Beyond what meets the eye: the photographic analogy in Cortazar's short stories - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

Style, Fall, 1993 by Marian Zwerling Sugano

Does not the photographer--descendent of augurers and haruspices--uncover guilt in his pictures?

(Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography")

Photography is a sort of a literature of objects.

(Julio Cortazar)

In reading Julio Cortazar's two major statements on the short story, "Some Aspects of the Short Story" (1963) and "On the Short Short Story and its Environs" (1969), one cannot but be struck by the multitude of analogies summoned to describe the art of that elusive prose-fiction genre. Unlike the critical essays of other well-known short-story writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Frank O'Connor, Eudora Welty, or Nadine Gordimer (four of those gathered in Charles May's 1976 collection of Short Story Theories, for example), Cortazar's essays seek to define this genre through a proliferation of metaphors drawn from widely disparate fields. Indeed, in addition to the photographic analogy, which I shall shortly be exploring in detail, in the brief space of the 1963 essay Cortazar likens the short story to a boxing match between the text and its reader ("Some Aspects" 28); to a transgression of limits, an "explosion of spiritual energy," a "bursting forth" or a "breakaway from the everyday" (29); to a macrocosmic galactic system ("a good theme is like a good sun, a star with an orbiting planetary system, that, often, goes unnoticed till the writer, an astronomer of words, reveals to us its existence" |30~); to a microcosmic atomic system ("a good theme is somehow atomic, like a nucleus with its orbiting electrons" |30~); and to the proverbial acorn ("every enduring story is like the seed in which the giant tree lies sleeping. That tree will grow in us, will cast its shadow across our memory" |30~).

In the 1969 essay Cortazar invokes a new panoply of metaphors. He refers to the necessary "spherity" of the short story's closed form ("Short Short Story" 34); to the advantages of the first-person narrator ("he's inside the bubble and not behind the bubble-blower" |34~); to the writing of the short story as a kind of "exorcism" (35); and to its production as an extraction from a "looming mass," from "the abominable glob you had to tear free of with words" (36). Although Cortazar also would contrast the short story with the novel and compare its genesis to poetry, here and in numerous theoretical statements in other essays, in countless interviews, and in the practice of the short story itself, Cortazar paradoxically attempts to move toward the essentials of the short story by moving away from the field of literature.

Although the most cogent of Cortazar's analogies for describing the impact of the short story may have been boxing ("the novel always wins by points, whereas the short story has to win by a knockout" |"Some Aspects" 28; translation modified~), his most extended metaphor for the art of short-story composition is photography. Other writers have employed this same interarts comparison I am thinking of Robbe Grillet's 1962 collection of stories entitled Instantanes (Snapshots), and Ionesco's 1962 La photo du colonel (The Colonel's Photo), but none have so thoroughly elaborated the equation of short-story writing to the practice of photography. In this essay I shall trace Cortazar's use of the photographic analogy from his critical writings through his collage texts to the metatextual aspects of his stories themselves I am interested in exploring the connections he makes between the cultural implications of the practice of photography and of the practice of literature and the way in which two stories in particular, "Blow-up" (Las armas secretas |1958~ translated as Secret Weapons) and "Apocalypse at Solentiname" (Alguien que anda por ahi |1977~ translated as A Change of Light) probe the question of the writer's engagement with society through themes that problematize photographic representation.

In "Some Aspects of the Short Story" Cortazar opens his discussion of the "unique character of the short story" with what some theorists of the genre have considered its nemesis, its inevitable but ultimately defrauding comparison to the novel.(1) But rather than simply contrasting the two narrative forms, Cortazar restructures the argument as a four-part homology using photography and cinema as the pivotal terms:

The novel and the short story may be compared, using an analogy to cinema and photography, in that a film is in principle "open-ended," like a novel, while a good photograph presupposes a strict delimitation beforehand, imposed in part by the narrow field the camera covers and the esthetic use the photographer makes of this limitation. (28)

His argument is predicated on the structural equivalence of photo and short story, which he extends to liken critical discourse about photography to discourse about the story, mentioning the work of two major contemporary European photographers as representative:

I don't know whether you've heard a professional photographer talk about his art; I'm always surprised that it sounds so much as if it could be a short-story writer talking. Photographs as fine as Cartier-Bresson's or Brassai's define their art as an apparent paradox: that of cutting out a piece of reality, setting certain limits, but so that this piece will work as an explosion to fling open a much wider reality, like a dynamic vision that spiritually transcends the camera's field of vision. (28)