DAVID KELMAN

The Afterlife of Storytelling:Julio Cortázar's Readingof Walter Benjaminand Edgar Allan Poe

"They say that the most fervent desire of any ghost is to recover at least theappearance of its corporeality ..."

—Julio Cortázar, "Some Aspects of the Short Story"

AMONG THE MANY EVENTS that took ptace in Cuba foltowing the 1959Revolution was a seemingly insignificant literary gathering: a lecture by

the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar in Havana in 1963. In "Algunos aspectos delcuento" ("Some Aspects of the Short Story"), Cortázar presented his theory of theshort story in relation to various masters of the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe,Eranz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield. While Cortázar focused primarily on thestructural characteristics of the best short stories, it is clear that in this lecture hewas also setting out to define the political possibilities of telling a story in post-revolutionary Cuba. As Miguel Herráez notes in his recent biography, althoughCortázar was never completely dedicated to the revolution in Cuba, he was never-theless infected with an enthusiastic desire to rethink the relation between litera-ture and politics (166).' Cortázar's lecture, which was eventually published as an

' Cortázar confessed to Antón Arrufat that his passion for Cuba had reached a pathological levelduring this period: "Me he enfermado incurablemente de Cuba" ("I've become incurably sick withCuba") (Cortázar, qtd. in Herráez 164). This incurable sickness pushed Cortázar to reconsider therelation between writing and politics, especially in regards to the regime of Ceneral Perón dtiring thelate 1940s. Referring to this moment, Cortázar notes: "[Desptiés de] Ese contacto con el pueblocubano . . . de golpe, sin que yo me diera cuenta (nunca fui consciente de todo eso) y ya en el caminode vuelta a Europa, vi que por primera vez yo había estado metido en pleno corazón de un ptieblo queestaba haciendo su revolución, que estaba tratando de encontrar su camino. Y ése es el momento enque tendí los lazos mentales y en que me pregunté, o me dije, qtie yo no había tratado de entender elperonismo" ("[After] That contact with the Cuban people . . . suddenly, without realizing it [I wasnever conscious of all this] and already on my way back to Europe, I saw for the first time that I hadbeen placed right in the heart of a people that was making its revolution, that was trying to find itsway. And that is the moment when I extended my mental lassos and asked myself, or said to myself,that I had never tried to understand Peronism") (qtd. in Herráez 168). Cortázar's contact with theCuban revolution became an event that not only opened up a new thinking about the political, butalso suggested a way to relate the present moment (Cuba, 1963) to a moment in the past (the Per-onism of the 1940s-1950s), a moment that he had never fully understood. In this way, Cortázar sug-gests a mode of historical reflection that seems related to Walter Benjamin's notion of the dialectical

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essay, should therefore be seen as a deliberate attempt to intervene in the debateon the place of the work of art in the new polis or political community.^ Cortázar'stask, in his theory of the cuento, was to rethink this debate in terms of the possi-bilities and impossibilities of storytelling.'

For Cortázar, the political efficacy of the short story lies not in its content, butrather in the particular effect, or jolt, transmitted by means of its form. Cortázarbuilds this theory out of a reading of two important precursors: Edgar Allan Poeand Walter Benjamin. In what follows, I examine Cortázar's relation to these twotheorists of the short story in order to measure the impact of his theoretical inter-vention into discussions of what it means to build a political community throughstorytelling. As we will see, Cortázar uses Benjamin and Poe in order to develop atheory of "artificial" storytelling, a mode of telling a story after traditional story-telling is no longer possible. For Cortázar, this new mode of storytelling—whichhe calls the cuento or short story—produces a shock that dislodges the reader fromthe everyday world. At the same time, however, Cortázar insists that the form of thecuento functions as a kind of artificial respiration for the reader: the cuento pro-duces artificial experience so that the reader may live on in an age when experi-ence is in decay. The afterlife of storytelling therefore points to the possibility of anew political community that is not predicated on the full presence of the people,but rather on the transmission of a story. Politics can then be said to take place asthe event of a transmission, and it is the function of the modern storyteller to tellstories that are able to produce this kind of event.

The Fall of Storytelling

By alluding to the decay of experience, I am already suggesting that Cortázar'sessay is in some sense indebted to the theories of Walter Benjamin. After all, inthe German theorist's essays from the 1930s, Benjamin insists that the definingtrait of modernity is the way experience has fallen in value. This inability to pro-duce true experience can be seen in a number of symptoms: the lack of interestin lyric poetry, the liquidation of tradition and its representation as ruin, the

image, especially Benjamin's emphasis on the sudden emergence of the past as an image that flashesup in a moment of recognizability (Benjamin, "Concept" 390). A more sustained meditation on thehistoriographical method of Benjamin and Cortázar will have to wait for another occasion.

'•* For two recent discussions of Cortázar's politics and the figure of politics in Cortázar's work, seeLevinson and Colas. Levinson provides a brilliant reading of "Casa tomada" (House Taken Over) andshows the impossibility of choosing between an aesthetic and a political reading of Cortázar's shortstory: "The choice between the two, indeed, is no choice since the claim to one, uncannily, mtist callupon its opposite as an alternative foundation that displaces and decenters it" (108). If Levinsonfocuses on the impossibility of choosing aesthetics over politics, or vice versa, Colás's essay attempts tounderstand the performative dimension of Cortázar's poetics as a form of the political. Colas stig-gests that, for Cortázar, "invention" is the "immanent, creative reconfiguration of the relations mak-ing up the fabric of our lives and our society in such a way as would free up the true potency of thehuman subject" (31). Although my reading is indebted to these two attempts to reacl the figure ofpolitics in Cortázar, I argue that it is necessary to emphasize storytelling as a practice that producespolitical effects. For that reason, I focus on the Argentine writer's narrative theory in its relation toWalter Benjamin's attempt to understand the political significance of storytelling.

' All translations from Cortázar's essays are mine. For clarity's sake (and to differentiate between "realstory" and "short story"), I will often use the Spanish term cuento to refer to the form of the short story.

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decay of the aura of works of art, and the inabihty to tell a story. As I will argue,Cortázar takes the decay of experience as a starting point for his own theory ofstorytelling. Strangely, however, Cortázar never refers explicitly to Benjamin,although he is clearly familiar with Benjamin's heirs, such as Theodor Adorno(after all, "Teodoro W. Adorno" was the name of Cortázar's famous cat). Rather,Benjamin stands as something of a hidden figure in Cortázar's texts; his work onnarrative, photography, cinema, and politics always seems to be hovering in thebackground of Cortázar's writings.

Whether or not Cortázar actually read Benjamin is for the moment irrelevant,since what matters is the way Cortázar's theory of storytelling sets up a relation ofreading with Benjamin's theory of storytelling. In other words, the relationshipbetween Benjamin and Cortázar is not based on influence or on a phenomenalact of reading, but rather on what Paul de Man calls "a process of translation or'transport' that incessantly circulates between the two texts" (De Man 260). If thereis no "natural" relationship between the two texts, it therefore follows that anyattempt to link Benjamin and Cortázar must focus primarily on the comparabilityof the two texts, since this comparability can never be taken for granted.'' My task,then, is to show that Cortázar's essay in effect reads Benjamin's theory of storytell-ing. This means that it is not sufficient merely to give a summary of Benjamin'sthought in his 1936 essay on storytelling, since a summary would necessarily glossover the crucial figures that Benjamin uses to develop his argument. Rather, I willtake the time to focus on those figures in Benjamin's essay that will be most impor-tant for Cortázar's argument. I will then examine the way Cortázar's theory figuresand disfigures Benjamin's image of storytelling.

The debate on storytelling can be said to have taken an important turn inWalter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of NikolaiLeskov." Although written as a review of Leskov's stories, this 1936 essay medi-tates more generally on the future of storytelling and its relation to tradition, mem-ory, and experience. As one of the last traditional storytellers, Leskov is importantbecause his presence highlights the loss of story telling in the modern age. Thisloss, Benjamin maintains, is due to the decay of experience: because modernindividuals have no experiences to share, traditional storytelling also falls in value.Therefore, Benjamin seeks to distinguish traditional storytelling from the mod-ern forms of storytelling that have taken its place. Although Benjamin's primaryconcern is to differentiate this more traditional mode of storytelling (or "realstory") from the novel, his essay also attacks another modern genre: the shortstory. In fact, Benjamin's denigration of the short story ends up casting a nega-tive light by which it is possible to read his theory of storytelling in general. At the

'' Benjamin himself focuses on the question of comparability in his early essay on two poems byHölderlin. Although Hölderlin's two poems would seem to be related by the mere fact that they areattached to the same proper name ("Hölderlin"), Benjamin does not take this "natural" relation atface value. Rather, he insists that any reading of the relation between the two poems must also showhow this comparison is possible: "The method will demonstrate that the poems are comparable. Acertain relationship connects them, so that one could speak of different versions" (Benjamin, "Hölder-lin" 21). For an excellent example of how Benjamin's notion of comparability can be applied to con-temporary efforts to rethink comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, see Gil Anidjar's"Our Place in al-Andalus." In La insubordinaáón de los signos, Nelly Richard emphasizes this Benjaminiannotion of comparison, when she insists that one can read the impact of Benjamin's thought in the workof Chilean intellectuals, even if the latter do not make any clear references to Benjamin's texts.

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same time, it is precisely Benjamin's negative definition of the short story thatbecomes a field of intervention for Cortázar.

Benjamin's denigration of the short story is always placed in relation to the pass-ing away of the storyteller. This argument about the loss of storytelling is not sim-ply a nostalgic yearning for older forms and figures.^ Rather, Benjamin insists thattraditional storytelling is essential to the notion of community, since it is the func-tion of the storyteller to impart wisdom that comes from afar (that is, tradition).If this ability to transmit traditional experience {Erfahrung, in German) is in decay,then everything else that depends on this transmission—community, history, tra-ditional forms of politics—must also be included in this story of loss: "It is as if acapability that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, hasbeen taken from us: the ability to share experiences [Erfahrungen]" ("Storyteller"143; Gesammelte Schriften 2:439). Experience or Erfahrung does, not simply meanthat which one has lived through in any particular moment {Erlebnis, in German).Rather, Erfahrung is the kind of experience that is built up through tradition. Expe-rience, in this sense, takes place only in relation to a larger community; its conditionis that there must be this communal environment—both spatial and temporal—within which experience can be shared.^ Modernity has interrupted this relation totradition; as a result, Benjamin writes, "experience has fallen in value [die Erfahr-ung ist im Kurse gefallen] " ("Storyteller" 143; GesammelteSchriften2:A'i9). A\Ú\o\i^Benjamin is clearly using an economic metaphor here, as if experience were a

•̂ In this sense, Benjamin's essay stands within a tradition that studies the passing away of "epic"forms. Like Georg Lukács in his The Theory of the Novel, Benjamin understands the development offorms as a process that cannot be separated from "the given historico-philosophical realities withwhich the authors were confronted" (Lukács 56). However, if Lukács's theory is nostalgic about theloss of an epic form in a new historical age, Benjamin's account is precisely not nostalgic, even if hestill emphasizes loss and disappearance. As trving Wohlfarth remarks, it is only "because [the story-teller] is vanishing that the storyteller's beauty is now so significantly enhanced" (1003). For Benja-min, then, the beauty of the storyteller does not lie within a lost past. Rather his disappearance inthe present historical moment is what makes this figure—and the grotip of concepts with which heis associated—take on a strange beauty. The storyteller is only significant insofar as he has turnedinto ?L figure, that is, a trope that signifies something absent. The storyteller therefore becomes legibleas a figure only when the presence oi the storyteller has disappeared irrevocably.

It is worth mentioning here that, in Benjamin's hands, the fate of the storyteller is linked to thefate of historiography. See Wohlfarth and Bahti (especially "Nietzsche's Ursprünge, Lukács's Leaps"and "Death and Authority: Benjamin's 'The Storyteller'"). As opposed to Wohlfarth, Bahti empha-sizes the importance of the storyteller's graáuííZdisappearance, or more precisely, his withdrawal—theway the storyteller is becoming ever more remote (weiter noch sich Entfernendes) : "this nonpresence,Benjamin's precision indicates, is not yet an absence; rather, it is a distancing, a withdrawing, a presentparticipial absenting" (227). Bahti insists that what is presented in Benjamin's essay is "[t]he story ofstoryteiling's becoming history—ending, passing away . . . " (232). Therefore, storytelling becomes his-toriography precisely in the gradual disappearance of the storyteller.

•• In his "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin discusses his theory of experience in relationto Freud's theory of unconscious traces and the buffering role of consciousness. Fora clear accountof Benjamin's use of Freud, see Marder: "According to Benjamin, it is Erfahrung, 'experience,' thatgives us a sense of community: we become bound to one another through the shared experienceswhich are transmitted through unconscious memory traces. By contrast, the preserved bits andshards of lived moments—Erlebnis—are severed from any form of commonality or sense of dura-tion. Since they are preserved in time but remain devoid of temporal duration, these 'souvenirs' or'conscious memories' ultimately engulf the life of the speaker and transform him into a walkinggraveyard—a lonely witness who, by becoming the conscious repository for what once was but is nolonger, loses his capacity to live in time" (93). Because Benjamin continually links the problem ofexperience to questions of time, history, and community, it becomes necessary to rethink politicsfrom the perspective of this crisis of experience.

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commodity that has now declined in value, he also suggests that the decline inthe value of experience takes place as a literal fall; indeed, "it looks as if it may fallinto bottomlessness [ins Bodenlose]. Every glance at a newspaper shows that it hasreached a new low [einen neuen Tiefstand]" (143; 2:448). The inability to shareexperiences produces a change in the very structure of experience: instead of expe-riencing a relation to tradition and community, the modern subject experiencesthe phenomenon of an endless fall. The importance of this figure of falling can-not be overemphasized, since it becomes a crucial motif in Cortázar's own attemptto theorize the unique effect of the short story.

Benjamin insists that this change in the structure of experience manifests itselfas, among other things, the atrophy of older notions of relation. For instance, in"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin, playing on the double sense of theword, employs the Latin-derived Relation to refer both to a connection (a moretypical word choice would be Beziehung or Verhältnis) and to narration (a more typi-cal word choice would be Erzählung). In thinking about the change in the struc-ture of experience, Benjamin finds that "the increasing wasting away of expe-rience is reflected in the loosening [Ablösung] of the older relation [Relation] bymeans of information, of information by means of sensation" {Gesammelte Schriften1:611, my translation). I will return to the role of information in a moment; fornow it is important to focus on the way new modes of communication are not onlyaffecting the way stories are being told ("narration" in Harry Zohn's translation),but are also loosening up the older relations that once connected the individualto tradition. It can be said, then, that the atrophy of experience in modernity isreflected in this loosening up of relations, which has a further reverberation in theability to tell stories. The atrophy of relation, Benjamin suggests, affects an indi-vidual's linguistic relation to others in the form of the story. Thus the crisis of expe-rience also produces a crisis in the very ability to tell stories (or "share experi-ences"). Released from the support of this network of stories, the subject falls intothe endless vertigo of modernity.

The modern age is thus marked, Benjamin notes in his later essay on Baude-laire, by the experience of shock. This "shock-experience" (Chockerlebnis) is notjustsomething that happens to people while walking along city streets ("Motifs" 329).More importantly for the present argument, new modes of communication, suchas the narrative techniques of newspapers or the more modern technology of thecinema,' also produce in the viewer or reader a kind of shock-experience throughthe instantaneous transmission of information.

' Unfortunately, the scope of this article does not allow a discussion of the way film, as a newmedium of communication, introduces the shock experience. However, the argument that Benja-min makes about film is roughly analogous to the argument he makes about the new narrativetechniques of the newspaper. As he notes in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno-logical Reproducibility," "[i]t is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious,just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis" (266). In this essay, he alsoargues that cinema liquidizes tradition and at the same time introduces a new way to view the worldand, therefore, new possibilities for a political intervention. He writes: "It thus becomes violentlyclear [So wird handgreiflich] that another nature [eine andere Natur] speaks [spricht] to the cam-era than to the eyes" {Gesammelte Schriften 1:500; my translation). Cinema is a new form of commu-nication precisely to the extent that it allows nature itself to speak in a new way: it presents some-thing otherto the eyes. Although Benjamin does not pursue this kind of argument explicitly in "TheStoryteller," it is implied in the way he describes the force of information. As we will see, Cortázarsuggests in a more explicit way what Benjamin only intimates in his essay on Leskov.

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In part, the shock of information is due to its abbreviated nature: it comesquickly and intensely, like an event. As Benjamin explains in his essay on Baude-laire, the purpose of information is "to transmit the pure 'in itself' of the event [zuübermitteln . . . das pure An-sich des Geschehenen]" {Gesammelte Schriften 1:611;my translation). Without the advantage of any kind of mediation, information sim-ply arrives and forces itself upon the receiver. Although it is supposed to presentfacts, what it transmits are not facts but rather the effect of shock. This process iscompletely opposed to what happens in the situation of storytelling. The story-teller, Benjamin insists, cushions the event and "submerges the thing into the lifeof the storyteller" ("Storyteller" 149). For this reason, a "real story" is one that isthoroughly connected not only to tradition but also to the very life of the one whois telling the tale. Because of the generalized abbreviating processes of modernlife, however, these kinds of connections are cut short by information.

Although the modern novel clearly exemplifies this shift to information, theshort story provides an even better literary example of the abbreviated natureof modern life. For Benjamin, the short story is not simply one mode of storytell-ing among others; rather, it is a foreign genre, an alien usurper that only servesto highlight the fact that storytelling is in the process of passing away. The for-eignness of the short story is immediately evident in Benjamin's German, sincehe refers to this modern genre by using the English short story rather than the Ger-man term Erzählung. In this way, the flow of Benjamin's German is interruptedand cut short by the English phrase. Instead of calling attention to the enumera-tive process of recounting that is apparent in German {Er-zählung) ,^ Benjaminsuggests that the operative word here is the instantaneous short—the abbreviationor abkürzen of storytelling {Gesammelte Schriften 2:448). Building on Valéry's com-ment that "man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated," Benjamin writes:"In point of fact, [the modern subject] has succeeded in abbreviating even story-telling. We have witnessed [erlebt] the evolution of the 'short story', which hasremoved itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling up, oneon top of the other, oftbin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appro-priate image of tbe way in which the perfect narrative [die vollkommene Erzäh-lung] is revealed through tbe layers of various retellings [vielfacher Nacherzäh-lungen]" ("Storyteller" 150; Gesammelte Schriften 2:448). Tbe short story thereforecannot be an Erzählung, if only because it does not permit tbe countless retellingsthat constitute tbe form of storytelling in tbe first place. After all, tbe conditionthat allows a story to exist is precisely tbe way a story gets repeated from storytellerto storyteller. These countless retellings in effect define tbe story as such. A "realstory" happens only as an accumulative process through which the story can arriveat its fulfillment over time. As Benjamin notes, these multiple after-stories {viel-facher Nacherzählungen) allow a story to arrive at its fulfilled completion: die vollkom-mene Erzählung. The accumulation process also means that a "real story" only fully

' In German, "to count" is expressed by the verb zählen, while "to tell a story" is, of course, erzählen.Cf. Borges on the etymological relation between telling a story and counting or enumerating: "nodeja de ser significativo que hablemos de contar un cuento y de contar hasta mil. Todos los idiomasque conozco usan el mismo verbo, o verbos de la misma raíz, para los actos de narrar y de enu-merar" ("tt's significant that we speakof telling a story and counting toa thousand. All the languagesI know use the same verb, or verbs of the same root, for the acts of narrating and enumerating")(Borges, "Nombres" 256).

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comes into its own when its origin has been displaced and its authority dispersedthrough a number of storytellers. No story can truly exist without these "variousretellings" or "afterstories."

However, these afterstories are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Benja-min explains that, in the modern age, " [w] e have witnessed [erlebt] the evolutionof the 'short story'" ("Storyteller" 150; Gesammelte Schriften 2:448). In other words,in the modern age the only thing that remains is something we have lived through,erlebt, but not fully experienced: the beginning of the abbreviation of storytellingand the subsequent development of the "short story." The short story arrives simplyas an event, just as information in the modern age hits the subject without cushion-ing the event within layers of tradition. The "eventness" of the short story, whichis equivalent to the way information transmits the pure "in itself" of the event, iscompletely opposed to the way the "real story" is transmitted. Unlike traditionalstorytelling, which "submerges the subject matter into the life of the storyteller"(149; translation modified), the short story forces itself upon the receiver and pro-duces a shock. Previously, it had been the function of art to transform these sud-den experiences {Erlebnisse) of life into an experience {Erfahrung) that expresses atemporal continuity and a link to the collective unconscious.^ This transformationis necessary because Erlebnis—instantaneous, lived experience—does not accu-mulate and therefore cannot enter as such into a collective experience. For thatreason, Benjamin insists that the primary function of a "real story" is its abilityto transform Erlebnis into Erfahrung by weaving "counsel" into the fabric of reallife, gelebten Lebens, life as it is lived {Gesammelte Schriften 442). In the modern age,however, the conditions that define the true story—this "weave" oí Erlebnis andErfahrung—have become impossible. We no longer have access to this ability toweave counsel into life as it is lived, and the storyteller is no longer able to conveythe accumulation of "afterstories" that have been built up over centuries.

However, the impossibility of storytelling does not mean that stories are nolonger being told, only that the act of storytelling has undergone a transforma-tion in the form of the short story. Rather than the accumulation of afterstories,the short story presents the afterlife of storytelling. The condition of this newmode of telling a story is modern-day experience, that is, the experience of thepure event that shocks and disturbs. The "short story," then, is the narrative formthat takes the shock-Erlebnis as its basis.

Artificial Erfahrung

If, after its decline, storytelling lives on in the form of the short story, what is thefunction of this form? Is the short story merely a substitute for the lost art of story-telling, or does it rather reconfigure what it means to tell a story in the first place?

' In his Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer reviews this function of art when speaking of thehistory of aesthetics during the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Anaesthetic experience, properly defined, would be one that takes Erlebnis as its basis and relates thismomentary experience to the totality of life. Because the Erlebnis is "an adventure," the power ofthe Erlebniskunst (art based on experience) is that it "suddenly tears the person experiencing it outof the context of his life, and yet relates him back to the whole of his existence" (Gadamer 70). It isprecisely the second moment of this process—the moment of relating the subject to a whole—thatBenjamin says is increasingly threatened by the new forms of communication such as information.

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In effect, these are the questions that Julio Cortázar poses in his theory of the shortstory. This theory is developed not only in "Some Aspects of the Short Story," butalso in Cortázar's introduction to his translation of Edgar Allan Poe's stories andcritical writings. Therefore, before turning to the essay presented in Cuba, I willfirst begin with Cortázar's translation of Poe in two senses—Cortázar's literaltranslation of Poe's works and his more general translation of Poe's theory of theshort story. Although Cortázar does not refer to Benjamin explicitly in his transla-tion of Poe, he presents nevertheless an image of the story when storytelling is nolonger possible.

In fact, the figure of Poe is critical here precisely to the extent that Poe's talesstand as both exemplary "real stories" for Benjamin and as models of the modernshort story for Cortázar. On the one hand, Poe is, according to Benjamin, the story-teller who exudes an incomparable atmosphere, like Leskov or Stevenson ("Story-teller" 162). On the other hand, Cortázar includes Poe within a litany of modernwriters that extends from Tolstoy and Hemingway to Borges and Truman Capote("Cuento" 375). Is Poe a traditional storyteller, or is he a modern short story writer?To a certain extent, one could say of Poe's short stories what Benjamin once saidabout Baudelaire's lyric poetry. If Baudelaire exhausted the tradition of lyric poetryby including motifs in his poems that forcefully made lyric poetry impossible,'"Poe bases his stories on conditions that make the storyteller's craft impossible.Thus, whereas Benjamin notes that Poe's way of transmitting experience is in theform of the hermetic tradition, thereby providing access to the hidden depths ofarchaic Erfahrung ("Storyteller" 157), Cortázar's emphasis on the transmission ofan event reveals the way Poe's work systematically undermines this link to tradi-tion. Better than anyone else, Cortázar understands the peculiarly modern effectof Poe's short stories—that is, their detachment from tradition. In fact, Cortázar'sreading of Poe eventually forms the basis of his own theory of the modern cuento(the short story, or what Poe calls "the prose tale").

Cortázar begins his reading of Poe with an overview of Poe's explicit statementsconcerning the prose tale. These statements appear in a review of the work ofNathaniel Hawthorne from the May 1842 volume of Graham's Magazine. The reviewis important for Cortázar because in it Poe insists that every short story shouldtransmit an event or what Poe calls the "effect" of the tale:A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thotights to accommo-date his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to bewrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him inestablishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the out-bringing of thiseffect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there shotild be no word written,of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. (Poe 572)

"• Cf. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire": "LesEleurs du mal was the last lyric work that hada broad European reception; no later writings penetrated beyond a more or less limited linguisticarea. Added to this is the fact that Baudelaire expended his productive capacity almost entirely onthis one volume. And finally, it cannot be denied that some of his motifs . . . render the possibility oflyric poetry problematic. These three facts define Baudelaire historically" (341-42). For this reason,Benjamin calls Batidelaire "a star without atmosphere"; Baudelaire is the image of the lyric poet whohas lost his atira (343). For a reading of the motif of the lost firmament in Baudelaire, see ElissaMarder's "Women Tell Time: Traumatic and Addictive Temporality in LesEleurs du mal" in Dead Time.For a reading of the motif of "a star without atmosphere" and its relation to the "actuality" of the lyricpoet, see my "The Inactuality of Aura: Figurai Relations in Walter Benjamin's 'On Some Motifs inBaudelaire." Fora reading of the idea of "the decay of the aura," see Weber.

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Poe links this effect to an "originality" or "novelty" that "tasks and startles theintellect, and so brings into undue action the faculties to which, in the lighter lit-erature, we least appeal" (Poe 580). Because, according to Poe, the tale arrests thereader with its startling effect, its reception is highly conscious, too conscious,perhaps, for a traditional story as defined by Benjamin. After all, the proper statefor receiving a traditional story, Benjamin insists, is "a state of relaxation" such asone finds in the rhythmic boredom of artisanal work: "The more self-forgetful thelistener is, the more deeply what he listens to is impressed upon his memory. Whenthe rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the giftof retelling them comes to him all by itself" ("Storyteller" 149). Against this imageof storytelling, Poe introduces the image of the startled reader, whose intellectis brought into play by the novel effect of the tale. This unique and preconceived"effect" need not be a magical or otherwise strange occurrence; after all, tradi-tional stories, especially fairy tales, are full of such magic. But it must press uponand shock the intellect of the reader.

To these theories, Cortázar adds some observations of his own, based on a read-ing of Poe's tales. "[Poe] understood that tbe efficacy of a tale depends on its inten-sity as pure event [su intensidad como acaecimiento puroY ("Poe" 34), he writes, sug-gesting that the point of a sbort story is not merely tbe realization of an indefiniteeffect, but the transmission of a/̂ wre event—or rather, a/?Mreand intense event.As we have seen, this reference to the pure "in itself" of tbe event is precisely theway Benjamin describes tbe essence of information in tbe "Storyteller" essay. Cor-tázar therefore follows closely Benjamin's definition of the informational force oftbe sbort story. Far from pretending to describe tbe more traditional form of story-telling, Cortázar focuses on this modern, abbreviated form, divorced from tbelayers of oral tradition. In tbis way, even thougb Cortázar's essay focuses on Poe'stheory of tbe tale, he is in effect responding to Benjamin's comments on the mod-ern sbort story. In fact, we will see that Cortázar's tbeory develops some of Benja-min's insights from bis other essays—most notably, "The Work of Art in the Age ofIts Technological Reproducibility"—and applies them to a theorization of tbemodern sbort story.

For Cortázar, then, tbe sbort story transmits a pure event. However, tbe wordbe uses for "event" is not suceso, whicb is one way of talking about a "happening"in Spanish, but acaecimiento. While acaecimiento also means "an event or happen-ing," it is perhaps best translated as a "befalling," since the verb "to fall" stands atthe beart of tbe Spanisb word {caer, "to fall," from wbich is derived tbe verb acae-cer, "to befall," "to happen"). The transmission of a pure event is therefore alsothe transmission of a pure fall or tbe bappening of a fall. By focusing on tbeshort story in his reading of Poe and in bis later essay "Some Aspects of the SbortStory," Cortázar is in fact asking: What does it mean to transmit the event of fall-ing, tbe event of a befalling, or even tbe event of an event? What is tbe effect oftbis transmission?

To answer tbese questions, it is necessary to look more closely at how Cortázaremploys tbis word acaecimiento. At first, it might seem tbat Cortázar is in facttranslating a central element in many of Poe's sbort stories: tbe experience offalling. Wbat else does Poe describe in bis tales but tbat uncertain reference tofalling, descending, or decaying? Wbat else does he enumerate but a long list

CORTÁZAR'S READING OF BENJAMIN & POE / 253

of cases, incidents, and accidents, all words that somehow translate the experienceof falling?" However, this conclusion fails to take into account what Cortázarmeans by the "event," or the "event of falling." He qualifies his use of the wordacaecimiento by saying that the tale need not contain exciting events. Here he usesthe other word for event, suceso: "when speaking of 'intensity', it should not beunderstood that the short story ought to contain events that are wildly intense[sucesos desaforadamente intensos]" (35). The spectacular or excessive sucesois not the same as the acaecimiento, the event (of falling). The event that Cortázarcares about is not on the order of a spectacle. For instance, it might happen that aman feels the need to confess a crime and indeed confesses. This non-spectacularhappening is the acaecimiento, the event. In fact, Cortázar talks about the eventmore as a situation or circumstance {circunstancia) than as the revelation of somekind of spectacular instant (36).'"''

In his 1963 lecture in Havana, "Some Aspects of the Short Story," Cortázarreturns to this topic in a more general way and develops what he means by the"event" or acaecimiento of the short story. Rather than a concentrated reading ofone particular author, in this essay Cortázar develops his argument from a sus-tained comparison between photography and the short story.'"* The point of thiscomparison is not to assimilate the short story to new media like photography,but rather to suggest that both photography and the short story are conditionedby the modern experience of shock. In the first place, Cortázar notes that, likethe photographer, the short story writer must focus on an abbreviated imageand fix this fragment through determinate limits. This process of delimitationor abbreviation succeeds or fails according to the precision with which the artistis able "to cut out a fragment of reality [recortar un fragmento de la realidad]"("Cuento" 371). Both photography and the short story belong to this history ofcutting, of the recorte (371). In this way, Cortázar mobilizes Benjamin's rhetoricof abbreviation—the abkürzen of storytelling—in order to talk about the shortstory as part of a generalized techne that fragments reality as part of its organiz-ing principle. Therefore, if Benjamin's essay gestured towards the storyteller as afigure of the past, Cortázar focuses on a shift in techniques of representation.Of course, Benjamin had already reviewed these new techniques in his essay"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." For Benja-min, these techniques—including the "technique" of information—bear witnessto a generalized historical process: "the desire of the present-day masses to 'getcloser' to things . . . Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at

" All of these words (decay, case, incident, accident) in some way relate etymologically to theword cadere, to fall.

''' By defining the acaecimiento in this way, Cortázar might have had in mind Henry James's defini-tion of an "incident" in "The Art of Fiction": "When a young man makes up his mind that he hasnot faith enough after all to enter the church as he intended, that is an incident... I do not say thatthese are extraordinary or startling incidents" (James 583).

" For an early account of Cortázar's use of the rhetoric of photography in describing the shortstory, see López de Martínez. Oddly, López de Martínez misquotes Cortázar's explicit statementabout the event-ness of the short story, by using the word acontecimiento instead o{ acaecimiento (567).Of course, both words refer etymologically to ad-cadere, but Cortázar's choice places the verb caermore visibly at the center of the word. For a reading of the importance of photography in Cor-tázar's illustrated essay collections Último round and La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, see Russek.

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close range in an image" (255). The desire of the masses is precisely to bringthings nearer, näherzubringen, to break things off from their context, and to pre-sent reality as an image {Gesammelte Schriften 1:479). Cortázar similarly focuses onthis generalized condition and notes that both photography and the short storycan be valued precisely by determining the impact of the recorte.^'*

It is at this point that Cortázar's comparison between photography and theshort story in the lecture rejoins his reading of Poe's theory of the tale. Afternoting that the techniques of both arts entail a close-up of reality, Cortázar goeson to say: "the photographer and the short story writer are forced [se ven precisa-dos] to choose and delimit an image or an event [una imagen o un acaecimiento]that is significant, that is not only valuable in itself but that is able to act upon thespectator or reader as a kind of aperture [apertura]" ("Cuento," 371). Accordingto Cortázar, the photographer and the short story writer do not have a choicein the matter: this delimitation or abbreviation of reality is the condition fortheir art, and they are forced to focus on a significant event that is cut off fromits context. Furthermore, as Poe's theory of the tale maintains, the purpose ofthe short story is the production of a unique effect. Cortázar again uses therhetoric of photography to describe this effect: the intense close-up that con-ditions photography and the short story produces an apertura. Here, Cortázarrefers to the opening on a camera to describe both the effect of the photographon the viewer and the effect of the short story on the reader. This effect is ashock: through the opening created by the recorte, a force similar to light hits andexposes the reader, creating the event or acaecimiento that befalls the reader ofthe short story.

In fact, Cortázar thinks of this éventas akin to a "knockout" in boxing ("Cuento"372), and it is worth noting that, as in Benjamin's essay, English is again the lan-guage that marks the strange difference that the short story makes. Whereas thenovel wears the reader out through an accumulation of light blows, the shortstory is "incisive, biting, merciless from the very first sentences" ("Cuento" 372).The short story writer must know how to produce a quick effect, because, unlikeBenjamin's "real story," "the short story writer knows that he cannot proceedthrough accumulation; time is not his ally" ("Cuento" 372). Furthermore, as theviolence of the word knockout suggests, the purpose of the short story is not tocushion the reader from the effect of the story. The short story does not trans-mit wisdom to the reader and does not allow the reader to tell a story in turn,thus cutting off the possibility of "afterstories." In fact, after the knockout, thereader is not in a position to say anything. The "unique effect" of the short storytherefore exposes the reader to the aperture of the camera in two senses. Onthe one hand, the short story produces an image of its reader, just as the aper-ture of the photographic apparatus takes a picture of the subject. On the otherhand, the "unique effect" of the short story produces an aperture or trauma in thereader: it knocks out and fixes the reader in a frozen image of petrified unrest.What befalls the reader is the inability to retell the event of the fall that marks the

" As Lindsay Waters suggests, there is a good chance that Cortázar read Pierre Klossowski's(abbreviated) French translation of Benjamin's "Work of Art" while living in Paris in the 1950s (139).

CORTÁZAR'S READING OF BENJAMIN & POE / 255

unique effect of the short story. The acaecimiento of the short story thus also trig-gers the reader's fall into silence.'^

It is now possible to see how Cortázar's theory resonates with Benjamin's theoryof the atrophy of experience in modernity. For Benjamin, experience in the mod-ern age has fallen in value, a fall that is in turn experienced by the modern subjectas an endless fall: every glance at a newspaper, for example, transmits this experi-ence {Erlebnis) of the fall of experience {Erfahrung). As a result, the modern sub-ject is no longer cushioned by the network of traditional stories. Without this webof stories, the subject falls away from any notion of community or tradition, andquite literally falls into silence. It is precisely this experience of falling into silencethat Cortázar theorizes as the central effect of a cuento. Following Benjamin, Cor-tázar insists that the condition of the short story is its very brevity: the cuento is theabkürzen or recorte—the cutting short—of traditional storytelling, and for that rea-son transmits the shock of an event, what Cortázar calls a "knockout." Cortázarfurther theorizes this fall in terms of the technique of "cutting." The apertureproduced by the short story not only knocks out the reader but also is a "secuestromomentáneo," an instantaneous kidnapping ("Cuento" 378). Suddenly the readeris arrested by the story, set apart and cut off from any previous context. This sepa-ration happens against the reader's will—as a function of reading regardless ofintention. In fact, one could say that this act of sequestration is the short story'sway of citing the reader: to be sequestered by the story is also to be quoted, to becited by the aperture that the story opens up. To read a short story is therefore tobe open to the event of the reader's own ruination: what "befalls" the reader is theevent {acaecimiento) of falling into the trap of the short story. Unlike traditionalstorytelling, the short story does not connect the reader to the experience of thecollective unconscious. Rather, the short story violently cuts off the possibility ofconnection and freezes the reader in a suspended state. In this way, the cuento takesthe fall of experience as its enabling condition.

However, the aperture produced by the cuento is not simply violent (although thisviolence cannot be denied). It is important to note that the aperture is also quiteclearly an opening and a beginning: the apertura or inauguration of somethingnew. He writes: "the purpose [of the writer] entails, among other things, the real-ization of the environment proper to the tale, which obliges one to keep reading,which traps one's attention and isolates the reader from everything that surroundshim, so that later, upon finishing the tale, the reader may find himself connected

'* It is useful al this point to refer to the way trauma theory has similarly emphasized the event ofa fall. For example, in his analysis of Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, Kevin Newmark concludes:"The resultant fall, or trauma, that lies hidden in reading the [Baudelaireian] text is therefore onethat now must befall the reader, whose sole task is to register and understand what actually doestake place in all these texts" (253). Similarly, Cathy Caruth focuses on the event of falling whenspeaking abotit the structtue of delay in tratimatic experience. By reading Paul de Man's theory inrelation to Kant, Caruth shows "how the problem of reference became, in the history of thought,inextricably bound up with the fact of literal falling" (75). She goes on to explain: "In de Man'stext, as in Kant's, the impact of reference is felt in falling . . . This significance has the weight of aparadox: that reference emerges not in its accessibility to perception, but in the resistance of lan-guage to perceptual analogies; that the impact of reference is felt, not in the search for an externalreferent, but in the necessity, and failtire, of theory . . . What theory does, de Man tells tis repeat-edly, is fall; and in falling, it refers" (89-90).

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to his circumstance in a new way . . . " ("Cuento" 378). The aperture is thereforeboth the violent end of the reader's previous life and the beginning of somethingnew. The act of reading a short story traces an arc that follows a negative momentof violence and separation, only to return on the other side of the arc to an"enriched, deeper, and more beautiful" circumstance (378). The event of falling—the acaecimiento—is a negative effect that the subject traverses momentarily untilbeing able to rise up again, this time within a higher state or a new circumstance.

Cortázar's theory of the cuento or short story, then, is itself a story about theHegelian subject who rises out of a negative moment in order to reach a new begin-ning, a sublimated state. The apertura of the short story is the mark of this dialec-tic, and the word itself shifts in meaning as it moves along the dialectic."^ In its firstmoment, the apertura produces a violent shock effect that loosens the subject froma particular context. On its return arc, the apertura becomes the inauguration ofsomething new. The true story of any short story is this double movement: first, amoment of disconnection and pétrification, which takes place while reading orwriting the short story; second, a moment of reconnection and a link to a new lifeas the subject moves away from the short story. In effect, the possibility of enteringhistory is predicated on this ability to enter into the story presented by the form ofthe cuento. Indeed, regardless of the actual content of this or that short story, theform itself ends up transmitting the possibility of a political relation, of a relationto a new polis. As Cortázar puts it at the end of his essay, a great short story is onethat would function as a pure transmission: "it will have to transmit to the readeras all fundamental things are transmitted: from blood to blood, from hand tohand, from one person to another [de hombre a hombre]" ("Cuento" 385). Thisfuture short story (it should be reiterated that this essay was first delivered to anaudience in Cuba in 1963) would present the conditions for a true polis: a politicalcommunity founded on the pure transmission of the form of the cuento.

However, it should be emphasized that the short story does not overtly tell apolitical story; rather, the form of the cuento is important only for its transforma-

'" In order to explain the movement of sublimation (stiblation or Aufliebung), Hegel uses what hecalls the speculative or philosophical proposition. For instance, in the sentence "God is being,"there is normally (that is, grammatically) a distinction between subject (God) and predicate (being).However, in the speculative sentence, the subject loses its objective basis and is continuously thrustinto the predicate, while the predicate finds itself already in the subject. As Hegel puts it, thini<ingsuffers a negative counter-thrust in the spectilative sentence: "Starting from the Subject as thotighthis were a permanent ground, it finds that, since the Predicate is really the Substance, the Subjecthas passed over into the Predicate, and, by this very fact, has been sublated" (37). What seemed previ-ously like a mere accident (a mere predicate of the subject) is in the speculative sentence revealedto be a crticial moment in the progress of thinking. As Werner Hamacher explains, tising Hegel'sexample "God is being" to indicate the movement of the speculative sentence: "The subject can nolonger appear as the bearer of accidents, but instead combines and closes with its predicates, inso-far as every accident now presents a case of essential predication and therefore reveals itself as cosub-stantial with essence . . . The subject, 'God,' 'falls,' into the universal and is lost, but in its fall intobeing, which is its essence, it is 'sublated' and finds itself unified with its whole speculative move-ment of all and sublation: it becomes the concept" (6). For a discussion oí Aufliebung (sublation orsublimation) as the exemplary speculative word, see Lyotard: "If thought's delight culminates inauflieben, it is because this term from ordinary language is also the name par excellence o[ the specu-lative operation. The Selbst, or subject of the ordinary phrase or phrase of the understanding, is circu-lated by speculative discourse among the various instances presented by that phrase. In this becom-ing, it is at once preserved and removed" (93). I suggest that Gortázar's use of the word aperturafollows a similar movement.

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tive ability, that is, its ability to cbange the life of tbe reader and to put the readerinto relation with others. In fact, wbat is at stake for Cortázar is always tbe relation-ship between "life" and "tbe written expression of life," a relationsbip that he seesas a "fraternal battle" ("Cuento" 370). In effect, Cortázar asks: How does one writea story tbat takes tbe reader's very life as tbe object of its transformations? Tbistask is the "battle" tbat takes place within tbe form of the cuento, and "tbe result [elresultado] . . . is tbe sbort story itself, a living synthesis as well as a synthesized life,something like the trembling of water inside a crystal, a fleetingness within per-manence" ("Cuento" 370). In tbis way, tbe short story turns out to be the placewbere "writing" and "life" are connected in a living syntbesis. At the same time,the form of tbe cuento would also seem to be the very condition of politics: bytaking up tbe life of tbe reader, it allows a subject to become—in a virtual way—an agent or actor in a story tbat links tbe subject witb otbers." The cuento tbus tellsthe story of tbe subject's disconnection from and subsequent reconnection witbtbe polis in a new context that might institute new political relations.

Unfortunately, this story is true only as a story, as a fiction tbat defines tbe formof tbis genre. Unlike tbe "real story" tbeorized by Benjamin and Hannah Arendt,in wbicb tbere is no true author or autbor-function, Cortázar's cuento empba-sizes tbe writer wbo creates a fictional story to forge a syntbetic life. In Arendt'sview, tbis artificiality would disqualify tbe cuento as a form of true (political) story-telling: "Tbe distinction between a real and a fictional story is precisely tbat tbelatter was 'made up' and tbe former was not made at all. Tbe real story in whicbwe are engaged as long as we live bas no visible or invisible maker because it isnot made. Tbe only 'somebody' it reveals is its bero . . . Who somebody is or waswe can know only by knowing tbe story of which be is himself the bero—bisbiography, in otber words" (Arendt 186). Although Cortázar explicitly hopes thatthe cuento might be the space in which one migbt resolve tbe conflict betweenlife as it is lived and tbe narrated version of life ("life" and "tbe written expres-sion of life"), this resolution takes place only in fiction. In reality, tbe subjectremains trapped within the form of tbe cuento.^^ Once the story bas begun, it is

" Cf. Arendt: "That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a storywith beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great storywithout beginning and end" (184). It is worth remembering that Arendt's minimal definition ofpolitics is "action" between human agents: "Action, the only activity that goes on directly betweenmen withotit the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plural-ity, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of thehuman condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically ¿Ae condition—notonly the condilio sine qua non, but the condilio per quam—of all political life" (7). Arendt goes on tonote that action "creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history" (Arendt 9). However,action without speech is no longer action (178-79). For that reason, political action only takesplace as the unfolding of the actor's story. In Renarración y descentramiento, Hermann Herlinghausnotes this relation between Arendt and Benjamin in his discussion of the storytelling practices ofSubcommander Marcos (see especially chapters 6 and 7).

'* Cohen arrives at a similar conclusion in his reading of "Las babas del diablo": "The transformationof the lived into the photographed—'the seeing' into 'the seen'—cannot for Michel dispel the disqui-eting aspects of the scene [caught by the camera].... Far from prodticing a tranquil fixation of thatmorning onto photographic paper, the camera has turned out to be the machine that recapitulates,Michel realizes as he stares beyond his typewriter, all the undecidability of the scene" (21 ). AlthoughCohen does not refer to Cortázar's essays on the cuento, his argument interestingly suggests that thiscomparison between photography and writing a short story is already at play in this early short story.

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impossible to rejoin life within a new context. Although the story might end withthe reader's reconnection to the world, the reader cannot in fact leave the form ofthe cuento behind in order to find a new connection to life. Like the water trem-bling inside the frozen crystal, the reader remains petrified within the form of theshort story.

Of course, this is not to say that the reader does not find a new life in this frozencrystal. As Cortázar insists, within the form of the short story the reader findsa living synthesis of "life" and "the written expression of life": a synthesized life.However, this new life is not Arendt's version of the "biographical"; rather, this newlife is fabricated or synthesized in the crystalline structure of the cuento. The shortstory turns out to be the image of a necessarily artificial life that allows the readerto survive. To be able to live at all, the reader must remain trapped within the formof the short story. In a way, Cortázar is simply taking Benjamin's conclusions totheir limit: if storytelling was responsible for connecting the reader to unconsciousexperience or Erfahrung, the short story must take up this task in a new way. How-ever, to ask that the cuento reduplicate what the "real story" once performed is toask the impossible, since experience {Erfahrung) is already going through a pro-cess of irreversible decay. The best the storyteller can do in the modern age isproduce a kind of artificial storytelling. This fake "real story" therefore cannotbe the condition of politics in the way that it is defined by Arendt (the possibilityof becoming the agent of one's own story). But at the same time, the short storyis not simply a form that produces without consequence a unique effect. In Cor-tázar's hands, this seemingly innocent form is nothing other than a kind of artifi-cial respiration machine: the reader plugs into this storytelling machine in order tolive, in order to have a life, albeit a synthetic one. Rather than connect the reader toa continuous unconscious experience, the short story produces a petrified imageof experience, an artificial Erfahrung.

In this way, Cortázar suggests that the death of storytelling has been subli-mated into the form of the short story. Storytelling now takes place as a machinethat always produces the same narrative in two stages. In a first moment, themachine reproduces the shock that marks the "fall" from storytelling and tbattransmits the pure event in itself; this shock severs the subject from a life that wasno longer connected to Erfahrung in the first place. In the second moment, themachine produces a kind of synthetic Erfahrung that enables the subject to surviveafter the decay of experience. The subject then necessarily remains trapped withinthe story, petrified in its crystalline structure. Cortázar suggests that the cuentoquite literally marks the afterlife of storytelling as well as the afterlife of every-thing else that depends on this lost practice; it introduces the afterlife of memory,experience, politics, and history. The cuento, then, does not refer to this or thatshort story, but rather to a generalized mode of telling an artificial story that pro-duces, as an effect, an artificial polis. However, precisely to the extent that the cuentois an artificial structure, this new polis cannot be performed as the full presenceof the "people" or as the expression of a full political experience. In this sense,his theory is Utopian: it is an attempt to rethink utopia as the non-place of story-telling, that is, as a non-community tbat takes place, as an event, through the nar-ration of a cuento. For Cortázar, a new political community can only be forged

CORTÁZAR'S READING OF BENJAMIN & POE / 259

through the paradoxical act of teUing the story of the absence of community, acommunity that is always about to arrive. Therefore, the aftedife of storytellingis also the beginning of a politics to come.

Galifornia State University, Fullerton

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