\"Unfrozen Music: Disrupted Synaesthesia in Julio Cortázar\'s Paris\"

1! Vaughn Anderson Rutgers University

Writing Sample: "Unfrozen Music: Disrupted Synaesthesia in Julio Cortázar's Paris"

The following article appeared in Hispanic Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring, 2013. pp. 115-129.

Abstract: Although the postmodern tradition of theorizing Paris that began with Henri Lefebvre and continued through Michel De Certeau has borne a fraught relationship with the Surrealist urbanism from which it drew early inspiration, Julio Cortázar manages to bring these traditions back together through music. In this essay I treat Cortázar and Lefebvre as contemporaries, reading each through the other, and show how their use of music in text critically revises a Surrealist tradition of collaboration between the arts. By focusing primarily on Cortázar's text in París: ritmos de una ciudad, I demonstrate the way in which a consideration of music within this work on the city adds to an already rich body of criticism on his incorporation of image into text.

2! Unfrozen Music: Disrupted Synaesthesia in Julio Cortázar's Paris In París: ritmos de una ciudad (1981), a collaborative work by Julio Cortázar and photographer Alecio de Andrade, Cortázar describes Paris by playing with Goethe's characterization of architecture as frozen music: “sus formas acaban siempre musicalizándose en otras facetas del poliedro mental, y en el instante de recordar a la ciudad, cuántas veces lo que viene es un ritmo, una arquitectura de la música allí donde la visión goethiana gira su medalla para mostrar su reverso igualmente válido” (París: ritmos). Cortázar returns fluidity to Goethe's metaphor by inverting it. Rather than making any specific claim about the nature of architecture or music, he identifies an inscrutability in the relationship between them. Cortázar indicates that no single medium can fully capture urban experience, and finds adequate expression of it only in the ever-shifting correspondences between various media. So it is that Cortázar uses a Romantic metaphor, expressed in high modernist rhetoric, to convey a postmodern sentiment. A collision of temporalities pervades París: ritmos. Although Cortázar invokes various versions of Paris, from the medieval to the contemporary, he gives pride of place to the surrealist city. Rather than simply resurrecting a defunct or out-of-fashion surrealist city, Cortázar treats surrealism’s prominent place in writing Paris as a living legacy. In this essay I argue that it is through music that Cortázar transforms and reclaims surrealist aesthetics for the task of expressing the experience of a contemporary Paris. As in its play with Goethe, París: ritmos disrupts the harmony of a surrealist synaesthesia, using music to unsettle any potentially stable representational relationship between text, image, and city space. Although the postmodern tradition of theorizing Paris that began with Henri Lefebvre has borne a fraught relationship with the surrealist urbanism from which it drew early inspiration,

3! Cortázar manages to bring these traditions back together through music. In this essay I treat Cortázar and Lefebvre as contemporaries, reading each through the other, to show how their use of music critically revises a surrealist tradition of collaboration between the arts. Before returning to my discussion of París: ritmos, I will briefly discuss Cortázar's use of surrealist urbanism, as well as the way in which a consideration of music within this work on the city adds to an already rich body of criticism on his incorporation of image into text.

Cortázar's Surrealist Paris

Henri Lefebvre, in introducing his seminal text, The Production of Space (1974), argues for a “unitary theory” with an aim to “discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended separately” (Lefebvre 11). As Edward Soja notes in Thirdspace, Lefebvre’s sweeping “unitary theory”—which works to break out of rigid dualisms within and between idealism and materialism—remains among the most striking aspects of his work on space, setting Lefebvre apart as “heretical and original from the start, . . . vigorously resisting any form of dogmatic closure or essentialism, always making sure to keep Marxism radically open to creative renewal” (Soja 37). This impulse away from dualism, Soja argues, stems from Lefebvre’s early association with surrealism and that movement’s constant push to question and revolutionize means of representation. Lefebvre, in his “conceptual triad” of perceived space (spatial practice), conceived space (representations of space), and representational space, constantly favored the latter, which he also termed “lived space.” It is this often elusive “lived space/space of representation” that Soja reads as both distinct from the other two and also

4! encompassing them. Representational space refers not to the mere description of space, but to its daily inhabitation and its use in representation, especially in art. Foregrounding as it does the means of representing space while retaining the partial unknowability of spaces of representation, this lived/representational space bears the distinct mark of surrealist artistic practice. While Lefebvre derides what he sees as surrealism’s substitution of poetry for politics, as well as the eventual sensationalism of techniques like automatic writing, he nevertheless acknowledges that surrealist aesthetics retain theoretical import:

The leading surrealists sought to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of the transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life. Consequently surrealism has a theoretical import which was not originally recognized. (Lefebvre 18)

For Lefebvre, the contribution of various surrealist strains was their emphasis on, and revision of, the means of representation. Most important in the work of surrealists like Breton or Aragon, for Lefebvre, is not the moment of departure from pure subjective space, nor the moment of arrival at some totalizing transposition, but rather the transition between those spaces—the motion of representation itself. As with the Freudian dreamwork on which surrealism drew, the process of translation here comes to the fore.

5! Proceeding to a discussion of the theoretical import of surrealist work, Lefebvre quickly dismisses the movement's poetic production as a failure according to its own terms of totalizing synthesis. However, his treatment of surrealism reduces it to the early work of Breton and Aragon. If we open that framework, no better vindication can be found of surrealist practices— on Lefebvre’s terms, at least—than the work of Cortázar, an Argentine exile writing in Paris some quarter century after Breton’s 1925 “Surrealist Manifesto.” As Julie Jones notes, for Cortázar "the Golden Age of the city is the early twentiethcentury period of artistic experimentation, which culminated in surrealism" (Jones 27). Similarly, Jean Franco notes that Rayuela (1963) presents "a literary vision of the city filtered through the Surrealists" (Franco "Paris" 276). Throughout his career Cortázar would experiment with surrealist theory through fictional practice, but this never becomes programmatic in the way that Lefebvre finds surrealist theory deflated in its accumulated manifestos. Cortázar engages surrealism as practice—as a collection of various (and not necessarily harmonious) aesthetics, gestures, and languages, and not as any single coherent movement. Cortázar’s critical stance toward surrealist aesthetics has been underappreciated. Franco, for example, in The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, quickly encapsulates him as a writer who "resurrected surrealism from the graveyard, while inserting theories of writing into his novel Rayuela” (Franco 5). However, rather than reducing surrealism to a single movement (as Franco does here), Cortázar demonstrates that surrealist practice had provided aesthetic theory still alive and in circulation. By the time that Cortázar arrived in Paris in 1951 any coherent surrealist movement had dissolved, splintering and inspiring various other movements, most prominent among which was the urbanism-oriented Situationist International. Like Cortázar’s fiction, the situationists’ early formulations of “psychogeography” would look to the commentary on urban experience

6! provided by early works by Aragon and Breton, to which Merlin Coverly ascribes an "absence of plot and digressive style that mirrors the aimless journeys they recount” (Coverly 21). When Rayuela's Horacio Oliveira famously asks, “Encontraría la Maga?” Cortázar immediately evokes the surrealist novels that also inspired Ivain and the psychogeographers. As Coverly points out, André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), among other works, “seemed to revolve unerringly around the pursuit of beautiful women” (Coverly 21). Much of Cortázar’s work on Paris, like psychogeography, adopts surrealist tropes not to call forth the vanished pre-war Paris of Breton and Aragon, but as part of an effort to work through that Paris toward another. In understanding the ways in which urban experience shapes Cortázar’s use of surrealist aesthetics of urban writing, it becomes necessary to look at his constant defiance of conventional boundaries between different media. Marcy Schwartz, in “Cortázar Under Exposure,” argues for Cortázar as an “urban writer whose experience and recreation of the city rely on extraverbal texts” (117). Beginning with a quotation from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”), Schwartz signals the ways in which Cortázar’s incorporation of image into text both takes its impulse from an experience of urban space, and fundamentally shapes the spaces of his texts. Urban space, Schwartz argues, “provides the architectural framework, and visual art the metaphorical analogue, for his ontological experimentation and revolutionary esthetics” ("Cortázar Under Exposure" 118). As Schwartz points out, the way in which Cortázar's works allow image and text to collaborate in the representation of space challenges conventional assumptions about how urban space is experienced. It is through a crossing of boundaries between various media, however, and

7! not only image and text, that Cortázar frees surrealist techniques from the limitations of being merely imitative or representational of urban experience. While Cortázar’s playful manipulation of spatio-temporality has not been overlooked, a consideration of music disrupts any potentially stable relationship between image and text, and demands that we reconsider the way in which Cortázar appropriates a surrealist Paris.

Cortázar, Music and Surrealism

It was on March 2, 1959 that Julio Cortázar, seated in the audience at the Pleyel auditorium in Paris, watched Lester Young give one of the last performances of his life. Later Cortázar would dedicate to it the first passage in his book of essays, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967). Of “Three Little Words,” the third song in Young’s set, Cortázar exclaims:

por el jazz salgo siempre a lo abierto, me libro del cangrejo de lo idéntico para ganar esponja y simultaneidad porosa, una participación que en esa noche de Lester era un ir y venir de pedazos de estrellas, de anagramas y palindromas . . . , fue la vuelta al día en ochenta mundos porque a mí me funciona la analogía como a Lester el esquema melódico que lo lanzaba al reverso de la alfombra donde los mismos hilos y los mismos colores se tramaban de otra manera. (7)

8! Though Cortázar sets off into his Vuelta al día with no apparent itinerary, writing about any and every art that intrigues him, he reserves his highest praise for jazz. As Sara Castro-Klarén argues, Cortázar finds in "the fluid, forever-becoming structure of improvised jazz melody" an analogue for the "porous, non-substantial, open structure for the self, the world and knowledge" (CastroKlarén 141-42). Cortázar’s praise of a peculiarly Bebop aesthetic participates in a popular postsurrealist enthusiasm for jazz that avoids Sartre’s near myopic focus on skin color and resists falling into the more conventional atavism that became the standard reception for American jazz in Montmartre.1 In contrast to the programmatic atavism of Parisian jazz critics like Hugues Panassié, Cortázar’s jazz writing is unconcerned with finding the essence of the music or defining the limits of the genre. Generally Cortázar focuses less on what the music is than on its effect, and what it has the potential to do—to the musician, the audience, and the text. As Lester Young’s famous standard carries the writer “around the day in eighty worlds,” music becomes that which both reveals the limits of textual representation and also allows Cortázar to imagine ways of playing with those limits. Notably, both volumes of Vuelta al día also incorporate images, but it is when the text addresses music that it most emphatically gestures outside of itself. It alludes to “el esquema melódico que lo lanzaba [a Lester] al reverso de la alfombra,” but chooses not to show (Vuelta 7). While that musical experience can never translate directly into text, the form of the text nevertheless reveals that absence as a force at work within its margins. It pervades the text as a constant point of reference, and as an impetus behind Cortázar’s much-noted sense of formal play and improvisation.2 Writing in 1979, Lefebvre would look back at the early surrealist work of Breton and Aragon with dismissal for what he sees as their attempts to achieve total synthesis and unity

9! through poetics, especially as that poetic project overlooks music and listening in privileging the perceived over the act of perception.

[Surrealism] prefers the visual to the act of seeing, rarely adopts a ‘listening’ posture, and curiously neglects the musical both in its mode of expression and, even more, in its central ‘vision.’ ‘It was as though the deep night of human existence had suddenly been pierced,’ writes Breton, ‘as though natural necessity had consented to become one with logical necessity and so plunged all things into a state of total transparency.’ (Lefebvre 19; italics his)

Initially striking here is the resonance between Breton’s opaque claim for a state of total transparency and Cortázar’s cryptic allusion to “lo abierto” or a “simultaneidad porosa.” However, Cortázar provides exactly the revision of Breton for which Lefebvre is calling. Not only does Cortázar incorporate music into his poetics, but he does so in a way that privileges the experience of listening over that which is actually heard. Accordingly, the means of representation itself comes to the fore in the text as the art it references exists within it only as a perceptible absence. Cortázar structures his writing in Vuelta al día through what he finds to be the impossibility of conveying the experience of Bebop through words. As Cortázar will further emphasize in “El perseguidor” (1959), a novella based on the life of Bebop legend Charlie Parker, what interests Cortázar most in music is not an arrival at some revelatory state but rather the pursuit of it. Cortázar values the process of jazz over the music as product. Roland Barthes, in Image/Music/Text, differentiates between music as it is heard and

10! music as it is played, but for Cortázar these two become indistinguishable (Barthes 149). In Rayuela, jazz improvisation provides a template for both creation and interpretation of text. Likewise, "El perseguidor" characterizes both the performance and spectatorship of jazz as "pursuit," using this as a metaphor and model for both the process of writing and the process of reading. Cortázar values pursuit for its own sake, adapting once again the iconic searches that structure surrealist works by Breton or Aragon. While the surrealist search is a journey toward a utopian moment of arrival, any arrival at all is ultimately beside the point for Johnny, Cortázar's protagonist in "El perseguidor." In Thirdspace, Edward Soja claims a place for music at the center of Lefebvre’s revolutionary, cross-disciplinary “trialectics” of conceived, perceived, and lived (representational) spaces. Discussing the structure of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Soja says:

perhaps Lefebvre was presenting The Production of Space as a musical composition, with a multiplicity of instruments and voices playing together at the same time. . . . The text could be read as a polyphonic fugue that assertively introduced its keynote themes early on and then changed them intentionally in contrapuntal variations that took radically different forms and harmonies. (Soja 9)

For Soja this musical aesthetic lies at the heart of what he identifies as Lefebvre’s groundbreaking postmodern theory of space. Soja highlights the way in which the very form of Lefebvre’s writings interprets space in terms of “contrapuntal variations” and “polyphonic

11! fugue.” Music becomes more than a mere metaphor for urban space. It provides a structuring but plastic analogue for spatial production, and creates the possibility for a poetics of space in much the same way that Michel De Certeau would argue some years later. Music opens possibilities through poetics for Lefebvre's text, which often has been characterized as contradictory, tangled, and opaque. Lefebvre’s “unitary theory,” like Cortázar’s process-oriented jazz aesthetic, allows the impossibility of synthesis or transparency to dictate the form of text. In both cases this musical/textual aesthetic also governs the means by which space is represented.3 A consideration of music, more than merely adding to an existing discussion of the relationship between image and text in Cortázar's work, restructures the relationship between media. Music, through image and text—and vice versa—provides Cortázar with an important means of engaging urban space through text. It is through music that he most substantially revises a surrealist urban aesthetics, and it is in París: ritmos de una ciudad that he pushes this furthest.

Between Image, Music and Text

At first glance, París: ritmos seems to be a perfect transposition into text of Debord’s 1957 piece, “The Naked City,” a fragmented, cut-and-pasted diagram of a scattered Paris. As users of Debord’s piece followed arrows between fragments in any number of possible trajectories, each fragment would be associated with a specific emotion, designating it as a discrete “emotional zone.” Similarly, París: ritmos presents a text broken into passages whose intermittent separation on unnumbered pages leaves the relationship between them unclear.

12! Cortázar's collection of impressionistic, tonally variant urban chronicles initially seem organized arbitrarily, allowing the absence of linear transition to suggest the multiply-signifying association of cut-and-paste or collage. However, by the end of the piece that arbitrary quality falls away. As Marcy Schwartz points out, the initially chaotic collage of París: rítmos accrues coherence through a gradual accumulation and condensation of the various iterations of Paris that it has scattered throughout space and time: “as the ‘yo’ and the ‘viajero’ become more enmeshed, so various temporal-spatial zones of urban experiences overlap. . . . Moving through the city, reading and observing art become interchangeable activities that generate time travel” ("Cortázar Under Exposure" 131). The speaker of París: ritmos describes a time travel inherent in navigating the city, but identifies it as a rhythm. "Acaso en último término una ciudad sólo se deja aprehender por el ritmo" the speaker says, "por esa lenta acumulación de proporciones y de perspectivas que la van cartografiando en la memoria del viajero y que en algún momento cuajará para siempre y la volverá imagen definitiva" (París: ritmos). Cortázar's speaker situates this memory of the traveler's direct experience of the city (what Lefebvre calls the "lived" city) "al margen ya de los miles de imágenes acumuladas por la memoria discursiva." As Schwartz claims, urban navigation and the consumption of art become analogous and mutually transformative processes. Also important here is that, according to the speaker, the scattered fragments of the urban collage resolve themselves into a more coherent "imagen" at the same time that they become a "ritmo." Indeed, that Cortázar and Andrade refer to their respective contributions—both visual and textual—as "rhythms" suggests an overarching coherence that otherwise remains largely elusive in terms of style, subject matter, and the overall form of the book. That is, rather than interspersing text with image, Cortázar and Andrade have chosen to divide narrative and

13! photography into two distinct sections. This avoids any suggestion that the text merely accompanies the images or that the images merely illustrate the text, but it also threatens to separate them into two entirely separate works published within a single volume. Throughout the text Cortázar's brief, impressionistic sketches of a mostly depopulated urban landscape never appear to make reference to Andrade's images, which almost exclusively tend toward portraiture or a focus on figure. The authors discourage any search for a direct ekphrastic relationship between image and text, but by bringing these two media together under a third—as "ritmos"— they suggest that text and image may become parallel activities when considered as music. Just as Cortázar implies an analogy between the textual collage of his narrative and an urban "collage," suggesting (as Schwartz points out) that an understanding of art and urban space become mutually transformative, the "rhythm" of the narrative both shapes and is shaped by an experience of the city. Cortázar's characterization of the rhythm of urban space could just as easily describe the text he has created:

sigue latiendo el ritmo primordial, nos bastará doblar la esquina para volver a entrar con una lenta delicia en la sucesión de viejos inmuebles que se alternan, se responden y se continúan, allí donde la unidad nació precisamente de las diferencias creadoras, de la dialéctica de una elección dentro de la gama acatada por todos. Y ese ritmo lo dan los portales, los patios y las ventanas, su disposición y sus proporciones traduciéndose en plenitud visual, en la armonía que nace de valores musicales y táctiles, como la distrubución de los elementos en una pintura

14! lograda. La ciudad vuelve a ser ahí lo que la sensibilidad de sus habitantes quiso que fuera, una diversidad unitaria . . . . (París: ritmos)

As this passage begins, it bears a discomfiting resemblance to the rhetoric of Panassié, who would reduce music to an ability to express a universal and primordial essence behind a modernist urban project. However, while that "rítmo" threatens to become the blanket term that would give us a key to unifying a scattered collection of sketches, Cortázar treats rhythm not as a structuring term but as a de-structuring one. Suddenly, the "ritmo primordial" of urban experience shatters into a "diversidad unitaria," whose character Cortázar can only suggest through a conjunction of all other aesthetic experiences. The extreme synaesthesia of urban experience fragments into a conjunction of independent senses that refuse to synthesize or cohere. By describing their respective works as "ritmos," Cortázar and Andrade draw attention to the ways in which each medium functions here through an understanding of the others, challenging received notions of aesthetic categories by creating a trialectic on the order of that which Lefebvre identifies in The Production of Space. Each moment relies on the others, and none can exist as an aesthetic category wholly apart. As in The Production of Space, musical form in París: ritmos always exists through text, and through image as well. The three become mutually constituted and mutually defined. Like Lefebvre's "unitary theory," in which the whole can never be identical to its three shifting constituent components, Cortázar's "diversidad unitaria" describes not only the urban experience to be represented through text, but the very act of representation itself.

15! In his attempt to bring together various media Cortázar seems, once again, to take his cue from previous surrealist projects. However, in Breton, Aragon, and others, this phenomenon appears most often as a wishful or even mystical synaesthesia, as a confusion of the senses in which one sense "evokes" another. Critics often note the surrealists' use of the symbolist notion of synaesthesia, which Edward F. Kravitt finds evident in Baudelaire's formulation of correspondences (Kravitt 169). "What would be truly surprising," Baudelaire notes, "would be to find that sound could not suggest color, that colors could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and color were unsuitable for the translation of ideas" (Baudelaire 116; italics his). Barbara Guest, in "The Shadow of Surrealism," similarly says of the surrealist artistic milieu that "in that creative atmosphere of magical rites there was no recognized separation between the arts" (Guest 52). For Guest, surrealism represented not only a moment of extraordinary collaboration between the arts but also the desire to abolish the boundaries between those various media, to fuse them into a single whole. This desire for a universal identity or translatability between media finds an apt metaphor in utopian surrealist urbanism: "Those of us who shared this atmosphere," Guest says, ". . . considered ourselves part of a hemisphere where all the arts evolved around one another, a central plaza with roads which led from palette to quill to clef" (Guest 52). Guest uses this metaphor of the city to imagine a space of universal encounter. The plaza, as a central public space, becomes the model for imagining the clear, ordered, and universally intelligible exchange between media. As Schwartz claims in Writing Paris, Cortázar's "fascination with interstitial spaces" captures the "betweenness" of urban experience (Writing Paris 28). In París: ritmos, Cortázar and Andrade emphasize the impossibility of total translatability between the media, celebrating that which, in the case of each art form—here music, image, and text—will always escape the

16! ability of other media to reproduce or imitate it. In Andrade's series of photographs, for example, a run of seven consecutive images toward the center of the collection shows musicians in the act of performing. In each of the photographs Andrade includes audience members as well as artists, allowing the focus of various images to fall not on the performer but on members of the crowd. We are invited to participate in that spectacle, though we do so incompletely. Andrade constantly calls attention to the difference between our own spectatorship and that of the audiences in the photographs. Our clearest clues as to the nature of the music come through the cues of the listeners themselves: the enraptured expression of an elderly woman standing before three tuba players; the practiced indifference of a café crowd to the music of a man playing the recorder; the attraction of a street side flautist for two small children. Highlighting this difference in spectatorship, Andrade begins the series of photographs with an image of a man pretending to play an invisible flute. Here the subject of the photograph is not the unheard music of the brass band standing behind him but precisely the performer's silence—that which the photographic format allows us to hear all the more clearly. The absence of sound in the photograph—the empty pair of hands—becomes its visual point of focus. As his collection of sketches draws to a close, Cortázar ends his text in París: ritmos with the only explicit mention he will make of Andrade's photographs: "Y de la gente de la ciudad se ha hablado poco porque no era necesario: Alecio de Andrade lo hace aquí mejor que las palabras" (París: ritmos). While both text and image are brought together as "rhythms," then, Cortázar also signals their separation at the level of the capabilities of the media themselves, which become complimentary. As in Rayuela's textual collage, the narrative in París: ritmos suggests the visual image as model for both product and process, but the piece simultaneously foregrounds the fundamental difference in these media. The same is true of its treatment of

17! music. Like Andrade's photographs, Cortázar's text constantly signals its inability to reproduce the music it references. Cortázar mentions musical portraits of Paris by Gershwin or Delius, and even likens his own art to that of Schumann or Coltrane, but it remains elusive as to how this might work. Cortázar characterizes his fragments of text as ritmos, but never allows the meaning of that word to hold still. Language itself can be described as having its own rhythms, but the ritmos of Cortázar's text are never merely those of the words and sentences that comprise it. Rhythm by definition implies pattern, repetition, or recurrence, but as the narrator says toward the beginning of the text, "repetirse es aquí cambiar" (París: ritmos). The definition of ritmos is always deferred—to text, to image, and back to music again. As in Rayuela, "El perseguidor," or Vuelta al día, music in París: ritmos more often becomes a model for the activity or process of creating narrative rather than a formal analogue. If, in "El perseguidor," pursuit for its own sake would be characterized as a particularly musical endeavor, here in París: ritmos Cortázar plays with that trope, turning it inward on itself. In París: ritmos that which is pursued is precisely the ever-elusive ritmo itself. Córtázar acknowledges that in his focus on pursuit he follows in surrealist footsteps ("Yo he seguido la sombra de Robert Desnos en las callejas del Marais") although he also signals here that he is playing with this concept. What initially entered his work from surrealist narrative Cortázar now transforms into the central trope in a postmodern meditation on the nature of artistic media. The surrealist rhetoric present throughout early texts like Rayuela persists in París: ritmos, though now the focus falls on the elusiveness of the "rítmo primordial" that the book's title suggests as the texts' organizing principle. Cortázar emphasizes that ineffable, indescribable, ever-shifting space of difference between text, image, and music. The paradoxical "diversidad unitaria" so suggestively present throughout Rayuela and Vuelta al día as an aesthetically organizing

18! principle returns here to characterize the relationship between the various media. Surrealism continues to be an important presence in Cortázar's Paris, not as a discreet version of the city, like the streets along which he traces Desnos' footsteps, but as a means of viewing all the various versions of Paris that he brings together. Like Lefebvre's The Production of Space, Cortázar's text utilizes music to imagine urban experience in a way that privileges that which escapes direct representation, that which must be merely gestured at and allowed to exist apart from our ability to characterize or reproduce it. Lefebvre calls for a passive 'listening" posture, and Cortázar characterizes this willingness to acknowledge the limits of representation as uniquely musical. However, unlike Soja, who interprets the musical as an aspect of Lefebvre's work that carries him further away from his early surrealist influences, Cortázar allows music to carry him constantly back to—and through—surrealist tropes and techniques. The postmodern self-reflexivity of París: ritmos is one aimed toward the celebration, reformation, and reincorporation of the city's previous iterations. Cortázar's is not a radically new Paris but rather a "diversidad unitaria" of past Parises seen in a radically new manner. NOTES !

1

Hughes Panassié, in The Real Jazz, denouces Bebop as plagued by a "complex of 'modernism,' of 'serious music'" (Panassié 41). 2 For four exemplary studies on jazz in Cortázar, see Borello, Gordon, Sommer, and Soren Triff. 3 Cortázar’s play with spatio-temporality has been well noted. Lois Parkinson Zamora, for example, in “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror: Reflections on the Photographic Image in Latin America,” argues that motion “takes on metaphysical, psychological, and aesthetic importance” for Cortázar, and that “the visual media of film and photo become the symbolic and structural means of embodying that movement” (Parkinson Zamora, "Quetzalcóatl's Mirror" 62). See also: Parkinson Zamora, "Movement and Stasis, Film and Photo: Temporal Structures in the Recent Fiction of Julio Cortázar."

19! WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1964. Print. Borello, Rodolfo A. "Charlie Parker: 'El perseguidor.'" Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 364-66 (Oct-Dec 1981): 573-94. Print. Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Ontological Fabulation: Toward Cortázar’s Theory of Literature.” The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. Eds. Jamie Alazraki and Ivar Ivask. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1978. 140-50. Print. Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1963. Print. ---. La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores, 1967. Print. ---. "El perseguidor." Las armas secretas. Madrid: Catedra, 1978. Print. Cortázar, Julio and Alecio de Andrade. París: ritmos de una ciudad. Barcelona: Edhasa S.A., 1981. Print. Coverly, Merlin. Psychogeography. London: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Print. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1995. Print. Franco, Jean. Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.

20! ---. "Paris: ciudad fabulosa." Novelistas hispanoamericanos de hoy. Ed. Juan Loveluck. Madrid: Taurus, 1976. 271-90. Print. Gordon, Samuel. "Algunos aportes sobre crítica y 'jazz,' en la lectura de 'El perseguidor.," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 364-66 (Oct-Dec 1981): 595-608. Print. Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkley: Kelsey Street Press, 2003. Print. Jones, Julie. A Common Place: The Representation of Paris in Spanish American Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1998. Print. Kravitt, Edward F. The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1974. Print. Panassié, Hugues. The Real Jazz. Trans. Anne Sorelle Williams. New York: Barnes, 1960. Print. Schwartz, Marcy. “Cortázar Under Exposure: Photography and Fiction in the City.” Beyond the Lettered City: Latin American Literature and Mass Media. Eds. Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. 117-38. Print. ---. Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. Print. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Print. Sommer, Doris. "Grammar Trouble: Cortázar's Critique of Competence." Julio Cortázar. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. 149-81. Print.

21! Soren Triff, Eduardo. "Improvisación musical y discurso literario en Julio Cortázar." Revista Iberoamericana 57 (1991): 657-63. Print. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. "Movement and Stasis, Film and Photo: Temporal Structures in the Recent Fiction of Julio Cortázar." Review of Contemporary Fiction 3.3 (1983): 51-65. Print. ---. “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror: Reflections on the Photographic Image in Latin America.” Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America 1866-1994. Eds. Wendy Watriss and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Austin: U Texas P, 1998. 300-84. Print.