The Unconscious Forces in Julio Cortázar's House Taken Over

Here is a small essay I wrote. Most of it was written, sporadically, over the last few hours, although I had started it a couple of weeks ago.

To read 'House Taken Over' in English click here.

If you think you can have a stab at reading it in Spanish, or if you are bilingual, click here.

I make mention of another story called 'Letter to a Young Lady in Paris', but I could not find the text on the internet.

This essay, I must stress, was written purely for entertainment value and was not submitted for any academic course. I have not proof-read it, nor has a lecturer made modifications to it, so it is a bit rough on the edges.

-----------------------------

When writing a screenplay for an A2 Film Studies assignment, I chose to make an adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s short story House Taken Over. Prior to commencing writing it, a teaching assistant read the story and said (I am paraphrasing here): “The story is open-ended; you could choose to show what it is that throws them out of the house and what happens when they leave it.”

I think that this completely misses out on the point of the story. What expunges the brother and sister out of their own house is their own dreams, fears and obsessions. In the screenplay I wrote I chose to merge it with another story in the collection Bestiary (1951) entitled Letter to a Young Lady in Paris. The story concerns a young Argentine who is looking after an apartment for a woman who has gone away to Paris; he vomits rabbits when he gets anxious and they mutilate the entire apartment. I added it in as a dream sequence (which was re-titled Letter to a Young Lady Who is Also Asleep) to make more explicit the fact that what throws the brother and sister out of their house are unconscious forces that are latent in the house, and they manifest themselves through these muffled sounds and voices.

After I sent my screenplay to a family relative in Chile, who is a university professor and a Cortázar fanatic, he said that implementing the second story into the script makes it clearer that what throws the brother and sister out the house is indeed their collective unconscious. He also said that it is a symbolic and ambiguous representation of the mysterious forces that inhabit the house. The destruction of the vomiting rabbits, he said, is liberation against a reality that has turned oppressive.

Julio Cortázar was a middle-class Argentine, who came to be a prominent figure in what was to be called el boom, a new wave of Latin-American fiction that erupted in the early 1960s. These texts were characterised by their objective realism; ordinary people find themselves in situations which can be surrealistic or uncanny. This genre was soon to be christened magic realism and it led to re-evaluation of previous generation of novelists soon to be heralded as masters, including Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo and Juan Carlos Onetti.

Cortázar’s role in the Boom was fundamental. The publication of his ambitious novel Hopscotch in 1962 revitalised the literary scene, and the youth of Latin-America became enraptured by it. If 1960s literature was led by the beats in the United States, it was Julio Cortázar who was the most read, admired and discussed author in Latin-America. The popularity of his novel led to an interest in three collections of short stories published in the ‘50s, which had fallen to a silence upon publication: Bestiary (1951), End of the Game (1956) and The Secret Weapons (1959).

The first story in Bestiary is House Taken Over. In this story a brother and a sister live in a large, spacious house and they have an income from a farm, permitting them to wallow in leisure activities. However, menacing sounds appear to emanate from distant rooms and corridors of the house. Eventually, these forces take up the entire house and the unnamed protagonist and his sister Irene are evicted, leaving it in lieu of a new destination.

There is an ambiguity as to what exactly it is that raids their house and evicts them. What is more peculiar is that the characters seem to accept this as it were completely normal; they acquiesce to it, without ever questioning the unusual events.

How is it possible to disentangle this morass of ambiguity and reach an interpretation? Cortázar does imply a great deal in this story, and there is a certain atmosphere that permeates in it which leads me to believe that the raiders of this house aren’t, in fact, people but forces that are implanted in both the house and the characters, alienating them, cornering them and eventually evicting them.

The genesis of the story all the more backs up this viewpoint: its idea came to the author in a dream. Cortázar, in his dream, found himself in a large mansion and was pushed aside from one room to the next until he was evicted from it. He woke up and wrote the story in a single sitting.

Initially, Cortázar sets the story by briefly describing the characters and the house they inhabit. The unnamed narrator and his sister Irene have reached middle age and have never had relationships that have led to marriage: “We ended up thinking, at times, that that [the house] was what had kept us from marrying.” The rest of the house is described and the narrator comments how the ornaments and furniture are covered in dust and that they have neglected this considerable space of the house.

Soon enough, these ‘forces’ make themselves present and the characters huddle to the part of the house they usually frequent. Yes, they are overtaken and disturbed, but try making the situation more tolerable by setting up a new routine. The narrator, with his collection of French literature stranded on the other side of the house, orders a stamp collection, while Irene makes up new patterns for her knitting. The narrator says “It is possible to live without thinking.” However, they are soon so discomforted that these forces that are within them manifest themselves through their dreams.

Cortázar describes in detail the brother and sister’s discomfort while they sleep: “Whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake. I could never get used to this voice from a statue or parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from the throat.” The forces that are present in the house intersect into their dreams or, alternatively, the forces within them intersect into the house. They are clearly anguished by these latent powers, unable to sleep or think clearly.

The collective past of the brother’s and sister’s lives are encapsulated within the house, even to the extent that their belongings, furniture and ornaments come to represent the lives of their ancestors: “It kept the memories of our great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather and the whole of childhood.” Everything about their past life surrounds them, which ultimately leaves them oblivious towards it and they find respite in the quotidian and the mundane: the anonymous character (who shares similarities with the author) spends his days reading French novels while his sister, Irene, knits.

Ultimately, these forces are so overpowering that they appropriate the entire house and the brother and sister are forced to leave. These sounds, even when they come to a closer proximity of the characters, remain indistinct: “You could hear the noises, still muffled but louder, just behind us.” These sounds increase in volume, but cannot be easily distinguished. They take over the part of the house the characters had insulated themselves, and they have no choice but to leave.

Following House Taken Over in Bestiary there is an equally enigmatic and cryptic story, Letter to a Young Lady in Paris. I inserted this story as a dream sequence in my screenplay, which acts as an interconnecting interlude. This epistolary story is a letter to a woman whose house the narrator is looking after. Like the brother and sister in House Taken Over, he is deeply depressed and anguished, resulting in an oppressive manifestation. He vomits rabbits, which then mutilate and deface the entire apartment. In my screenplay, this dream sequence acts as a suggestion of these inner forces within the characters.

Another interpretation of these stories is they are a political allegory of the climate in Argentina at the time of its publication. Peron’s dictatorship was very powerful and had already oppressed many groups and minorities. Cortázar didn’t discard this viewpoint, saying that this political aspect could have had a psychological influence on his dream, although he wasn’t aware of it at the time of writing. His writing, and his political views, in the late 1960s would veer to out-and-out socialism and he would dedicate himself to political activism in the later stages of his life.

The erupting rabbits and the muffled sounds are repressed desires which are, in a warped way, liberations which in turn oppress the characters and leave their surroundings in a state of disfiguration and dilapidation. These forces could stem from political repression, although this is of course entirely ambiguous and entirely up to the reader to decide for him or herself.