Julio Cortazar: Magic Realism

Cortazar’s prose and poetry are all about the duality of process: the infusion of the non-linear with the linear; the fantastical, magical plots portrayed dryly as realistic. His prosems (that’s what he called them!) employ humour but leave the reader with the sense of their darkness. In ‘The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island’, Cortazar’s aesthetic of duality is pronounced in how the linear narrative moves within non-linear events in a literal sense. His use of duality in the macro and micro levels of the poem are intriguing to me. The poem is funny and quirky, yet extremely poignant.

When you set up a mirror on the western side of Easter Island, it runs backwards. When you set one up on the eastern side of the island, it runs forward. Delicate surveys may discover the point at which that mirror will run on time, but finding the point at which the mirror works correctly is no guarantee that that point will serve for any other, since mirrors are subject to the defects of the individual substances of which they are made and react the way they really and truly want to. So that Solomon Lemos, an anthropologist on fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, looking into the mirror to shave, saw himself dead of typhus-this was on the eastern side if the island. And at the same time a tiny mirror which he’d forgotten on the western side of Easter Island (it’d been dropped between some stones) reflected for no one Solomon Lemos in short pants on his way to school, then Solomon Lemos naked in a bathtub being enthusiastically soaped by his mommy and daddy, then Solomon Lemos going da-da-da, to the thrilled delight of his Aunt Remeditos on a cattle ranch in Trenque Lanquen county.

trans. Paul Blackburn

In the spirit of Magic Realism explore your imagination to come up with a plot for a prose poem. Let the plot move you within the world/situation you have created, pay attention to the duality of details. Your poem could be linear, non-linear, or both!