SOURCE: Musselwhite, David. “Death and the Phantasm: A Reading of Julio Cortázar's ‘Babas del Diablo’.” Romance Studies 18, no. 1 (June 2000): 57-68.

[In the following essay, Musselwhite considers the model of the phantasm in “Babas del Diablo” and other stories collected in Las armas secretas.]

‘Babas del diablo’ is probably Cortázar's best known short story, and in spite of the quite extraordinary amount of commentary dedicated to it,¹ it still remains one of his most problematic,² quite apart from the notoriety that accrued to it from being the text on which Antonioni based Blow-up. There are many things that are confusing: the hesitancy as to the person of the narrator, the grammatical permutations, the mixture of first and third person narration, the double time of the narrative—first the original scene at the parapet of the Quai de Bourbon and then the recurrence or repetition of the scene in the fifth floor apartment of the writer/photographer Roberto-Michel—the rotation of the subject positions taken up by the boy, the blond woman, the man in the grey hat and Roberto-Michel himself—and finally the ‘dead’ (and alive?) status of the narrator at the end of the story. It is true that many of these structural and narrative effects or devices are to be found in many of Cortázar's other short stories—indeed there are times when his resort to them seems almost formulaic—but they are to be found in ‘Babas del diablo’ in a peculiarly dense and complex form. A reading that succeeded in offering a more comprehensive and theoretically convincing account of the dynamics and complexities of ‘Babas del diablo’ might then go some way towards providing an interpretative model that would not only facilitate readings of other texts by Cortázar but might also provide some clue as to the obsessions and problematics that lie at the heart of his work as a whole.

The theoretical model on which I propose to base my reading is that of the theory of the ‘phantasm’ as first elaborated by Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis in their seminal article of 1964³ and further developed by Gilles Deleuze, first in his Différence et Répétition and then more extensively, in Logique du sens.⁴

The model of the phantasm seems to me to be particularly suggestive and powerful⁵ but, as far as I am aware, and in spite of Burgin's 1986 book, it is not as well known as it deserves to be. In any case I have found it nowhere cited in the body of commentary dedicated to the work of Cortázar and so, because it is the primary aim of this paper to juxtapose the work of Cortázar and the phantasm, I hope I will be forgiven for first dedicating a perhaps disproportionate amount of space to a summary of the Laplanche and Pontalis essay.

Laplanche and Pontalis begin by distinguishing their account of the phantasm from all those which tended to regard it as something merely ‘imaginary’ as opposed to the ‘real’. The phantasm is not so much a ‘fantasy’ that one has, as a structure wherein one is placed; ‘… the phantasm,’ they say towards the end of their article, ‘is not the object of desire, it is a scene’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1964, 1868).⁶

Freud had explored the nature of the phantasm with his early interest in the so-called ‘scene of seduction’. Freud had found that many of his patients suffering from neurotic symptoms recounted under analysis that they had been subject to some form of sexual aggression at an early, infantile, period. The early experience had not of itself been traumatic and, indeed, had hardly been registered at the time: the traumatic response came later, at a post-pubertal moment, when, again often through an anodyne or indifferent experience, the memory of the earlier event was triggered by some associated trait and provoked a pathogenic response. In the event, it is well known, Freud had to abandon his ‘seduction theory’: on the one hand it proved impossible to discover any ‘real’ event behind the phantasm and, on the other, it was theoretically difficult to explain how an infant in its ‘innocence’ could have registered—even unconsciously—the first event, without somehow already ‘knowing’ what it was all about: i.e. you would need something like a ‘sexual-pre-sexual’ child.

The ‘seduction theory’, however, had been important for Freud. In the first place it explained the connection between sexuality, trauma and defence: it could explain why repression bore exclusively upon sexuality. Moreover, and just as importantly, the seduction theory seemed to account for the temporality of human sexuality situated between the ‘too early’ of birth and the ‘too late’ of puberty: the trauma of sexuality was occasioned by a ‘delay’. The advent of sexuality to the human being was not coincident with itself but the product of a deferral, of a resonance established between the original scene and the recollected memory.

In 1897 Freud abandoned this theory in favour, for a time, of the notion of an endogenous infantile sexuality for which the phantasms of seduction would be no more than disguises for infantile autoerotic activity. The discontinuities of the phantasm theory gave way to the continuities of biological realism. Ironically it was at just about the same time that Freud discovered also the ‘Oedipus complex’—which was to become the phantasm par excellence—in his own analysis: for a time ‘Oedipus’ and ‘infantile sexuality’ struggled to hold primacy of place in Freud's thinking—the latter for a long time predominating and risking the loss not only of the ‘Oedipus complex’ as the nuclear complex but also the abandonment of the phantasm as the specific object of psychoanalysis.

In fact Freud continued to explore the nature and structure of the phantasm. He was beginning to find that phantasms were not simply the materials offered for analysis but also, at times, the result of analysis itself—so that the phantasm was to be found at both the latent and the manifest levels of consciousness. Further, Freud found himself increasingly confronted by what he began to characterize as ‘typical’ phantasms—phantasms that recurred from patient to patient and which clearly revealed structural features transcendent to the experience of the individual. Among such phantasms figured what Freud would later characterize as the ‘primal scene’—the witnessing of parental intercourse—as well as phantasms of castration and the already familiar phantasm of seduction. Freud had, in any case, never desisted from attempting to locate and establish the ‘origins’ of these phantasms. For a time he was attracted by the notion of a phylogenetic heritage—these typical phantasms being inherited memories of real events in the distant past (but this only reproduced at a higher level the difficulties of locating a specific ‘real’ in the experience of the individual).

What makes the phylogenetic theory untenable, however, is that certain features of the recorded phantasms make it impossible to assimilate them into a purely transcendent scheme. Freud recalls the case of a paranoiac who believed she was being observed and photographed while in bed with her lover: she had heard a ‘small noise’, the click of the camera. Behind this scene Freud found the typical phantasm of the primal scene: the noise is the noise of the parents which wakes the child, and also the noise the child is afraid of making, which would betray her listening. In some ways the noise seems a purely chance occurrence but Freud goes on to say that it is hardly accidental for the noise constitutes a necessary part of the phantasm of ‘lying in wait’ (être aux écoutes) which is a typical feature of the ‘parental (i.e. Oedipal) complex’. The noise invoked in the present by the patient reproduces the very characteristic of the primal scene that allows the whole subsequent elaboration to take. ‘In other words the origin of the phantasm is integrated into the very structure of the phantasm itself’(p. 1853).

At this point Laplanche and Pontalis draw attention to the particular importance Freud gives to the role of hearing: for the noise that impinges on the phantasm may not just be brute sound, but also might be the ‘familial noise’ (bruit familial) which carries the histories or legends or traditions of parents, grandparents and, indeed, the whole tribe. The noise, then, is both interruptive and interpellative and it is a critical component of the phantasm. ‘Phantasms are produced by an unconscious combination of things lived and things heard’(p. 1854).

Moreover, what these typical phantasms refer to are origins: in the primal scene it is the origin of the individual that is figured; in the phantasm of seduction it is the origin of sexuality; in the phantasm of castration, it is the origin of the difference of sexes. What the phantasm is, above all, is the interface of biology and culture, of the purely physiological and the quintessentially human—the phantasm is the very mechanism by means of which the human itself is constituted:

What does the primal scene figure for us? The conjunction of the biological fact of conception (and of birth) and the symbolic fact of filiation, between the ‘naked act’ (acte sauvage) of coitus and the existence of the triad of mother-child-father.

(p. 1855)

The phantasm, then, is the site where desire is separated off from need, where sexuality distinguishes itself from hunger, where the cogitans separates itself from the res, where some measure of mental articulation takes the place of merely inchoate feeling. The least sophisticated account of how this ‘jump’ takes place is that which sees the phantasm as a merely imaginary and auto-erotic compensation for the loss of the real. What Laplanche and Pontalis are at pains to point out, however, is that the object of the auto-erotic phase in the evolution of human sexuality is not a real object, but a lost or virtual object—not the breast as supplier of food but the breast as the object of desire:

The ‘origin’ of auto-eroticism will be that moment when sexuality detaches itself from every natural object, sees itself handed over to the phantasm (se voit livrée au phantasme) and by virtue of that very fact constitutes itself as sexuality.

(p. 1866)

Laplanche and Pontalis immediately add however:

one could just as well say, on the contrary, that it is the eruption of the phantasm which provokes that disjunction of sexuality and need.

(p. 1866)

We have seen earlier how the phantasm is a combination of things lived (choses vécues) and things heard (choses entendues) and it is now necessary to understand a little more clearly exactly how the ‘heard’ impacts upon the ‘lived’, how the semiotic ‘rumeur’ registers on the somatic mass.

In the first place there can be little doubt that initially the rumeur—the chorus of legends, traditions, institutional inscriptions—that will later contribute to the formation of the phantasm are just as confused and indiscriminate as the brute noise of the body itself. Bit by bit, however, we can imagine their insistence and repetitiveness resolving themselves into increasingly significant clusters. It is at this point that one can begin to envisage the phantasm being born. What first attracts and beguiles the child are clusters of unstable, agrammatical, barely discernible, nonsensical (‘fort! da!’) frequencies and intensities. The ‘heard’ does not arrive in the shape of fully formed propositions and grammatically correct pronouncements. To the extent that the nebular clusters of the nascent phantasm make sense, they can only offer the unformed subject a sense of decentrement and dispersal. Not only will there be a decentering with respect to space, but so too with respect to time: without doubling and repetition the mere noise of the heard would be as meaningless as the noises emerging from the body. There can be no simple ‘now’ in the phantasm—the sense of sense can only be a secondary sense, an after-sense, a sense after the event (a ‘double take’: we can now see that the ‘delay’ or ‘after-effect’ of the ‘seduction theory’ was no more than this hiatus peculiar to the phantasm writ large). One can see that this orrery-like (an orrery without a centre) structure is made possible by the very lacks and displacements that constitute it: without these it would have no meaning. It is in this sense that the phantasm is not a response to loss—to the loss of either the real or the virtual object. Instead, it is the constitutive matrix of such losses—the lacunae, the gaps, the absences—that make desire and meaning possible.

At this point we can begin to look at the phantasm in relation to the subject or, rather, the position of the subject in relation to the phantasm. We began by remarking that the phantasm was not so much a ‘fantasy’ that one had as a structure in which one was placed. We have also noted in passing that the phantasm can be found both as a material to be analysed and as the product of analysis—that it can be found, that is, both at the unconscious level and the conscious level of daydream, both in the umbilical of the dream and spread out across the façade of the secondary revision. However, though the same elements might be found at both latent and manifest levels, the way in which those elements are structured differs greatly:

At the pole of the day dream, the scenario is centred essentially on the first person, the place of the subject marked and invariable. The organization is stabilized by the secondary process, anchored in the ‘ego’: the subject, one might say, lives his dream. The pole of the original phantasm, on the contrary, is characterized by an absence of subjectification which goes hand in hand with the presence of the subject in the scene: the child for example, is one of the many personae among many others …

(p. 1860)

In other words, at the conscious level, the phantasm will have all the coherence of a standard narrative (what Freud would call a ‘family romance’) centred on a subject with all positions stabilized in accordance with normal narrative practice. At the deeper level, however, those same elements will find themselves scrambled and the subject will not be found as an anchor to the scene but will itself be dispersed among the elements of the scene as a whole. Laplanche and Pontalis give an example:

‘A father seduces his daughter’, this might be for example the summary of a phantasm of seduction. The mark of the primary process is not here the absence of organisation, as is sometimes said, but the particular character of the structure: it is a scenario of multiple entries, in which nothing says that the subject will find itself in the first place in the term ‘daughter’; one might equally find it establishing itself in the father or even in seduces.

(p. 1861)

What we have to imagine is that the phantasm will first register at the level of the unconscious, and here it will be a chaotic, nebulous heap of all kinds of heterogenous materials without rhyme or reason: at this level subject and object, noun and verb, past and present, here and there are just tumbled on top of each other.⁷ As this raft of elements slowly rises up through the layers of the consciousness it will become increasingly organized, changing from a mere heterogeneity, through varying degrees of ambiguity (passive/active, sado-masochist, permutations for example), until, as it emerges into the light of full consciousness, it assumes clarity and unambiguity of expression. The series might go, for example, in the case of ‘Babas del diablo’, from ‘tú la mujer rubia eran las nubes que siguen corriendo delante de mis tus sus nuestros vuestros sus rostros’ (Cortázar, 1990: 123) to ‘el muchacho fue seducido por la mujer rubia y amenazado por el hombre del sombrero gris’. Unscrambled, ‘Babas del diablo’ reveals itself to be centred in its entirety on what Freud calls the ‘parental complex’—Oedipus.

Although I have not particularly biased my summary of Laplanche and Pontalis's article toward a reading of ‘Babas del diablo’ it must be becoming clear by now that Cortázar's short story presents us with an almost text-book example of a phantasmic structure and, when we see it as such, much of its complexity, if not perplexity, becomes clear.

First and foremost, there is the double narration—the repeating of the first incident that took place on the parapet, in the revised versions of it recounted a week later. The first scene, moreover, is clearly a scene of seduction—one of Freud's typical ‘fantasmes originaires’. But as it is retold with its varying of subject positions and nuances, we become aware that it is not only a scene of seduction but betrays features and details that reveal it to be also a version of the ‘primal scene’, and of the phantasm of castration.⁸ As far as the primal scene is concerned we have the classic instance of the interruptive noise—the ‘clic!’ of the camera betraying the ‘lying in wait’ (être aux écoutes—the ‘acechando’, ‘estar al acecho’ of the Spanish) of the primal scene—and in one of the permutations of the personae of the scene we have the classic Oedipal triangle:

El payaso [el hombre del sombrero gris] y la mujer se consultaban en silencio: hacíamos un perfecto triángulo insoportable [my italics], algo que tenía que romperse con un chasquido [‘chasquido’ here being the equivalent of the ‘clic’].

(Cortázar, 1990, 134)

There is, too, the moment when it is the woman who finds herself in the position of the victim—the primal scene often construed as an act of violence against the mother:

me pareció que la mujer, de espaldas al parapeto [in the position formerly occupied by the boy], paseaba las manos por la piedra, con el clásico gesto del acosado que busca la salida.

(p. 134)

As far as the phantasm of castration is concerned there is, first, the dreadful sense of impotence inflicted on the narrator:

De pronto el orden se invertía, ellos estaban vivos, moviéndose, decidían y eran decididos, iban a su futuro; y yo desde este lado, prisionero de otro tiempo, de una habitación en un quinto piso, de no saber quiénes eran esa mujer, y ese hombre y ese niño, de ser nada más que la lente de mi cámara, algo rígido, incapaz de intervención. Me tiraban a la cara la burla más horrible, la de decidir frente a mi impotencia …

(p. 138)

The threat is reinforced towards the end of the story when the man in the grey hat turns on the interfering narrator and seems, in fact, to obliterate him.

Once we understand the phantasmic nature of the episode(s) recounted in the story many of the incidental details make more sense. There is, for example, the irritation and impatience with the notion of ‘ahora’ (‘qué palabra, ahora, qué estúpida mentira’) (p. 127). We have seen earlier how there can be no ‘ahora’ in the phantasm: the phantasm is essentially split, divided, double. Significantly, we are told at the very beginning of the story that it is based upon an ‘agujero’ (p. 123)—a hole, an absence. Linked to this aporetic effect, too, is the decentred structure of the phantasm: when the narrator reviews the scene of the episode on the parapet, as it has been captured in the photograph he hangs on the wall of this room, it dawns on him that he is now looking at the scene from a different point of view due to the off-set of the camera lens:

… entonces se me ocurrió que me había instalada exactamente en el punto de mira del objectivo.

(p. 129)

The focal point of the phantasm, like its time, is always elsewhere, ever adjacent, never a here or now. We are told, too, that, ideally, the whole story might have been best told by a machine:

Puestos a contar, si se pudiera ir a beber un bock por ahí y que la máquina siguiera sola … sería la perfección. La perfección, sí, porque aquí el agujero que hay que contar es también una máquina … y a lo mejor puede ser que una máquina sepa más de otra máquina que yo …

(p. 123)

The ‘machinic’ qualities of the story lie in the impersonal, transcendent, structures of the phantasms, their typicality and generality, ‘something which transcends at the same time both the individual experience (le vécu individuel) and the imaginary (l'imaginé)’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1964, 1850). The quasi-machinic qualities of the phantasm are perhaps best conveyed by the French term ‘agencement’ which seems to be something between a structure and a process, and for which I can find no equivalent in English. Finally there is the perplexity as to why the narrator remembers the body of the woman rather than her image—whereas he remembers the image of the boy rather than his body (Cortázar 1990, 128): could it not be that whereas the boy is primarily a cipher in the dream for the narrator himself the woman is precisely an element of the ‘naked act’ (the ‘acte sauvage’) that the phantasm seeks to translate from body to image? Perhaps this, too, explains, why she is accredited with such subhuman—animal, even inorganic—attributes:

… sus ojos que caían sobre las cosas como dos águilas, dos saltos al vacío, dos ráfagas de fango verde.

(129)

This is not even the primeval mother—it is lower, beneath the threshold of humanity, a viscous, bilious, original slime, a glimpse of that on which not even the phantasm can take purchase. Indeed there is a visceral revulsion here that perhaps threatens the very decorum of the story.

The phantasmic structure also explains the switching of narrative voices between first and third person narrative as well as the narrator's inclination to ‘bifurcate’ himself so readily (‘… Michel se bifurca fácilmente’, p. 128) his name is already a double name—Roberto-Michel; he has dual nationality—Franco-Chilean; he has two jobs—translator and photographer; both jobs suggest modes of translation—from one language to another, from the ‘real’ to the ‘image’, this last particularly close to the analogous function of the phantasm. We have mentioned earlier the two poles of the phantasm: at the one pole there might well be a first person narrative, but at the other, deeper, pole there is an absence of subjectification or, rather, the subject becomes dispersed among the manifold subject positions of the phantasm. We have already suggested that the boy is a mere cipher of the narrator. There is a clue to their identity in the shared detail of having their gloves in their pockets: ‘… guardé los guantes en el bolsillo; … llevaba unos guantes amarillos … era gracioso ver los dedos de los guantes saliendo del bolsillo de la chaqueta’ (p. 127 and p. 129), but there is some sense, too, in which at different points in the story the narrator is identified with all the narrative positions—the boy, the blond woman and the man in the grey hat—or even the Contax 1:1.2 (‘entonces giré un poco, quiero decir que la cámara giró un poco …’ p. 138) or the Remington typewriter. The ‘self’ (moi), we might say, is a ‘dissolved self’ (un moi dissous).

We can now understand why the narrator is dead (and alive..) (yo que estoy muerto [y vivo, no se trata de engañar a nadie]) (p. 124), for what the phantasm provokes is the dissolution and ‘death’ of the singular self. In this sense the effect of the phantasm is explosive (a ‘blow-up’ in a sense quite different from that intended by Antonioni) for not only is the self scattered among the various subject positions of the phantasm, it is also dispersed among the different phantasms themselves—here the phantasms of the primal scene, seduction, castration, and perhaps too, a phantasm of death, though in many ways the phantasm of death is the phantasmic structure itself. One can imagine that finding itself so scattered, so bifurcated, so strewn across so many scenarios and occupying in each scenario so many, not always compatible, positions, the self must finally collapse under such a strain. Such a collapse would be akin to some form of psychosis and I sense this is what is revealed at the end of ‘Babas del diablo’ and one might go further and suggest that this psychosis might well be a result of a failure to cope with an Oedipal overload.

It is perhaps worthwhile at this stage to compare what I have just said about the conclusion of ‘Babas del diablo’ with Susana Jakfalvi's comments on the close of ‘Las armas secretas’:

En este movimiento de superposición de varios yos (en este caso dos) el ego pierde sus límites e ingresa en una constelación que le posibilita la realización múltiple del ser, pero al final fatalmente repite el camino hacia la muerte, con lo que esta búsqueda de una dimensión suprareal queda trunca.⁹

The conclusions to the two stories are so similar because they are both phantasmatic structures. ‘Las armas secretas’, like ‘Babas del diablo’, is again structured around two events, the first consisting of the violation of Michèle by a German soldier at Enghien, and the second, the ‘repetition’ of this event seven years later during the visit of Michèle and Pierre to Michèle's parents' home at Clamart. The story clearly recounts the traumatic consequences not only of a violation but also of the clumsy, but, we see now, unsuccessful, attempts to eliminate that event from consciousness by the killing of the original perpetrator. The ‘return’ of the dead man in the shape of the luckless Pierre recalls Lacan's remarks on the effects of ‘foreclosure’: what is expelled from the symbolic—that is, not negotiated in consciousness—returns in the real, in hallucinatory form.¹⁰ There has been a failure, we might say, to accommodate the event, via a phantasmatic reworking, to the regulative proprieties of the ‘family romance’.

The first story in the volume, ‘Cartas de mamá’, has an almost identical structure: the precipitate and inadequately digested—that is affectively digested—dispatch of the sickly Nico means that he returns in a hallucinatory form, to haunt the life of Luis and Laura in Paris.¹¹

‘Los buenos servicios’, another of the stories in the same volume, also has a phantasmatic structure. Again we have a structure of repetitions where a second scene, in the funeral parlour, repeats and reworks a first scene, the party at the house of the Rosays' and the looking after the dogs. Again this double structure is centred upon an absence or a lost object—this time it is the figure of the dead Bebé or M. Linard—around which swirl a welter of affects and repressed emotions, a web of hysteria and taboo. What makes for much of the fascination of this story is that due to the limited perspective or consciousness of the narrator, Mme Francinet, we can only guess at what might be the real nature of the dramatic events—homosexual jealousies, business rivalries, blackmail—that lie behind the events we are allowed to witness. There is a sense, too, that we are not dealing here with just ‘human’ affects: the first scene with the dogs clearly suggests some kind of repressed unconsciousness consisting of non-human sexuality and affective promiscuity. The folding of an animal affectivity upon the ill-defined behaviour of a human group, which is the effect of the phantasmatic juxtapositioning of the two scenes, alerts us to the fact that we are here dealing with a realm beyond mere human psychology and with constellations of affects and traits transcendent of the individual.

It is at this point that I want to suggest that the phantasm, as I have attempted to describe it in the foregoing, comes very close to providing a theoretical account of what Cortázar attempts to formulate with his notion of the ‘figura’:

La noción de figura va a servirme instrumentalmente, porque representa un enfoque muy diferente del habitual en cualquier novela o narración donde se tiende a individualizar a los personajes y a darles una psicología y características propias. Quisiera escribir de manera tal que la narración estuviera llena de vida en su sentido más profundo, llena de acción y de sentido, y que al mismo tiempo esa vida, esa acción y ese sentido no se refieran ya a la mera acción de los individuos, sino a una especie de superación de las figuras formadas por constelaciones de personajes … Quisiera llegar a escribir un relato capaz de mostrar cómo esas figuras constituyen una ruptura y un desmentido de la realidad individual, muchas veces sin que los personajes tengan la menor conciencia de ello.¹²

This ambition famously recurs among Morelli's notes in chapter 62 of Rayuela:

Si escribiera ese libro, las conductas standard (incluso las más insólitas, su categoria de lujo) serían inexplicables con el instrumento psicológico al uso. Los actores parecerían insanos o totalmente idiotas. No que se mostrarían incapaces de los challenge and response corrientes: amor, celos piedad y así sucesivamente … Todo sería como una inquietud, un desasosiego, un desarraigo continuo, un territorio donde la casualidad psicológica cedería desconcertada, y esos fantoches se destrozarían o se amarían o se reconocerían sin sospechar demasiado que la vida trata de cambiar la clave en y a través y por ellos, que una tentativa apenas concebible nace en el hombre como en otro tiempo fueron naciendo la clave-razón, la clave-sentimiento, la clave-pragmatismo. Que a cada sucesiva derrota hay un acercamiento a la mutación final, y que el hombre no es sino que busca ser, proyecta ser, manoteando entre palabras y conducta y alegría salpicada de sangre y otras retóricas como ésta.¹³

This, in turn, becomes the programme for 62: Modelo para armar.¹⁴

62: Modelo para armar is clearly a text which is susceptible to interpretation as a phantasmatic text. The whole is a kaleidoscopic permutation of repetitions where a number of apparently discrete episodes are no more than transcriptions one of the other, so that, in a sense, all the events become versions of but one event, without any one event, however, being accorded the status of being the ‘original’. As in the phantasm, these repeated events seem to be motivated and linked by a series of absences and fractures, which circulate from episode to episode: the ‘muñeca rota’, the ‘muchacho muerto’, the ‘chica inglesa’. As the series of events unfold, practically all the major personae, at one time or another, occupy this ‘default’ or ‘virtual’ position of the lost or broken object—Juan, Hélène, Celia, Nicole, Austin—so that rather than stable identities, there is a migration of affective states and conditions: pursuers/pursued, pitied/feared, attracted/repelled, killing/killed—a transcendence, that is, of discrete identities and all the old psychologies of the traditional novel. The ‘free-floating’ status of the odd figure of ‘mi paredro’ and also of the paredroi figures of Calac and Polanco, are indicative of the fortuitous and arbitrary nature of identity in the phantasmic structure. Whenever, for example, Juan, in the famous opening episode in the Polidor restaurant, comes up with a formula that seems to approximate to the experience triggered by the ‘comensal gordo’ asking for a ‘castillo sangriento’ (p. 9)—‘contradicción instantánea’ (p. 10), ‘fulgurante unidad’ (p. 11), ‘viviente constelación’ (p. 12), ‘coágulo fulminante’, ‘explosión silenciosa’ (p. 13), ‘plenitud instantánea’ (p. 14)—such formulae are precisely of the kind one might use to describe the phantasm.

It is clear from his comments on the potential of the figura, and even more from Morelli's notes in Rayuela, that Cortázar hoped to achieve some kind of epistemological or ontological break-through through this pursuit of a schema that transcended the old psychological and philosophical categories of humanism and individualism—to achieve some kind of completely new human, and even non-human, condition. Nevertheless 62:Modelo para armar, like ‘Los buenos servicio’, ‘Babas del diablo’ and ‘Las armas secretas’ ends inconclusively, or even in death and failure. Austin's nightmarish murder of Hélène is like the hallucinatory return of the ‘muchacho muerto’¹⁵; like the return of Pierre at the end of ‘Las armas secretas’, or of Nico at the end of ‘Cartas de mamá’ it is the return of an event or an experience—a residue—that refuses to be accommodated within, or surrender itself to, or be resolved by, the phantasmic structure.

I think, in a sense, that this was Cortázar's failure.¹⁶ Cortázar had a strong sense of the liberatory potential of the phantasm but there was a residual incapacity within himself to surrender to it. Malva Filer describes the impasse well:

Sin duda, pues, la idea de un yo liberado de la individualidad y, por lo tanto, ubicuo y susceptible de diversas encarnaciones, ha atraído poderosamente a Cortázar. Pero su intento de darle vida y forma se ve frustrado por una evidente imposibilidad de llevar el concepto no individualista del yo hasta sus últimas consecuencias.¹⁷

What Cortázar seems never to have realized is that the explosive disjunctions of the phantasm, the dispersal of subject positions, the dissolution of the singular subject, the scattering and shattering of identity across a multiplicity of impersonal traits and affects, the vertiginous annihilation of time through recuperative repetitions—that all these had an affirmative as well as a destructive potential. For what the phantasmic structure sets in play with its doubles and duplications, its repetitions and its lacunae, is a kind of vertiginous pendular movement whereby the dissolved self ‘is’ and ‘is not’ all the positions it occupies, and the repertoires it traverses at the same time. It is this that leads Deleuze, for example, consciously building on and extending the work of Laplanche and Pontalis, to speak of the ‘royal splendour’ or the ‘glory’—the ‘radiancy’¹⁸ to use a term he borrows from Lewis Carroll—of the phantasm, and to see in it the triumph of the eternal return. With the experience of the eternal return,

I deactualise my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through … At the moment the Eternal Return is revealed to me, I cease to be myself hic et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others.¹⁹

In 62: Modelo para armar Juan's perpetual sense of being part of a larger movement which seems to exclude him at the very moment that he becomes capable of thinking it—‘todo a punto de explicarse sin explicación posible’ (p. 179)—is very similar to Klossowski's gloss of Nietzsche's experience (‘I am one of those machines which can EXPLODE.’²⁰) at Sils Maria in August 1881:

What is my part in this circular movement in relation to which I am incoherent, or in relation to this thought that is so perfectly coherent that it excludes me at the very moment I think it?²¹

In fact the ambiguity as to whether the narrator at the end of ‘Babas del diablo’ is dead or alive, seems to me to represent a genuine dilemma in Cortázar's thinking as to the nature of death and its relation to the phantasm, a dilemma which perhaps finds its finest and most evocative formulation in Blanchot's writing on the ‘double death’ in Rilke:²² on the one hand there is a death which is merely a physical end and a removal from life, while on the other there is the death which can never be mine, because in death, as in the phantasm, the very notion of the ‘mine’ or the ‘I’ is wrested from us in a vast, vertiginous and liberating impersonality:

death as an abyss, not that which provides a foundation, but the absence and loss of all foundation … it is the inevitable but inaccessible death: it is the abyss of the present, the time without present with which I have no relation, that towards which I cannot launch myself (m'élancer), for in it I do not die, I am deprived of my power of dying, in it one dies, one never ceases and never finishes dying.²³

Notes

1. For a recent bibliography see Frederick Luciani, ‘The Man in the Car/in the Trees/behind the fence: from Cortázar's “Blow-up” to Oliver Stone's JFK’ in Julio Cortázar: New Readings ed. Carlos J. Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 205-07.

2. Susan Jakfalvi, ‘Introducción’ to her edition of Julio Cortázar, Las armas secretas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), p. 43 All quotations from ‘Babas del diablo’ are from this edition.

3. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis ‘Phantasme originaire, phantasmes des origines, origine du phantasme’, Les Temps Modernes 19 (1964), 1833-68. English translation: ‘Fantasy and the origins of sexuality’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49, 1 (1968), 1-18. A further edition of this translation is to be found in Formations of Fantasy ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 5-34.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference et répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Logique du sens (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969).

5. As, indeed, it did to Michel Foucault: see his comments on the phantasm in his review of Deleuze's two texts, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977), p. 180.

6. The translations from the French are my own.

7. There are two examples of just such jumbled elements to be found at the beginning of ‘Las babas del diablo’: ‘yo vieron subir la luna, o: nos me duele el fondo de los ojos’ (Cortázar 1990, 123).

8. That different phantasmatic scenes might be ‘successive registrations’ and translations of each other is discussed by J. Laplanche in his New Foundations of Psychoanalysis trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 114, where he refers to Freud's correspondence with Fleiss, 6 December 1896, where this notion is first proposed.

9. Jakfalvi, 1990, p. 52.

10. Laplanche and Pontalis, 1964, p. 1849, n. 32.

11. Deleuze 1968, p. 25: ‘Is it not true that the only dead that return are those who have been too quickly and too deeply buried, without according them the necessary rights, and that remorse testifies less to an excess of memory (mémoire) than to a powerlessness or failure in the elaboration of a remembrance (souvenir)?’.

12. Quoted in Harss, 1966, p. 288-89.

13. Julio Cortázar, Rayuela, ed. by Andrés Amorós (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), p. 524.

14. Julio Cortázar, 62: Modelo para armar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968).

15. Cortázar 1968, p. 266.

16. By ‘failure’, what I have in mind is that, instead of surrendering himself to the explosive potential of the phantasm, Cortázar found himself pursuing another aim which was couched in the many metaphors of ‘otro lado’ or the need to break through a ‘puerta cerrada’ to find a ‘más allá’ or ‘centro’ or ‘kibbutz de deseo’ (Harss, 1966, 269). This alternative version of what might be a model of transcendence is developed at length in ‘El perseguidor’, the one remaining story of the volume Las armas secretas which I have not discussed—precisely because it does not conform to the phantasmic structure.

17. Malva Filer, ‘Las transformaciones del yo’, in Helmy F. Giacoman, Homenaje a Julio Cortázar (New York: Las Américas, 1972), p. 276.

18. Deleuze, 1969, p. 256 and p. 280.

19. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997) pp. 57-58.

20. Klossowski, 1997, p. 55. The italics are in the original.

21. Klossowski, 1997, p. 64.

22. Cortázar's admiration for Blanchot is well documented. See Julio Cortázar, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (México: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1967) p. 136.

23. Maurice Blanchot, L'éspace littéraire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1955) p. 201.

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice, L'Espace littéraire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1955)

Cortázar, Julio, Las armas secretas, ed. by Susan Jakfalvi (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990)

Cortázar, Julio, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1967)

Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994)

Cortázar, Julio, 62: Modelo par armar (Buenos Aires: Editorial sudamericana, 1968)

Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et Répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969)

Filer, Malva, ‘Las transformaciones del yo’, in Helmy F. Giacoman, Homenaje a Julio Cortázar (New York: Las Américas, 1972)

Foucault, Michel, ‘Teatrum Philosophicum’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977)

Harss, Luis, Los nuestros (Buenos Aires: Editorial sudamericana, 1966)

Jakfalvi, Susan, ‘Introducción’ to her edition of Julio Cortázar, Las armas secretas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990)

Klossowski, Pierre, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997)

Laplanche, Jean, New Foundations of Psychoanalysis, trans. by David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme’, Les Temps Modernes 19 (1964), 1833-68 (English translation: ‘Fantasy and the origins of sexuality’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 1 (1968) 1-18. A further edition of this translation is to be found in Formations of Fantasy ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 5-34)

Luciani, Frederick, ‘The Man in the Car/in the Trees/behind the fence: from Cortázar's “Blow-up” to Oliver Stone's JFK’, in Julio Cortázar: New Readings, ed. by Carlos J. Alonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 205-07