Material #2: Cortázar’s stories
“Material” can bring negative connotations of a human over-emphasis on material goods and accumulation. But in the fiction of Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar – as explored by Verónica Abrego in “materiality in Julio Cortázar’s literature” – materiality can bring into sharper focus the presence and agency of objects and of non-human beings.
Abrego explores examples from two of Cortázar’s stories. In “Axolotl” (Axolotl’s are a curious-looking species of salamander), the narrator becomes the animal he’s watching through the aquarium glass – “making permeable the boundary between both living materials”.
In “No se culpe a nadie” (“Don’t blame anyone”) a blue wool sweater wins the battle as its wearer wrestles to put it on, with lethal consequences: Abrego sees parallels with autonomous cars and military robots. She cites Jane Bennett, who describes what happens in the story as the experience of “common materiality”, a “wider distribution of agency”, and “chastening the fantasies of human mastery”.
The emphasis on non-human beings and objects constitutes a shift away from anthropocentrism, which Cortázar has described as the root of our problems:
“En el siglo XX nada puede curarnos mejor del antropocentrismo autor de todos nuestros males que asomarse a la física de lo infinitamente grande (o pequeño)”
“In the twentieth century, nothing can better cure us from anthropocentrism, which is the author of all our evils, than to look at the physics of the infinitely large (or small).”
Abrego elaborates further on this:
“The Anthropocene concept makes visible the interweaving of nature, society, culture, material life, and technology, drawing attention to a human being that, in spite of her/himself, is part of a whole and not its center, nor its culmination point.”
The materiality of our actions on the World and the material feedback loops to our own survivability can surely help us realize how both are inextricably interconnected, and inspire us to tread more lightly.
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Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.