Julio Cortazar's Blow-Up and Other Stories

In Julio Cortazar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories, the short stories Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, Continuity of Parks and Blow-Up demonstrate the theme of concealing reality. Cortazar uses closely intertwined imagery and symbolism throughout his short stories to conceal the overall message. In Letter to a Young Lady in Paris there is the allusion to repression of the main character as he writes about his continual problem of vomiting bunnies and his eventual suicide. The story Continuity of Parks, a man reads a story and finds out that he is a part of a dramatic love affair and becomes murdered by the main character in the novel, demonstrating repressed sexual desire. In Blow-Up, Cortazar uses careful imagery of the scene to conceal a larger story between a young boy and an older woman photographed by a photographer. These three individual stories both demonstrate the theme of concealment through the usage of symbolism and imagery.

In Cortazar’s Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, Cortazar uses the symbolism of the bunnies to represent repression of the main character and concealment of suck repression. In the story the main character moves into the apartment of a young lady who is away and in Paris. Instead of providing a description of the woman and her connection to the main character, Cortazar provides descriptions of the apartment. Such descriptions act as a representation of the woman herself. For instance, as the main character states, “It hurts me to come into an ambience where someone who lives beautifully has arranged everything like a visible affirmation of her soul…” (Cortazar, 39). With the apartment as a representation of this woman’s soul, the main character feels as if he and the bunnies are encroaching upon this w...

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...d the clouds. Cortazar focuses upon the imagery of clouds and pigeons, which conceals the larger story between the boy and the woman. The imagery also eludes to the photographers hallucinations, instead of truly seeing the pigeons and clouds he hallucinates and in the end these images are on a projector. For example, “… like a spell of weeping reversed, and little by little, the frame becomes clear, perhaps the sun comes out, and again the clouds begin to come, two at a time…And the pigeons once in a while…” (Cortazar, 131). Such imagery of the clouds and the pigeons in the end become the projections of the photographer’s mind as he projects these images onto the blow-up. The blow-up itself becomes instrumental to the photographer as it becomes a revelation of the projected reality. The photographer’s misconstruction of reality is his way of projecting his reality.