Continuity of Parks

Challenging conventional ways of reading fiction, “Continuity of Parks” uses a frame narrative device to tell the tale of a man whose murder is being plotted by the protagonists of the novel he is reading.

Cortázar’s story introduces a metaphysical twist on the frame narrative, or a story within a story, structure that collapses the distinction between the two narratives and allows them to communicate with one another. The title, “Continuity of Parks,” refers literally to this overlap, the continuity between the park in which the reader-protagonist’s house sits and the park across which the assassin “hero” of the novel comes to kill that reader. By extension, the title also refers to the continuity between the two levels of experience in the story, thus a Continuity of Worlds.

While Cortázar’s story centers on the interpenetrative continuity of these two worlds, it also establishes their different atmospheres. The story contrasts the two “worlds” or narrative levels, that of the reader-protagonist in his study and that of the adulterous couple in the mountain cabin. The scene of the protagonist reading in his study emphasizes comfort, leisure, tranquility, and seclusion (63). In contrast, the novelistic scene he is reading of the encounter in the mountain cabin is marked by tension, activity, passion, and violence (64).

The reader-protagonist sunk in his armchair vicariously enjoys the thrill of fictional lives more vibrant than his own. He is ensconced in a kind of layered cocoon of comfort: in his armchair, in his study, in his house, in the middle of a private park. He is so absorbed in the act and pleasure of reading that “even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it” (63). This narrative reflection on the unthinkable possibility of an intrusion resonates ironically with the startling twist at the end of the story when the character from the novel does indeed intrude into the reader’s study, armed and ready to kill him.

Cortázar’s story also raises questions about Ways of Reading, especially the mode of immersive fiction reading that had become habitual by the mid-20th century in which literature is treated as entertainment to be consumed. As is suggested in “Continuity of Parks,” fiction can be escapist, providing the excitement, passion, and vitality that comfortable, sedate, modern life may lack. Once the real business of life has been attended to, the well-to-do protagonist throws himself into his favorite armchair and settles comfortably into the more thrilling world of his novel. He takes his pleasure, it is assumed, without risk of any actual danger disturbing his cushioned seclusion. His attention to the comforting proximity of his cigarettes to his reading chair suggests that both novel and cigarette are habitual supports of his leisure (63). However, by presenting the second narrative within the story, one that is charged with violence and conflict, Cortázar seems to be warning against the more leisurely, passive engagement with literature. In fact, it is through this act of reading as pleasure that the protagonist-reader is interrupted and taken under attack.

Utterly passive and “licked up by the sordid dilemma” (64) of the novel, the reader’s consciousness is absorbed into the fictional world. This process demonstrates the seductive Power of Literature over readers. Paradoxically perhaps, it is precisely through the passivity of his reading practice that the reader-protagonist initiates the interpenetration of these two levels of narrative (64). First, he enters the world of the novel. Then, unexpectedly, the world of the novel crosses over into his.

This moment of absorption is the last time that the third-person narrative records the experience and thoughts of the reader-protagonist. At this point of total immersive penetration “where the images settled down and took on color and movement” (64) the narrative of Cortázar’s story switches focus. The reader-protagonist is left behind as the narrative turns to the characters and story of the novel being read.

This might solely represent a shift in narrative perspective, or it could signify the introduction of a new and distinct narrative voice—the one from the novel the protagonist is reading. It is possible to understand each of these levels of fiction—the initial one of the frame narrative and the subsequent one of the novel—as having distinct narrative voices. Nonetheless, if understood as different narratives, these, like everything in this story become “continuous” with one another. As in the property acquisition the reader-protagonist discusses with his estate manager, the two narratives finally take a kind of “joint ownership” of the story (63).

Across the two narratives and their fictions, the story establishes continuities of time, space, and character. There is continuity of time; it is late afternoon when the reader settles back into the armchair and dusk is falling when the murderous lover approaches the house of his victim. There is continuity of space; the literal continuity of the park in which the reader’s house sits and the park through which the novel’s assassin comes to murder him. There is the continuity of the characters; the reader-protagonist of the first narrative is doubled into the “husband-victim” in the narrative of the novel, and the “lover-woman” in the novel is continuous with the wife of the reader-protagonist.

Folding these two fictions across each other, the story does not resolve one into the other. Cortázar leaves us at this point of intersection. The story does not return to the first fictional world of the frame narrative by affirming that this approach of the killer is happening solely in the imagination of the reader-protagonist. Nor does the story confirm the supremacy of the novel’s fiction by having its protagonist carry out the plotted murder of the reader. The ending of “Continuity of Parks” is open-ended for a reason. It leaves the reader at a conceptual impasse, forcing them to sustain the presence of two levels of reality.

The story puts a question mark over the conventional distinction between fiction and reality. It invites readers to reconsider the solidity of that distinction and their experience of what is real. The Power of Fiction exercised by “Continuity of Parks” calls for a radical rethinking of the concepts that define the place of fiction in the real world. This kind of fiction, prevalent among the writers of the Latin American Boom movement, invites readers into a kind of conceptual game designed to expand their understanding of reality itself.