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.
Themes
Continuity of Worlds
One central theme of “Continuity of Parks” is the continuity of worlds, or the relation between reality and what is fiction or imagined. The story invites the reader to reconsider the place of fiction and the imagination in our worlds, demonstrating how one can inform or overlap the other. Worlds collide and different levels of reality interpenetrate. Cortázar also suggests that this transition can happen without one realizing a shift is taking place. Interestingly, the critical moment when the story’s narrative steps away from the reader’s perspective to that of the hero and heroine is combined with the reader’s experience of the story: “He was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch” (64). There is no clear break or exit from the reader-protagonist as Cortázar transfers the focus on the characters of the novel. This continuity of worlds occurs again at the story’s conclusion with a fantastic, uncanny scene in which a character from a novel being read by the protagonist arrives to kill this reader.
Most literally, Cortázar’s story relates the interpenetration between two fictions: the fictional story called “Continuity of Parks” and the novel being read within this story by the protagonist of “Continuity of Parks.” It gives an unexpected twist to the established device of the frame narrative. By reading “Continuity of Parks,” one not only reads about the novel being read by the protagonist, but also serves as a witness to the interpenetration of the characters and plot of that novel with the character and the narrative that frames the reading of that novel.
Cortázar’s story represents the interpenetration of two fictions, two levels of narrative, and in the process posits a broader question about the relation between fiction and reality. Within the conventions of realist fiction, the first or frame narrative represents “real life,” while the world of the novel the protagonist is reading represents a fiction unfolding within that “real” world. As the fictional story intrudes on the “real” one, it becomes clear that the division between real and artificial is less solid than it had appeared. Both worlds are equally fictitious—or equally real—and the story concludes with the implication that the border between itself and the actual real world may be equally porous. The exploration of these metafictional themes invites reflection on the relation between fiction and real life.
Ways of Reading
As is typical of metafictional narratives, “Continuity of Parks” reflects on the act of fiction making. While some metafictions focus on the writing process, Cortázar’s story focuses on the other side of fiction making: the process of reading. Literature is produced through a kind of agreement between the writer and the reader. Typically, reader and writer share an understanding about what is real and what is fictional and how these levels of experience are represented. The expectations readers bring to literature are based on this shared understanding. “Continuity of Parks” intentionally breaks with the implicit understanding of conventional readers of fiction. It breaches the agreement that establishes a secure frontier between reality and fiction, encouraging the reader to revise their expectations and alter their reading habits.
The story disrupts the settled agreement about the separation between fiction and reality through the continuities it establishes between the two narratives. This affects the identities of and relations between the characters. Just as the story insists on the continuity of the two worlds in its narrative, it also asserts a continuity of identity between the reader and the fiction he is reading. The passivity of the reader-protagonist helps enhance this argument. Rather than actively experiencing the words of the novel, the protagonist almost allows the story to happen to him: “He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once” (64). Thus, it is through this resignation to the story that the reader-protagonist of the first narrative is doubled into the husband-victim in the narrative of the novel he is reading.
Fully absorbed, the reader-protagonist in a sense “becomes” a character in the novelistic scenes he is “witnessing.” It might be understood that the final image of the story—the assassin standing behind the reader, knife in hand, poised for murder—comes from the reader’s imagination. However, Cortázar’s story does not present it on a level of reality—fantasy and the imagination—different from that of the narrative’s literal action, “reality.” In the story, literally and without narrative comment, the character from the novel comes to kill the reader of the novel who, in this metaphysical twist, turns out to be a character in the novel he is reading.
The murderous twist at the end of “Continuity of Parks” suggests that this kind of passive, immersive reading presents dangers as well as pleasures. Cortázar’s story undermines the kind of comfortable immunity provided by the assumptions and expectations of conventional reading. “Continuity of Parks” resists thoughtless immersion. Instead, it challenges the habitual concepts of what is real and what is fiction. It confronts the reader with the possibility that the distinction between these worlds is itself a kind of conceptual “fiction” that can be rewritten. “Continuity of Parks” creates work for the reader through its open-ended conclusion by presenting unanswered questions such as will the reader be murdered? Further, is this “actually” happening or is it only being imagined? “Continuity of Parks” suggests that the proper role of the reader is as a thoughtful collaborator, not as a passive consumer.
Power of Literature
“Continuity of Parks” explores the power of literary fiction from at least two angles. First, there is the seductive power that his novel has over the reader-protagonist. He cannot resist being drawn into its mildly guilty pleasures: “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him” (63). The seduction of the text is figured in overtly sensuous terms: “Word by word” the reader is “licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine” (64). The novel here has active agency over the passive reader. He may be consuming fiction but at the same time the fiction is consuming him, taking over his consciousness and being.
However, this “sordid” power of seduction is not the only power literature offers. “Continuity of Parks” serves as proof that literature can do more than absorb readers into a passive immersion in alternate realities: It can prompt active contemplation of the nature of art and of reality itself. “Continuity of Parks” twists the story of real life and of fictional life into one continuous band of narrative. As the murderous lover is on his fateful errand, the narrator says, “The dogs were not supposed to bark, and they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not” (Paragraph 2). The structure of these sentences—each beginning with a kind of prophecy, followed immediately by its fulfillment—calls attention to the constructed nature of the story. A fictional plot is a form of destiny—within it, free will and chance exist only as illusions. The husband, who is both the reader of this story and its victim, is sitting in his chair at the appointed hour both because his wife knows his habits and because the author has arranged it that way.
At its outset, this story has a traditional structure: that of the frame narrative. In the second of its two paragraphs, however, the characters of the inner story break the frame, asserting their existence within the outer story, where they had previously been presented as fictional. The line between real life and fiction is erased, with deadly implications for the man in the green velvet chair and destabilizing ones for the reader of Cortázar’s story.
