Transition
A common theme across several of Cortázar's stories in Blow-Up and Other Stories concerns climactic moments of transition or a climactic "switch" that reframes the narrative and forces the reader to revise their first impressions of the plot and/or characters of the story in question. Where some authors, when introducing a "switch" or "twist," rush the actual moment of transition, Cortázar thrives in these moments and dwells there, tending not to shy away from describing the psychological and metaphysical character of the switch.
In the first story of the collection, "Axolotl," the moment of transition is prefaced with the ongoing understatement that "nothing strange" had happened, and the narrator describes how "[m]y face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood" (8). It is ironic that "Axolotl"'s narrator uses the phrase "no transition" when Cortázar actually does spend about a page of the relatively short story describing the transitionary moment, and the entire story is devoted to exploring the question of why this transition occurred in the first place.
Other stories in the collection concerned with this moment of transition include "Blow-Up," in which a photographer realizes that the blown-up photograph he took in a public square that hangs like a poster on his wall is suddenly moving, and this realization sucks him into the photograph, where he is attacked by a figure who originally resided beyond the margins of the photo. After the encounter with the photograph, the photographer is stuck in a strange, skyward position, disembodied (and describing himself as dead). In "Continuity of Parks," the "continuity" refers to a transitional, interstitial space between written narrative and reality, across which the "hero" traverses and confronts his reader in the study of the estate. And finally, in "The Night Face Up," Cortázar leads his unwitting reader to a climactic switch in which he uses defamiliarizing language to emphasize that the space which the reader previously assumed was "dream space" is actually the "real" of the story, and vice-versa.
Art/Literature as Communication
Many of Cortázar's alienated characters are avid readers. The narrator of "House Taken Over" is a hermit who only leaves the house in hopes of obtaining new French literature from the book store. Letitia in "End of the Game" spends her days reading about the fantastical adventures of Rocambole when she, herself, is for the most part bound to her bed by a debilitating spinal condition. And the first story of the collection, "Axolotl," ends on a hopeful note about the potential for stories to give a voice to experience. The narrator "buried alive" in the body of an axolotl says of his former human self that has since stopped coming to the zoo, "in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls" (9). And in "Blow-Up," the narrator grapples with how to best to communicate his story, and he theorizes about why human beings feel the strong impulse to tell stories, which he ultimately attributes to our need to have witnesses to our thoughts, fears, and joys.
Ancestry
Several of Cortázar's stories deal with ancestry and place, as in, the ties people have to a certain piece of land or structure, like a house or estate, that situates them not only in space but in history. Several of the stories here take place in the countryside of Argentina, a place with which Cortázar was highly familiar, and several of these stories deal with family estates and the middle- and upper-middle class that Cortázar felt was in stagnation under the leadership of Juan Perón.
This question of ancestry and ancestral homes is, of the selected stories, most central to "House Taken Over," in which the narrator refers to his time as "a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials" (10) and feels that rather than letting the house be sold by distant cousins, it would be more just for him and his sister to "topple it [them]selves before it was too late" (11). Of course, they're never given that chance, and the mysterious intruders take over their family home, pushing its final "rightful" inhabitants into the street. Perhaps the invasion is Cortázar's way of portraying the slow death of Argentina's middle class.
The Fantastical/Metaphysical
Cortázar categorizes his own stories as belonging to the genre of "fantastic" stories that oppose "that false realism which consists of believing that everything can be described and explained as it was accepted by the scientific and philosophical optimism of the eighteenth century" (Hayes). Cortázar is skeptical of empiricism and the narrative of simple cause and effect, especially when it comes to the exceptional circumstances that make for an excellent short story. His disinterest in explaining the practical mechanisms of the often absurd circumstances of his stories, like the tiger in "Bestiary" or the transformation in "Axolotl," position his work in this fantastical, "magical realist" realm.
Repression
Repression is the central theme to "Bestiary" and an important theme in "End of the Game." In "Bestiary," the wandering tiger symbolizes the Damoclean stresses that constantly hang over the anxious inhabitants of the estate. Don Roberto and the field hands keep track of the tiger's whereabouts and keep the residents informed on which room or area of the estate to avoid. The tiger represents a chronic aversion to confrontation, to pretending a problem isn't there or learning to live with a problem instead of facing it and seeking a resolution. Rema represses her true emotions so that she won't reveal herself to The Kid, and The Kid uses her reticence against her—knowing nobody but he is willing to "rock the boat," he pushes his family members to the edge. It takes an outsider, Isabel, to intervene and finally allow one source of stress (The Kid) to meet another (the tiger), and fight fire with fire, so to speak. It's unclear whether the Funeses will do anything about the roaming tiger, but one thing is clear: by the end of the story, The Kid is no longer an issue.
In "End of the Game," Cortázar portrays repression through the character of Letitia, who refuses to acknowledge her medical condition out loud. Her actions reflect a deep understanding of how other people perceive her disability, but as the narrator points out, Letitia refuses to utter a word about her disability, and because of her unwillingness to talk about it, nobody else in the household will talk about it. "She knew we weren't going to say anything to her, and in a household where there's someone with a physical defect and a lot of pride, everyone pretends to ignore it starting with the one who's sick" (142). In this way, Cortázar differentiates between the public and private dimensions of repression.
Perspective
Cortázar begins the title story of the collection, "Blow-Up," with the line, "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. One might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell" (115). This frustration with tenses and pronouns is not restricted to "Blow-Up," but pervades many of the stories in this collection and across Cortázar's body of work. The stories do not pretend to be answers to this question of how a story should be told "properly," because Cortázar himself admits that there is no "proper" way to tell a story. However, the sense that the human impulses that guide a story's telling are imperfect and fall short of the complete moment that can be captured by the aperture of a camera or a typewriter seems to drive Cortázar's narration.
Youth/Childhood
Cortázar has a keen eye for the strange and honest ways that children communicate with one another. He also seems to take an interest in the transitional period of adolescence. As an author so fixated on magical and fantastical moments of transition, adolescence serves as a familiar and realistic counterpart to that favorite subject of his. Of the selected titles, "Bestiary," "End of the Game," and "Blow-Up" in particular address issues of childhood and adolescence.
In "Bestiary," Isabel and Nino spend their days on the estate collecting bugs and taking notes on them, but after Isabel has to face the Kid in Rema's stead, Cortázar writes, "she saw [Nino] suddenly as so childish, such a little boy with his snails and his leaves" (94). Isabel's determination to lead the Kid into the library where he'll be mauled by a tiger matures Isabel and forces her to see the adult impossibility of Rema's circumstances.
"End of the Game" is far more explicitly cast as a coming-of-age narrative, in which Letitia is forced to demonstrate her understanding of how others see her disability. By writing the letter to Ariel, she leaves him with the choice of whether or not to overlook her condition and love her for the contents of her mind. The end of their "game" also marks the end of a period of their childhoods in which the three cousins could unabashedly perform for commuters on the train and not feel threatened or accessible by them. "Blow-Up" also addresses adolescence in a less direct, more speculative manner. Michel sees the boy in distress, cornered against a parapet by the older woman, and fabricates a whole biography for the boy in which he (the boy) feels torn between his desire to have sex with a woman and his fear that he'll be kidnapped or taken advantage of in a sinister and dangerous way, such that, by the time he realizes the true nature of the encounter, he will not be able to escape.
