the grammar of technique inside continuidad de los parques

The Grammar of Technique: Inside "Continuidad de los parques"Author(s): Patricia V. Lunn and Jane W. AlbrechtSource: Hispania, Vol. 80, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 227-233Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and PortugueseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/345881 .

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227

The Grammar of Technique: Inside "Continuidad de los parques"

Patricia V. Lunn Michigan State University

Jane W. Albrecht Wake Forest University

Abstract: The manipulation of various grammatical devices structures Julio Cortaizar's short-short story "Continuidad de los parques." Variations in the use of verbal aspect (preterite/imperfect) mark stages in the development of the plot, and modal and lexical choices reinforce its reflexive and repetitive nature. Linguistic and literary analysis are mutually reinforcing approaches to this text: the study of grammar contributes to revealing the story's meaning, while the story exemplifies creative use of grammatical choices. Teaching students to identify and analyze grammatical features of the story allows them to discover its meaning for themselves.

Key Words: Cortaizar (Julio), "Continuidad de los parques," aspect, prete'ite/imperfect, linguistic analysis of literature

Introduction

Julio Cortizar's "Continuidad de los parques" (from the 1967 collection Final del juego) is one of the most anthologized stories in college textbooks. Clearly, the minimalism of the story and its arresting conclusion have captured the attention of editors, teachers and students. Surpris- ingly, however, little critical attention has been paid to how Cortazar achieves the effects for which the story is known. This is the more surprising in view of the story's extreme brevity, which allows the author considerable technical control and which permits readers to track all of the elements of the narrative.

Lagmanovich has shown how Corttizar uses the grammatical possibilities of Span- ish, especially the aspectual contrast between preterite and imperfect, to demarcate and then to merge two fictional worlds.1 This paper goes beyond Lagmanovich's observations to define verbal aspect in ac- cord with current linguistic research, and then to use this definition to generate an analysis of the story which reveals that its aspectual structure is parallel to its narra-

tive structure. To the extent that this analysis is convincing, it is also an argument in favor of using grammar as a tool for understanding texts, and against the curricular separation of grammar and literature.

The story begins with a man who is sitting in a green velvet armchair and reading a novel about an adulterous couple who plan to murder the woman's husband. The story ends as the woman's lover, who has some- how escaped from the novel, creeps up be- hind the green armchair in which the reader/husband is sitting. Obviously, the story raises questions about the boundaries of fiction and the permeability of fictional worlds. Not so obvious, however, is just how Cortizar manages to tell this complex and mysterious story in little more than five- hundred words.

Linguistic Background

The contrast between preterite and imperfect in Spanish is not one of tense, because both forms are past tense forms. In- stead, the contrast is aspectual. The linguistic category of aspect is very broad, but it is sufficient for our purposes to say that aspect



228 HISPANIA 80 MAY 1997

is the linguistic encoding of a speaker's (or a writer's) perspective on a verbal situation. According to Comrie, the various kinds of aspect encoded in the world's languages are "different ways of viewing the internal tem- poral constituency of a situation" (3). The words perspective and viewing suggest that how speakers use aspect has something in common with how they manipulate visual focus, and, indeed, the visual metaphor is both inevitable and instructive.

Langacker has argued convincingly that "[l]anguage is an integral part of human cognition" (12). It follows from this view of language that the grammars of human languages are cognitive systems that exhibit numerous parallels with perception. The preterite/imperfect contrast is a clear example of the link between aspect and perception, because the contrast depends on speaker focus. When speakers can focus on the entirety of a past situation and therefore perceive it as a whole, i.e., as having boundaries, they mark it with the preterite; when they perceive a past situation as out of focus and therefore unbounded, they mark it with the imperfect. But focus, whether linguistic or visual, depends on point of view, and speakers may adopt a point of view either consciously or unconsciously. Histori- ans, for example, consciously adopt an objective point of view which marks fore- grounded events with the preterite and the background to these events with the imperfect. Other speakers may unconsciously use the imperfect because they are too close to a situation to see it whole (as in dreams), or too far away from a situation to perceive it clearly (as in reminiscence).

Conventionally, situations that have natural definition (typically, concrete actions) are likely to be perceived as units, and situations that lack natural definition (typically, ongoing states) are unlikely to be perceived as units. These conventions are often mis- interpreted (and, alas, taught to students) as "rules" of preterite/imperfect usage. However, it is not the case that the nature of the verbal situation imposes aspectual choice on speakers. On the contrary, speakers impose aspectual encoding on situations

in the act of describing them-just as art- ists impose perspective on scenes in the act of painting them. That is, virtually any situation can seem whole to a speaker who is at a vantage point (physical or psychologi- cal) from which it appears to be in focus, and virtually any situation can lack boundaries for the speaker who is too close or too far away (again, either physically or psycho- logically) to perceive its boundaries. Lunn has discussed the literary exploitation of aspectual marking: "In their aspectual choices novelists can ignore the objective character- istics of a situation and classify it according to the point of view they wish the reader to adopt, or according to the point of view they wish to impute to a character" (54).

As a particularly skilled user of Spanish and a master storyteller, Cortizar gets maximum impact out of the preterite/imperfect contrast. In "Continuidad de los parques" he uses patterns of aspectual contrast to distinguish the world of the reader/ husband from that of the novelistic adulterers, and then to merge the two worlds. In fact, the linguistic structure of the story is mimetic to its narrative structure, with the result that the impact of the whole is en- hanced.

Aspectual Analysis

Based on verb endings, the story can be divided into three parts: a first part in which the reader/husband settles into the act of reading, a second part in which the doubly fictional characters in the book he is reading are introduced, and a third part in which one of these characters enters his home. At the end of the story, there is a fourth part which can be defined not by verb endings, but by the absence of verbs. Significantly, what happens in each of the first three parts of the story corresponds to distinct and de- scribable uses of verb morphology; i.e., the content of the story is mirrored in the verb forms that are used to tell it.

In the first part, in which nothing unto- ward has so far taken place, preterite and imperfect are used in conventional ways: discrete actions appear in the preterite



TEACHING LITERATURE: THE GRAMMAR OF TECHNIQUE 229

("volvi6 al libro," "se puso a leer"), and background states appear in the imperfect ("del estudio que miraba hacia el parque," "su memoria retenia sin esfuerzo los nombres" [emphasis throughout ours]). At this point, the story is quite unremarkable; we are in- vited to believe what we are reading because the scene is described in the kind of language that an ordinary observer would use to describe it. Narratively, preterite situations stand out in contrast to imperfect situations in just the way that carefully drawn figures stand out against a sketchy background. Narratively, visually and grammatically, then, everything seems normal.

At the end of the first part, the reader/ husband is firmly linked to the concrete reality of his world by the use of the preterite: "fue testigo del 6iltimo encuentro en la cabafia del monte." The use of the word testigo, though, suggests that he is present in the novelistic world as well. Lagmanovich (182-83) discusses the language of children's play, in which an anchoring preterite is followed by a series of imperfects which are understood to describe imagined events.

The second part of the story describes the episode in the novel in which the lovers put into action their plan to murder the woman's husband. In this part, the preterite-used to this point to mark "real" actions-does not appear at all. In the novelistic world, even discrete actions appear in the imperfect: "ahora llegaba el amante," "restahlaba ella la sangre," "e1 rechazaba las caricias." The use here of the imperfect, the marker of unbounded past tense situations, is consistent with the fact that the fictional adulterers live inside their novel and out- side of time. Whenever the novel is opened to a certain page, there they are, doing just what they were doing the last time that page was read. Fictional situations are ongoing and repetitive by definition, because stories are realized each time they are heard or read; the unlimited nature of such situations is perfectly congruent with the meaning of the imperfect. The use of the imperfect to narrate the novel-within-the-story marks this world as having an existence which is

simultaneous to, and contingent on, the act of reading about it.

The term "co-preterite" used by the Ven- ezuelan grammarian Andr6s Bello is help- ful in understanding the role played by the imperfect in narration. For Bello, the imperfect "significa la coexistencia del atributo con una cosa pasada" (163). Bello's termi- nology captures the fact that imperfect situations are anchored to narrative by the preterite and serve basically to fill in background information related to situations encoded in the preterite. In "Continuidad de los parques," the use of the imperfect rel- egates the events of the novel to the background of the story, while the preterite fore- grounds the reader of the novel. This aspectual marking invites readers of the story to assume that the conventions of reading are being observed: fiction is unreal but the readers of it are real. Of course, according to these conventions, the fictional reader/husband is treated as real. In this story, as in so much of his work, Cortazar both straddles and examines the fuzzy line between reality and unreality.

There is a break between the second and third parts of the story which is signalled both by a new paragraph (the only paragraph break in the story) and by a new use of the preterite. For the first time, the actions of the characters/lovers cease to appear exclusively in the imperfect and are encoded in the preterite: "se separaron en la puerta," "e1 se volvii un instante." Their actions, in other words, now bear the same aspectual marking as those of the reader/ husband in the first section. This choice of verb form signals aspectually that the lovers have entered the husband's world. Be- cause its basic meaning is that of past tense time span with defined limits, the preterite often adds an air of reality to the verbal situations that bear its mark. Compare, for example, quise lamarte with queria llamarte: the preterite version means that the speaker actually made an effort to call, while the imperfect version means only that the speaker had good intentions. In the same way, the use of the preterite to mark the actions of the novelistic lovers confers on




them a reality that they lacked when marked with the aspectually unfocused imperfect.

Where there is just one point of view, narrative texture and character depth are minimal. Such one-dimensionality can be seen in the second section, where the lovers are generic figures seen from a de- tached perspective. Both linguistically and metaphorically, the lovers become two-di- mensional in the third section, where they enter the short story world in which their actions have enough definition to merit preterite focus-and to influence events in that world. In Cortazar's fiction, a change in language is a change in events, as he him- self recognized: "En todo gran estilo el lenguaje cesa de ser un vehiculo de 'ideas y sentimientos' y accede a ese estado limite en que ya no cuenta como mero lenguaje porque todo '1 es presencia de lo expresado" (Vuelta 94).

On being reread, the aspectually distinct parts of the story reveal links among themselves. The following passage appears at first to be a simple description of the reader/husband's experience of reading the novel: "Gozaba del placer casi perverso de irse desgajando linea a linea de lo que lo rodeaba, y sentir a la vez que su cabeza descansaba c6modamente en el terciopelo del alto respaldo, que los cigarrillos seguian al alcance de la mano, que mais alli de los ventanales danzaba el aire del atardecer bajo los robles." When this sentence is reread in the light of the story's structure, the imperfects can be understood to prefigure the aspectual marking of the novel, and the husband can be seen to leave his world be- hind, verb by verb. Another example comes from the third part of the story, in which "Los perros no debian ladrar, y no ladraron" as the lover/assasin approaches the house. In one sentence, imperfect debian refers back to the novel (in which the lovers surely discussed whether the dogs would give them away) and preterite ladraron places the action in the world of the reader/husband. Cortlzar leads us through the loop of the story visually (from the room where the reader/husband sits, through the window

to the forest where the lovers meet, and back into the house), grammatically (from the use of both verb forms, to the use of only one, and back to the use of both) and narratively (from the story to the novel and back to the story). Readers who understand how this loop is designed can experience the continuity of the text.

In the last three sentences of the story, there are no verbs at all: "En lo alto, dos puertas. Nadie en la primera habitaci6n, nadie en la segunda. La puerta del sal6n, y entonces el pufial en la mano, la luz de los ventanales, el alto respaldo de un sill6n de terciopelo verde, la cabeza del hombre en el sill6n leyendo una novela." When verbs are absent, the information that is carried by verb morphology is absent as well. The morphological categories of person and tense have thus been eliminated, with the result that the end of the story is literally impersonal and atemporal: the violation of reality described in the story is not specific to any person or time. There is grammatical motivation, then, for the uncomfortable feeling that the boundary between Corttzar's story and our own reality may be as permeable as that between the reader/ husband and the characters he is reading about.

M Additional Features of the Text

In a successful short text, every word and every grammatical recourse must success- fully communicate meaning. In addition to the manipulation of the implications of the preterite/imperfect contrast already discussed, "Continuidad de los parques" ex- hibits masterful use of other features of Spanish grammar and lexicon.

There are only three subjunctives among the fifty-two conjugated verbs, but these three subjunctives are telling. Bybee has defined mood in a general and useful way: "mood is a marker on the verb that signals how the speaker chooses to put the propo- sition into the discourse context" (165). Terrell and Hooper's classic study showed that the indicative mood is used in Spanish to mark propositions that can be asserted




and the subjunctive to mark propositions that cannot be asserted, often because they are untrue or unrealized. Clearly, most conjugated verbs-in this text and elsewhere- are intended to engage a hearer's or a reader's attention; that is why most verbs are conjugated in the indicative, the mode of assertion. The subjunctive, in contrast, serves to suggest the existence of certain situations whose status precludes assertion.2 Once again, verb morphology provides a potential contrast which can be used to structure narrative.

The first subjunctive in the story appears in part one, in the description of the reader/ husband who is sitting in his armchair "de espaldas a la puerta que lo hubiera moles- tado como una irritante posibilidad de intrusiones." No intruder has come through that door at this point in the story, but the subjunctive foreshadows the intrusion that is to come. The remaining two occurrences of the subjunctive appear on the verb acariciar. In part one, the reader/husband "dej6 que su mano acariciara una y otra vez el terciopelo verde." He does not caress his wife, because someone else is doing that. The lovers' caresses in part two appear in the subjunctive as well: "el doble repaso despiadado se interrumpia apenas para que una mano acariciara una mejilla." Narra- tively, caresses are the background to what happens in this story, and modally they are so described; for all of the characters in- volved, events have gone far beyond caresses.

In the context of the story's sophisticated syntax, the lexicon is notably straightfor- ward. But, while the words themselves are simple, their disposition reveals yet another element of the continuity of the text. Of the fifty-two conjugated verbs, three appear in both parts one and two (acariciar, empezar, and ser) and three others appear in parts two and three (correr, entrar, and liegar). Volver appears in parts one and three. Most of the repeated verbs are verbs of motion, appropriately enough in a story in which characters and motifs arrive, enter the narrative, pass through it, and return.3

A look at how these verbs are used re-

veals links among the aspectually distinct parts of the story. For example, the first verb in the story is habia empezado, which is pluperfect and thus connects the story with a previous past time. This same verb appears in the imperfect at the end of part two; "Empezaba a anochecer" describes the time of day in both worlds. In part one, the reader/husband is twice the subject of volvid; in part three, the lover/assassin is the subject of this verb, i.e., he performs the same action once performed by his lover's husband. The lover/assassin is the subject of imperfect entraba in part two, where all verbs are marked aspectually as belonging to the unreal world of the novel, and also of preterite entr6 in part three, where the fictional characters have entered the short- story world. In this case, the same character performs an action which is first aspectually blurry and then aspectually distinct.

The word mano appears four times, twice in part one, where the husband strokes the arm of the chair, and where cigarettes are described as being "al alcance de la mano," once in part two, where the lovers' hands caress one another's cheeks, and once in part three, where the lover/assassin has "el

pufial en la mano." Only in the first of these instances does the noun appear with a pos- sessive; otherwise, mano appears with the definite article, a word whose generic and impersonal meanings further serve to con- fuse and link the worlds of the novel and of the story.

Using the Story in Class

Because of its length and its modest vo- cabulary, "Continuidad de los parques" is often assigned to intermediate learners of Spanish. The story is only superficially easy to read, however. As we have shown, Cortaizar makes very sophisticated use of the linguistic resources of Spanish, and this usage is part and parcel of the plot. Students who do not understand the grammatical choices that the author has made cannot read the clues that point to the story's conclusion. Unprepared to perceive the concrete features of the text, they must have




the ending explained to them, thereby miss- ing out on the flash of understanding that the story was designed to effect. In contrast, when the story is taught as an example of, say, how the meanings of preterite and imperfect can be manipulated, it is rendered both comprehensible and accessible.

A very simple but effective tool for guid- ing students to an understanding of the use of aspect in the story is to ask them to mark all preterite and imperfect verbs contras- tively, e.g., underline one form and circle the other, or highlight one form with one color and the other with a different color. Based on this identification of the forms (which is not as easy a task as one might expect at this level4), students can see that there is a part of the story which contains only imperfect verbs, and that the end of this part coincides with the paragraph break. They can also see that the all-imperfect section segregates the part before it from the part after it.

Further insights will result from asking students to answer the following questions:

- En la primera parte, ?que personaje es el sujeto de los verbos en prete6rito? - En la segunda parte, ?que' personajes son los sujetos de los verbos en imperfecto? - En la tercera parte, jque personajes son los sujetos de los verbos en pret6rito? - Cu~ntos verbos conjugados hay en las iltimas tres frases del cuento? Up to this point, students have been

asked to perform analyses of a mechanical kind. Based on these analyses, though, and on an understanding of the semantic value of preterite and imperfect morphology,' students can go on to draw inferences from the patterns they have identified. They can answer the kinds of questions which have a number of correct answers and therefore lead to discussion:

- En la primera parte del cuento, el uso de pretirito e imperfecto es conven- cional. jQu6 nos dice el convencio- nalismo del lenguaje sobre el mundo descrito por este lenguaje? - El imperfecto es la marca de situaciones pasadas ilimitadas. Teniendo en cuenta

esto, jcuiles son las implicaciones del uso exclusivo del imperfecto en la segunda parte? - En la tercera parte, los actos de los personajes novelisticos llevan la marca del pret6rito. jCuiles son las implicaciones de este uso del preterito? - En las iltimas lineas del cuento, no hay verbos y, por o10 tanto, no hay marcadores de tiempo ni de persona. ?Cuiles son las implicaciones de la falta de verbos en esta parte del cuento? Answering these questions will induce

students to understand the story. Crucially, though, this process does not tell students what the story means; rather, it allows them to see how the meaning of the story grows out of the language of which it is made.

Conclusion

As admirers of Cortazar's story will have realized, there are many critical possibilities that have not been discussed here.' This article is not an exhaustive treatment of the story, but a proposal for integrating grammatical analysis and the reading of literature. This integrated approach invites students to apply their knowledge of grammar, thus helping them to understand that all grammatical choices have meaningful con- sequences. It also encourages students to see literature as a modality of the language they are learning, rather than a code to which they have no access.

Far from detracting from the artfulness of literature, grammatical analysis reveals just how artful great writers are. Surely, one's appreciation for Cortaizar's skill in- creases as one becomes aware of how he makes use of the grammatical potential of Spanish. Cortazar's comments on his own work suggest that he was aware of the kind of linguistic engineering that characterizes "Continuidad de los parques." Professional users of language differ in this way from other native speakers (the producers of what is misleadingly called "ordinary" speech), who are often unaware of how they create rhetorical effects. Whether literary and rhetorical effects are consciously or




unconsciously achieved, though, they are analyzable linguistically. The abiding rel- evance of literature lies in its comprehensi- bility, and revealing the source of this com- prehensibility is an act of homage to literature. In the case of modern Latin American literature, justly famous for its linguistic playfulness, linguistic analysis allows students access to the rules of the game.

In writing about translation' Gregory Rabassa has made the polemical statement that "[11]anguage learning and the study of literature are two completely different things" (27). One need not agree with his characterization of the problem to recog- nize that there is a contradiction inherent in the teaching of foreign languages through literature. Rabassa argues that se- rious discussions of literature require sophisticated language skills; this suggests (and, in fact, often results in) the use of English in the classroom. At the same time, language learners need to practice encoding and communicating ideas; this suggests that the foreign language be used in the classroom. Integrating the study of grammar with the study of literary texts provides a partial rapprochement between the goals of literary study and those of language learning.

M NOTES 1The analysis in this article was developed inde-

pendently of Lagmanovich's article. However, both analyses divide the story into the same four parts, which argues for the empirical basis of the division.

2The past subjunctive in Spanish is, appropriately enough, an imperfect subjunctive. There is an inevitable semantic overlap between lack of focus and irreality, and the confluence of imperfective aspect and subjunctive mood is the morphological expres- sion of this overlap.

'Greimas points out that the story begins with the words "Habia empezado a leer la novela" and ends with "del hombre en el sill6n leyendo una novela" (32). As the title suggests, themes, settings, and characters are continuous in the story and loop back on themselves.

4Indeed, fourth year university students not infre- quently misidentify the verb "habia empezado" as imperfect. Ability to mechanically identify verb endings is a useful diagnostic; surely, students who cannot pick out preterites and imperfects from a text are

not ready to read that text in any ordinary sense of the word read.

5Butt and Benjamin present a concise and well- documented treatment of preterite and imperfect. The relevant chapter in Lunn and DeCesaris discusses the semantic motivation of both conventional and uncon- ventional uses of aspectual morphology.

6Greimas, for example, links the lack of verbs in the last part of the story to aesthetic apprehension, a "purified" signifier, and Aristotelian catharsis (36). In the literary-critical mode, the story is the first step in a series of appreciations. For students, though, the story is a language-learning exercise as well as a literary text, which argues in favor of an approach that involves the examination of grammar.

7''Continuidad de los parques" poses an interest- ing dilemma when translated into a language which lacks the preterite/imperfect distinction, such as En- glish. There are several English versions that make no distinction between the two forms and translate both of them as the English past tense; in these trans- lations, Cortizar's wordplay is lost and the story becomes a simple horror story. Linguistic analysis suggests a solution: the English present tense, which is aspectually imperfective, could be used to translate the imperfects.

N WORKS CITED

Bello, Andres, and Rufino J. Cuervo. Gramadtica de la lengua castellana. Buenos Aires: Anaconda, 1941.

Butt, John, and Carmen Benjamin. A New Reference Grammar ofModern Spanish. 2nd ed. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1994.

Bybee, Joan L. Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1985.

CortAzar, Julio. "Continuidad de los parques." Ceremo- nias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1968. 11-12.

-La vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1967.

Comrie, Bernard. Aspect. Cambridge UP, 1976. Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. "Una mano, una mejilla."

Revista de Occidente 85 (1988): 31-37. Lagmanovich, David. "Estrategias del cuento breve en

Cortaizar: Un paseo por 'Continuidad de los parques."' Explicacidn de textos literarios 17.1-2 (1988- 89): 177-85.

Langacker, Ronald W. Foundations ofCognitive Gram- mar. Vol. 1. Stanford UP, 1987. 2 vols.

Lunn, Patricia V. '"The Aspectual Lens." Hispanic Lin- guistics 2 (1985): 49-61.

Lunn, Patricia V., and Janet A. DeCesaris. Investiga- ci6n de gramdtica. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1992.

Rabassa, Gregory. "If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Possibilities." Translation: Literary, Lin- guistic and Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. William Frawley. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1984. 21-29.

Terrell, Tracy, and Joan Hooper, "A Semantically Based Analysis of Mood in Spanish." Hispania 57 (1974): 484-94.



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