Open AccessAxolotl/Bichos Raros Crónica
Author(s) -
Susana Chávez-Silverman
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
portal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.125
H-Index - 2
ISSN - 1449-2490
DOI - 10.5130/portal.v9i2.2514
Subject(s) - veneration , casual , axolotl , identity (music) , psychoanalysis , privilege (computing) , pleasure , sociology , aesthetics , art , psychology , philosophy , biology , computer science , theology , materials science , computer security , regeneration (biology) , neuroscience , composite material , microbiology and biotechnology
In this crónica, I pay homage (and talk back to!) one of my favourite authors, Julio Cortázar, who I had the great privilege and pleasure of befriending in 1980, when he was a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley. I have been obsessed with time-travel, doubling, and interstitiality since I was very young; even the most casual Cortázar reader (if such a thing is possible) will immediately recognise these as recurrent themes in his work. Here, faced with several actual axolotl in a Buenos Aires aquarium, I explore and comment on Cortázar’s strangely mesmerising meditation on identity and transformation. My personal connection is (as in much of my writing) concerned with aspects of gender and sexuality suppressed or (more likely) ignored in Cortázar’s version. I identify, too, with a poignant in-betweenness and ambiguity I read in the figure of the axolotl—and in the work of Cortázar and Alejandra Pizarnik