Continuity of Parks

“Continuity of Parks” is a short story by Argentine author Julio Cortázar. Best known for his experimental novel Hopscotch, Cortázar was one of the founders of the literary movement known as the Latin American Boom. This experimental group of writers from Latin America—including authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa—exploded onto the literary scene in the 1960s and 1970s, earning international renown through the widespread publication of their works.

The edition of the text used in this guide is from Cortázar’s Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn and published in 1967.

“Continuity of Parks” was first published in 1964 in the second edition of the short story collection End of the Game. Coming in at just over 600 words, it is an early instance of what is now known as “flash fiction” or “micro fiction.” With its narrative twists and open-ended conclusion, it exemplifies the techniques of metafiction—that is, fiction that takes as a theme its own techniques and its own fictional status. Metafictions often explore the relation between the textual world of literary imagination and the world of everyday reality. Like much of Cortázar’s work, “Continuity of Parks” revolves around metafictional themes: the Continuity of Worlds between fiction and reality; Ways of Reading; the relation between reader and text; and the Power of Literature not only to represent but also to create the worlds we live in.

A fiction about reading fiction, “Continuity of Parks” opens on a scene of reading. After being called away from his estate by business for a few days, as he returns home on the train, the unnamed protagonist opens a novel he had started earlier. He steps into the fictional world: “he permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations” (63). Once home, after taking care of a couple practical tasks, he again returns to his novel. As the reader-protagonist settles back into his armchair with his novel, the narrative opens into the extensive scene of reading that comprises the first episode of the story. In this first part of the story, the third-person narrative closely follows the thoughts and actions of this reader. An “estate manager” is mentioned but there are no narrated characters except for the reader-protagonist.

The details of the scene underscore the comfort and tranquil beauty of this room with its picture windows opening onto a view of a secluded park. The reader’s body relaxes into the soft green velvet armchair. “Sprawled” in this favorite chair and with his back facing the door, he savors the leisure and privacy that allow him to give uninterrupted attention to his novel (63). “Effortlessly,” he reengages with the story, remembering “the names and his mental images of the characters” (63). Absorbing his attention, the novel casts its spell and “spread its glamour over him almost at once” (63). The reader is seduced away from his immediate circumstances and feels “the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him” (63). Yet even as he becomes more mentally immersed in the novel, he maintains awareness of the physical sensations and objects surrounding him, such as “the green velvet of the chair with its high back” “the cigarettes [that] rested within reach of his hand”, and “the air of afternoon [that] danced under the oak trees in the park” (63).

Sunk in his easy chair, the reader-protagonist becomes totally immersed in the novel’s fictional world: “Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin” (63-64). The reader’s senses and consciousness are now processing, not the lived reality in his study, but the fictional world of the novel. He becomes a “witness” present at the scene in the cabin. The “images” represented by the text he reads seem to come alive, and they take on “color and movement” (64).

From this point in the text, the narrative shifts and begins to focus on the “story within the story,” which includes the words, thoughts, and actions of the hero and heroine of the novel being read by the protagonist. The narrative begins to describe the meeting of the hero and the heroine in a mountain cabin. They are lovers meeting secretly. As becomes apparent, they are plotting the murder of the woman’s husband.

The woman arrives first, followed shortly by the man whose face bleeds from a scratch left by a tree branch. The woman tries to kiss her lover’s wounded face but is rebuffed. The man has something else on his mind and “had not come to perform the secret ceremonies of a secret passion” (64). His spirit is animated not by erotic desire but by their murderous plan: “The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close” (64). The dialogue that follows reveals that they have plotted their crime to the last detail: “Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. […] The cold-blooded, twice-gone-over re-examination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek” (64).

In the following paragraph, the narrative follows the lovers as they leave the cabin. They go their separate ways, each “rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them” (64). The woman goes northward on the trail and the man goes south, running down the path, “until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house” (65). The details of his approach to the house reveal the insider information the woman has given him about how life is run on the estate. He knows that “the dogs were not supposed to bark” and “they did not bark”; he has been informed that “the estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there” (65). He enters the house, guided by the floorplan described to him by his lover: “The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears: first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway. At the top two doors” (65). He tries one door and then the next, looking for his victim, but finding “no one in the first room, no one in the second” (65). The third door opens to the study “and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel” (65).

The story ends with the collision of two worlds, of these two fictions with their two protagonists: the man reading the novel in his armchair and the adulterous and murderous lover. These worlds meet in a scene of incipient violence and fatality where the knife is left hanging in the air and the story’s conclusion is left open-ended.