Summary
"Continuity of Parks" begins by describing a wealthy landowner returning to his estate by train after "some urgent business conferences" (63) and reading a novel which he'd begun to read before his business called him away from his estate. He reads the novel on the train and then, upon returning to his estate, situates himself comfortably in the green velvet armchair in his study, which looks out onto a tree-lined park. The novel absorbs the estate owner with its romantic tropes; the hero and heroine meet in a cabin in the woods and plot what seems to be a burglary and murder of some sort. They corroborate their alibis and work out every painstaking detail of the mysterious crime they're preparing to commit and then part ways. The heroine runs off deeper into the woods, and the hero advances in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, the estate owner luxuriates in the passive act of reading his novel. All of his desired comforts are within reach, and the tree-lined park which is a part of his estate stretches out before him through the large window. As the estate owner reads, the hero of the novel emerges from the woods and onto a large estate. Everything goes as planned. The estate manager is not there because of the late hour. The guard dogs do not regard him. And the hero enters the house through the porch, following the directions his lover gave to him. He moves through the house, knife in hand, until he reaches the study, where he sees the head of the estate owner peeking over the back of his green velvet chair, looking out onto the park of his estate, reading his novel.
Analysis
In "Continuity of Parks" Cortázar explores the relationship between narrative and reality; in this story, he creates a meta-fictional feedback loop that concludes at the very point of convergence between the narrative that the estate owner is reading and the estate owner's lived reality. Cortázar portrays the estate owner as the ultimate non-actor, passive in everything he does. The story begins by describing the engagements that keep the estate owner from reading his book, and those engagements include "some urgent business conferences" and "writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate" (63). These engagements suggest a transfer of power and responsibility away from the estate owner and into the hands of other people. He seems to have arrived at a point in life where he's willingly relinquishing his power of attorney and forfeiting his holdings, and the story takes place in the midst of the estate owner's expanding passivity.
Once he settles into his study, after making all of the necessary phone calls, the estate owner returns to his book. Cortázar emphasizes the estate owner's passivity as he reads the novel; the estate owner allows the novel to happen to him—his remembrance of the characters and plot elements is "effortless"; Cortázar writes that "the novel spread its glamour over him" and that "he tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him" (64). It is almost as if the estate owner, in his passivity, barely exists. He relinquishes his agency and allows stimuli to wash over him.
In an important moment of transition buried in the middle of a long paragraph, Cortázar transfers the perspective from the estate owner to the scene inside the novel he's reading, and in so doing, he transfers the perspective of the story to the characters in the novel. The characters in the novel are called hero and heroine. They are passionate, archetypal lovers at a crossroads. They are plotting a robbery and murder. And though their short scene in the woods may seem literarily recognizable and perhaps even cliché, their urgency and propensity for action dominates the narrative and acts as yet another force usurping the "real" estate owner. Of course, the actual agency of the novel's characters is minimal as a function of being characters in a novel and also by the scene's characterization by Cortázar, who writes that their "lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity" (64).
The story could be interpreted as an indictment of the passive pleasure of reading, and it proposes, through a meta-narrative experimentation in form, a conequences of this passivity, in which the stories that give us this pleasure magically breach the fourth wall and affect our lives in a real way.
