"El oficio de mirar": Regarding the Human-Animal Gaze in Three Texts by Julio Cortázar

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Several of Cortázar's stories feature animals represented in a range from the fully realistic, to the fantastic, to the symbolic or purely imaginary. One of his most widely read stories, "Axolotl," turns on the transmigration of a human consciousness into that of a salamander. This limit situation is predicated on the act of looking, a mutual gaze that ultimately leads to the inexplicable absorption of the human subject into the animal object. Two other lesser-known texts by Cortázar—the early short story "Bestiario" and a later sui generis text called "Paseo entre las jaulas"—likewise develop the trope of the human-animal gaze as a mode of knowledge or understanding, but they do so using a variety of techniques that obviate the kind of fantastical twist we see at the end of "Axolotl." These two texts, whose animal logic is developed discursively and associatively, offer the reader a more psychologically plausible and even intimate glimpse into the potential of the interspecies gaze. Taken together, these three very different works serve to further elucidate Cortázar's insistent grappling with the problematic of self and (animal) other.