Doin’ the Julio flip of reality and dream.
Espectacular imaginación on display in Julio Cortázar's 1967 tale of a dude hospitalized following an accident on his motorcycle.
Shining and sparkling with the brilliance of Aztec gold, The Night Face Up dazzles us from beginning to end. Here are a number of memorable themes and events:
Doin' the Julio Flip in his own life: Julio Cortázar recounts when he was a boy growing up there was an older adult on the inside but when he himself became a man, the dynamics of his life flipped: he was an adult with a little boy inside. This flipping from boy/man to man/boy undoubtedly contributed to Julio's penchant to shift back and forth between levels of reality in his fiction as if a little kid playing make-believe under his bedroom blankets.
Speed, Speed, Speed: "We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed." So proclaimed Italian artist F. T. Marinetti in his 1909 Manifesto of Futurism. Bull's eye, Julio! Using a motorcycle as the symbol of speed in our modern world was a flash of literary genius.
Modern and Urban: With all the speed and so many people, cities need rules and regulations to keep everyone safe, such things as traffic lights. However, as we all know, accidents do happen and a fun, sunny day can instantly turn into cuts, scrapes, broken bones and a trip to the hospital. And this is exactly what happens to Julio's unnamed protagonist when a woman crosses the street against the red and he swerves to avoid hitting her.
Post-Op: Let's give our young man a name, an energetic guy who could be any one of millions of young men around the globe - let's call him Juan. Following surgery, Juan wakes up with stitches over his eye, his arm in a plaster cast and feeling thirsty, feverish and woozy.
Crossover: Juan slips into a fever dream where he's a Moteca Indian running for his life in a sweltering jungle, running from Aztec warriors. Poor, Juan! He wakes from the nightmare in his hospital bed but slips back into sleep. As a Moteca, he holds a sacred amulet to his chest and prays he will not be captured. Again he awakes in the hospital and this time fights to keep awake but, alas, sleep overwhelms him and he's back in the jungle. Bad news - the Aztecs surround him. Although he's able to kill one of the Aztecs with his knife, the warriors tie him up and take him away. Juan knows all too well what fate awaits him.
Storytelling Magic: Please keep in mind this is a tale written by the one and only Julio Cortázar. Many are the themes and questions posed, including the contrast between the open veins of Latin America and oh, so civilized North America and Europe, between dream and reality, between the blood sacrifice on the alter of an Aztec temple and the blood sacrifice on an operating table in a modern hospital.
What?!! Are you serious, Mr. Reviewer? I most certainly am serious: as the Aztecs had their blood sacrifices, so we in our modern world have ours. If anybody has any doubts, ask the families of those thousands of unfortunates who have died under the surgeon's knife following a serious vehicular accident.
Listen to a reading of The Night Face Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVJFq...
Argentine author Julio Cortázar, 1914-1984
"It was unusual as a dream because it was full of smells, and he never dreamt smells. First a marshy smell, there to the left of the trail the swamps began already, the quaking bogs from which no one ever returned. But the reek lifted, and instead there came a dark, fresh composite fragrance, like the night under which he moved, in flight from the Aztecs. And it was all so natural, he had to run from the Aztecs who had set out on their manhunt, and his sole chance was to find a place to hide in the deepest part of the forest. taking care not to lose the narrow trail which only they, the Motecas, knew." - Julio Cortázar, The Night Face Up
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