Blow Up Questions and Answers

BROAD QUESTIONS

Examine the themes in the story Blow Up.

It’s easy to become fascinated with Cortazar’s tour de force in creating the consciousness of a psychotic mind and miss the fact that ” about understanding what one sees the major theme is about “seeing,One can read the story as an initiation story. At the beginning of his story, Michel has great confidence in his own powers of observation–his ability to see and understand what he sees. After all, he’s a photographer–his business is capturing the truth–of revealing what’s going on–breaking through sterotypes and cliches of sight-to some true vision.

In the park he thinks he sees what’s going on–a woman seducing a boy. He’s confident in his insight and he decides to capture it with his camera. He is pleased with himself when his act of taking the picture scares the boy off and thus prevents the abuse of the boy by the woman. But later when he looks carefully at the blow-up of the incident, he gradually sees that he had completely misunderstood what was going on–he was blind to the truth of what he had seen. The blow-up reveals to him that it was a homosexual seduction.

It’s important to note that Michel creates the film of him watching the film of the boy and the man, and then his own entrance into that film, which once again allows the boy to escape, purely out of his imagination. The details of the blow-up only suggest what was really going to happen. But it didn’t because Michel took his photograph. The film is his imaginative story construction out of what was implied in the details of the blow-up.

This insight into his own ignorance and blindness is overwhelming to him and causes him to reject the sight and to retreat into his own psychic projections. He completely erases the contents of the photo from his mind and projects clean peaceful scenes from nature onto the blow-up.

At the beginning of his venture on Sunday Nov. 7, he tells us: “I think I know how to look….” At the end of his traumatic projection of the film in which the man is engulfing him, he screams and says, “I didn’t want to see anymore. I shut my eyes “

His confidence in secing causes him to take the picture. The blow. up sucks him into a reality that shatters his seeing and makes him see something that he didn’t want to see.

The issue of why seeing a homosexual seduction is so traumatic for Michel as to cause a psychotic break is not really answered in the story. It’s tempting to t suggest it’s a rejection of his latent homosexuality or his fear of such. But the story just doesn’t give enough details about Michel to warrant an explanation of why the event was so traumatic. The story seems more interested in presenting the irony of the movement from confidence in seeing to a rejection of seeing More interested in the ironies of photography and the difficulties of interpreting and understanding the visual.

What is your opinion of the story and the collection?

While the theme of unknowing continues within some of these stories the author morphing time and place and being they are each intensely evocative. Again, the questions of “What should I feel?” and “What should I know?” arose in our discussion, and yet, without words, Delvers clearly felt something and often realized that they knew the occurrence, bewildering as the slowed-down, drawn-out events may have been.

We began with “The Secret Weapons.” In this story, Cortázar uses words to make the reader feel, to reshape reality without saying what literally occurred, though every reader knows what Cortázar is referring to and, most importantly, they feel what is happening for the characters. Cortázar transfers consciousness throughout this collection either from character to character or character to object. He brings spaces to life in a way I have not encountered in other writers. Readers feel the tension of place and time and conflict without it being drawn or drawn without the literal, often, and with gaps. Details are chosen to leap us into a character’s experience or the energy between characters or to witness, as in the case of “The Pursuer,” the great lengths of their obsessions or faults, to be worn by it ourselves.

I dare say that Cortázar wrote his stories in symbols in snapshots, as he often has said. These snapshots destroy compasses because they take us deep into the still: into every layer, not as witnesses, but as full of color and breath as the story and characters themselves.

This is where the master shines. I found it transcending, as an artist and a reader. Time dissolved. The labyrinth exploded. The energy was transferred and, as often happened with Cortázar’s characters, the reader was embodied, engulfed in the moment. The still was still no longer.

The black winter nights kept on, the heat moved up the high ceilings. We Delvers did the work, whether we heard the music or not, and drank the wine, surrounded by tomes and sketches and our guide, who invited us onward through these images, into and past language, so we might let go and allow ourselves the free will to search, without a compass to be alive in a room and in texts that only look still.

Comment on the literary progress as mentioned in the collection in the political context of Argentina.

Much of Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s fictional writing defies categorization and critics have labeled it “fantastic”for lack of a better description. Meanwhile, he felt that literature must progress towards unforeseen future states and new modes of expression, as the task of an author was not only to engage in art, but to engage in history. In an article that addresses the role of Latin American intellectualism entitled, “Politics and the Intellectual in Latin America,” he writes:

Never recede, for whatever reasons, along the path of creativity. It is hardly discouraging that the literature which we could term “avantgarde” still cannot count on the understanding of all the readers which we might desire. It is precisely to reach that totality someday that one must fiercely search for new vehicles of creativity and language. One must hurl oneself towards the new, toward the unexplored, toward mankind’s most unsettling reality. And simplification in the name of the vast public is treason to our people.

Cortázar’s drive for new modes of expression suggests that he was firmly invested in transforming history by putting his literature into dialogue with the future. This corresponds with Walter Benjamin’s conception of art, as he describes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. Like Benjamin’s description of artistic development, Cortázar’s art embodies a point of entry that aims for its own future disappearance. Cortázar foresces a time when his radical aesthetic will recede as an outmoded strategy for the coming always-already transformed world. Yet, in the process, he will have helped that very future to emerge.

Cortázar’s most celebrated literary form was the short story, although he felt that traditional narrative forms such as the story and the novel were anachronistic in the development of art. He sought to use these traditional literary forms in order to usher in the new. He writes:

“Paradoxically, I affirm that an intellectual like me has the right and duty to keep on taking advantage of these forms of creation destined to disappear or to be radically modified in the future and that one should do so precisely in order to bring about that modification.”

It is as though Cortázar felt that his role as an intellectual itself would eventually become an untenable role. Over time, he suggested that his earlier emphasis on purely philosophical, metaphysical, and fantastical forms of writing did not address the pressing political issues that consumed him later in life.

Cortázar placed a distinct emphasis on the need for perfected craft, resistance to rational thought, revolutionary form that defied the confines of political dogma or mimetic representation, and a symbolic solidarity for the collective experience that belonged to Latin America. Several of these empahses distinctly emerge within the story,”Las Babas del Diablo,” which literally translates into English as “the tears of the devil,” but was later translated into English with the title “BlowUp. “It was first published in 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution.

The protagonist of the story is a French Chilean translator named Roberto Michel, who takes photos along the docks of the Seine one afternoon. The character is an intellectual and expatriate living in Paris with a South American identity, sharing all of these traits in common with Julio Cortázar, himself. Cortázar lived in Paris starting in 1951, at first by choice, but eventually he was consigned to live there due to censorship of his writings in the 1970s by the right-wing military junta in his home, Argentina. He often described the nature of his expatriates as a form of self-exile.

Within the story, the protagonist’s romantic conception of the significance of his photographs as artistic mementos explodes when he reproduces and enlarges the images to view them in detail back at his home. He then bears witness to an irrational embodimet of violence emitted by the images and the photographic medium imposes itself on his consciousness, crasing the naïve, innocent mental images he had preserved in his memory. Through this story, Cortázar critiques the untenable status of bourgeois subjectivity in the face of violence. By the end of the story, a transformation from man into machine results in his isolated subjective impotence, with the protagonists’ consciousness remaining locked inside the mechanistic perceptions of his camera. Though the story was written almost sixty years ago, it remains filled with relevant links to our own time in which forms of visual communication have proliferated extensively through the internet and social media and they constantly inform our own framework of bourgeois subjectivity.

The narrator undergoes a loss of control as a producer of his own experience, sacrificing his lived-memories to the dictation of a machine. Elucidate in reference to the story.

The transformation into mechanistic thinking creates a kind of allegory for the bourgeois subjectivity in which an already limited purview is increasingly apprehended through technology to heighten the arbitrary objectivity of the gaze. The narrator undergoes a loss of control as a producer of his own experience, sacrificing his livedmemories to the dictation of a machine. The story subjects the narrator

to the consequences of his own “indifference of form towards content” that Georg Lukaks attribtues to the bourgeois “contemplative stance in his critique of the subjectivity described within Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Such a bourgeois subjectivity implies a “reified structure of consciousness” one that hides or suppresses social relations that constitute the material economic base by conceiving of the world as a product of the mind, rather than something independent of the knowing subject. This form of consciousness produces reason that is purely formal and partial in its ability to account for the relationship between the thinking subject and the world’s objectivity. In many ways, the embodiment of multiple subjectivities within the narrative of his story serves to produce an awareness of both the bourgeois and the mechanical subjectivities, as each one comparatively defines the other in terms of their contrasting limitations. These limitations are revealed when Cortázar’s character undergoes his transformation, and they point to an independent objectivity that cannot fully be captured by the purview of either.

In Blow-Up, Cortázar appeals to the photographic process to produce shock through its mechanical production of objective violence in the minds of his bourgeois protagonists. These objects appear as a result of momentary lapses in a contemplative, detached stance, which expose violence as a social reality. The horrifying shock the images produce in the minds of his protagonist results in the symbolic dismantling of his bourgeois subjective stance, meant to be shared by the reader. In his imbedded critique, Cortázar depicts the collapse of bourgeois representational control, which gives way to objective historic testimony, through the impersonal lens of the machine, or camera.

The beginning narration of Blow-Up introduces a binary between his human narrative and the different forms of mechanical mediation that play a role in the narrator’s life. Cortázar destabilizes the narrative voice by introducing slippage between the use of first and third person narration. The narrator expresses his lackadaisical wish for the machine to take over in writing the story, so he wouldn’t have to do the work: “if the typewriter continues by itself that would be perfection”. He then enters into a meditative interior monologue on the other machine that has significance for the story the camera: “the aperture which must be counted also as a machine and it is possible that one machine may know more about another machine than I, you, she the blond the clouds”. This discussion of the interplay of machines and their mediation of reality aligns the impressions in “Blow-Up” with Walter Benjamin’s analysis on the way mechanic reproducibility reveals the “developmental tendencies of art under the present conditions of production” in his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. Benjamin suggests that changes in forms of artistic production make the dialectic comprehensible. Cortázar’s incorporation of machines in his text similarly forms a dialectic that shapes the story a metamorphosis that takes place from the narration’s primarily bourgeois subjectivity to a purely mechanical subjectivity itself serves as a kind of allegory for historic shifts that technology imposes on our subjectivity, and our emerging awareness of such a shift.

The narrator describes with both first and third person narration how Roberto Michel, the French-Chilean translator protagonist, decides to talk a walk on the docks of the Seine to photograph buildings. The narration undergoes repeated interruptions from a secondary voice in the form parenthetical anecdotes: “the sun came out at least twice as hard” or “Right now I was able to sit quietly”. In my interpretation, this narrative refraction is caused by the two machines involved in telling the story the typewriter and the camera through their personification in the form of interrupting voices. The story introduces Michel’s contemplative thoughts that are largely shaped to conform to the specialized thought processes of photographic work, thereby aligning him with the sense that a bourgeois rational world-view entails increasing specialization:

Michel knew that the photographer always worked as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world as other than the camera insidiously imposed upon it, but he lacked no confidence in himself, knowing that he had only to go out without the Contax to recover the keynote of distraction, the sight without a frame around it, light without the diaphragm aperture or 1/250 sec.

Cortázar highlights the way that frames and apertures significantly transform one’s experience by molding limitless experience into a particular habit of mind. Roberto Michel is held captive by the mechanistic procedure involved in using the camera even though periodically, he escapes that mode of thinking. “I was able to sit quietly on the railing overlooking the river watching the red and black motorboats passing below without it occurring to me to think photographically of the scenes” Thinking “photographically” forces him to actively dictate the meaning of the world according to his specialization, but at times he lapses into periods of disengaged. observation.

The narrator recalls how Roberto Michel noticed a couple on his walk that day. The woman was older, the boy was young and looked nervous. The narrator points out a difference in the way he is able to remember each of them. He remembers the boy’s body better as a photographed image, while he remembers the woman’s body better as a memory. This distinction reasserts the mediating effect of the mechanical process on his memory, which destabilizes the authority of both his memory and the photograph. It is uncertain whether the photograph or his memory represents the original. Each records deceptively viable impressions of the truth.

In retrospect, the narrator recalls how he assumes that his sensibility produced the sensation of mysterious beauty he felt when witnessing the couple. His subjective gaze had been divorced from any sense that the objects themselves could have any bearing on his thoughts. The narrator states: “Strange how the scene was taking on a disquieting aura. I thought it was I imposing it, and that my photo, if I shot it, would reconstitute things in their true stupidity”. This foreshadows that the story will later reveal a more precise discontinuity between his lived impressions and the “reconsituted” reality. Once he develops the photo, the scene goes on to conform to a completely different frame of reality than what he remembers.

Roberto Michel begins taking photographs and he speculates about how the pair’s night will end up, assuming the woman is a call girl: “But that woman invited speculation, perhaps giving clues enough for the fantasy to hit the bullseye”. The couple notices him and the woman confronts him, but he resists her plea for him to hand over his film by arguing that it is his right to take photos in public. The boy runs off and a man waiting in a car approaches Roberto Michel walks away from them. This is how the narrator remembers the scene. He navigates through what he considers a harmless interaction and he opts out of further engagement with the people he photographed.

Back in his apartment, Roberto Michel develops his role of film and enlarges one of the photos taken of the boy. After a few days, he sees that the image of his camera is reflected in the woman’s eyes in the blown-up photo: “I’m such a jerk; it never had occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens”. His observation aligns with Benjamin’s description of the way photographic reproduction brings out aspects of the original that are not visible to the naked eye: “photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision”. In this instance, the photograph creates a mirror in which the photographer finds a trace of his otherwise invisible presence in the reality of the scene, but the scene itself reveals more than he remembers seeing through the lens that day. At one point, while working on his translations, Roberto Michel sees the image move. Suddenly, he witnesses the moving scene as though it were a movie projection. This time, the images he witnesses enact a situation that extends beyond the confines of the photographer’s

subjective influence:

“And what I had imagined earlier was much less horrible than the reality, that woman, who was not there by herself, she was not caressing or propositioning or encouraging for her own pleasure The real boss was waiting there, smiling petulantly, already certain of his business; he was not the first to send a woman in vanguard, to bring him the prisoners manacled with flowers.”

Recognizing the alternate reality outside his limited understanding, Roberto Michel witnesses the violent situation that the image contains and he can do nothing but watch it with mechanical fixity: “to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention. It was horrible, their mocking me, deciding it before my impotent eye” The impotence he feels causes Roberto Michel to have a shocking physical reaction; he screams.

At this point, his narrative transforms from the purview of a thinking bourgeois subject into the alien mechanical lens-view of the situation. His close proximity to the scene blots out the imagery. What seems to have taken place is a murder, perhaps his own, but the depiction is vague and indeterminate. After this, the narrator shuts his eyes to the scene. When he opens his eyes, he remains stuck in the lens-view perspective of the camera and the camera has fallen to the ground. The earlier parenthetical descriptions of the sky that interrupted the story return without parentheses as if the Roberto Michel, the photographer transformed completely into the eye/I of his machine, the camera: “Now there’s a big white cloud, as on all these days, all this untellable time”.

The emphasis in this story hinges on the characters’ impotent estrangement from action, the inhuman foreignness of machineconsciousness, and his metaphysical isolation. In essence, Cortázar likens bourgeois consciousness to its metaphysical reduplication of mechanistic thinking. His character suddenly embodies the impotent relation to history that a machine has, in that it is an unconscious and arbitrary recorder. The result of this transformation is the narrator’s complete loss of agency. The story portrays the irrational nightmare of bourgeois consciousness achieving the completion of its trajectory in the specialization of thought processes from a photographic specialist, fully crossing over to becoming a photographic machine, itself.

What is the medium of the story to the readers?

The story Blow-up uses the photographic medium as a means for exposing the reader to the oppositional forces present within a dialectic conception of reality. Through photographic process, the protagonist witnesses the total reversibility of his assumptions about the world. It undermines his authority and the authority of their worldview altogether. The bourgeois subjectivity that grounds him in the beginning of the story completely unravels by the end It is no konger a viable framework of understanding to embody the diversely oppositional worlds the story introduces.

Photography serves as the narrative tool to symbolically slice reality from its context and place it within a newly established frame A long-time reader of Walter Benjamin, it is easy to trace a line of influence from Cortazar to the theorist. For Benjamin, photography penetrates deeply into its reality’s web”. In Cortázar’s portrayal, this exposed web is violent and otherwise not penetrable by the countenance of his bourgeois subject. Furthermore, the type of violence portrayed in “Las Babas” takes place among strangers. The protagonist neither sympathizes with the people, who produce the violence, and he does not understand what the purpose or nature of the violent action is. The violence becomes visibly distorted, the closer he gets to it, “an instant still in perfect focus, and then all of him a lump that blotted out the island, the tree, and I shut my eyes, I didn’t want to see anymore, and I shut my eyes and broke into tears like an idiot”. Cortázar uses photography in an irrational way to exhibit the shock such violence produces for his protagonist and which only the camera can reveal to him. Likewise, Walter Benjamin noted how early film produced shock for its viewers, since they had not yet developed any sense of filmic convention. He writes: “the shock effect of film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by a heightened sense of mind”. Cortázar uses the portrayal of shock to remind readers that violence should be shocking.

Benjamin writes that photography “extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives” and “it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action”. This “field of action” is a newly recognized plane of possibility, which in these stories create a circumstance that permanently alters the possibility of bourgeois subjectivity. The mechanical process explodes the protagonist’s framework of memory, and it dismantles his willful desire to ignore the asymmetries his subjective gaze seeks to diminish. The shock of the moment of recognition happens as an instantaneous reversal. The bourgeois rational worldview becomes untenable because of the imposition of a more visceral, penetrating violence.

In many ways, this story stands at a kind of turning point towards an intensification of Julio Cortázar’s political investment in writing literature. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Julio Cortázar sought to write revolutionary literature because he felt the historic necessity to do so. Cortázar often said that the Cuban Revolution awakened him to politics. He did not merely seek to utilize a mimetic framework to reflect life during times of revolution. Cortázar asserts: “to write for a revolution, to write within a revolution, means to write in a revolutionary way; it doesn’t mean, as many believe, to be obliged to write about the revolution itself”. Cortázar’s goals with literature involved the rejection of Western rationalism and all of the modes of expression that he attributes to it, including literary realism. He resists what he terms “cultural fascism” through “intellectual combat,” which is to say symbolic combat. Cortázar attributes the military as the motivation for his political involvement in Latin America.

At the same time, Cortázar describes how he that writing has in the struggle for material change:

“I do not delude myself concerning the influence of literature and art on the geopolitical process; the petroleum industry, the multinational corporations and the many other forms of capitalist power are infinitely more powerful. But one can discover upon observing Latin America to what extent there is a growing popular consciousness of the devastation caused by imperialism and fascism in our countries. This new consciousness has been reached to a large extent by direct or indirect intellectual means.”

In spite of the limited power of writing, Cortázar expresses a certain faith in indirect influence. He took part in various politically symbolic gestures such as signing on to the second Russell Tribunal that denounced the militant infiltration of Latin American governments by North American multinational corporations as war crimes. He asserts: “And let’s think that a writer isn’t judged only by the theme of his novels or stories, but by his living presences in the heart of the community, by the fact that the total commitment of his person is an undeniable guarantee of the truth and the necessity of his work”.

However, in spite of the optimism of Cortázar’s political aspirations, he was also met with some criticism: “The tension arising from his being away from Argentina and Latin America, and from the criticism of the lack of explicit social and political denunciation in his fiction. Though he had begun to use his status as an intellectual to align the literature and essays he wrote with revolutionary movements through symbolic solidarity in opposition to fascist governments across Latin America following the Cuban Revolution, for some, his gesture was still not direct enough. His critics continue to interpret his work based on his earlier and more well-known experimental works that have an emphasis on metaphysical and surrealistic representation and that drew heavily from Borges as their predecessor. Nevertheless, writing itself, for Cortázar, produces an affect directed at the realization of future forms by defying rational thought and endeavoring to produce revolutionary agency through an aesthetic means.

Comment briefly on the character of Michel.

Roberto Michel, the protagonist of “Blow-Up,” changes from observing other people’s actions to influencing them after he photographs a woman apparently trying to seduce a boy. The character comes to view reality and imagery as so tightly intertwined that he can no longer distinguish between them. While the novel is concerned with one photographer’s perceptions, it may also stand as a metaphor for the limits to and responsibilities of creative people.

Out on a Paris street one day, Roberto takes several photographs of an attractive woman interacting with a teenager. The woman’s flirtatious behavior seems to be making the boy nervous. Nearby a man sits in a parked car. When she sees that Roberto has been photographing them, she asks for the film from his camera; at this point, the boy runs away. The man gets out of the car and joins in her demand. Refusing to turn it over, Michel leaves the scene.

Both the scene that he saw and his imagined story about what was occurring stay with him as he develops the film and examines the photographs. After enlarging one frame and putting the blow-up on his wall, he becomes increasingly fascinated by the actual event

and elaborates the story further, convincing himself that his presence enabled the boy to escape a bad situation.

At this point, the line between reality and Roberto’s fantasy becomes blurred. The reader cannot know if the author intends them to believe that what Roberto describes actually occurred-a fantasy story-or if his description indicates a mental breakdown. The figures in the photograph come alive and resume the story at the point right after the last image was taken. The story is a different one than what Roberto observed. In this new version, the action continues as if he had not been present and interrupted them. He gets so upset at what is transpiring that he runs toward the blow-up, and by doing so, alters the events in the fantastic story as well.

The author does not provide Roberto’s character with a back story, so the reader is left unsure about his mental state. While it might be that he is undergoing a crisis of conscience about his vocation of photographer, which depends on remaining outside the frame, his actions could also be interpreted as losing his grasp of reality and believing that he actually can change events that were already recorded. As the photographer’s role is similar to that of an author, Cortázar may be making a larger statement about relationships among creative work, objectivity, and activism.

SHORT QUESTIONS

Comment on the character of Michel.

Michel is the central character; the others exist only in the past story he is telling us. The story focuses on what is going on inside Michel. His story of taking the photo in the park and then the subsequent experience with the blow-up reveals in the end that he’s had a traumatic experience. We know at the beginning of the story that the narrator is upset and is trying to find a way to tell the story. By the end when he reveals his hallucinatory experience with the blowup, we see that it has caused him some kind of mental breakdown. His experience of taking the photo of what he thought was a simple seduction scene, and then discovering by studying the blow-up that it was a homosexual seduction by the man in the car becomes for him a overwhelming experience of evil which causes a psychotic break.

At the end we understand that the clouds passing by which he has been seeing from the beginning of his story are the projections of his mind onto the blow-up. At the end he no longer sees the boy and the woman in the photo, but projects an innocent scene from nature onto a blank blow-up in which there are only clouds and birds passing by in the film. This projection indicates his traumatic rejection of what he had seen in the photo.

What are the symbols used in the story?

The reader assumes that the clouds and pigeons are real, that Michel is looking out a window because he constantly interrupts his story to tell us that they are going by. At the end, the clouds and pigeons turn out to be his hallucinations about what he sees in the film he’s projecting onto the blow-up on the wall. What were details of what he remembered about the clouds and pigeons that were in the park that day, become, in the present moment of his telling of his story, projections of his mind onto the blow-up.

The original title of the story is symbolic of the experience in the park both for the boy in the photo and for Michel. Michel thinks he saved the boy from the Devil. The boy had a close shave with the Devil almost seduced. So close that he could feel the wetness of the Devil’s drool on him. Michel himself has the same experience. He projects himself entering into a movie in which he confronts the Man and is standing almost in the Devil’s mouth. He escapes his hallucination by shutting his eyes as the man comes so close that he fills his camera lens. The boy presumably escapes, but does Michel? The suggestion is that this experience of the Devil’s drool causes a psychotic break. The blow-up becomes the instrument of revelation. The blow-up reveals that what he thought he saw was in fact something else.

What is the source of the story?

Adapted into one of the most influential British films of the 1960’s, Blow-Up is an excellent example of the postmodernist fragmentation

of narrative that defines much of Cortazar’s work. In a story in which prevailing theme is that of perception versus reality and ambiguous relationship between truth and fact, the narrator draws attention to the fact that he is writing a story and then takes this to the next level by first introducing the main character a photographer and then becoming him The literary POV shifts between first and third person servicing a plot in which a moment frozen in time captured on film comes to suggest infinite possibilities of truth rather than finalizing a single explanation as might be expected.

What is the plot of the story in brief?

In Blow-Up we follow a highly successful fashion photographer in the midst of London in 1966. He is now named Thomas, as in doubting Thomas, named after the apostle who refused to believe that Christ had arisen from the grave after his death unless he could see and touch the wounds himself. Thomas wanders from an antique store that he plans on buying as a real estate investment into Maryon Park located in the then gritty low-income area of South East London. There he takes some shots clandestinely of two lovers at play, a young woman named Jane played by Vanessa Redgrave and an older man whom we never meet. Jane sees him and asks Thomas for the film. He refuses and later in his studio after blowing up the negatives sees that in fact he may have recorded a murder in progress. There is apparently a hand holding a gun off to the side behind some bushes. Jane seems to know what’s going on and the man is oblivious. An idyllic encounter that was supposed to finish Thomas’ work in progress, a photography book about the poor in London, seems to have recorded a man’s murder. But of course there are doubts. Thomas returns to the park and finds the body, but it has vanished when he returns with his camera to take a picture of it. In the midst of this Jane turns up at his studio and continues to demand the original negatives to the pictures, this is interrupted by some flirting and the arrival of a propeller from the antique store that Thomas had purchased on a whim. Jane, the mystery woman, leaves with what she thinks are the negatives and Thomas is left completely in the dark. He decides to investigate what really happened via the images he took in the park, find the woman and solve the mystery. In short he becomes a detective. Siegfried Kracauer described the detective as an essentially modern figure who is on a rational quest for meaning and narrative closure.

Comment on the role of the detective in the story.

It is the detective who uses logic, keen observation and deductive skills to assemble fragmentary details into a meaningful narrative and thereby arrive at the truth, but does he? Blow-Up is a meditation on this question. The sense of dislocation and anxiety in the film are acute but never fully articulated as they would be in a conventional narrative film. For example when the woman in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) is suffering from dislocation we understand that it is her perceptions which are distorted because she is deranged, not the world, we are merely seeing it through her eyes. Conversely in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) it is society that is deranged, having become dislocated from a collective sense of common human values that bind us, and it is the adaptation to that society that is seen as morally reprehensible and comically grotesque. In Blow-Up it is not possible to pinpoint either a trauma in the characters or a social dystopia at work. Antonioni gives us good helpings of the disjunctions and psychological dislocations that we have come to expect from auteur films, but then keeps them in play without resolving them with brilliantly suggestive shots that appear headed toward metaphor or toward a conclusion and then the symbolic evaporates, the possible philosophic explanation becomes muddied with contradictions, the psychological becomes opaque.

VERY SHORT QUESTIONS

What is the narrative point of view in the story?

The story shifts between the First Person Narrator, Michel, and Michel talking about himself in the Third Person. It’s clear that it is Michel who is telling the story, that first person narration is the dominant mode and that the third person narration is embedded within the first person narration. The intriguing question is why Michel tells part of his story in the third person.

What is the plot of the story?

The plot is Michel’s telling of his experience of taking a photograph of a couple in a park, his subsequent studying a blow-up of the photo, and his discovery of what was really going on. A detective plot in which Michel gradually figures out what was going on in the park, which leads to a traumatic climax.

What is the setting of the story?

The main setting is Michel’s room in Paris where he is looking at the blow-up on the wall as he’s writing the story of his experience on a typewriter. The time is the now of the writing of the story. The secondary setting is the park area when Michel took the photograph of the woman and the boy. The time is in the past.

What is the language of the story?

The most interesting aspect of the language is the simulation of the consciousness of a psychotic. The form of the story, Michel’s difficulty in telling it, some of the non-sense phrases at the beginning, are all ways of simulating a derranged mind. Michel’s language is quite poetic. A number of graceful phrases about the meaning of taking photographs and “seeing.

What is the Style and Technique of the story?

The story is told in a somewhat complex manner. Above all, it features a self-conscious narrator who not only criticizes his own

1-person choice of words but also alternates frequently between third-p and first-person narration. The fact that Michel refers to himself in the third person is a bit disconcerting in itself.

What is easy to become fascinated with?

It’s easy to become fascinated with Cortazar’s tour-de-force in creating the consciousness of a psychotic mind and miss the fact that the major theme is about “seeing,” about understanding what one sees.

How can one start reading the story?

One can read the story as an initiation story. At the beginning of his story, Michel has great confidence in his own powers of observation his ability to see and understand what he sees. After all, he’s a photographer his business is capturing the truth of revealing what’s going on breaking through stereotypes and clichés of sight to some true vision.

What does he see in the park?

What does he later realise about the incident?

But later when he looks carefully at the blow-up of the incident, he gradually sees that he had completely misunderstood what was going on he was blind to the truth of what he had seen. The blow-up reveals to him that it was a homosexual seduction.

What important impression does Michel create?

Did the incident actually happen to him?

But it didn’t because Michel took his photograph The film is his imaginative story construction out of what was implied in the details of the blow-up.

What leads onto the blow-up?

What does he tell us at the beginning of his venture?

At the beginning of his venture on Sunday Nov. 7, he tells us. “I think I know how to look….” At the end of his traumatic projection of the film in which the man is engulfing him, he screams and says, “I didn’t want to see anymore. I shut my eyes. “

What does his confidence lead him to?

His confidence in seeing causes him to take the picture. The blowup sucks him into a reality that shatters his seeing and makes him see something that he didn’t want to see.

Why is the traumatic issue?

What are our limitations as readers?

But the story just doesn’t give enough details about Michel to warrant an explanation of why the event was so traumatic. The story seems more interested in presenting the irony of the movement from confidence in seeing to a rejection of seeing. More interested in the ironies of photography and the difficulties of interpreting and understanding the visual.

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Blow Up Questions and Answers

Blow Up Questions and Answers

Examine the themes in the story Blow Up.

What is your opinion of the story and the collection?

Comment on the literary progress as mentioned in the collection in the political context of Argentina.

Comment briefly on the character of Michel.

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