Cortazar's Intentions: "The Continuity of the Parks", "The Demeanor at Wakes", & "Axolotls"

Julio Cortazar in his short stories, Axolotls,” “Our Demeanor at Wakes”, and “The Continuity of the Parks,” presents the human being in a light that shows his shortcomings and strengths. He highlights the positive attributes such as our sense of pity and compassion, but also makes plain our temperament to be deceitful to the point where we not only fool and manipulate others but lose ourselves, and our humanity.

I’ll begin with this praising of humanity by looking at “Axolotls”. The narrator in this story is very much like all of us in that he seeks to live for his sole delight, amusement and joy. He goes to the zoo for this very reason. This man wants to be entertained at sheer sight and thrill evoked by the panther and the lion. Indeed, it wasn’t his intention to see the silent, diminutive axolotls; fortuitous circumstances bring him into contact with them and it is at that moment that he “is linked by something lost and distant” between them. So, it isn’t as if the axolotls weren’t already “…slaves of their bodies” who were “condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss” and doomed to a “hopeless meditation.” We can presume that they had dwelled in that state inside the “dark, humid building that was the aquarium,” ever since they had been put there. Cortazar wants to remind us all who live every day to bear this in mind — that we shouldn’t live emotionally insulated from what is happening around us. He recognizes that we prefer not to think about the suffering in the world, because it is easier for us that way (and I’m at fault of this). But it is this exactly, which Cortazar urges us to eschew. There are those around the world, who although are, perhaps, distant and separated in time, but suffering. “Once we go on to know,” we discover amazingly that they are not different from us but, we are the same. I couldn’t agree more.     

Now, in looking at “Our Demeanor at Wakes” we get to see Cortazar satirizing on human follies in a more mean-spirited way. Although, I disagree on the subject matter (death) that he chooses to demonstrate our propensity to be hypocritical, he gets the point across. At the very beginning he tells you right away “We don’t go for the anisette, we don’t even go because we’re expected to. You’ll have guessed our reason already: we go because we cannot stand the craftier forms of hypocrisy.” And he’s talking about— in this case — people’s exaggerated show of sorrow— but, in general, people’s pretend show of care and concern towards others. Cortazar alludes to what author Kyoko Mori in her memoir, Polite Lies, calls “polite lies”. The term is Mori’s expression of what we do to keep and maintain polite society. It is how we are unable to express ourselves completely to people, how we cannot be frank. And this is not in the sense of being brutally honest, but rather, it is not being able to say what we mean to say. Thus, we fake it, and therefore we lie. Simply put, don’t do it. Because if and when you do, it compels others to act in the like manner, as a result, it renders us all hypocrits.

Lastly and above all, however, Cortazar is shouting and pointing out to readers and saying, “Look, I’m not just putting on display here the virtues and vices of mankind but I want you to notice the way I’m doing it. I’m using art.” Yes, he wants us to understand the power of art. He tells us that art is real.  “The continuity of the Parks”epitomizes this concept. As the audience we get to witness our protagonist become the main character in the novel he’s reading because his situation and his environment are so much intertwined. Again, this is us. We are moved to be moved by art.