"And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?"
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Cortazar’s question is a dare disguised as politeness: are you willing to live without the comforting narcotic of reasons? Framed as “do you accept,” it treats meaning not as something you discover but something you consent to. The line’s pressure point is psychological. It doesn’t ask whether “there is” an explanation; it asks whether you can tolerate the absence of one without panicking, improvising a story, or retreating into dogma.
That little “the idea” matters. Cortazar isn’t staging an argument about metaphysics so much as dramatizing a mood, a mental posture. “No explanation” isn’t pure nihilism; it’s the unsettling freedom of the unaccountable, the everyday surrealism where causality slips its leash. In his fiction, the ordinary world is always one crack away from turning into a corridor you didn’t know your apartment had. The sentence carries that same hinge: one step and the room changes.
As a Latin American writer shaped by European modernism and the region’s political volatility, Cortazar understood how official “explanations” can be both seductive and violent. Regimes explain; bureaucracies explain; even lovers explain. Explanations tidy up mess, assign blame, justify outcomes. Refusing them can be ethical as much as existential: a resistance to narratives that pretend to total clarity.
The question lands with a wry intimacy, too. It’s not addressed to “one” or “people” but to “you,” recruiting the reader into the experiment. Acceptance becomes the story’s threshold: cross it, and you enter Cortazar’s preferred territory, where uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to inhabit.
That little “the idea” matters. Cortazar isn’t staging an argument about metaphysics so much as dramatizing a mood, a mental posture. “No explanation” isn’t pure nihilism; it’s the unsettling freedom of the unaccountable, the everyday surrealism where causality slips its leash. In his fiction, the ordinary world is always one crack away from turning into a corridor you didn’t know your apartment had. The sentence carries that same hinge: one step and the room changes.
As a Latin American writer shaped by European modernism and the region’s political volatility, Cortazar understood how official “explanations” can be both seductive and violent. Regimes explain; bureaucracies explain; even lovers explain. Explanations tidy up mess, assign blame, justify outcomes. Refusing them can be ethical as much as existential: a resistance to narratives that pretend to total clarity.
The question lands with a wry intimacy, too. It’s not addressed to “one” or “people” but to “you,” recruiting the reader into the experiment. Acceptance becomes the story’s threshold: cross it, and you enter Cortazar’s preferred territory, where uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to inhabit.
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| Topic | Deep |
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