl, 1987. Julio Cortázar: al calor de tu sombra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa). Zh izhek, Slavoj, 2004. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York & London: Routledge).
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Una de las obras finales y menos estudiadas de Julio Cortázar, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, parece oponerse a toda clasificación: es a la vez autobiografía, experimento sociológico y epopeya surrealista. Ajeno a la grandeza barroca de Rayuela, se trata, sin embargo, de un trabajo de ingenio cortazariano característico que abarca la reflexión metafísica y la intuición filosófica. Este ensayo establece varias conexiones entre el pensamiento vitalista de Cortázar y aquél de Henri Bergson, el polémico filósofo francés de comienzos del siglo veinte, cuya obra vuelve a ser analizada tras décadas de olvido académico. Al igual que Cortázar, Bergson tiene algo de alma rebelde: un filósofo que desafía la interpretación científica al mantener que la intuición de la realidad y del tiempo trasciende el intelecto, y que luego fue galardonado con el Premio Nóbel de Literatura en 1927 gracias a su uso heterodoxo de la metáfora y la analogía. Los siguientes nexos filosóficos entre la obra de Bergson y Los autonautas de la cosmopista serán analizados aquí: el interés por los papeles desempeñados por la memoria y la percepción dentro del tiempo psicológico, y el recelo del espacio y de la costumbre, ambos considerados antagónicos a la libertad de la consciencia. Dado que dentro de este enfoque fenomenológico hay un cierto repudio de la abstracción intelectual, la última parte del ensayo examinará las técnicas empleadas por Cortázar cuando intenta comunicar la singularidad de la experiencia a través de la escritura.