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Dark Humour in Julio Cortazar’s “Simulacra”
Sushil Ghimire
Assistant Lecturer of English
Bal Kumari College, Naryangarh, Nepal.
ABSTRACT
Humour in Cortázar short fiction has not received a comprehensive treatment as in his long fiction. This
essay makes a full-length study of his use of humour in the story ―Simulacra.‖ It assumes that the author‘s
use of humour is dark. After a streamlined discussion of dark humour, the essay uses it as a theoretical
framework for the analysis of the story which, it posits, is an absurdly humoured way of responding to the
nihilism of modern life.
KEYWORDS: J.F. Cortázar, humour, dark humour, nihilism, modern life
1. INTRODUCTION
Critics have noted Julio Florencio Cortázar as
a humourist. They have characterized his
humour to be dark. But the studies of his dark
humour are limited largely to his novels. His
stories, which too are rich in dark humour,
have not received the kind of critical attention
that these texts should have. This brief
analysis of the much-anthologized short story
―Simulacra‖ seeks to fill in this critical gap. It
makes the point that the use of the dark
humour in the story deconstructs the routined
habitude and attitude of modern man.
2. INTRODUCING THE AUTHOR AND
THE STORY
Cortázar (1914–1984) was an Argentinean
author of fiction. Born in Brussels, he spent the
rest of his life in France and Argentina. His
literary career, which lasted almost forty years,
includes—besides his short stories—novels,
plays, poetry, translations, and essays of
literary criticism. An antirealist, Cortázar is
often grouped with Gabriel García Márquez as
one of the foremost proponents of the Magical
Realism movement. He presents official
history as a mere simulacrum, a cultural
artifice created on the basis of social needs and
political pressures.
The story ―Simulacra‖ belongs to the second
section of Cortázar‘s Cronopios and Famas,
which subverts the usual historical thinking
and conventional outlook by participating in
―the dialectics of rebellion and legality, of
desire and frustration, [which] operate in all of
Cortázar‘s work through humour and
gameplaying‖ (Julio Premat 155). The second
section
of
the
collection,
―Unusual
Occupations,‖ which details the antics of a
bizarre family, depicts the cronopios as naive
and idealistic, disorganized, unconventional
but life-enjyoing beings who stand in contrast
to famas who are rigid, organized and
judgemental, and esperanzas who are
unimaginative and dull watchers. The story
―Simulacra‖ revolves around a family that
decides to build an elaborate gallows in their
front yard, an occupation that brings everyone
even closer together, while causing the entire
neighbourhood to go through various stages
of
curiosity,
alarm,
annoyance,
and
expectation.
Disappointed
at
nothing
meaningful happening there, they eventually
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wander off, and so life goes on. Cortázar is
simply amusing himself and his readers
through a carefree display of absurd humour.
As Ilan Stavans rightly remarks,
Humour was also his trademark. His
literature attempts to be comic, albeit
not in a light-hearted way. His esthetic
approach is to intertwine parody and
sarcasm, to generate a nervous smile
on
the
reader‘s
face
and,
simultaneously, to reflect on a certain
mysterious aspect of daily life. (206)
Cortázar‘s humour maintains equilibrium of
pomposity with the ghastly, thereby giving a
serious message garbed in the comic. By such
use of humour, Cortázar privileges the event
time over the clock time—an action that helps
assuage the effect of the tragic and the horrific
that one associates with post-war Argentina in
particular and the twentieth century in
general. Imagination, working witch-like, is
liberating here, though in an absurd manner.
3. METHODOLOGY
Humour is generally defined as the quality of
providing amusment or provoking laughter,
especially in literature. It is used in literature
―in terms of incongruity, superiority, or the
release of energy‖ (John Lippitt 334-35). While
incongruity theory associates humour with the
thwarting of expectations to a discordance that
is amusing rather than painful, superiority
theory aligns it essentially with derision and
the indulgence into one‘s own superiority in
exposing the shortcomings of another. The
nub of the release theory ―is that laughter
provides a release of tension: nervous or
psychical energy built up in the nervous
system can be discharged through laughter‖
(Lippitt 336). Claire Colebrook, quoting
Deleuze, makes the point that humour is allied
with unusual events that are seemingly
meaningless, not structured according to the
logic of clock time: ―Humour . . . is this art of
singularities, of events that are not
meaningful, not structured according to a
logic of before and after‖ (131). If the logic of
the clock time means that politics is primarily
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a matter of sharing group values and norms,
the logic of the event time leads to ―a
micropolitics, where passions, forces, events
and differences collide with no common ground‖
(italics in original, 131). It is humour‘s
micropolitics of the abandonment of the clock
time logic that links it with the dark irony of
the Theatre of the Absurd which is ―‗absurd‘ [.
. .] not because life is rendered despairingly
meaningless. Rather, we laugh when the order
of time and explanation no longer holds (134).
Among other things, dark humour is deployed
in response to the need of coping with the
angst of modern life, which pulverizes the
individual by compressing forcefully in its
preset schedule. This is why, Lisa Colletta calls
it
the humour of survival, the humour of
getting through another day with as
little trauma as possible, without
committing suicide or dying of
loneliness. . . . It is not the most
‗moral‘ of humors . . . the distance
required of a grimly comedic stance
often requires certain amoral actions
and attitudes from the characters.
(114)
Unlike appearing incontrovertibly moral like a
satirist, a dark humourist looks as if he were
extremely amoral. By so looking, the
humourist beckons toward ―an as yet
undiscovered social order, while energetically
lampooning, and thus rejecting, existing
behavioural models‖ (Wheeler Winston Dixon
31). The mixing of amorality with ridicule
produces an ambiance of cheerful nihilism.
The
alienation
from
usual
morality
deconstructs claims by Kant, Freud, and others
that ―the phenomenon of nihilistic incongruity
[. . .] necessarily culminate[s] in destructive
despair‖ (158).
4. STORY
An uncommon family, to which the narrator
belongs, lives in the lower middle class
neighbourhood of the barrio Pacifico of
Humboldt Street. The family is fond of taking
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to unusual occupations which are replicas of
the original. One rainy afternoon the family
members decide to build a stylish gallows—an
activity which occurred to the narrator‘s elder
uncle after reading a cloak-and-dagger novel.
The family chooses the garden in front of the
house as the site for the gallows. The family
members decide to raise a high platform for
the gibbet. The structure is, however, poised to
be a far cry from the original idea.
The construction which begins on a Sunday
afternoon, after the raviolis, attracts the
neighbourhood‘s attention. Quite a few of the
neighbours gather, but the family members go
on working until midnight by which time they
complete the platform and the two sets of
stairs.
The next evening when they are about to
complete the task, the neighbourhood erupts
into protest against the construction. Even the
Deputy Commissioner of Police arrives but
gushes over the elegance of the structure.
Satisfied with the fact that the construction is
of no illegal character, he goes away.
The family celebrates the success of the
construction by having supper on the platform
itself. At that moment the threatening
spectators disperse but some thirty or twenty
stay on. As the night deepens, the family
members go to sleep while the remaining
spectators also wander off feeling quite
disappointed. During the sleep the family
members dream of fiestas, elephants, and silk
suits.
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5. ANALYSIS OF STYLE AND
TECHNIQUE
The dream of the family members encodes a
contrasting but unsaid nightmare for the
neighbourhood public who get disappointed
at no hanging taking place at the gallows. The
family members, who ―maintain a surrealist
worldview, frequently seek relief from
existential anguish in humour‖ (Peter Standish
77). Cortázar combines fears, dreams, the
irrational and the fantastic with what seems to
be an ordinary, but unusual situation in order
to create antirealism which subverts the socalled rational thinking even as it upholds the
coexistence of nightmares and dreams. The
antirealism is built up by a Sartean joke that
generates an absurd humour which mocks at
and exposes the routine habits and the
predictable thinking of the neigbourhood.
Cortazar‘s depiction of the Humboldt Street
society is facilitated by the population of the
three different types of the people: cronopios,
famas, and esperanzas. The cronopios—the
family members—are spontaneous, freespirited beings with a capacity to enjoy life
whereas the famas—the neighbourhood
public—are more conventional and less
imaginative, and the esperanzas—the police—
are somewhere in between the above two with
the inclination to go with the flow. Among the
cronopios, mention must also be made of the
narrator‘s sisters whose practices of the wolf
howl deconstruct the boundary between the
human and the animal: the humanity that
Cortázar depicts is a porous world in which
living
beings
intermingle—a
man‘s
consciousness may enter that of an animal, or
an animal‘s into a man.
Cortázar employs what later in the 1960s came
to be designated as the technique of
deconstruction. The story presents itself as the
explanation of a gallows to a reader who does
not know what a gallows is. But the story only
makes sense precisely because the reader
knows—or thinks (s)he knows—what a
gallows is, and can be surprised, amused, or
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annoyed by the extraordinary assumption that
(s)he does not know. What the situation
suggests is that all the interest and the
meaning of the text lies in this gap between
what the reader is supposed to ignore and
what (s)he really knows, and the emotions and
cognitions so triggered in the reader, not about
the gallows, but about himself or herself. The
story deconstructs the reader‘s knowledge—
represented in the story by the neighbourhood
spectators—by suggesting that obviousness
can be less obvious and can become a
dangerous concept from a practical point of
view. The crowd‘s usual expectation of the
gallows is what disappoints them and
prevents them from seeing through the
performativity of the family members whose
use of the simulacra, as that which allows the
act of being, refers more to the act of
performing than to the act of existing. The
performance reenacts spontaneous moments
in their life, problematizing the relationship
between rationality and irrationality and
bringing to the forefront the little
idiosyncrasies that they adopt, cultivate and
enact in order to be their self with others.
6. DISCUSSION OF THEMES AND
MEANINGS
Like all inventors, the family members lack
originality: ―Nearly everything we decide to
do is inspired by—let‘s speak frankly, is
copied from – celebrated examples‖ (Cortázar,
―Simulacra,‖ 494). But that does not mean that
they do not make new things. It just means
that they do not suffer from the arrogance and
sober egotism that would lead them to
mistakenly believe that they are the origin of
the new things that they make.
When
something new springs from the family on
Humboldt Street, it is the result of a deviation
from the norm: ―If we manage to contribute
any innovation whatsoever, it always proves
to have been inevitable: anachronisms, or
surprises, or scandals‖ (494). Really, their only
role, like any inventor, is to be sure they do
not get in the way; or, to put it in more
positive terms, to be sure that they facilitate
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the strange flow. That is why the useless
gallows is such a perfect event.
With
invention, in Cortazar‘s world, it is always
about disarming the instruments that destroy
life: whether it is a gallows, or a numb habit
that says we ought to be seriously unplayful
when we are working for money and playfully
unserious when we are not.
Of course, inventors always have to be careful
of the neighbours. For, as Brewster Ghiselin
once put it, ―every new and good thing is
liable to seem eccentric and perhaps
dangerous at first glimpse, perhaps more than
what is really eccentric, really irrelevant to
life‖ (21). The family on Humboldt Street is
not trying to goad the neighbours, but it
always seems to happen anyway. With the
gallows, it starts off fairly innocently: citizens
have the right to put an addition to their house
within their own premises. However, by the
time the younger uncle is astride the
crosspiece, driving in the hook for the noose,
―the people in the street could not help
realizing
what
it
was
we
were
building‖(Cortázar, ―Simulacra,‖ 496).
But
what should the neighbours care? The family
breaks no laws. During the day, they go to
their regular, respectable jobs just like
everyone else. And, in their construction of
the gallows, they are scrupulously wellorganized and methodical. This is not a
rowdy party. Indeed, the neighbours are the
unruly ones: ―several disorderly types had
made an effort to keep my second-oldest
brother and my cousins from conveying into
the house the magnificent poplar trunk [for
the rack and whee] which they‘d fetched in the
pickup truck‖ (496). Fortunately, the family
maintains its composure and pulls together:
―An attempt at harassment in the form of a tug
of war was won easily by the family in full
force tugging at the trunk in a disciplined
way‖ (496). Here it must be noted that the
neighbours are not disturbed—at least not
primarily—by the construction of the gallows
in the neighbourhood. What really seems to
get under their skin is that nobody winds up
swinging from that crosspiece. If someone is
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going to make an instrument of death, well,
there had better be a death. But, if family
members are just going to sit up there on the
platform, under the moonlight with the noose
swaying empty and lightly in the breeze,
drinking chianti, well, what‘s the point?: ―We
looked at it, so happy it was a pleasure, but
the neighbours were murmuring at the
railings as if they were disappointed or
something‖ (497).
Their disappointment
expresses the deadly convergence of the
dominant uglinesses of the twentieth century:
a blinding fetish for utility and an unreserved
callousness to death.
That is what the
inventors that live on Humboldt Street quite
innocently mock and so expose. To work so
purposefully at the construction of a gallows
whose only purpose will be to provide sensual
stimulation during a meal is to violate the
secret or not so secret laws according to which
the governments of the twentieth century—
with our more or less tacit consent—have
organized our world.
8. CONCLUSION
As this essay shows, in ―Simulacra‖ the
persona and his extended clan erect a gallows
on their front lawn, giving us a glimpse of
family at its most darkly humourous. The
accruing laughter that the family‘s act
generates is nihilistic and is aimed at
valorizing the event time over the clock time,
which has shaped the mechanized, routined
sensibility of the modern man. Simply put, the
incongruity arising from Cortázar‘s use of
dark humour deconstructs the clock time
worldview of modern man.
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Ghiselin, Brewster. ―Introduction.‖ The
Creative Process. Ed. Brewster Ghiselin.
New York: Mentor, 1952. 1-21. Print.
Lippitt, John. ―Humor.‖ A Companion to
Aesthetics. 2nd ed. Eds. Davies, Stephen, et.
al. Chicester, West Sussex: WilleyBlackwell, 2009. 334-338. Print.
Marmysz, John. Laughing at Nothing: Humor as
a Response to Nihilism. Albany: State U
New York P, 2003. Print.
Premat, Julio. Encyclopedia of Latin American
and Caribbean Literature 1900–2003. Eds.
Daniel Balderston and Mike Gonzalez.
London: Routledge, 2004.155-156. Print.
Standish, Peter. Understanding Julio Cortázar.
Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2001.
Print.
Stavans, Ilan. ―Justice to Julio Cortázar.‖ Julio
Cortázar: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Ed.
Harold Bloom. Philadelhia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 2005. 195-214. Print.
Cortázar, J.F. ―Simulacra.‖ Elements of
Literature. 4th ed. Eds. Robert Scholes, et. al.
New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. 494-497.
Print.
---. Cronopios and Famas. Tr. Paul Blackburn.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.
9. WORKS CITED
Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London: Routledge,
2004. Print.
Colletta, Lisa. Dark Humor and Social Satire in
the Modern British Novel. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films
of the 1960s. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015. Print.
Dark Humour in Julio Cortazar’s “Simulacra”