Dr...Rocal only

5

Student Name

Annie McGreevy

English 1110.01

5 March 2014

Part A—Critical Summaries of Scholarly Articles

I. Source

Ferrua, Pietro. "Blow--Up From Cortázar To Antonioni ." Literature Film Quarterly 4.1 (1976): 68. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Feb. 2014 .

II. Claims

1. “All Cortázar’s work is marked by these influences: extra-sensory perception and metaphysical humor” (Ferrua 69).

We can see in Cortázar’s work two influences: one, the effects of the reception of information that is sensed with the mind and, two, comedy having to do with the abstract concepts of being, knowing, identity, time and space.

2. “His [Cortázar’s] stories never have a linear structure, but are strayings of the imagination describing all the occult and opaque presences which lie under the stratum of apparent reality” (Ferrua 74).

Cortázar’s stories never follow a straight path. Rather, they are the wanderings of the mind describing all the supernatural, mythical, and difficult-to-understand things which exist just under that which we understand to be reality.

3. “The short story [Blow-up] adopts the proceeding of the counter-language. The dissolution of meaning is not produced by the verbal explosion (as Dadaists would do) nor by the uncommonness of the image (as Surrealists would do)” (Ferrua 74 ).

“Blow-up” takes on how language that is not clear in meaning (and which often means the opposite of what it says) works. The breakdown of meaning doesn’t come from a shattering of language, like Dadaists, who prized nonsense, would do. It doesn’t come from the strangeness of the image, either, like Surrealists, who aim to shock, would do.

III. The Source in Conversation with my Primary Source

Ferrua’s claim that “[a]ll Cortázar’s work is marked by…metaphysical humor” is an interesting claim but one I have trouble accepting . While “Blow-up” certainly deals with the abstract concepts of being, knowing, identity, time and space , it does not do so through comedy of any sort. Michel is a lonesome, somewhat pathetic figure, and his persona plus his photograph essentially “coming to life” on the wall could be seen as humorous to a certain type of reader, but the events of the story are deadly serious and upsetting. Michel describes the man in the car as the “real boss”, indicating that he has true control over the situation: the woman and the boy. He is “smiling” but “petulantly”—a word that means both childish and bad-tempered; in other words, not someone you would want to be in control of a situation (Cortázar 129). Michel may fancy himself an intervener, but the climax of the story finds him deciding that “the abusive act” between the man and the boy “had…already taken place” (129). The act is a sexual transaction for money—illegal and immoral by most standards, but the boy is a child, making it all the more upsetting, and ultimately, not humorous at all .

I. Source

McLaine, Brent. "Sleuths In The Darkroom: Photographer-Detectives And Postmodern Narrative." Journal Of Popular Culture 33.3 (1999): 79-94. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.

II. Claims

1. “This kind of cancellation between the living and the dead, between the ‘I’ and the ‘he,’ amounts to what McHale calls ‘flicker,’ by which he means the rapid switching between distinct ontological worlds, fictional or otherwise, the effect of which is to leave us uncomfortably in neither” (MacLaine 88).

When Cortázar erases the distinction between life and death, and also between the first and third persons, he does what McHale called “flicker”, which means he moves quickly back and forth between different worlds in which we understand the nature of being, whether in reality or in literature. The effect of this “flickering” is that we as readers don’t settle comfortably into either.

2. “The data of ‘Blow-up’ may be uninterpretable, but the methods it uses to keep it that way are identifiable and point to at least one recognizable theme, namely, the violence done to reality by a reifying art and imagination” (MacLaine 89).

The information in the story may be impossible to analyze, but we can understand the techniques it employs to remain so obscure. These techniques suggest at least one familiar theme, which is the way reality becomes distorted when we try to make the abstractions of art and the imagination more concrete.

3. “As a translator, Roberto is guilty of the assumption that experience may be seamlessly transposed. What he attempts to do with the photograph is governed by a similar attitude: his photograph is an act of translation, an attempt to transcribe moving reality into a still image. That such a project in naïve mimesis fails underlines the story’s concern with representation, which, according to Linda Hutcheon, is the defining feature in any thorough-going postmodernism” (MacLaine 91).

Because Roberto is a translator, he wrongly thinks that everything, including something that actually happens in real life, can be translated without a problem. This outlook leads him to understand his photograph in a similarly problematic way: he tries to make real life into an image that does not move. This endeavor is innocent, even immature of him, and when it brings him trouble, it highlights one of the story’s themes: representation. According to Linda Hutcheon, this interest in the theme of representation is what makes the story post-modern.

III. The Source in Conversation with my Primary Source

I am interested in MacLaine’s assessment of Roberto Michel as a translator, and the problem this presents him. As somebody who exists in two countries and two languages, I agree that he applies the idea of translation too quickly and too easily to his photograph . “…in the end an enlargement of 32 X 28 looks like a movie screen…” Michel in fact sees the connection while he is completing a translation “I had just translated ‘In that case…’—when I saw the woman’s hand beginning to stir slowly…” (128). In other words, Michel translates the photo—an instant in three strangers’ lives—into a movie, complete with characters, motivations, conflict, and drama. So, while I agree with MacLaine’s claim that Michel tries to “transcribe moving reality into a still image…” it is important to note that he also imposes meaning and a story, however plausible, onto the still image. He attempts to make sense out of chaos and this seems to me to subvert postmodernism in certain ways as well, to refute MacLaine’s claim that “[the]…act of translation…in naïve mimesis fails [and this] underlines the story’s concern with representation, which, according to…Hutcheon, is the defining feature in…postmodernism” (91). Most definitions of postmodernism associate it with deconstruction—the literal deconstruction of ideologies, cultures, and texts. Michel quite literally does the opposite: he constructs meaning, however horrifying, from the photograph. This is in turn subverted and complicated by the deconstruction of his own text as he describes the meaning-making of his photograph .

Part B—Standard Annotations of Two Other Secondary Sources

I. Source

Cortazar, Julio. "Some Aspects Of The Short Story." Review Of Contemporary Fiction 19.3 (1999): 25. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.

II. Summary of the Author’s Article

In this speech, reprinted in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Julio Cortázar discusses the value of the short story form, detailing his opinion of what makes a good story so. He goes into detail about theme, asserting the idea that every story has a theme whether the writer realizes it or not (30). He says that a good story “bring[s] in a reality infinitely vaster than that of their mere storyline and…they’ve influenced us with a power…their brief texts…don’t even hint at” (31). He emphasizes that “[n]othing short of…the [writer] fully committed to his nation’s and the world’s reality…will do” (34). Finally, he identifies himself as an anti-imperialistic, and says that “…to write for a revolution, to write within a revolution, means to write in a revolutionary way; it doesn’t mean…to be obliged to write about the revolution” ( 35 ). I understand the overall argument of the speech to be one that connects art and politics permanently. In other words, art that is not making a serious statement about current events, political and social, is not “good” art.

III. How This Source will Contribute to my Analysis

Because I am analyzing Cortázar’s story “Blow-up” in terms of how and in what ways it is subtly criticizing capitalism, it is helpful to me to have his own description of his mission as an anti-imperialistic “revolutionary” writer. I plan to use at least one of the quotes from my summary above in my introduction, in order to bolster my reading. His quote about the “summing-up of a certain human condition” has inspired a new idea for me that I plan to explore in my analysis: the connection between capitalism and the human condition, which is something I’d previously thought to transcend an economic system. It is my hunch that the story illuminates not only the problematic relationship between genders under the capitalistic system (and particularly money as it relates to sexual relationships), but also the problems of representation. When Michel tells his story to us, the reader, the violence is buried and the horror is initially unclear. While this made the initial reading experience frustrating, reading Cortázar’s idea that a good story “illuminates something beyond itself” strikes me as true and inspires me to probe the story to see what else it is illuminating .