SOURCE: Sanjinés, José. “‘Blow-Up’: A House with Many Stories.” Point of Contact 4, no. 1 (fall-winter 1994): 46-55.

[In the following essay, Sanjinés analyzes the narrative framework of “Blow-Up,” asserting that the story “is constructed on the principle of Chinese boxes.”]

I. ALL THE FRAMES OF THE FRAME

One of Cortázar's best-known short stories, “Blow-Up,” is constructed on the principle of Chinese boxes. The text consists of a series of stories interpolated one within the other; each new story in the syntagmatic disposition signals a new hierarchical level and opens a new internal frame. Although the agile narrative transitions veil many of these borders and generate in the reader a sometimes disorienting illusion of continuity, the main internal frames of the story can be described with relative precision.

The first frame occupies more or less the first two pages. The narrator, who is also a writer, deliberates about the ways to tell a story. He would like to be able to choose, simultaneously, all the options of compositional point of view, to write all the story's stories:

It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell.¹

Apart from the compositional options, a theme of the first story is that rhetorical stage prior to the inventio in which the storyteller asks himself why relate an anecdote or give expression to a fable. (“All of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this” [115]). And as if anticipating the others still to come, this initial frame contains within itself micro-stories (“Oh, doctor, every time I take a breath …” [116], for example).

The second frame opens when the narrator decides, finally, to tell a story in the third person. The story he tells us is that of “Roberto Michel, French-Chilean, translator, and in his spare time an amateur photographer” (116), who leaves one November morning to take photographs in the streets of Paris. Within the horizons of this subtext is stored all that the character sees in the streets of Paris. And what Michel notices most during his walk is the scene of a young man and an older woman (quite a bit older than him) who apparently are conversing in a small plaza.

Michel's imagination does not take long to open a new frame, the third (“Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities. Nothing pleases him more than to imagine exceptions to the rule, individuals outside the species, not-always-repugnant monsters” [124]). In fact, Michel, second narrator of the story, imagines with careful detail the possible—and in his mind probable—seduction of the boy by the woman:

I imagined the possible endings (now a small fluffy cloud appears, almost alone in the sky), I saw their arrival at the house (a basement apartment probably, which she would have filled with large cushions and cats) and conjectured the boy's terror and his desperate decision to play it cool and to be led off pretending there was nothing new in it for him.

(123)

The long story which Michel tells himself between pages 118 and 124 includes a detailed biography of the boy in which apparently far-fetched speculations of the narrator abound. Observing that the boy is wearing yellow gloves, Michel deduces, for example, that he has an older brother who “is a student of law or sociology” (120). This type of speculation has the transitory effect of reminding the reader that Michel's subjective interpretations of the relationship between the woman and the boy are just that, fantasies which contrast with what is really about to happen. And what does happen seems to confirm, at least in part, the narrator's theories. The boy runs away, taking advantage of the distraction caused by the photograph Michel takes of the couple. “The important thing, the really important thing”—Michel thinks later—“was having helped the kid to escape in time (this in case my theorizing was correct, which was not sufficiently proven, but the running away itself seemed to show it so)” (127).

After an exchange of words with the woman, who demands that Michel give her the film containing the picture, Michel returns home. At this point in the narrative discourse the reader is invited to equate the point of view of the first frame's narrator with that of the third person (Roberto Michel) of the story that begins in the second frame: “What happened after that happened here, almost just now, in a room on the fifth floor” (126). This mix of levels foreshadows the fantastic confusion of the registers of the real and the imaginary which takes place in the text, but it is not necessarily a fantastic event: the possibility that the narrator of the first frame had decided to begin to tell in the third person a story that happened (and is still happening) to him may explain the eventual unification of the viewpoints of the narrator and his character.

The fourth frame—which we shall call the intertext—is opened by an account of the development of the photographic negative of the woman and the boy and its two subsequent enlargements. Like the other internal stories, the photograph can be considered a discrete object of aesthetic experience; but in contrast to them, the photo is also described in the story as a material object—produced and enlarged by mechanical means—which ends up “fixed” to the wall of a room.² In principle it would seem that there is nothing extraordinary within the borders of the intertext: the photo is nothing more than the representation in a system of invariant relations of the phenomenological instant before the boy's flight. But the double blow-up of the photographic image, as we will see, marks a first stage in the gradual fantastic mutation of the intertext's semiotic modality; it will end up resembling a cinematic projection where the events of that November morning in Paris are again diversely played out. And as soon as the subjects of the photograph acquire movement, Michel's imagination is once again activated—or is the movement itself perhaps the product of an extraordinarily vivid imagination? The association of the processes of imagination with those of cinematography is not merely aesthetic. Imagination, as has been demonstrated by recent clinical investigations in the field of psychology, can well be compared to a machine which projects images on the screen of the mind.³

Based on the scene in the photo, Michel imagines a story for a second time. This story, imagined “in a room on the fifth floor,” opens a fifth frame. And this time the story, which little by little becomes from his point of view “the reality,” is worse than the one he had imagined before: its protagonist is one of those people we know Michel likes to imagine, an “individual outside the species” (124), a monster, in this case, yes, absolutely repugnant:

And what I had imagined earlier was much less horrible than the reality, that woman, was not there by herself, she was not caressing or propositioning or encouraging for her own pleasure, to lead the angel away with his tousled hair and play the tease with his terror and his eager grace. The real boss was waiting there, smiling petulantly, already certain of the business; he was not the first to send a woman in the vanguard, to bring him the prisoners manacled with flowers. The rest of it would be so simple, the car, some house or another, drinks, stimulating engravings, tardy tears, the awakening in hell.

(129)

This internal story culminates with the transgression of the frame of the intertext. As we will see better in the next section, this event lends itself to an ambiguous and paradoxical double reading: in one of the possible readings, the character/narrator, perhaps absorbed by the illusion of reality of the photograph, perhaps dominated by his fantasy of saving the boy for a second time, crosses the semiotic borders of the intertext where he meets his own death; in another reading, he remains—alive—outside the frame of the photographic blow-up to witness and be able to tell the story (“I'm not trying to fool anybody” [115]). In both cases what remains implicit is the point of view of the lens of a photographic camera abandoned in a plaza; a fantastic eye which records cinematographically the images of a frame of the Parisian sky (with clouds and passing birds) and projects them on a screen which is pinned to a wall in the room where the protagonist writes. This piece of sky, the sixth and last internal frame described in the last paragraph of the story is, as we will see, a sign of the metaphorical resolution of the story of the fifth frame (Michel's dying and living) and, by extension, a sort of final enlargement in which all the remaining metanarratives of the text are revealed and summarized.

It is a sign which extends throughout the text: the images of the sky are also coded in brief parenthetical sequences scattered throughout the entire story. We will call this set of sequences the sky subtext. The syntactic organization of this subtext is significant for two reasons. First, because it reflects the circular, flexible nature of time in the story: as the narrator announces from the beginning that he (Michel) is dead and not dead (115), the sky subtext reminds the reader, in a second reading, of the resolution of the character/narrator's adventure through the semiotic frontiers of the intertext. And second, because the dissemination of parenthetical sequences reflects, microtextually, the compositional technique of the text. By successively inserting one tale within another, the structure of the text is itself organized in the grammatical manner of opening parentheses.

And this is precisely the compositional technique which is turned into a central theme of the story by the development and blow-up of the intertext.⁴ The theme of “Blow-Up” reflects its structure, and its structure reflects its theme. It is true that the double enlargement of the photograph produces only two frames, but this simple duplication suggests the generation of many more. Similarly, the structure of “Blow-Up” is like that of a house in our dreams which, seen from the outside, appears to have two floors but when we enter has five or more. Just as the successive enlargements of the photograph permit Michel to see, imagine, or participate in the details of the outcome of the events which take place in the small plaza in Paris that November morning, the story is itself structured around a series of internal stories which fit inside each other, which enlarge, each time with greater precision, the hidden detail, the “true” story unknown at first glance.

II. FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE FRAME

We have mentioned that in one of the possible readings of the final sequences of “Blow-Up” the protagonist goes inside the frontiers of a photographic enlargement pinned to the wall of his room. This event is the result of the gradual mutation of one semiotic modality to another, from photography to cinema. Before describing this transformation, we should observe that the text foregrounds the fundamental importance of the problem of the frame in the construction of the intertext. This is the function of the repeated references to the semiotic limits of the intertext in the rhetorical stage prior to the taking of the photograph of the woman and the boy (the inventio of the intertext by the protagonist). Michel's metalinguistic deliberations about the possibilities of inclusion or exclusion of elements within the view-finder of the camera, for example, evidence the inherence of the principle of demarcation in the composition of an artistic universe—in this case that of a photograph—: “Why wait any longer? Aperture at sixteen, a sighting which would not include the horrible black car, but yes, that tree, necessary to break up too much grey space …” [123]. This stage in the process of selection of a finite fragment of the infinite reality, of the creation of an aesthetic space, concludes with the taking of the photograph: “I got it all into the view-finder (with the tree, the railing, the eleven-o'clock sun) and took the shot” (124).

But this sort of translation of reality into photographic language does not end with the first polychromatic impression of the light on the negative. Before the final materialization of the intertext, the stages of development and enlargement are necessary: “The negative was so good that he made an enlargement; the enlargement was so good that he made one very much larger, almost the size of a poster” (126). The reference to the double enlargement of the photograph is significant, as we saw, because it thematizes the organizational mode of the multiple internal stories of the story; but it is also significant because with it starts the process of transformation of the semiotic modality of the intertext. The enlarged dimension of the second blow-up signals the passage from one modality with attributes of documentary veracity (the photograph) to another which attempts to resemble reality even more, to get even closer to the authentic size of things in the objective world (the poster).

The new size of the photograph, nevertheless, is not in itself sufficient to make the semiotic horizons of the intertext completely disappear from the receptor's consciousness. The atemporal fixation of the forms represented in the intertext essentially differentiates them from the elements which compose the changeable reality in which we live. “There was the woman, there was the boy, the tree rigid above their heads, the sky as motionless as the stone of the parapet, clouds and stones melded into a single substance and inseparable […]” (126; emphasis added). Like those our memory keeps and daydream recalls, the photographic images are immobile. But daydream remains in the margin of the categories of daily life. Photographic language lacks the temporal cadences of life to reach an illusion of reality capable of destroying the frame of the intertext. Even in the stage of the inventio, the photographer in Cortázar's story tries to capture the dynamics of life in the photograph's system of invariant relationships: “I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction” (123).

These reflections, together with the size of the second enlargement, serve the function of preparing, and perhaps anticipating, the eventual intervention of movement in the photograph—the last semiotic quality necessary to establish the analogy with the language of film. This is why the fantastic mutation of one modality to another begins in a completely natural way:

I don't think the almost-furtive trembling of the leaves on the tree alarmed me. I was working on a sentence and rounded it out successfully. Habits are like immense herbariums, in the end an enlargement of 32 × 28 looks like a movie screen, where, on the tip of the island, a woman is speaking with a boy and a tree is shaking its dry leaves over their heads. But her hands were just too much. I had just translated: Donc, la seconde clé réside dans la nature intrinsèque des difficultés que les sociétés …—when I saw the woman's hand beginning to stir slowly, finger by finger.

(128)

This metamorphosis of the intertext's modality reproduces that key stage in the gestation of cinematography as an art form: the incorporation of movement into photography. In the case of Cortázar's fantastic story, the objective, as we said, is to increase the photograph's capacity to reproduce reality authentically to the point of confusing depiction with depicted.⁵

The passage between semiotic systems is accompanied by the interpolation of a syntagma in French and in italics which alludes to the act of translation and which reminds us that Michel, the narrator, is a translator, as Cortázar, the author, also was. As the photograph is a translation of reality—as are too the stories which Michel imagines about the relationship between the woman and the boy—so also is the intervention of movement in the enlargement a sort of translation from one semiotic modality to another. Perhaps the most significant critical function of the allusion to translation is that of emphasizing the fact that the intertext, like any text, is a sort of reflection of one language onto another (of reality to photography, of photography to cinema) and not a mere duplication of the reality of that sunny day when a woman and a boy conversed in a Parisian plaza.

The size and the intervention of movement in the second enlargement fulfill a diametrically opposed function in the organization of the fantastic operation. The goal of the successive mutations of the intertext is to increase the illusion of reality to such a point that the protagonist's transgression of the internal frame is presented with complete verisimilitude. In a fragment of the phenomenology of the past (set inside the frame of a photograph as large as a cinematic screen) something begins to be played out again little by little, like the slow movement of the woman's hand. The added semiotic qualities of the intertext make it possible for the mobile character (Michel) to transgress, almost without transition, the topological border which separates him from the world of things and people represented in the photograph: “There was nothing left of me, a phrase in French which I would never have to finish, a typewriter on the floor, a chair that squeaked and shook, fog” (128).

This double allusion to the frame's transgression (nothing remains of Michel because he is on the other side) and to the death of the protagonist (Michel will never finish the translation he is working on) foreshadows what is about to happen in one of the possible readings of the text. But the story also encodes an alternative, paradoxical, reading. In it the mobile character becomes immobile and the immobile characters of the photograph acquire movement, order is inverted fantastically, yes, but now Michel remains outside the frame of the photograph unable to do anything to impede the fulfillment of the horrible destiny he has imagined for the boy:

All at once the order was inverted, they were alive, moving, they were deciding and had decided, they were going to their future; and I on this side, prisoner of another time, in a room on the fifth floor, to not know who they were, that woman, that man, and that boy, to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention.

(129-130)

To say that Michel is the camera's lens is to say, literally, that the protagonist is again in the time and space in which he took the photograph, that the frame is behind him; but it is also to say, figuratively, “that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens” (127), and therefore that Michel is still in his room viewing the photograph frontally. This semantic oscillation, which suggests that the protagonist finds himself simultaneously inside and outside the frame of the intertext, is codified throughout the entire description of the frame transgression event.

A double fantastic operation: in one reading, what is fantastic is that Michel is inside the enlargement and sees all that happens as if through the lens of his camera; in the other, what is fantastic is that the protagonist remains resting against the wall of his room and directly in front of him, almost as though projected through his eyes, the images of a large photograph pinned to the wall replay variedly the events of that November morning. This ambiguous figure emblematizes the duality of the aesthetic experience generated by the reading of the story. Like the protagonist of the story, the reader of “Blow-Up” is also, in a way, on both sides of the frame of a representation. The pendular oscillations in the use of the internal and external narrative points of view reproduce in the reader Michel's sensation of finding himself simultaneously inside and outside the semiotic frontiers of the intertext.⁶ The story induces the reader to identify with the protagonist's internal point of view, to enter gradually the multiple imaginary worlds of the story, to participate in Michel's gradual conviction that each new story brings him closer to “the reality” (129) of the events of that sunny Parisian morning; and this growing illusion of reality (thematized by the modal transformation of the intertext) enters into tension with the concurrent incitation to reassume an external point of view with respect to the text, to regain, from this side of the frame, the critical distance necessary to recognize the modes of construction of the imaginary and the theoretical problems that inform it. Conversely, while we seem to be furthest from the truth, we are closest to it.

III. FROM NEITHER SIDE OF THE FRAME

The protagonist's simultaneous crossing and not crossing the semiotic frontiers of the intertext culminates, as we saw, in an event no less ambiguous and paradoxical: the protagonist's dying and not dying. To suggest this double resolution and encode it throughout the story, Cortázar makes use of rhetorical operations which build bridges between the modalities of film and literature, points of contact between visual and verbal signs. Let us begin by remembering that Michel enters the photograph in order to save the boy for a second time—this time from a presumed dark corruption conjured up by the blond woman and the mysterious man in the gray hat. If the boy takes advantage of the shot of the photograph to escape the first time, the second time he takes advantage of the advance of the camera, which is a metonym of the photographer (Michel), toward the man in the gray hat. Immediately after the boy's escape, Michel (which is also to say the camera's point of view) stops, panting, in front of the man. What happens next culminates with the total obscuring of the artistic space of the intertext. As if he had hurled himself toward Michel with his hands raised, the body of the man in the gray hat ends up occupying the entire field of view of the camera's lens:

[…] but the man was directly center, his mouth half open, you could see a shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground, an instant still in perfect focus, and then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree, and I shut my eyes, I didn't want to see any more, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot.

(131)

In this ambiguous passage—in which Michel is simultaneously inside and outside the frame of the intertext—we can recognize some of the lexical elements of the language of cinema. To understand the function of these elements in the event of the protagonist's dying and not dying, it is useful to reread the passage from the perspective of one of Lotman's observations about the creation of abstract signs in film:

Separation of the cinematic sign from its immediate, material meaning and transformation into a sign of more general content is primarily achieved through strongly expressed modality of the shot. For example, objects in close-ups are seen in cinema as metaphors (in a natural language they would be metonymic). Distorting shots such as the abrupt magnification of a hand extended toward the screen have the same effect.

(Semiotics 44)

In the linguistic narrative code, the raised hands can be interpreted as a metonym, more precisely, a synecdoche of the man in the gray hat (the part for the whole). But the isomorphism of the intertext with cinematic language invites the reader to interpret metaphorically the sign of the raised hands which obscure the visual space of the camera: the man has assailed Michel and killed him.

There is still one key passage that facilitates access to this reading. We refer to the sequences immediately following the darkening of the frame of the intertext, the last paragraph of the story:

Now there's a big white cloud, as on all these days, all this untellable time. What remains to be said is always a cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very clean, clear rectangle tacked up with pins on the wall of my room. That was what I saw when I opened my eyes and dried them with my fingers: the clear sky, and then a cloud that drifted in from the left, passed gracefully and slowly across and disappeared on the right. And then another, and for a change sometimes, everything gets grey, all one enormous cloud, and suddenly the splotches of rain cracking down, for a long spell you can see it raining over the picture, like a spell of weeping reversed, and little by little, the frame becomes clear, perhaps the sun comes out, and again the clouds begin to come, two at a time, three at a time. And the pigeons once in a while, and a sparrow or two.

(131)

The paragraph suggests that the man's attack has passed inoffensively in front of the protagonist, as in a movie projected on the wall of his room in which he afterwards sees pass endless images of a piece of sky. But the passage also invites the reader to mentally construct the image of an immobile camera with its lens pointing toward the sky (in a plaza in Paris) and silently registering the passage of clouds and an occasional sparrow. We have seen that the camera is a metonym for Michel, the photographer; the image of a camera turned upward after the assault of the man in the gray hat becomes a metaphor for Michel's death. The destiny of all metonymy—Cortázar reminds us—is to become metaphor; the fate of every sequence to be substituted by a condensatory sign.⁷

To say that the protagonist ends up on both sides of the frame, on the side of the dead and that of the living, on the side of the real and that of the imaginary, is the same as saying that he is on neither of them. This paradoxical resolution, as we have mentioned, is already announced by the narrator during his metalinguistic deliberations about the act of writing in the initial passages of the story:

One of us all has to write, if this is going to get told. Better that it be me who am dead, for I'm less compromised than the rest; I who see only the clouds and can think without being distracted, write without being distracted (there goes another, with a grey edge) and remember without being distracted, I who am dead (and I'm alive, I'm not trying to fool anybody, you'll see when we get to the moment, because I have to begin some way and I've begun with this period, the last one back, the one at the beginning, which in the end is the best of the periods when you want to tell something).

(115)

The prolepsis in this passage anticipates (and confirms) the event which occurs in the final sequences of the story. A double critical reflection accompanies the allusion to what is to come: consciousness of the prolepsis (“you'll see when we get to the moment”), and consciousness of the circular structure of the text (“I've begun with this period, the last one back, the one at the beginning”). The serpent bites its tail between light and shadow. Cortázar's story gives expression to that point of the spirit sought by the Surrealists where opposites merge.⁸ The original Spanish title of the story, “Las babas del diablo”—literally, “The Drools of the Devil”—denotes a real object seen in the sky of Argentina, but it is also an extreme juxtaposition, a sign of the texts of the text, of the continuity in the discreet, of the communicable in silence, of the invariable way in the changeable river, in short, of “all this untellable time” (131).

In the passage we also find one of the parenthetical phrases which compose the sky subtext: “(there goes another, with a grey edge).” In a first reading the most likely conjecture is that the images of the sky coded in these parenthesis correspond to what is seen by the narrator, from time to time, from the perspective of a window, implicit, in the room where he is writing the story. But the proximity of the parenthesis we have cited to the anticipation of the narrator's dying and not dying is not gratuitous. The sequences of the sky subtext, as we said, are also signs of the metaphorical resolution of the event of the transgression of the frame. That is to say, the sporadic references to the piece of sky fulfill the function of reminding the reader, in a second reading, of that other image which is also implicit at the end of the story: the image of an inert overturned camera facing the infinite in a Paris plaza (metaphor of Michel's death), which projects images of the sky on a photographic enlargement pinned to the wall of a fifth floor room (in which Michel, alive, witnesses them). Thus, for the reader who, upon completing a reading of the text, accepts the incitation to return to the beginning, the sky subtext extends and maintains, throughout the story, the structural tension which is summed up by the oxymoron “living death.”

“Blow-Up” is constructed so that its rereading changes the meaning of its parts. Rereading the story is like entering a house we have only seen from the outside. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard demonstrated that a house, like a room or a sea shell, can be read like a text because it resembles the soul of the one who inhabits it. We are not all “cast into the world” as Heidegger said, we have shelters; literature is one of them. Complex and paradoxical as the houses in our dreams, the structure of “Blow-Up” achieves the opposite effect of the one sought by dogmatic texts. The game of its multiple levels generates surplus-information untranslatable by the languages of description. “Blow-Up” is an exemplary model of those laborious stories of Cortázar which produce a high degree of information with the greatest possible economy of means. Critics have not yet given enough attention to the incontrovertible fact that Cortázar occupies a privileged place in the history of the quest to reduce the entropic level of the work of art. This is a search for freedom, in the sense that we cannot be truly free when we do not have multiple possibilities of choice, when the hall or the textual passage in which we move leaves us facing only one door or only one predictable, inevitable reading. “Blow-Up” seeks to say it all, opening doors to reverie and critique. Everything can be renewed when we enter or leave a condensatory form, open like a plaza, hidden like the image of the first stairway. Above or below await us colors or shadow, the banister or the street.

Notes

1. Cortázar, Julio, “Blow-Up,” Blow-Up and Other Stories, 1967. We indicate subsequent quotations from this story by the page numbers from this edition. The original Spanish title of the story is “Las babas del diablo” (1959).

2. We refer to the distinction established by Roman Ingarden in, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object,” 304.

3. Dr. Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University explains: “A picture can be displayed on the screen from the camera, which is your eyes, or from a videotape recorder, which is your memory.” (quoted in Blakeslee, B6).

4. The hierarchical importance of this theme is evident in the choice of title for the English translation of the story as well as for the English version of Michelangelo Antonioni's acclaimed film based on Cortázar's story (Blow-Up, in both cases). The original title of the film is Storia d'un fotografo e una donna in una bella mattina d'aprile. It was presented in Buenos Aires with the title, Deseo en una manana de verano (Desire on a Summer Morning) (Mundo Lo 192).

5. As Lotman explains in Semiotics of Cinema, this was precisely the result of the technical invention which made possible the evolution of cinematography: “Cinematography as a technical invention which had not yet become a form of art was, first and foremost, a moving photography. The ability to register motion added to the trust in the documentary reliability of films. Psychological data indicate that the transfer from a motionless photography to moving film is seen as an introduction of greater capacity of depiction. Precision in the reproduction of life, it was thought, could go no farther” (11).

6. The alternations in the pronominal forms of the narration to which the narrator alludes at the beginning of the story is an aspect of the complex compositional problem of point of view which has been lucidly studied by Boris Uspensky in, A Poetics of Composition.

7. Two examples: as the sequential exposition of a novel is condensed in its title, so also the name of a person ends up summarizing the temporal succession of his or her life.

8. See Breton, Second manifeste du surrealism 76-7.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Tran. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Blakeslee, Sandra. “Seeing and Imagining: Clues to the Workings of the Mind's Eye.” NewYork Times, 31 August 1993, national ed.: B5-6.

Breton, André. “Second manifeste du surréalisme.” Manifestes du surréalisme. Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 1981.

Cortázar, Julio. “Blow-Up.” Blow-Up and Other Stories. Tran. Paul Blackburn. New York: Random House, 1967. 114-31.

———. “Las babas del diablo.” Pasajes. Madrid: Alianza, 1976. 124-38.

Ingarden, Roman. “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object.” Readings in Existential Phenomenology. Eds. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O'Conner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967.

Jakobson, Roman. Ensayos de lingüística general. Tran. Josep M. Pujol and Jem Cabanes. Madrid: Editorial Ariel, 1984.

Lotman, Yuri M. Semiotics of Cinema. Tran. Mark E. Suino. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1976.

Mundo Lo, Sara de. Julio Cortázar: His Works and His Critics—A Bibliography. Urbana, Ill.: Albatross, 1985.

Uspensky, Boris. A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.