1.) INTRODUCTION

 

August of 1914 was the precise month in which the centuries-old project of Enlightenment and progress threw itself headlong of a cliff and into a Great War unlike any that had been seen before ~~ a war to end all wars which nonetheless led inevitably, 20 years later, to another that was exponentially worse. These two world wars, collectively, would cripple ~~ or perhaps even destroy ~~ what historian Barbara Tuchman called the “Proud Tower” of western illusions. It was an irruption of nightmare logic and terrifying darkness into the well-lit, ordered homes and secure lives of millions. No surprise, then, that Julio Cortåzzar, whose blackly witty stories would one day grip the attention of the world, stories of inexplicable, surreal horrors intruding suddenly on everyday scenes, himself came INto that world in that seemingly cursed month,    as the battles of Tannenberg and Le Cateau raged and the lamps ~~ of western civilization, of culture, of Enlightenment ideals ~~ were (as Edward Grey famously said) going out all across Europe.

 

The Cortåzzar family spent the war peacefully in Switzerland and then returned to their native Argentina, settling down in a suburb just south of Buenos Aires. Soon Julio’s father left, divorcing his wife and disappearing out of the family‘s life never to be seen again, and thereafter young Julio grew up in the care and company of three women… his mother, his Aunt and his beloved sister Ofelia. He was a sickly child and, as so often happens with sickly children, a heavy reader from an early age. At the age of eight his favorite authors were Jules Verne & Victor Hugo, romantic fabulists whose distant, strange worlds have provided refuge for so many odd, maladjusted children over the years. In a letter to his friend Graciela de Sola many decades later, Cortázar said this whole period of his life was “full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness.“ He spent much of his childhood in bed due to his ill health. But his mother was a great reader in several languages, and so it was she came to introduce him to the fantastic authors of his early youth. 

 

In the magazine Plurál in 1975 he wrote “I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elves, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else’s“. He spoke at greater length about his early attraction to the unreal in a later interview in the Paris Review… “It began in my childhood,” he says. “Most of my young classmates had no sense of the fantastic. They took things as they were . . . this is a plant, that is an armchair. But for me, things were not that well defined. My mother, who’s still alive and is a very imaginative woman, encouraged me. Instead of saying, “No, no, you should be serious,” she was pleased that I was imaginative; when I turned towards the world of the fantastic, she helped by giving me books to read. I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time when I was only nine. I stole the book to read because my mother didn’t want me to read it; she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it . . .  For me, the fantastic was perfectly natural; I had no doubts at all. That’s just the way things were. I •preferred• the world of the supernatural.“

 

When Julio emerged from this darkly idyllic upbringing & came of age he studied philosophy and languages at the university of Buenos Aires, before leaving early without his degree when his funds ran out. Thereafter he taught in two high schools in Buenos Aires and then in 1944 left the city briefly to try his hand as a languages professor in a small university ~~ but soon, owing to anti-intellectual political pressure from supporters of the new dictator, Juan Peron, he was forced to resign, and thereafter he returned to the capital. After his expulsion from the world of the Academy, Cortázar knocked around for a bit, working as a translator and so on while turning out and stacking up stories by the dozen, til eventually he began to publish, and soon found himself becoming quite popular. His first three books of fantastic stories (starting with “Bestiary” in 1951, which contained “House Taken Over”) were brought out by reputable houses over the buttoned-up decade of the 1950s, and pointed a way out of the grim domestic realism that dominated the postwar literary world.

 

Later, in the 1960s, Cortázar became as much of an international icon as Columbia’s Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Chile’s Mario Vargas Llosa or Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Two of his stories were made into iconic films embodying some of the more unsettling aspects of the late-60s zeitgeist.  The great Italian art-film director Antonioni’s 1966 “Blow-Up”, an existential study of the world’s unexaminability cleverly disguised as a tale of sex-and-murder in swinging London, was modeled on a Cortázar story (disturbingly entitled “Las babas del diablo” or “The Devil’s Slobber”), as was Jean-Luc Godard’s late-Ballardian black comedy “Weekend”, a bleak 1967 post-modern romp through the French countryside, based on Cortazar’s “la autopista del Sur” or “The Southern Highway”. Around this time Cortazar immigrated permanently to Paris and soon became something of a a celebrity among the leftist youth culture and eventually an international public icon. Pablo Neruda said of him in his heyday, "Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. This man would quietly become sadder . . . and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair." 

But decades before the world caught up with him, he was still teaching French literature to undergraduates at the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza, a thousand km West of the Argentinean capitol, though, as an avowed leftist in a society drifting rapidly rightwards, he rightly suspected that soon enough he would lose the position.  At that same moment, back in Buenos Aires, the great literary fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, then in his 40s, was moving ever deeper into his role as shepherd to a slightly younger generation of Argentine surrealists and weird fiction authors. He had just been fired from his post at the Municipal Library of Buenos Aires by the newly ascendant military dictator Peron in retaliation for his leftist views and vocal support of the anti-fa scist powers during the recently-ended World War. As a surprisingly amusing punishment & personal insult, Peron himself directed that the dignified, half-blind, irremediably urbane Borges be appointed “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits”, a post he promptly quit in what one can only imagine, knowing Borges, was good-humored annoyance. T he whole thing turned out to be a blessing in disguise anyway, since Borges had hated the library job, and now had time to take over the editorship of a newly launched magazine, “Annals of Buenos Aires”, a position he was to hold until the end of 1948, publishing in that time 23 issues that came in many ways to define young literary Argentina. The Annals launched the careers of a generation of authors, including Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Sylvina Ocampo ~~ in fact almost all the leading lights of Argentine fiction in the mid-twentieth-century. Perhaps predictably, many if not most of the poems and stories compiled in the magazine were, to one degree or another, Borgesian… which is to say enigmatic, academic, labyrinthine and uncanny, with their roots planted firmly in pre-war European surrealism & strange fiction ~~Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka and so on. Whether this is just the result of good gardening on the beloved editor’s part… pruning back the literary realism that was dominant in the world outside Latin America while nurturing any flowering of the fabulous & the weird… or whether there was just something very strange in the water of Buenos Aires after the war, the result was transformative at a national level. The wave of stories that was produced ~~in which fantastical elements were embedded in otherwise mundane fictional worlds ~~ would come to define the country’s literature and eventually contribute to a continent-wide movement called Magical Realism which brought Latin America to the forefront of global literature and sixties youth culture.  

Cortåzar & his peers at the magazine shared many stylistic traits. Sylvina Ocampo’s writing tended to focus on transformations, metamorphoses ~~ the doubling, splitting, and fragmenting of the self. Julio shared her obsession. For instance in his famous story “Axolotl”, a man visiting a Parisian aquarium slowly transforms into the strange, alien-seeming titular creature. Or in “La Noche Boca Arriba” an injured motorcyclist dreams he is an aztec warrior, only to find that he is in fact an ancient aztec dreaming of modernity. Meanwhile their compatriot Adolfo Bioy-Casares, for his part, tended more to the uncanny subversion of genre fiction ~~ detective stories and such that devolve into time loops and various existential frustrations reminiscent of Kafka. Borges loved the genre ploy too ~~ “Death and the Compass”, for instance, has a Sherlock Holmes or “Man Who Was Thursday” feel about it. And Cortåzar too loved the sort of thriller or murder mystery which slowly begins to blur around the edges, allowing otherworldly elements to crash the party, as in “Continuidad de los parques” from 1956, in which a man is murdered by the fictional killer in the murder mystery he is reading. 

His stories always tended to be very short, to involve some unnamed and often unnameable leakage of high weirdness into an otherwise everyday world, and to offer no explanations for that weirdness, nor solutions to the problems it causes. The methodology is: take two incompatible things, two things that can’t inhabit the same universe, force them together by fiat, and then step back and cooly consider the result. 

 

 

2.) SYNOPSIS

 

The narrator of “House Taken Over” is unnamed, a middle-aged, cultured, wealthy man living quietly in his ancestral home in a fancy neighborhood in downtown Buenos Aires with his beloved sister Irene. They have no servants and no guests, and indeed there are no other characters in the story unless you count the house itself. Which many do. Although once a week the narrator leaves to do the shopping in town, otherwise there is no mention of either of them ever leaving the house for any reason. His description of their daily activities is unvarying in its simple domesticity. They clean, cook, eat, & he reads French literature from the library room, though he has bought no new volumes for half a decade. She knits, practical items, though sometimes she pulls apart the blanket or sweater she’s just completed in order simply to have the pleasure of redoing it from the beginning. The drawers and closets of one of the master bedrooms are full of her never-used shawls and socks and such. 

The great, hollow, silent house is a pleasure & a comfort to them. They grew up in it, as did their parents and their parent’s parents, and they fully expect to end their days there in comfort, eventually. They live an elegant but simple life on the dividends of old family money, and the house is lavishly appointed ~~ he speaks of marble console-tops and the diamond patterns in a tooled leather desk set, of wrought iron doorways and enamel tiles and multiple grand pianos. The house is large enough to straddle a city block, and it’s layout is important to the story... One entrance fronts on a public square, an elegant Edwardian park called Plaza Rodriguez Pena, and the other entrance is one street over. Inside, the house is divided into two wings ~~ the grand bedrooms, dining hall, and library are on the park side, while the street side constitutes a simpler, more functional      apartment ~~ a kitchen, a sitting room, bathroom, & several small se rvant’s bedrooms. Between the two halves there is a heavy wooden door. 

The relationship between the brother and sister who inhabit this house is very close, and though it’s described in the text as a marriage of sorts, and though some critics have titillated themselves with the possibility of something more salacious, there’s no real hint in the text of any incestuous romantic attraction. We’re told by the narrator that “Irene turned down two suitors for no particular reason, and my Maria Esther went and died on me before we could manage to get engaged. We were easing into our forties with the unvoiced concept that the quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable end to a line established in this house by our grandparents”. The bonds of family and friendship tended to be more demonstrative in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Cortåzar’s own relationship with his only sister Ofelia was by all accounts similarly close. 

That said, it’s worth pointing out that these first few pages do trot out a litany of Gothic or Decadent fiction tropes… the last, self-indulgent scion of a wealthy family, his suspiciously close relationship with a sister, the both of them closed off together in a vast, decaying old family manor. Beneath the common, everyday set of circumstances described by Cortåzar, it does give off a subtle, mouldering, perfumed smell, the slightest hint of Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, or Poe’s “House of Usher”, or some other such Edward Goreyish scenario. These seem like just tips of the hat, really, just vague and mildly unsettling gothic undertones. But taken together, they form a broad enough hint that perhaps the reader’s subconscious begins to expect some turn toward the dark and the supernatural, as would inevitably happen in a gothic tale at this point. Nor will the reader be disappointed, as almost immediately things begin to slide into proper strangeness.

I wanna read this part of the story out loud ~~ the part where the uncanny first intrudes into the everyday ~~ because it gives you some sense of how by NOT saying things, by not explaining events, Cortåzar throws you off-balance with a sudden bloom of weirdness, while simultaneously denying you any details or explication with which to steady yourself… 

 

“I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss. Irene was knitting in her bedroom, it was eight at night, and I suddenly decided to put the water up for mate. I went down the corridor as far as the oak door, which was ajar, then turned into the hall toward the kitchen, when I heard something in the library or the dining room. The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation. At the same time, or a second later, I heard it at the end of the passage which led from those two rooms toward the door. I hurled myself against the door before it was too late and shut it, leaned on it with the weight of my body; luckily, the key was on our side; moreover, I ran the great bolt into place, just to be safe. I went down to the kitchen, heated the kettle, and when I got back with the tray of mate, I told Irene: “I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.”

She let her knitting fall and looked at me with her tired, serious eyes. “You’re sure?” I nodded.

“In that case,” she said, picking up her knitting again, “we’ll have to live on this side.”

I sipped at the mate very carefully, but she took her time starting her work again. I remember it was a gray vest she was knitting. I liked that vest.”

Note that what the narrator hears from the other side is entirely unthreatening in & of itself.  Subtle sounds ~~ a chair being tipped over ~~ onto carpet, no less ~~ a soft, almost domestic sound. Just the tiniest hint of some disruption. Why •would• a chair be tipped over, anyway? ~~ is someone searching the room? Or is there a great mass of people in the room, so many that they move around each other awkwardly, accidentally disarranging things? Or is whatever’s in the room unused to human objects?

 

Anyway on the surface it’s all rather everyday. Nothing obviously terrifying. But the narrator reacts instantly, as if to a serious threat ~~ he’s obviously thought about this before, he’s obviously been anticipating this. Without an instant’s hesitation he slams and locks the wooden door between the two sections. And ~~~ spoiler alert ~~ he never opens that door again. There’s no attempt to negotiate with the intruders or fight them or even to poke his head around the door to verify that there’s really a threat. Just this instantaneous permanent closure ~~ after which he proceeds calmly down the side hallway to the kitchen without comment, and makes the tea that he had been planning to make before the terrifying event. Note that his sister takes the news with equal composure. Whatever dire event has just occurred is not allowed to ruffle the surface of propriety or disarrange their serene masks.  Instantly they return to their simple existence, their domestic life. In the space of the last three short sentences the brother seems to have put aside the fearsome threat entirely and is calmly sipping his tea, commenting on his sister’s newest knitting project. 

 

And this is a precursor of the strangeness that permeates the following section of the story. The couple take the loss of half their house with complete passivity and almost no comment. The most he says is “the first few days were painful since we both left so many things in the part that had been taken over. My collection of French literature, for example, was still in the library”. Irene has left her slippers and so on ~~ he misses his pipe ~~ “it happened repeatedly in the first few days that we would close some drawer or cabinet and look at one another sadly ‘it’s not there’. One more thing among the many lost on the other side of the house” But immediately he’s on to the details of their new mode of living ~~ how much simpler the cleaning is, how they quickly get in the habit of eating their dinners alone in their respective bedrooms. Irene’s still got her knitting so she’s happy. He’s a little lost without his beloved books, but gamely sets about re-ordering his father’s old stamp collection to kill time. “We amused ourselves sufficiently, each with his own thing, almost always getting together in Irene’s bedroom, which was the more comfortable. Every once in a while, Irene might say: “Look at this pattern I just figured out, doesn’t it look like clover? Then after a bit it was I, pushing a small square of paper in front of her so that she could see the excellence of some stamp or another”.  These tasks seem almost sub-mundane, activities specifically designed to kill time and dull thought. “We were fine”, he says, “and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.” They’ve made their peace with the reduced circumstances. They don’t think about it because to think about it would let the fear flood in. They are living tiny lives now, like Anne Frank in her attic, so as not to be noticed by whatever dangerous power or entity is so nearby. 

 

The only sign that they’re in any way nervous, really, is that whenever they’re near the great oak door that divides them from the part of the house that has been taken over, they become nervous that they might hear noises from the other side. It’s never stated that they DO hear noises, it’s just that when they’re passing the door, or when they’re in the kitchen, which is near the lost side of the house they become anxious and make their own noises to preemptively cover over anything from beyond the wall. “In the kitchen or the bath, which adjoined the part that was taken over, we managed to talk loudly, or Irene sang lullabies. In a kitchen there’s always too much noise, the plates and glasses, for there to be interruptions from other sounds. We seldom allowed ourselves silence there”. 

 

Finally ~~ after an unspecified number of days or weeks in this strange, reduced domestic circumstance, this anxious but outwardly calm transitional existence ~~ the last act of the drama plays out. Again it’s described in an understated matter-of-fact register... “Except for the consequences, it’s nearly a matter of repeating the same scene over again. I was thirsty that night, and before we went to sleep, I told Irene that I was going to the kitchen for a glass of water. From the door of the bedroom (she was knitting) I heard the noise in the kitchen; if not the kitchen, then the bath, the passage off at that angle dulled the sound. Irene noticed how brusquely I had paused, and came up beside me without a word. We stood listening to the noises, growing more and more sure that they were on our side of the oak door, if not the kitchen then the bath, or in the hall itself at the turn, almost next to us”. No mention of HOW the door might have been breached, no shattering of wood, no tramping of feet. The occupying force has somehow simply arrived.

 

And so they flee the house, out the front door, their course of action seemingly decided in advance, as if no other response were possible. “We didn’t wait to look at one another. I took Irene’s arm and forced her to run with me to the wrought-iron door, not waiting to look back. You could hear the noises, still muffled but louder, just behind us. I slammed the grating and we stopped in the vestibule. Now there was nothing to be heard.

 

“They’ve taken over our section,” Irene said. The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappeared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.

“Did you have time to bring anything?” I asked hopelessly.

 “No, Nothing.” We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. Too late now. I still had my wristwatch on and saw that it was 11 P.M.. I took Irene around the waist (I think she was crying) and that was how we went into the street”. 

There’s one final shiver-inducing stinger in the last two sentences. “Before we walked away”, the narrator says, “I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer. It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour, and with the house taken over” 

 

And so now the characters are, as it were, severed from the set. The house is completely taken over, and thereby transformed to the extent that it’s a danger to anyone who enters. But danger from what, exactly…? What, hidden from the many unsuspecting passers-by, is locked away behind the wrought iron door of this old mansion? And what could all of this possibly mean? Let’s have a song, and then examine some possibilities…

 

 

 

3.) THREE LENSES: METAPHOR, MADNESS, & THE UNCANNY

 

 

Casa Tomada, as with all partially abstract art, all art that declines to explain itself, is open to interpretation. One likelihood is that the story is, to some extent, a socio-political metaphor, a fable about class struggle & the rise of the proletariat. Many of the details in the story reflect the actual historical situation with some specificity. For instance the narrator says that no new French literature had been available for him to buy since 1939 ~~ and this dovetails with reality: in 1939 Argentina declared ostensible neutrality in World War II, a position they would hold for the duration of the conflict. This meant that they couldn’t import foreign manufactured goods, and certainly not books from Paris. They were thus forced by circumstance to industrialize rapidly in order to manufacture critical goods for their own citizens. This in turn caused a rural-to-urban migration as the villagers of the Pampas came to work in the factories, and the poor from the fields displaced the middle classes in the cities. However, despite not being able to import goods, the country did continue to export farm products and, eventually, manufactured goods as well, and thus, as a country, Argentina prospered. 

 

In the midst of all this, as the overseas war raged on, in 1943 a military coup was executed by a group of Argentine generals and army brass. One of the officers in this cabal was the future strongman ruler Juan Peron. In 1943, though, he was by no means the head of the new ruling junta, only a lowly “Secretary of Labor and Welfare”. But he used this position & his skills as an orator, over the next three years, to rapidly build a strong populist base among urban workers and the organized labor movement. He began to lay the groundwork for the nationalization of steel manufacturing, railroads, and other industries worth millions, and this prospect caused no small consternation & dismay among the monied classes, for obvious reasons.

 

Two years later, in October of 1945, conservative military elements, frightened at the success of his demagoguery and fearing his ambitions, had Peron arrested and thrown in prison.  As it turned out, their fears were justified, and their action only made matters worse. Peron was released almost immediately, following immense nationwide labor protests and strikes, and he rode this wave to a landslide victory in the presidential election of 1946. For the next ten years he and his ex-actress wife Evita would walk a patriotic and patriarchal but flamboyant line between Soviet communism and American capitalism. Peron adopted an antagonistic, repressive position toward leftist academics and authors, and in return intellectuals saw him as a sort of post-war post-fascist, a gauche anti-intellectual with an authoritarian streak. He was a firm believer in heavy-handed propaganda and ideological control in the classroom & elsewhere. This, as I mentioned, led to Cortåzar, Borges and many others losing their professorships and other sinecured positions. 

 

Thus artists, the educated middle classes, academics and urbanites found themselves in a suddenly precarious position, under pressure from above and below. In practice this meant Cortåzar and all his artistic comrades felt that their livelihoods and well-being could be taken away at a moment’s notice. Is “House Taken Over” a metaphor for this dreaded process…? Is the “they” that has taken over the house the nameless, faceless working classes, brought to shambling life & given unnatural power by the Peronist moment, arriving to displace the fearful urban bourgeoisie? Are the siblings in the house something like the passive, childlike Eloi in H G Wells’ “Time Machine”, evolved from aristos & weakened by generations of absolute ease, destined to be supplanted or worse by the descendants of the proletariat: the brutal, mechanically-minded, cannibalistic Morlocks? 

 

Such things were certainly in the air at the time. The dictator Peron spearheaded many schemes to house the factory laborers newly arrived from the country, often in previously upper-class areas. De-gentrification was national policy, and though in the end it didn’t go as far as was feared by the monied classes, that fear was definitely pervasive ~~ the fear that, as in Russia after •it’s• revolution, old-money wealth and privilege might disappear completely, with power devolving instead to the Peronist political base, low-income and working-class Argentines called descamisados or "shirtless ones”, in a deliberate echo of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. In the story, the house where Irene and her brother live has at least ten rooms… he himself says “Irene and I got used to staying in the house by ourselves, which was crazy, eight people could have lived in that place and not have gotten in each other’s way”. So perhaps, as in Ballard’s “Garden of Time”, or, indeed, the French Revolution itself, it’s an army of the great unwashed that is occupying the manor, and soon every grand room will house a poor family, and the leather-bound works of Voltaire and Rabelais in the library will be burned for heat in the winter by the hoi polloi.

 

Possibly this explains the strange unwillingness of the siblings to defend themselves, their acquiescence to this Event. It could be that deep down they see the moral inevitability of this sociological upset. Society is perhaps simply righting itself in an inevitable, Marxist evolution. One can only wait and see what will happen next. “Little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.”  Is their never-acknowledged guilt over inherited wealth and privilege now, suddenly, in the light of history, too obvious to be argued against? Is this resignation in the face of a societal force too great to withstand, of the sort seen so often in repressed or condemned minority communities through history…? 

 

Or maybe the moral shoe is on the other foot, and this is an allegory of what it is to be Jewish, or some other despised underclass, under fascism ~~ a top-down authoritarian takeover rather than a bottom-up socialist one. The incremental loss of the siblings’ freedom of movement along with their belongings certainly mirrors the experience of German & Austrian jews in the 1930s. And something about the way the siblings don’t want to talk about it & won’t address the problem directly or act to save themselves, seems reminiscent of the psychology of some among those oppressed populations. Remember that the restrictions and abuses committed by the nazis were at first almost negligible: Jews can’t enter libraries or sit on park benches, Jews can’t be notary publics, Jews must have a special stamp for their passports. To object to these minor inconveniences was to raise one’s head ~~ to be noticed ~~ and •that• could incur much worse punishment. The siblings may just be keeping their heads down in hopes that things don’t get worse. 

 

In the real world, of course, things did get much, much worse in the end.  WW2 saw millions of people flee their homelands. Displaced persons, as they were called. These unwilling emigres had been flooding this way and that across the national borders of Europe for a decade by the time this story was written. Some were fleeing racial persecution, some fell afoul of unscrupulous governments or individuals, some were simply removing themselves from the paths of marauding armies. Many, like the jews in the years leading to the third reich, found that their homes, their Heimat, had become únheimliché ~~ a fascinating word which, if translated with strict literalness, would be something like “unhomelike”, or “un-homey”, but which actually means simply uncanny.

 

They sold everything they could, usually at great loss, and set out for new worlds, leaving a burning continent behind. Many washed up in Buenos Aires during the war. •After• the war, of course, Argentina saw a second, even larger & certainly more disturbing, influx, this time of ex-fascists fleeing retribution. Peron was known to be willing to defend ex-nazis from deportation, so many of the so-called rat-lines that ferried German criminals like Eichmann and others to safety led, in the end, to Argentina.  

 

All of which is to say that the story is redolent of the mythology of exile. The way the siblings keep remembering the cherished domestic items they abandoned in the territory they were driven from, the way in the end that they leave everything behind and start out into the world with nothing at all, it all keeps reminding me of all the many thousands of heartbreaking accounts of forced immigration, including even those of great heroes of mine, such as Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig, both of whose efforts to flee the Nazis ended very badly indeed. 

 

There is a particularly heartbreaking song from 1941 ~~ disguised as an innocuous, nostalgic mid-tempo dance number ~~ by the swing-orchestra bandleader Jimmy Dorsey. It’s called “My Sister & I (We Don’t Talk About That)” and it’s about a pair of refugees from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In a voice as cultured and mannered as that of Cortåzar’s narrator, a male voice croons…

 

“The warm and lovely world we knew

Has been struck by a bitter frost

But my sister and I recall with a sigh

The world we knew and loved and lost

 

My sister and I remember still

A tulip garden by an old Dutch mill

And the home that was all our own until ...

But we don't talk about that

 

My sister and I recall the day

We said goodbye, then we sailed away

And we think of our friends that had to stay

But we don't talk about that”

 

In the end, it was less than five years later that Julio Cortåzar himself fled Argentina for Paris, never to return. It seems very likely indeed that in 1946, as he wrote “House Taken Over”, he felt that HIS home, Argentina, was itself being taken over by dark political forces. And that he, like the unnamed narrator in the story, was already preparing psychologically to abandon it forever. 

 

If this story is a story of class struggle or political disaster plain and simple, though, one can’t help noticing that it’s full of strange elisions & seemingly impossible things left unexplained. Simple, pragmatic things like how, for instance, was the oak door separating the two wings breached, practically speaking? The narrator reports no splintering of wood, no explosions. The invading force has somehow quietly, almost inevitably, as if through osmosis, made its way past his only defense.  Could this happen in reality, as some bolshevik cadre forces its way into the house of an aristocrat, with the intention of converting it into working class apartments? No — it could only happen if the story is about something much stranger ~~ encroaching madness, perhaps ~~ or something stranger even than that, something with no name. Something uncanny. I’m not even sure these two things can be separated entirely, but let’s try. Let’s consider madness first. 

 

Since the narrator seems on the face of things to be sane enough (if we leave aside the mad facts of the story he tells), in order to posit lunacy we’ll have to assume that he’s an unreliable narrator, to treat him as a hostile witness, as it were, and examine his assertions with suspicion. Early on, the narrator directs our attention explicitly away from himself “But it’s the house I want to talk about,” he says “the house and Irene, I’m not very important.”. But perhaps he is, and is either misperceiving or misreporting events. When you re-read the story in this light, the whole thing gives off a different sort of shivery chill. Comments that seemed like unimportant asides on first read begin to look like clues to a disarranged mental state. Consider this throwaway passage, entirely unimportant to the main thrust of the story… “Whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake. I never could get used to this voice issuing forth as if from a statue or a parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from a throat. Irene said that in my sleep I flailed about erraticaly and shook the blankets off. We had the living room between us, but at night you could hear everything in the house. We heard each other breathing, coughing, could even feel each other reaching for the light switch when, as happened frequently, neither of us could fall asleep.” So is the brother merely troubled, worried, insomniac, despite his unruffled facade? Or is his mind perhaps more unstable than that.

I find it interesting that even before the invasion he’s already fixated on losing the house someday ~~ his distant relatives will get the place, he thinks, they’ll tear it down and sell it for scrap. And this is worth noting: his fear of losing the house predates his beginning to mysteriously lose the house. Even his eventual death is seen in these terms “We would die here someday,” he says “and obscure and distant cousins would inherit the place, have it torn down, sell the bricks and get rich on the building plot; or more justly and better yet, we would topple it ourselves before it was too late.” Violent imagery. A strange over-identification with the old place. Could it be that these thoughts are in the process of festering into some delusional neurosis, and the sounds he eventually thinks he hears are simply the manifestations of his unsound mind?

 

Of course you could definitely make the counter-claim that the presence of the sister eliminates the possibility of his insanity ~~ there is after all an external observer present, vouching for his every assessment. BUT I suppose there’s always the outside possibility of some sort of folie a deux ~~ some contagious delusion~~ or, more likely, a commonplace impressionability on the part of the sister that simply leads her to value her brother’s potentially unreliable assessments too highly. It’s worth remembering that, for the most part, women in 1946 were, shall we say strongly encouraged to play submissive, supportive roles in the family.

 

Let’s think again about the first time the outsiders enter the house. The brother is of course the only one who hears it, and if you read the passage again with a suspicious mind, the odd behavior patterns stand out more, demanding explanations that are not forthcoming. In a panic he throws himself against the great door, but then in the next instant he’s proceeding calmly to the kitchen to make his tea, just a moment after losing half his house to some unknown terror. Is this simply admirable composure or something more disturbing? One imagines Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho would react in this manner, his madness compartmentalized and hidden almost too well.

 

The odd gaps and pauses in his sentences when he reports the incursion to his sister ~~ the way the brother stares at her averted face as he sips his tea ~~ now sound and look, when heard again with our newly-minted suspicious ears, as if he’s uncertain whether she will believe him ~~ and she, for her part, seems to have retreated into herself rather protectively, her eyes tired from dealing with a less-than-rational family member. And then there’s that too-abrupt Hitchcock pivot to happy domesticity … 

“You’re sure?” I nodded.

“In that case,” she said, picking up her knitting again, “we’ll have to live on this side.”

I sipped at the mate very carefully, but she took her time starting her work again. I remember it was a gray vest she was knitting. I liked that vest.>>> 

… Anyway, I’m probably over-egging the pudding, but of course SOMEthing is off in this story, SOMEthing is very wrong, and whatever’s wrong is unspecified, unnamed. Surely madness is less unlikely than some supernatural explanation, isn’t it? So… is this a case of one habitually submissive person acquiescing in the paranoid delusion of a dominant partner? Irene sings in the kitchen to avoid hearing the outsiders through the wall, but who knows what she would have heard had she not sung ~~ perhaps only silence, because in fact there is nothing TO hear. 

Viewing it through this lens, I’m reminded of an unfinished story by Franz Kafka called “the Burrow”. In that weird feverish tale, an unnamed forest creature is happy in a vast burrow he has laboriously dug over a long period of time… “It’s nice in approaching old age to have such a burrow, to be well covered up when autumn begins. Every hundred metres I’ve widened the corridors into little roundabouts where I can curl up comfortably, warm myself and rest. There I sleep the sweet sleep of peace, of becalmed desires. Ah, the wonderful hours that I, half peacefully sleeping, half happily awake, tend to pass in the corridors, in those corridors that are there just for me, for pleasant stretching, childish rolling about, dreamily lying down, blissfully falling asleep.” But soon the creature begins to hear a strange whistling or hissing sound, distantly through the earthen walls of his tunnels. He fears that some other creatures are tunneling toward him, with the intention of ambushing and eating him, and that it’s the wind from the surface occasionally pushing its way into these enemy tunnels that makes the sound. Despite his frantic efforts he always fails to find them, and after some time the reader ceases to believe in their reality, begins to see that the narrator is paranoiac, delusional. Just a small shift in his mind and his refuge has become a torture, a prison. 

 

Perhaps something similar is taking place in Cortazar’s story, an imaginary threat creeping toward the narrator from the depths of the house. Or perhaps it’s worse than that… returning to Kafka’s story for a moment, there’s an anomalous passage that bridges the thin rift between madness and things more profoundly weird. In among pages and pages of practical ramblings on the fortification of burrows and the history of his earthwork defenses, his hunting habits and the various sorts of dangers he faces, the creature in the burrow speaks of more terrifying threats still…”There aren’t just my external enemies that threaten me”, he says, “There are also those who live in the earth. I’ve never seen them, but the legends tell of them and I firmly believe in them. They’re creatures of the inner earth, and not even the legends can describe them physically. Even those who’ve become their victims have hardly seen them; they come, you hear the scratching of their claws just below you in the earth, which is their element, and you’re already lost. It doesn’t matter that you’re in your own home. You are, rather, in their home.”

 

Which vaults us right into the last and most interesting •single• explanation of “House Taken Over”, which is of course the uncanny explanation. Or rather, the fundamental absence of explanation that always, by definition, underpins the uncanny. Through THIS lens, unnamed & undefined supernatural entities are simply taking over the house, full stop. 

 

So it may be that it’s a straightforward haunted house story ~~ in fact, “unknown malevolent entity pushes residents out of house” is the basic template for haunted house stories, isn’t it. There are thousands upon thousand of stories that conform to that basic pattern, each distinguished only by its details ~~ is the house haunted by a ghost, a demon, a curse, faeries, ancestral spirits ~~ and can these forces be thwarted or defeated, and if so, how?  But the thing that separates Cortåzar’s story from all these others is the ABSENCE of details. ALL THERE IS is “unknown entity pushes residents out of house”. This glaring emptiness where an explanation, however partial, would normally be, leads one inevitably to speculation… what COULD the entity be? 

 

What do we know about them? Well, (1) they talk to each other (that “buzzing conversation” the narrator heard during the initial incursion) so they’re intelligent and perhaps human-ish, and there must be more than one of them to make conversation possible. (2) They’re capable of physically interacting with the everyday world (that chair was knocked over, remember). Those two facts are the extent of the reader’s knowledge about the intruders, though, except for one important inference we can make: they are fully EXPECTED. Both siblings know exactly how to react when they appear ~~ no thought or discussion is needed to understand the situation. And presumably the couple’s often bizarre acquiescence to events ~their limp unresponsiveness, their lack of plans and investigations~ is a result of having already examined and discussed and discarded all possible responses long ago, in preparation for this dreaded day. 

 

So, in the light of the narrator’s clear anticipation or even expectation of the event, some critics have put their money on family ghosts. Have the ancestors somehow always been there, and are •they•, not the siblings, the house’s true possessors?  Or is it possibly an ancestral curse? Those are the usual bane of rich families in gothic tales… no mention is made of how this particular clan made their fortune, but property, as they say, is theft, and no fortune is accrued without making enemies. And no family tree is without its bad apples… so perhaps a century ago some businessman was cheated of a fortune and killed himself with a curse on his lips, or a jilted lover trafficked with dark forces to punish some rakish younger son who had betrayed her, or the ghosts of their family’s plantation slaves have returned to wreak vengeance and end the family line of their oppressors. 

 

Or maybe it’s a reverse-haunted house story. The siblings themselves are the ancestral ghosts, attached to the house by spectral bonds without even knowing it. Which would make the ostensible intruders the new •tenants•, I suppose. Recently I was reading Jean Genet’s play “the Balcony”, in which the madame of a brothel under a sort of siege from rowdy, revolutionary crowds, says to her wealthy clients, who are holed up inside and, predictably, indulging their most bizarre sexual fantasies in anticipation of imminent death "One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear all that’s going on in the house." This made me notice that the viewpoint of the intruders in House Taken Over would provide a story every bit as scary as the one Cortåzar has written, In THIS tale, the unwitting new residents enter from the lovely public plaza, but as they make their way along the grand hallway past the library and dining hall, the great oaken door at the far end slams mysteriously and proves unopenable. As they try, over the course of the following days, various ways of getting past the door, from the other side the spectral siblings’ ghostly tea-cups are heard clinking, along with their •own• low, buzzing, indistinguishable conversation, and Irene singing her faint, terrifying lullabies. Just as in Richard Mattheson’s “I Am Legend”, sometimes the monster doesn’t know it’s a monster. 

 

Of all the Weird Fiction sub-genres, Gothic Horror might be the closest relation to this story. The Gothic Horror mode essentially makes a literary mechanism of Freud’s “return of the repressed”, in which something (a trauma, a tragedy, a crime) is tamped down and hidden away in space or time or the subconscious… in order to allow the semblance of a ‘stable’ self with clean borders to be defined. Its protagonists push the terrible thing away in order to live in something approximating peace, but the secret continues to nag at them from that hidden space, haunting them and nudging them ever closer to the point where their defenses crumble and the horror is once again revealed. In Lovecraft’s disturbing “The Rats In The Walls”, for instance, the ancient, gruesome crimes of the De La Poer family first announce themselves in the faint, titular sounds heard through the walls of their crumbling old residence, before rushing forward into the dreams of the last heir of the line and from there exploding out into the real world in acts of madness and cannibalism. 

 

Or take Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”. Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only remaining members of the ancient, noble Usher family, living in a crumbling manor that seems to embody their troubled, inbred family lineage. Roderick entombs Madeline alive ~~ perhaps accidentally, perhaps not ~~ but for days afterward hears, through the walls, her struggles to free herself from her premature coffin. In the climax a great oaken door swings wide to reveal her bloody, wrathful form, just before the house itself collapses in a great storm. All the elements of Cortåzar’s story are here ~~ the house, the aristocratic siblings, the sounds in the walls, the curse moving slowly toward them through the rooms, even the huge wooden door ~~ though if Gothic literature is, as is often said, “the intrusion of the past upon the present” then perhaps Cortåzar’s story is the inversion of that, an anti-gothic, as it were, the intrusion of the future, in the form of socialist justice, upon the current moment. Or really, I suppose, the crashing-in of •both• the social crimes of the past and the social punishment of the future to the narrator’s helpless, hapless present.

 

 

4.) FINAL THOUGHTS

 

The horrifying events in classic Gothic fiction quite often turn out to be allegories for psychological or social conflicts ~~ patriarchy, slavery, the shock of industrialism, and the madness that such things sometimes engender ~~ and this brings me to the first of several final thoughts, which is that of course NONE of the three lenses we’ve been utilizing is sufficient in and of itself. There’s something inherently uncanny in madness, and something mad in the uncanny. There’s a reason so many horror books and films end or begin with someone locked away in a madhouse after viewing things that, when reported, society finds utterly unbelievable. The uncanny is madness made manifest. It plays on the basic unknowability of reality, and the unsharability of perceptions. If I see ghosts frolicking in the trees of my garden, is this an aberration in reality or in my perception of reality? Have I gone mad, or has the world? Inside the mind of a madman, uncanny things are happening nonstop. And honestly, who’s to say that whichever poor insane bastard we’re reading about is seeing a less-true picture of the universe than the rest of us. All owls are color-blind, and see the world in monochromatic shade of grey… but if an owl was born that could see the redness of the blood inside their field-mouse dinner, that owl wouldn’t be mad, though the other owls might think he was. 

Likewise, there’s something unreal-seeming, almost miraculous (or apocalyptic, depending on your perspective), in abrupt societal inversions, in sudden upheavals of the class structure. Revolution is by definition a disordering of what people had previously come to think of as reality. How often do you suppose the aristocrats of Marie Antoinette’s court uttered some version of “the world has gone mad?!” in the months when the mobs were rampaging ever closer to their gilded palaces. They might just as well have said “the world has gone uncanny”, though ~~ because things that could NOT happen WERE happening. In reality, not in their minds. To have fishwives and gutter urchins from the market at Les Halles slaughtering the royal Swiss guards by their hundreds with axes and saws, their blood running in rivulets down the marble halls of the Tuileries, is as profound and terrifying a warpage of reality as any paranormal occurrence I can think of. A man who turns into a wolf at the full moon seems a mild aberration by comparison. 

So, in Cortåzar’s tale, the narrator might well BE going mad, but consider that the OBject of the character’s paranoid fixation might be an imagined violent takeover by the lower classes. He has •imagined• that he’s heard lowborn accents & street argot spoken angrily in his library, imagined that he has heard hobnailed workers boots tramping down the hall toward him. Social allegory and madness are intertwined, and in •this• interpretation, when he locks the front door at the end of the story, he will have left the house unoccupied by any malevolent force but simply empty, except for his books and his money, both fated to moulder away over the coming years as he ~~ poor madman ~~ tramps around the world with nothing but his persecutory delusions and his gullible, accommodating sister for company.

To put one final twist on it, consider that Cortåzzer himself may well have shared these fears at a subconscious level in his real life ~~ and that even if he did not intend “House Taken Over” as a allegory of class struggle or fascist takeover, the actual dream he had that night at the college in Mendoza and then transcribed into this story MIGHT have been his own real, practical fears about Peron manifesting in an anxiety dream. But that anxiety dream itself might not simply have been, in his sleeping mind, about a takeover by real workers or agents of the government, but rather, in the normal Jungian manner of dream-substitutions, about a takeover by vague and threatening abstract, which is to say supernatural, forces.  The lines all get very blurry very quickly. 

Cortåzzer himself knew as much…. In a 1984 interview with the Paris Review, he says “I have the feeling that there is less distance now between what we call the fantastic and what we call the real. In my older stories, the distance was greater because the fantastic really was fantastic, and sometimes it touched on the supernatural. But of course, the fantastic morphs; it changes… Nowadays we laugh when we read Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto—the ghosts dressed in white, the skeletons that walk around making noises with their chains. These days, my notion of the fantastic is closer to what we call reality. Perhaps because reality approaches the fantastic more and more.” Looking at our own modern-day world of ceaseless technological revolution, in which seemingly-sentient robots are only the most recent example of paradigm-upheaval and science-fictional visions made manifest ~~ a real world in which the encroaching global climate catastrophe has rendered Nature too strange to be portrayed in so-called “realist fiction” (as Amitav Ghosh discusses so brilliantly in his book “The Great Derangement”) ~~ looking out the window at that sort of world, one feels Cortåzar was right, and the boundaries between real and unreal have only grown thinner in the intervening decades.

Historically, these times of great accelerative tensions in society do seem to produce flowerings of weird fiction ~~ the 30s was one such era ~~ Kafka, Schulz, etc ~~ and the so-called “magic realism” of South America and Eastern Europe in the 60s was another. Cortåzzer was claimed as an avatar of that movement but myself, I don’t quite see it. Or at least it’s not an exact match. He’s too restrained, too precise. In his works there are no grandmothers growing butterfly wings, no rainstorms that last for years, no eternal dictators or phantom faces revealed in the scorch marks on tortillas.  His magic isn’t grand or miraculous, it doesn’t seek to overwhelm with excess in the manner of most magic realism ~~ instead it undercuts and disconcerts. 

His stories have the odd particularity and refusal to explain themselves that old fairy tales tend to have. (Why does Bluebeard kill his wife? Because she looks into the forbidden room where he’s put the corpses of his other dead wives, all of whom whom were killed because they looked into the forbidden room where he had put the corpses of his other dead wives. There is no start or finish to it, no hint of any actual explanation. Just a very fraught sort of specificity, and a refusal to explain anything.) 

In the same way, Cortåzzer’s events are somehow both specific and unnameable. “What if something moved into your house and you had to leave” is the •entire• premise of “House Taken Over”. Cortåzzer’s power derives from a stubborn disinclination to put names to whatever mysterious events might occur in his stories. Every aspect of the lives of the siblings in “House Taken Over” is detailed realistically ~~ hobbies, income sources, cleaning regimen, reading habits. But once the intruders arrive, suddenly data is withheld ~~ the details are not muddy, not obscured, but simply nonexistent. The siblings, like the author, speak of the intrusion as little as possible. Perhaps some things are just beyond discussion, too strange to wrap words around.

“Robert Aickman’s famous dictum is that an effective piece of weird fiction “must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the end, leave it open”. This demands extreme discipline from a writer. One errant word can give the game away, can collapse all the possibilities down into one definitive answer in the mind of the reader.  The writer must reveal that there is a box and inside the box is a cat and that that cat may be dead or alive… and then fill page after page with discussion of the box, the cat, life, death, without ever dropping any hints that definitively give the answer away.  Cortåzzar says of his mentor Borges that he was “an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers”. And Cortåzzar does the same, and this precision and discipline is what, ironically, allows such true, profound, unsettling Ambiguity to exist in these stories. 

 

In fact, I think Cortåzzar does a particularly tricky thing in this story… first he anchors you in a realistic world (the quiet domesticity of the siblings), then he introduces an event (a break-in), and your first inclination is of course to interpret that event in non-uncanny terms, since those are the rules the writer has laid down. So… maybe it’s a burglar, you think, or conceivably, at the most abstract, it’s some real-world metaphor made manifest, as we’ve discussed. From that point on the reader, without necessarily knowing it, tries their best to interpret any new facts that are given in the light of this hypothesis. But the writer carves away around the edges of your certainty, destabilizes your footing bit by bit, until the last lines of the story, when the brother locks the house and throws the key down the street drain because “It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour, and with the house taken over.” These lines make no practical sense if real people have taken over the house (even metaphorically speaking ), and thus they limit us to explanations involving madness or the uncanny. In this final moment, the class-struggle analogy drops away and you’re left with something inherently inexplicable. For, after all, if the story here is that the siblings are being displaced by proletarians or fascists, that they’re essentially being robbed by some new privileged class, surely they wouldn’t try to protect a burglar from that, there’d be no need, there’d be no more danger to the burglar than if he set out to rob any other house. So the intruders, in the end, are revealed by inference to be something unequivocally supernatural (or something that, in the siblings’ madness, seem supernatural to them) ~~ in either event, what lies within the house is, to its former inhabitants  at least, something truly horrible, from which ANY human, no matter how criminal and undeserving, should be protected.

The effect of this slow slide from realism to the unheimlich is that you as the reader spend the whole story scrabbling to anchor yourself in known reality, desperately seeking some solid footing in the real world you •thought• you were inhabiting. But at the last possible moment, in the very last line, Cortåzzar strips that away and you’re left with the bald, inexplicable horror of pure mystery. 

One final thought, just to end on an appropriately scary note: the spectral intruders got through the giant oaken center door with, seemingly, no real trouble, except that it took a few days for some unknowable reason. But then they slid right past or through it with no fuss. And now, at the end of the narration… now they’re held back from the innocent citizens of Buenos Aires only by a decorative iron-grated front door and a key-lock. How long before the things that took the house slide through the vestibule and past the iron-ornamented entryway into the fading light of evening in Buenos Aires ~~~ and all those regular people, going about their unsuspecting lives on the bustling thoroughfare, what will become of them then?