Divertimento
Divertimento, the first novel of Julio Cortazar.
When we were still playing life… that’s what Divertimento is about. This playing of life which comes to the point of “growing up”, growing out, the life awaits, and the games should be left behind. But the notion of game is ambiguous here… Playing because of playing, playing because one needs to remain detached from reality bares a risky path to the vanity. Not a vanity towards reality (reality – one of the most abused words ever) or “real life”… no, not that. This is a vanity which comes from isolating art from everything. (I’d say a vanity of trying to be a-political, in the broadest sense of this word… but I won’t go into that now).
The story is circular, almost like in this great movie Doni Darko. It’s the search for knots only in order to have something to unknot, creating them even there where there are no knots, just to prolong the game, while the game prolongs itself towards its end, as the string has an end, even when it’s rolled in a ball… I guess some of us love to search for the knots… it’s the feeling of complexity of reality, of its details and beauty (-> knitted scarf) But they were creating them so that they could search for them, leading themselves to the realization of this fact, painting a sword, which will cut the string… Pity noone realized that sword-fight could be a game too…
November 29th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Yes that seems to be a big topic in Cortazar’s writing: also Rayuela’s characters are great players of life. It might have the aspect or the dangers which you seem to point to in your entry: a complacent, maybe even narcistic playing along. On the other side they are excaping the lies of being adult, that feeling of having found yourself and realizing what you think you are. Camus writes you have to feel enough detached from yourself in order to be free or maybe better to let yourself be free. The orders and hopes of the adult life are absurd walls. Cortazars characters rebell against them. Camus also warns like you do – we should find the right measure, if we do we can stretch the bow the most intensive, live life to its most intense. But how to do that – Cortazars characters swin in metaphysical rivers, they play along, they dance, they doze, they discuss, they create, and they search just like we do. It feels good to find yourself in a book and feel how you’re right and wrong at the same time with them together – but you keep searching on and that’s what it’s all about.
And we can consider Sisyphos to be a happy character – sometimes.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:28 am
:) that’s why, after all, why these two books have those names – Divertimento and Hopscotch… somewhere *between* or as Eliot would say “the voice of a hidden waterfall… between two waves of the sea…” Can we catch it?
November 29th, 2006 at 9:28 am
the best is we try – let’s try