Summary
Cortázar begins "Blow-Up," the collection's titular story, with a relatively long treatise on point-of-view and the personal function of storytelling to the storyteller, which the story's narrator, Roberto Michel, posits is to relieve a certain interior pressure to tell the story—to "get rid of that tickle in the stomach that bothers you" (116). The narrator also establishes in his preamble to the story that he is dead, but also that he is somehow alive, which is partially explained later on in the narrative. The narration frequently switches pronouns, alternating between third- and first-person accounts of the event being described.
Michel then launches into the day in question. He describes leaving his apartment on a Sunday afternoon in November, in Paris, on an unexpectedly sunny day for November in Paris, with his camera hanging from a lanyard around his neck. He goes for a walk with the intention of taking a few photographs and describes the way photography changes the way one observes one's surroundings, especially in the event that one is intent on taking pictures. Michel extols the benefits of teaching children to use cameras, starting them early so that they have the benefit of knowing and engaging more closely with their surroundings from an early age.
Michel walks until he reaches a small park where he spots an unlikely couple speaking against a parapet. At first, he thinks they are a mother and son—the boy is young, pre-teen or early teenager, and the woman is old enough to be his mother—but based on their body language and the squirmy discomfort of the boy, Michel concludes that they are almost certainly not mother and son, but that they are just making each other's acquaintance and that the boy is perhaps conflicted about whether he should stay or leave. Michel believes that the woman plans to entrap the young man in some kind of affair. He, Michel, imagines a whole biography for the boy, based on nothing other than his appearance there in the park, cornered against a parapet by a much older woman. Michel imagines that he's a schoolboy from a comfortably affluent family but with not more than a nickel in his own pocket, roaming the streets of Paris in search of some unlikely, romantic adventure.
Michel trains his camera around the woman and the boy, pretending to focus on something beyond or around them. There is a man in a parked car behind Michel, far out of the frame, but in some way connected to the conversation taking place between the woman and the boy. By the time Michel focuses his lens on the woman and the boy and decides to shoot the photograph, they have noticed him. He doesn't notice them notice him until after snapping the photograph, though the timing of the photograph is such that it captures them registering the fact that they're being photographed. The woman is angry, feels violated by the photograph, and immediately starts in on Michel, demanding the film from him. The boy takes the opportunity to run away and disappears gradually down the street. The man in the parked car exits the car and approaches Michel and the woman, who still stand at a considerable distance from one another. When the man arrives, he stands between them at an angle, and they form a tense triangle. Michel laughs at them both and leaves. At a distance, he looks behind him and sees the man encroaching on the woman menacingly, and her backing away as if pursued by him.
Michel then gets the film developed, and he's so taken with the photograph of the woman and the boy that he has it enlarged, and then he has it enlarged again to the size of a poster, which he hangs on his wall. Michel is a translator, and around the time he hangs the photograph on his wall, he's translating a political treatise by José Roberto Allende. He takes breaks between sentences and paragraphs of translation to gaze at the photograph on the wall. He feels guilty in some sense for "stealing" the image from the woman, but in another sense he feels like the net effect of his taking the photograph was good if not downright necessary, because it allowed the young man to flee what would almost certainly have been an abusive situation for him.
In the middle of translating a sentence, Michel looks up at the photograph and is, this time, particularly overwhelmed by the woman's hands. Her fingers start to move, and then her whole hand, and then Michel loses control of his body and seems to collapse into the scene of the photograph. It seems that the scene is playing out again, before him, except this time he is bound to the perspective of the lens. He cannot intervene as he did the first time, by taking the very image that allowed the boy to escape that first time. He's paralyzed and forced to watch as the man in the car walks up to the woman and the boy and propositions the boy. Michel is sure that the boy will agree to go with them this time and feels tortured by his powerlessness to intervene. Then, suddenly, he feels himself moving towards them. He feels himself screaming. He provides enough of a distraction for the boy to escape again. The man who was once sitting in the parked car turns toward Michel with black eyes and a black tongue and reaches his arms up as if to strangle him. Then, all Michel sees is the sky. He sees the sky change from blue to black, sometimes to grey on an overcast day, and counts the clouds and the birds as they pass him by. This is the perspective in which Michel is stuck at the beginning of the story, and the perspective from which he tells the story: seeming to be at once omniscient and dead, speaking from someplace in the sky, and also possessing an identity and sense of self, even if the self is a former self.
Analysis
By loading the beginning of the story with such explicit musings on the art and craft of writing and the function of storytelling, Cortázar bares his themes for the reader to plainly see. Perspective is an important theme of "Blow-Up," as is narrativization and the process of invention in fiction. First, Michel struggles to determine how he'll tell the story that he eventually proceeds to tell. The first line is, "It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing" (114). The narrator seems not only to be questioning what is the proper mode of narration, but to be struggling with and lamenting the notion that he will likely fail to translate the experience adequately for his reader. This resolute struggle to communicate is underscored by Michel's occupation as a translator. He spends his days attempting to translate abstract philosophical ideas from one language to another while retaining their subtle linguistic qualities, and Michel is abundantly self-conscious of his shortcomings; for example in his last translation project, he admits to often being "unable to find the way to say in good French what José Roberto Allende was saying in very good Spanish" (127). Of course, this prompts one to question the perspectival consequence of translation, just as Michel questions who is really telling his story when he finds himself in such an altered state—in his translation, is it José Roberto Allende speaking, or Roberto Michel? These questions are further complicated when one considers that "Blow-Up," as a collection of short stories, is widely translated—if you're reading this guide, you probably read "Blow-Up" in Paul Blackburn's English translation from the original Spanish.
The reader takes for granted that certain elements of Roberto Michel's retelling of the events surrounding his blown-up photograph are true to his experience while others are admittedly fabricated with little and no evidence. For example, Michel provides an extensive hypothetical biography for the boy in his photograph. Cortázar writes, "Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities" (124), and this statement, of course, contains a hefty dose of irony seeing that it is occurring inside of a short story in a whole collection of fabricated unrealities.
"Blow-Up" is also clearly concerned with the medium of photography and the frozen potential of images captured on film. Much like how Cortázar depicts the (lack of) agency of characters in novels in "Continuity of Parks" and experiments with depicting the magical hypothetical situation in which those characters were able to breach the margins of the page and affect the "real world" of their reader, "Blow-Up" imagines a circumstance in which the action in a photograph resumes; this action is further complicated by the fact that the photograph itself is the thing that originally interrupted it, the invasion of the photograph being the very obstacle that kept events from proceeding as planned. Cortázar seems, in this way, to be examining the limitations of photography. If the subjects are aware of being recorded, if the condition of being recorded is, as it is, a spectacle in itself, then how can photographs—or in our contemporary society's case, videos—be trusted to be "genuine" or "authentic" representations of reality? As more and more methods and applications for recording are developed, Cortázar's "Blow-Up" seems to become only more relevant.
