29 pages • 58 minutes read
Julio CortázarContinuity of Parks
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Setting
In “Continuity of Parks,” the setting serves to establish the continuity of the two narrative levels in the story. Throughout the story, locations are repeated as a kind of motif. An intersection between locations is created by the movement between the settings of each story: the estate house and its park, on one hand, and, on the other, the cabin in its wooded forest. The continuity of the action of the two narratives moves across these locations effortlessly. In the frame narrative, the reader-protagonist sits in a study overlooking his park with its avenue of oak trees. He later enters as a “witness” to the novel he is reading, directly into the scene taking place in the cabin in the forest. The hero-protagonist of the novel meets his lover in the cabin in the forest. He then hurries through the woods until he enters “the avenue of trees which led up to the house” (65). In this way, the paths of the two protagonists intersect—from the estate in the park to the cabin in the woods, and from the cabin in the woods to the estate in the park. What appears to be two distinct settings from two separate worlds end up being the same place as the murderous lover crosses the forest and enters into the reader-protagonist’s estate.
Green
The color green is an important motif that runs through “Continuity of Parks” and enhances the theme of continuity that exists between reality and the imagined world. At home in his estate, in the real world, the reader-protagonist is ensconced in his green velvet armchair. While letting his mind slip into the fiction of his novel, he still seems aware of his head resting “comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back” (63), demonstrating that although his thoughts have drifted off to the story, his body is still physically and firmly rooted in the real world. When the hero of the story enters the salon to kill the husband, it is the same “high back of an armchair covered in green velvet” (64) that he encounters, again showing how these two worlds are linked.
Green, and nature in general, is also used to enhance the setting that each narrative world encompasses. The protagonist’s house is nestled in its green private park where “the afternoon air danced under the oak trees” (64). It is also through that same green park and those same oak trees that the assassin stalks on his murderous mission, “crouching among the trees and hedges until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house” (64). Here, green is again used to connect the two narratives, or reality with fiction, although they serve different purposes in each atmosphere. In the setting of the estate, green indicates comfort, tranquility, and ease. However, it is also in the cabin within the green mountain forest that the murder is plotted, demonstrating its more menacing connotations.
Novel
The novel the protagonist is reading is used to symbolize the commercialized culture of literature as entertainment. It is sensationalist, filled with conventional romantic tropes and typical gender roles represented by the “hero” and “heroine.” It provides the excitement of vicarious pleasures and dangers to the safely sequestered reader-protagonist: “He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him” (63). However, Cortázar strips away the divide between the reader and his text to reveal the dangers of passive, consumerist reading. “Continuity of Parks” points to the risks and the mindlessness of popular literature and offers itself as a more substantial and rewarding alternative to its reader.
