“I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way to tell it,” the narrator (if that’s what he is) of Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece tells us early on. “It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing…or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is.”
The “I” in this story is as hard to define as its plot. An amateur photographer captures a scene he does not quite know how to interpret – and that’s the beauty of it. Later, looking at the developed film, he sees details that make him regret he is “only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention”. The story inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1967), which in turn gave it the new title.
No matter how many times you reread the piece, you can never be sure of what the “real” story is; nor do you care. Its essence is that of all fiction: “It might go like that, it might very well go like that”.
Originally published in Spanish as ‘Las babas del diablo’, 1959. Collected in Blow-Up and Other Stories, Pantheon Books, 1985
A Personal Anthology 