62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar

First published:62: Modelo para armar, 1968 (English translation, 1972)

Type of plot: The novel as play

Time of work: Uncertain; possibly the 1950’s or the 1960’s

Locale: Paris, London, Vienna, Arcueil, and an imaginary city

Principal Characters:

• Juan, an Argentine translator
• Hélène, a young French anesthetist
• Marrast, a French sculptor
• Nicole, a French illustrator and the mistress of Marrast
• Tell, a Danish woman, Juan’s travel companion
• Calac, an Argentine writer and critic
• Polanco, another Argentine, the inseparable friend of Calac
• Celia, a young French teenager who is pampered by the group
• Austin, a young English lutenist
• Feuille Morte, a female character whose only words are “Bisbis”
• The Paredros, an impersonal entity

The Novel

The novel begins on the twenty-fourth of December in Paris. As Juan spends Christmas Eve alone in a gloomy restaurant, he examines the relationship between thought, word, and action and he questions the value of reasoning itself. The deceiving nature of memory is then explored in passages which change swiftly and without warning from a first-to a second-and third-person narrator. Glimpses of specific details of what is going to happen, or has already happened, are introduced mostly through Juan’s thoughts. In the midst of a labyrinthine beginning, which will set the tone of the text, some explanation is provided as to what constitutes the city and the paredros, key elements in the book.

For a great part of the novel, the friends are scattered in different European cities. In London, Marrast, Nicole, Calac, and Polanco amuse themselves at the expense of the British and their sense of decorum. Yet if a museum and the streets of London offer the possibilities of freedom and games, inside their room of the Gresham Hotel Marrast and Nicole live their last days together. Nicole is in love with Juan, and Marrast becomes the frustrated witness of her melancholy. Their exasperating state of mind is portrayed carefully by the use of dialogue, inner reflections, or letters.

At the same time, Juan is translating for an international conference in Vienna, accompanied by Tell. Tell, the crazy Dane, as Juan calls her, makes him forget the treachery of language, and her sense of humor relieves him from the pain of his unrequited love for Hélène. In their pursuit of play, they decide to follow the steps of Frau Marta—a gray, repulsive old lady—whom they have watched develop a bizarre friendship with a young English female tourist. Tell and Juan couple their wish of adventure with the historical background of a legend and become detectives in a modern story of vampirism.

In Paris, the attention is focused on Hélène, an anesthetist, and the teenage Celia. The same day that Celia runs away from home, Hélène has lost a young man—who reminds her of Juan—at the operating table. The anesthetist invites Celia to her apartment; the prose switches back and forth between Celia’s surprisingly mature and thoughtful analysis of Hélène and Hélène’s memories and her actual displacement to the streets of the imaginary city. In the city she searches for a certain hotel and for a certain room where she is to deliver a package. Dialogue and interior monologue cut into each other constantly, and any attempt to establish a rational continuity is doubly frustrated by the tale of Juan and Tell in Vienna, which alternates with the episode in Paris. That night, Hélène seduces Celia in a scene which is presented both in a lyric and a violent fashion. The broken doll in the morning, and Celia’s horrified scream at its sight, stress the dark and mysterious aspect of the plot.

Shortly before the final gathering of the group, the various tensions produced by desire and adventure and play come to their conclusion. Nicole attempts suicide; Celia falls in love with Austin, the young English lutenist adopted in fun by Calac and Polanco in London, and Hélène and Juan finally confront each other and see themselves reliving the myth of Diana and Acteon. Nearing the end of the novel, all of the friends, including Feuille Morte and Osvaldo, a pet snail, converge in France. The occasion is the unveiling of the statue of Vercingetorix, sculpted by Marrast and commissioned by the city of Arcueil. The sculpture turns out to be quite scandalous, for it appears that the hero of Gaulle has its backside pointing heavenward. On their return to Paris, Hélène and Juan keep repeating the same words, their language and themselves unable to advance anywhere except toward the city, the imaginary city which has haunted them from the start. It is in the room of a hotel where Hélène had a date, where she was to make a delivery, that Juan finds her, Austin’s dagger in her chest, her body crushing the package, which contains a doll. As the train approaches Paris, Calac, Tell, and Polanco wait anxiously at the gate for Feuille Morte, who appears to have been forgotten. Feuille Morte, delighted at being rescued, ends the book with a joyful “Bisbis bisbis.” Echoes of the initial fragments of the book come to mind as in déjà vu. To find out if all the parts of the model kit are really there, at this point in the novel, the reader is unavoidably tempted to return with Juan to a gloomy Parisian restaurant on Christmas Eve.

The Characters

It is in section 62 of Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) that the basic components of 62: A Model Kit are to be found. Morelli, a character in Hopscotch, is working on a book in which the actors “would appear unhealthy or complete idiots.” He adds that “any standard behavior (including the most unusual, its deluxe category) would be inexplicable by means of current instrumental psychology.” In the introduction to 62: A Model Kit, Cortázar warns the reader about the various transgressions in the novel at the level of the characters or the plot. The former, it is true, behave in a very bizarre manner: They are childlike, unpredictable, or caught in a web of thought that laboriously seeks for answers which are never given. They have no complete names, they have no background or history other than the one that involves them in the zone, their common territory. Cortázar has thus stripped from his characters the traits which traditionally enhance development in a realistic manner.

In certain cases, it is possible to establish a few associations. Juan, for example, who works (perhaps) for the United Nations, brings to mind Cortázar himself. Some characters in Hopscotch find their parallels in this novel. Juan’s main intellectual ruminations are similar to Oliveira’s; Hélène, the loner of the group, in her serious and ordered life mirrors Pola; Tell, innocent and unreflective, reminds one of La Maga. Calac and Polanco, like so many of Cortázar’s literary figures, are both Argentine writers displaced in Paris, and they depict intensely the aspect of life valued by the author. They are also the most eminent speakers of an invented language shared by the group—to the dismay of good citizens around them—that echoes the giglico speech of Hopscotch.

Following the usual manner in which characters are presented, it is also possible, for example, to see Nicole and Tell as opposites. For Nicole, living has been reduced to perpetual introspection and a sense of passive bondage; for Tell, on the other hand, life is seen as action and freedom of movement. Marrast is tortured, torn between a free intellectual, artistic unconventionality and the traps that his love for Nicole sets for him. Couples do not fare well in Cortázar’s novels. Love is described as a possessive, closed universe that curtails erotic freedom and play. Thus, Celia and Austin, in the mutual discovery of their bodies, depict the beauty of the erotic side of human desire; in their narrow and private world, by contrast, they become merely ordinary.

Any in-depth analysis of the characters of 62: A Model Kit will be frustrated by the author’s designs to de-psychologize the classic individuality given to characterization. Consequently, the language and the tools to study the protagonists in a traditional way will always fall short and outside the realm of the novel itself. The very essence of the ego’s subconscious is devalued by the fact that the group dreams in common. The paredros, an impersonal entity who at any given time can speak for any character without ever being identified, stresses further the notion of the decentered subject.

Critical Context

No doubt there is the temptation to see the incoherent plot and erratic behavior of the characters as a theme of the existentialist absurd. Cortázar, nevertheless, had refuted in Hopscotch the existentialist project, and in the dialogues between Marrast and Nicole, he refutes it once more. It is no longer a matter of capitalizing on an established theme, which after all tends to bind man to an irreversible existing condition in the world. The cut piece of the postcard from Bari, Italy, shows rather clearly the author’s intentions: “upside down and cut out, on a different stairway, from a different step,” the little segment detaches itself from reality to become an object of pure beauty. Cortázar, therefore, tries to do away with the terminology by which man and life have been made so far explainable in pragmatic, realistic notions. He alters the order of the pieces and disrupts the expected pattern of novel (and life) to find out whether a puzzle with new shapes and perspectives can be achieved.

Bibliography

Alazraki, Jaime, and Ivar Ivask, eds. The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Perhaps the finest collection of criticism on Cortázar, a representative sampling of his best critics covering all the important aspects of his fictional output.

Boldy, Steven. The Novels of Julio Cortázar. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980. The introduction provides a helpful biographical sketch linked to the major developments in Cortázar’s writing. Boldy concentrates on four Cortázar novels: The Winners, Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit, and A Manual for Manuel. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Guibert, Rita. Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. New York: Knopf, 1973. Includes an important interview with Cortázar, who discusses both his politics (his strenuous objection to U.S. interference in Latin America) and many of his fictional works.

Harss, Luis, and Barabara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Includes an English translation of an important interview in Spanish.

Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis. Amsterdam: J. Benjamin, 1981. This is a part of the Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, volume 8. Cortázar praised this study for its rigor and insight.

Peavler, Terry L. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peavler begins with an overview of Cortázar’s life and career and his short stories of the fantastic, the mysterious, the psychological, and the realistic. Only one chapter is devoted exclusively to his novels. Includes chronology, notes, annotated bibliography, and index.

Stavans, Ilan. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. See especially the chapters on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Cortázar’s fiction, his use of the fantastic, and his reliance on popular culture. Stavans also has a section on Cortázar’s role as writer and his interpretation of developments in Latin American literature. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Yovanovich, Gordana. Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Three chapters focus on Cortázar’s four major novels and his fluctuating presentations of character as narrators, symbols, and other figures of language. Includes notes and bibliography.