Axolotl clocks in as one of the coolest short stories ever written. To take a deep dive into Julio Cortázar's surreal, haunting, hypermagical tale, I'll pair my comments and observations with a number of choice direct quotes, moving from the opening sentence to the closing sentence.
“There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.”
Usually, if there's a shocking revelation in a short story, it comes at the end. But there’s nothing usual about Julio Cortázar. He discloses the impossible transformation of his narrator right at the outset. This also ties in with one of the author’s enduring themes: the nature of observation, which reflects the Argentine writer’s role as the supreme observer of life, constantly adopting new perspectives and identities.
"That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank."
Ah, the axolotl have little pink Aztec faces. Fans of Julio Cortázar will hear echoes of the author's The Night Face Up, about a motorcyclist who crashes and has a fever dream in the hospital, where he becomes a captive of the Aztecs and is about to be sacrificed. Cortázar's reference to the Aztecs highlights the enigmatic, mysterious nature of the axolotl.
“The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together.”
The narrator immediately senses that he and the axolotl are linked, connected in some inscrutable, inexplicable way. Cortázar was keenly interested in the boundaries separating humans from other creatures and, more broadly, the boundaries separating the individual from the outside world—and how humans can overcome such boundaries through empathy, the development of sensitivity, and even the cultivation of powers that verge on the occult. This theme is explored on a psychological level in Orientation of Cats and addressed in a more overtly metaphysical way in Axolotl.
"Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing."
“Another way of seeing” — even from a young age, Julio knew that his way of seeing the world and being in the world was radically different from the people around him. This unique perspective takes its place as a central theme in Julio's novella, Cronopios and Famas, where the Cronopios' otherworldly realm of literature, art, and imagination contrasts sharply with the Famas' rigid, conformist, and dreary world of routine. Julio the Cronopio. And Julio, likewise, bestows a Cronopian nature on this tale's narrator.
“The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy. And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an axolotl.”
Let’s not forget one of Julio Cortázar’s prime projects: translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Those burning golden axolotl eyes share an eeriness and unspeakable depth with the evil, pale blue eye of the old man in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
"Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining, went through me like a message: ‘Save us, save us.’ Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour? I was afraid of them.”
Is the axolotl's immobility and silence a metaphor for human existential angst? Does the narrator's fear represent human alienation and isolation? Both of these questions touch on an abiding theme within Julio Cortázar's fiction.
“They were suffering, every fiber of my body reached toward that stifled pain, that stiff torment at the bottom of the tank. They were lying in wait for something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of the axolotls.”
For me, reading these lines evokes the possibility that the still, silent axolotls, with their glowing golden eyes, are reincarnated Aztec warriors lying in wait—waiting for the moment when they can magically rise and conquer our modern world, and thus reestablish the lost glory of their ancient Aztec kingdom. Perhaps a first step: taking the narrator as a sacrificial victim.
"And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls."
Oh, Julio! With this closing twist, Cortázar lifts the story into the realm of metafiction, blurring the lines between narrator, character, and author. The axolotl’s assertion suggests that the act of storytelling itself becomes a form of transformation—a merging of perspectives where the writer and the written are inseparably intertwined. By infusing the tale with this self-referential moment, Cortázar reminds us that stories are living, breathing entities, just like the axolotls themselves: mysterious, layered, and endlessly open to interpretation. Wow! Make that a double Wow.
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