Don't You Blame Anyone by Julio Cortázar

 

"The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting."

The above quote by 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer applies to short stories as well as novels and is certainly a fitting way to begin a review of Don’t You Blame Anyone by the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar.

I say this since the entire short story takes place in a room on the twelfth floor of an apartment where a man prepares to join his wife who is waiting for him in a store to pick out a wedding gift. How does this man prepare? Simply by putting a blue sweater on over his gray suit. That's it. That's the story. But, since we're talking Julio Cortázar, it is quite the story, pure magical storytelling rasa.

Since the man whistles a tango as he moves away from the room's open window to look for a sweater in the wardrobe, let's give him a fitting Argentine name—Mateo.

Although the story's location is unstated, I imagine Mateo and his wife living in an apartment in Paris. After all, Julio Cortázar moved from Buenos Aires to Paris in 1951 at the age of 37 and lived in the beautiful French city for most of his life.

So there's Mateo as he begins to put on the blue wool sweater, struggling with the task. "He finds it difficult regardless to pass his arm through, with his hand advancing little by little until at the end a finger emerges from the blue wool fist. And yet, in the twilight, the finger has the appearance of having been shriveled up and placed toward the inside, with one black nail ending in a point."

Once Mateo's finger emerges from the sleeve of his blue sweater, it looks shriveled and oddly turned inward. Shriveled? What’s that about? To add to the strangeness, a black fingernail seems to taper into a sharp point. From the outset, Julio's story signals a shift from straightforward realism to a dream veering into nightmare.

If nightmare strikes anyone as overstatement, what happens next will leave no doubt that Mateo is caught in a web of horror. Mateo tugs the sweater off and tries putting it on with the other arm first. More trouble, lots of trouble. To distract himself, Matgeo starts to whistle again and figures it might be best to put the sweater on with everything-head, left art, right arm-all at once.

But this maneuver proves a disaster. "No matter how hard he pulls, nothing comes out, and he realizes that perhaps he made a mistake owing to the ironic anger with which he resumed the task, and that he was stupid enough to have placed his head in one of the sleeves and a hand through the collar of the sweater." Oh, his trapped head. The blue wool is pressing against his nose and mouth, suffocating him, forcing poor Mateo to breathe deeply.

Mateo grows increasingly angry with the absurdity of the situation. In his simple attempt to put on a blue sweater, he has been laid bare in all his vulnerability and helplessness. The more he struggles to free his arms and suffocating face from the smothering wool, the more he loses control. Ahh! For a now panic-stricken Mateo, the blue wool sweater has become his personal House of Usher. To reinforce this grim truth, when Mateo opens his eyes, he sees "five suspended black nails aimed at his eyes, vibrating in the air before jumping against his eyes."

Oh, no. From a simple, everyday situation—a regular guy in a city trying to put on a sweater to join his wife—Julio Cortázar has crafted a tale where death and human mortality intertwine with the tragic and comic. The suffocating sweater becomes more than an absurd physical obstacle; it’s a haunting metaphor for human vulnerability and the uncontrollable forces that shape our lives. This story exemplifies Cortázar’s genius for transforming the mundane into the extraordinary, inviting us to consider how easily the structures of our reality can collapse into chaos.

In the broader context of Cortázar’s oeuvre, Don’t You Blame Anyone reflects his fascination with the intersection of the ordinary and the surreal. From Blow-Up to The Night Face Up, his stories often hinge on a disruption of the everyday, where characters face an existential unraveling through seemingly innocuous events. This short story echoes the playful yet ominous spirit of Cronopios and Famas, while also resonating with the darker, more enigmatic undercurrents of Hopscotch. Cortázar’s work challenges readers to rethink the boundaries of reality, exposing the fragility of human agency and the pervasive, often comic absurdity of existence.

With its masterful blend of horror, irony, and humor, this story encapsulates Cortázar’s signature style: the ability to render the smallest moments with an intensity that unveils profound truths. It invites us to ask not only how much of life’s absurdity is self-inflicted, but also how much stems from forces beyond our comprehension—a question central to much of Cortázar’s literary legacy.