all truth is crooked, even time is a circle.

ooh literary theory, i will make you accessible if it's the last thing i do. how much does perspective have to do with truth? think on't a minute. let that percolate.... ok, here we go. instead of getting lost in the story, some stories require that you lose yourself. if a story depends on its reader's interpretation and effort to make sense (or meaning), it is not complete until the reader reads it and constructs his or her own meaning from it. 

the concepts of where a work of literature sits in history, the author's intentions, and what the reader brings to the text are not new. they are, however, SO MUCH FUN. especially since every stinkin single person is so flingin'-flangin' different. this brings into question all kinds of super-stimulating ideas about accuracy of history depending on author (the victor writes the history books, etc.), and the applicability of the message (to place oneself in a character's shoes, the character must wear the same size). i have no intention of addressing all this today, but i wanted to start here so that i can drill down and show you what happens when you play with 'what really happened' in a story if the author gives you multiple perspectives.

Julio Cortazar's 62: A Model Kit employs an open stylistic form that demands that the reader actively participate to construct meaning. even more unique, this postmodern strategy is taken one step further by the inclusion of an elusive type of "other," called in the novel the paredros. it has no direct translation - it's an egyptian term meaning something like 'one who sits beside,' but consider the paredros to be the 'other,' 'attendant,' 'alternate,' etc. somewhat companion, somewhat voyeur. ooooooo blowin' your mind!


to give you just a tiny bit of an idea of what the book is "about"... it's to do with a group of friends. and they hang out. and talk about stuff. and theeyyy like each other and have little trysts. they have silly conversations and deep conversations. there are arguments. one character is named Feuille Morte (french: dead leaf) and never speaks. you will recognize things. they have mutual ground.. called the City. not necessarily A city, but perhaps where ever they are all together or sharing something... is home. ok, i realize it's still super vague. here's some of the copy on the back flap:

First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortazar's brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called "City." As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, 'seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!' It is the setting where the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order are discarded and the reader is taken on a daring and exiting new experience of life itself.  

the OTHER!
characters within the novel speak to and about their paredros, yet the reader is left to assemble an idea of what or who this is. Likewise, the reader is left to assemble a great amount of "plot" throughout the novel, as the surrealistic prose not only moves back and forth through time, but also merges physical cities into one pseudo-metaphysical City. the narcissitic "i" suggests that so much is required of the reader in this novel that the reader becomes the paredros of the text, the ultimate Other, mediating the text itself. the one who defines what the book is and isn't.


as the title implies, 62: A Model Kit requires some assembly. Cortazar makes a number of postmodern literary moves throughout the text, beginning with the first sentence:

Not a few readers will notice the various transgressions of literary convention here.

how kind of him to forewarn the reader that the novel will follow no realistic concept of time or meaning, and that whatever tale the reader ends up constructing out of it will be 

the book he has chosen to read.

while the reader must finish the novel by creating coherence and making connections between characters and events, she or he also essentially becomes a part of the novel, acting as 'the other.' the one outside the situations, apart from the characters, is the only one who can see all and find a way to create meaning from an otherwise disoriented set of individual events and thoughts. does this give you any new perspective on history? nonfiction? anything anyone ever tells you, ever? ok, ok, ok.


so you have something to make you read the awesomeness of this book... the narrative beings with by easing the reader into this sense of interconnected/connectedness (not quite as confusing as it sounds). our (first) narrator overhears a remark in a diner just as he's glancing inside a book he bought, and for some pages the reader is lead through a labyrinth of jumbled memories and connections. one critic explained it eloquently as

the unpacking of the resonances and associations embedded in that simple moment of eavesdropping.

this narrator thinks on the causal relationship between past events, friends, and even the book he chose to buy 'with the tacit certainty that [it] would be lost forever in the bookcase.' already a vague relational metaphor is made. while he reflects on the relationship between his opening a book he never intended to read to a specific page while overhearing the 'fat diner,' the reader of 62: A Model Kit is still pondering Cortazar's point of the previous page regarding this book being 'the book has chosen to read.'


back to how we each bring something unique to a text... Cortazar plays with this all over this fantastic novel, allowing his characters to be as jumbled and unique as his readers. there are so many things in this novel that can be connected (or not) and it takes the reader to tie them together. that's a lot of work. but so much fun. 


oh, and so it makes possibly a tiny bit more sense, the title of this post is from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.