SOURCE: "Irony and the Double in Short Fiction by Julio Cortázar and Severo Sarduy," in Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall, 1977, pp. 111-22.

[In the following essay, Johnston explores the confrontation of characters with their doubles in Julio Cortázar's "Historia" and Sarduy's "Junto al Rio de Cenizas de Rosa."]

Man's encounter with his Doppelgänger, a meeting between an individual and his animal, mechanical, or human counterpart, often serves as the narrative material by which contemporary writers of prose fiction depict the human condition. In addition to the portrayal of man through the confrontation of an individual with his double, literary creators have turned to the ancient device of irony, a clash between reality and appearance, for the fundamental narrative technique which permits the examination of modern man and his foibles.

Shared by both irony and the Doppelgänger is a structure of duality: in the former case, the duality consists of two conflicting interpretations of an event or of a single situation; in the latter case, on the other hand, two conflicting aspects of a single personality or identity form the pairing we know to be the double. Essential for the effectiveness of both these literary devices is the presence of a third element, the observer or reader who sees the antithetical components both as separate entities and as parts of a unified whole. Thus the reader performs the function of joining the constituent elements of either irony or the double to form a perceptual unit from which the symbolic meaning of a work emerges.

The ironic confrontation between man and his double may assume many forms. It is, however, the specific man-man double pairing characterized by an ambiguous, self-conscious treatment, bordering on parody or caricature, called a "Baroque double" by Robert Rogers [in his A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, 1970], which concerns us in the examination of two contemporary Latin American works of short fiction: Julio Cortázar's "Historia" and Severo Sarduy's "Junto al Rio de Cenizas de Rosa." Each of these pieces of short fiction reveal a particular focus on the dissociation of the narrator's personality into the antithetical aspects of his being. This fragmentation results from an attempt to hide his true identity from both himself and the reader. As the reader perceives an emerging Baroque double in the story he becomes aware of the ironies inherent in the particular narrative.

His fascination with the appearance of man's double runs through the totality of Cortázar's literary production. The man-animal double appears as the pairing of man and Minotaur in "Los reyes," man and axolotl in "Axolotl," man and Minotaur in "Carta a una sefiorita en Paris," man and tiger in "Bestiario," and man and the imaginary mancuspias in "Cefalea." The man-machine Doppelgänger appears specifically in the man-camera pairing in "Las babas del diablo" and generally in many of the humorous stories from the collection Historias de cronopios y de famas. While Cortázar's development of the man-man double both in Rayuela and in many of his short stories is undeniable, it is in his very concise story "Historia," in the collection Historias de cronopios y de famas, that Cortázar offers an outstanding example of the ironic use of the literary double in order to bring forward a penetrating vision of man and the act of literary creation. In this brief work Cortázar elaborates on a man-man double pairing which conforms to the pattern he has described in Rayuela as "paravisiones," the existential experience of feeling oneself as oneself and as another at one and the same time. In this particular short story Cortázar elaborates the idea of the Doppelgänger in one of the mythological cronopios in whom he embodies a vision of man's consciousness or his state of mind in the form of an abstract character.

"Historia" is a concise work consisting of two sentences: "Un cronopio pequefito buscaba la Ilave de la puerta de calle en la mesa de luz, la mesa de luz en el dormitorio, el dormitorio en la casa, la casa en la calle. Aqui se detení el croaopio, pues para salir a la calle precisaba la Ilave de la puerta." Without plot and indeed without substantial action, "Historia" seems to offer little possibility for the ironic development of the double. However, it is precisely its brevity which permits Cortázar to create an intense vision out of what initially appears to be a trivial and unimportant situation, for as he exaggerates the disproportion between the brevity and intensity of his creation he succeeds in stressing the ironic disparity between the title, "Historia," and the absence of material of great consequence. The ambiguity of the word historia, meaning either "story" or "history," further accentuates the ironic quality of the presentation of the material.

In order to understand the nature of the double in this work it is necessary to take into consideration the point of view from which the material is related. A detached observer impersonally presents the cronopio's search for a lost key. From this distanced, objective perspective the narrative shifts to the consciousness of the character being viewed, to the internal workings and associations of the cronopio's mind.

The fundamental opposition of the text thus develops in terms of an interior-exterior clash of perspectives. The dualism of an external view and an internal one arises in the movement from the narrator's detached reference to "Un cronopio" to his description of the association of ideas—"la llave de la puerta de calle en la mesa de luz, la mesa de luz en el dormitorio, el dormitorio en la casa, la casa en la calle"—to return again to an external vantage point: "Aquí se detenía el cronopio." This movement of the narrative thus involves a shift of perspectives from exterior to interior to exterior, clearly establishing an opposition between antithetical points of view. It is this opposition which serves as the basis for the development of the doubles.

The thoughts of the cronopio also represent a movement through space, a movement which itself duplicates a progressive transference from exterior to interior. That is to say, the associations he formulates in his mind involve a spatial transformation from the key for the door to the street on the night table to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the house, from the house to the street.

On the basis of the perspective differences that appear as the opposition of interior and exterior, the double pair of the narrative appear to be the narrator and the cronopio. Initially the narrator sees the cronopio as something distinct from himself, but the reader notes how the narrator enters into the mind of the cronopio in such a manner that it appears to him that narrator and cronopio are two facets of a single identity. The narrator is thus both the observer and the observed, splitting into two beings which appear to be distinct. This fragmentation proves to be the basis for the ironies of the work in addition to being the foundation upon which Cortázar creates the doubles.

If the narrator sees the cronopio as a being distinct from and external to himself, from the reader's vantage point this distinction is illusory. For him both narrator and cronopio are one and the same. This perceptual discrepancy between the reader's and the narrator's evaluations of the situation creates one of the basic ironies of this brief work.

In a further assault on the reader's perceptual certainty, Cortázar attacks linear logic and sequence in developing a circularity in the narrative. This appears in the movement from narrator to cronopio to narrator and in the cronopio's associations that proceed from the key to the table to the bedroom to the house to the key for the door opening on the street, once again. The pattern of circular movement extends to the reader's perception of the narrative, for, in reading the final comment, "pues para salir a la calle precisaba la llave de la puerta," he finds himself obliged to return to the beginning of the work in order to capture its overall import.

Through the creation of this circular structure in "Historia" Cortázar not only rejects sequential logic but also subverts the reader's concept of linear time, replacing it with mythical circular time. The narrative, then, is both a manner of describing circularity in the cronopio's perception of reality and of duplicating the same circularity in the reader's perceptions.

The circular pattern reproduces in the reader another textual phenomenon. The situation of the cronopio, locked in his room without a key, is duplicated by the reader's entrapment in the circular structure of the narrative, which will continue ad infinitum in perceptual repetition. At the same time, this entrapment in circularity produces an expansion of the reader's consciousness. With each revolution in the narrative, the reader perceives the narrative and his situation differently; the repetition of the pattern becomes a means of drawing back to contemplate oneself in the act of reading in the previous revolution. What at first glance appears to be a pattern of confinement and frustration thus ultimately becomes a contribution to the enlargement of consciousness, as the reader seeks to behold more and more of experience.

In short, by creating the man-man double of narrator and cronopio in a manner which masks the fragmentation of the narrator's personality, Cortázar lures the reader into the closed realm of the narrative. The result of this decoying into a perceptual repetition is an important doubling in which reader and narrator-cronopio become reflected images, expanding and extending the impact of the story. As he experiences the expansion of his consciousness, the reader duplicates himself in each revolution of the circularity of the text; and this perception of himself in the act of reading produces a fragmentation of his being into the antithetical components of observer and observed. By this fragmentation the reader duplicates the narrator's disintegration into two seemingly autonomous identities.

Reader and narrator thus become doubles through which two contrary worlds are united in the act of reading. The duplication of the narrator's experience by the reader produces the perceptual unification of the realms of art and life, a unification which inhibits making clear distinctions between apparent opposites. The identities of reader and narrator are joined in the same manner in which are those of the narrator and the cronopio.

Basically, it is the relationship of the reader to the text which forms the narrative unity of "Historia," a unity from which the disparities of irony emerge and from which the antithetical aspects of identity develop. This brief work changes what Noé Jitrik understands to be the structural basis for the stories in Cortázar's earlier work, Bestiario, which he sees as consisting of double planes whose "términos se sitúan, se resuelven o se resumen en la interioridad de un actor de la peripecia" [Noé Jitrik, "Notas sobre la 'Zona sagrado' y el mundo de los otros en Bestiario de Julio Cortázar," La vuelta a Cortázar en nueve ensayos, edited by Sara Vinocur de Tirri and Néstor Tirri, 1968]; in the case of "Historia" it is the reader, not the character, who ironically is one of the double planes and the actor in whose consciousness these antithetical elements are unified.

In the creation of the doubles of narrator and cronopio and of the resultant irony Cortázar displaces the focus of "Historia," for doubling and irony do not principally occur in the narrative, but rather in the mind of the reader as he perceives the work. The text functions not only to present the disintegration of personality, but also to cause the reader to experience the same fragmentation and misinterpretations as it describes.

Our second example of the man-man double in which the reader's perception of a dual identity produces a unitary vision, the fusion of opposites, appears in Severo Sarduy's "Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa," one of the units of his longer work, De donde son los cantantes. This particular narrative centers on an examination of Cuban identity and of reality in terms of the Chinese influence on the synthetic process of acculturation. Sarduy focuses on this aspect of Cuban culture in order to examine a specific facet of reality because, in his opinion, "El mundo chino, me parece un mundo de percepción, un mundo estático más bien, un mundo que se sitúa en la dialéctica de la contemplación y de la acción extrema." [quoted by Emir Rodrigez Monegal, "Dialogo con Severo Sarduy: las estructuras de la narration," Mundo Nuevo 2, Agosto, 1966]. As the basis for the creation of the double and the associated perceptual discrepancies, Sarduy concentrates on a hallucinatory world of metamorphosis and misinterpretation.

As Sarduy suggests, the basic material of this narrative fundamentally depends on perception, rather than on psychological development of characters and traditional plot. The action is essentially the General's anguished search for Flor de Loto, a mysterious woman who is present only momentarily in the work. During his quest for Flor the General pursues her through the barrio chino of Havana, in a theater, in a cafe. Throughout the hallucinatory search two other characters, Auxilio and Socorro, are continuously present. While their presence is constant, these two masters of disguise and transformation undergo a series of metamorphoses.

The point of view from which the narrative is presented is that of a third-person observer. Sarduy, however, does not limit his narrator to mere reporting but permits his intrusion into the narrative. Exemplary of such intrusions are his remarks to the reader: "Yo—Bueno, querido, no todo puede ser coherente en la vida. Un poco de desorden en el orden, ¿no?" or "Bueno, pues como iba diciendo cuando me interrumpieron las Llenas de Gracia, el Mirón camina siempre en diagonal." Also, the narrator addresses the characters directly, as in his comment to the General: "Yo—Silencio. Óyela. Entona su solo." Sarduy depends on this particular point of view for the creation of the Doppelgänger, which appears in many forms in the narrative.

In order to trace, or at least indicate, some of the doubling which appears in "Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa," an examination of Sarduy's use of disguise in the process of metamorphosis is necessary. From the onset of the narrative the author places a premium on fleeting appearance and evanescent identity in the world of perception as he introduces the General in his first encounter with Flor de Loto. The reader immediately becomes aware of an important incorrect perception on the part of the General as he takes as reality a woven tapestry or piece of embroidered material:

El rumor de la tierra era como el de los palillos que chocan en el aire en la Toma de un Fuerte Enemigo, así es que, nada raro, allí estaba Cenizas de Rosa. Cosida en aquel paisaje, ejercitando su yin en pleno bosque de la Habana, era un pájaro blanco detrás del bambú, un prisionero inmóvil entre lanzas. Recitaba los Cinco Libros, cantaba con su voz de pitillo; parecía que iba a reventar como un sapo salado, miraba a la luna en silencio y volvá a recitarlos.

In this description the narrator presents for the first time Flor de Loto, the metaphoric white bird sewn into the material. It is shortly after this description that the General views the scene.

As the narrator continues his description it becomes evident that Flor appears in the General's perceptions to have an existence autonomous from that of the woven scene, to be a real person:

El venía separando los gajos, dando golpes con los brazos como un machete doble, se abría paso entre la zarza entonando un aire de combate. Era un mirón, el muy tunate, otro místico. ¡Pero hay que ver que las artes gimnásticas sirven para algo! Da un salto Flor de Loto, y, como el pececillo que al saltar fuera del agua se vuelve colibrí, así vuela entre las lianas.

In these descriptions of Flor's actions, which appear in a scene woven on a tapestry, the narrator establishes the relationship of observer and perceived object between the General and Flor that is to remain constant throughout the narrative. Further suggestion of the General's mistaken belief that Flor is a person appears in another seemingly unimportant observation of the narrator:

Cenizas de Rosa teje su propia figura con lianas y huye, dejando al adversario ese doble inasible, esa imagen deshilachada y móvil.

Él se acerca por detrás, sutil; pero abandonado por Chola Angüenque, la reina de las armas, queda atrapado en el telar.

This comment by the narrator indicates the existence of Flor as a character woven in a tapestry, rather than as a living person, as the General believes, imperfect interpretations which serve to create one of the early ironies of the narrative.

In seeing Flor as a living individual, the General actually projects his own desire onto a human image distinct from and autonomous from himself. He fails to realize that Flor is in reality the externalization of his desire, but the reader is aware of this, and it is this awareness that produces a disparity essential to the ironic quality of the work. In the figures of Flor and the General we thus have a double pairing in which what appears as difference in the narrative is for the reader sameness, what appears as two becomes one in the reader's perception.

Shortly after the General has first viewed Flor, the narrator's observation reveals the pattern of transformations which she is to follow. She becomes "una máscara blanca que rayan las sombras de las canas, es apenas el vuelo de una paloma, el rastro de un conejo." To this point in the narrative Flor has been referred to by the narrator as ella, la amarilla, una máscara blanca, un pájaro blanco; similarly, the General has several identities, several names: el Condecorado, el Glorioso, el mirón.

Flor's disguises are many: "Es mimética. Es una textura—las placas blancas del tronco de una ceiba—, una flor podrida bajo una palma, una mariposa estampada de pupilas, es una simetria pura." Another example of her disguise is her imitation of the General, "imita el choque de medallas, la propia voz del perseguidor, o aparece como otro general lujurioso para enloquecerlo." She appears as the figure of the Empress, as Maria, as la Fija. Thanks to her many disguises and transformations, Flor succeeds in evading the General.

The General also is a constant figure appearing in many forms and disguises. Not only is he "el Condecorado, el Glorioso," but also "el matarife," "el Fijo," "el gallego," "el Batalloso," "el Medalloso." In the narrator's eyes both Flor and the General are in a perpetual process of transformation, a constant permutation of identity which contrasts with the static quality of the General's viewing the woven scene and the invarying relationship between the General and Flor despite their multiple identities.

Within the pattern of continual deterioration and recreation the characters of Socorro and Auxilio duplicate the relationship of movement and static presence we have seen in the figures of Flor and the General. It is these two characters, Auxilio and Socorro, who, according to the narrator, are "poseedoras … del secreto de las setenta y ocho transformaciones." Although they never reveal the secret, they are for the reader the keys to the multiple metamorphoses of the General and Flor. Among the many identities by which Auxilio and Socorro are known are: "las Siempre Presentes," "las Simétricas," "las Siamesas," "las Divinas," "las Peripatéticas," "las Pintarrajeadas," "las Cejudas," "las Obesas," "las Sonsas." Despite their protean identities, Auxilio and Socorro are constants within the narrative, always symmetrical in their presence. While they appear to be different at every moment, they are always the same, whether in motion or static.

What has thus emerged in "Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa" is a dialectical relationship of changing identities in terms of movement and immobility. As we have seen, the General and Flor continually change identities, but the relationship between them remains the same, that of pursuer and pursued. Similarly, Socorro and Auxilio have permutable multiple identities, but their presence and symmetry remain constant: "lo que da unidad," Sarduy has said, "… desde ese punto de vista son los personajes que siempre son los mismos y siempre son distintos." ["Dialogo con Severo Sarduy…."].

In the cases of the General, Flor, and Auxilio and Socorro what changes is merely their surface appearance as characters; the creation of the new identities becomes the act of disguise. Each character in his multiple identities is presented as constantly changing masks. It is a case of "máscaras que cubren otras máscaras que cubren otras máscaras." ["Dialogo con Severo Sarduy…."].

The same basic relationship between motion and immobility also appears in the author's creation of the narrator of the text. The author remains fixed, constant, but his creation, the narrator, appears and disappears precisely as does Flor; at one moment he is absent, at the next he directs himself to the characters in the narration—"Yo—Déjese de retórica. Tíreles aunque sea una piedrecita, un suspiro"—or to the reader—"Yo—Eso dice él. Locierto es que la Generala…." Sarduy's creation of his narrator duplicates the situation which the narrator describes in the fiction.

The narrator is the projected double of the author, as Flor is of the General, becoming an objectified, detached image of the author's personality: "Cuando yo digo en mi novela: yo," reveals Sarduy, "ese yo es un él. Es decir, toda primera persona singular en una novela es en él" ["Dialogo con Severo Sarduy"]. The narrator becomes both a transformation of the author's identity and, paradoxically, the expression of that same identity. In short, the narrator is the exposed disguise of the author, a disguise that not only hides, but reveals.

Fiction is thus the creation of a literary disguise which both exposes and conceals the identity of the author. The act of creation becomes the verbal movement which reproduces the perpetual opposition between transformation and fixed identity, between appearance and reality. Not only does the language of this particular fiction communicate the evanescent identities of the characters, but it also performs the function of creating the author's fleeting disguise in the narrator. Language and writing become the mask which the author creates and with which he deceives the reader, who believes, in this case, that the General and Flor, the author and narrator, are distinct beings, when in reality they are one and the same. Thus Sarduy has created a perceptual disharmony between appearance and reality.

The resultant ironic perception on the part of the reader produces yet another disparity in which the reader's expectations that the meaning of the work is other than the act of metamorphosis it describes are disproved by the fact that the act of writing and narrating duplicates the very metamorphosis it describes. The meaning, the ironies, the doubling of "Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa" lies not in the material presented, not in the plot, but in the act of creation by the author and the reader's perception of the narrative. Thus the entire narrative may be seen as the creation of a surface which the reader is to perceive, but cannot penetrate. The act of writing is itself an act of disguise.

We have seen the presentation of two distinct examples of the man-man double in which the impact of the encounter is intensified by the use of irony. Through the perceptual movement, both in terms of point of view and of the cronopio's thoughts, Cortázar represents the fragmentation of the narrator's being into two antithetical facets: from what appears to be a unified identity emerge two distinct modes of existence. To fully realize the effect of "Historia" Cortázar lures the reader into the pattern of circularity which dominates the narrative, a pattern which induces him to duplicate the fragmentation of the narrator's being into observer and observed. This dissociation, a result of a fundamental act of perception, completes what Cortázar considers to be the creative act, the writing of fiction.

Sarduy, on the other hand, has created in "Junto al Río de Cenizas de Rosa" a narrative in which the opposition of metamorphosis and fixed identity determines the relationship between characters, between doubles. The General's projection of his own desire, the creation of Flor de Loto, is duplicated by the author's creation of the narrator. Thus, what initially appears to be two distinct, separate identities turns out to be the manifestation of a single being. The reader finds doubling to be a series of masks and disguises; he sees the narrative as a mask which reveals the identity that it attempts to hide. Identity and disguise are one and the same thing. For Sarduy, the act of creation, the act of writing, becomes an act of disguise which reveals his being.