Final Exam

by Julio Cortázar

  I n t r o d u c t i o n

  The brilliant Spanish American novelists of the sixties—Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier—all admired Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963). It was the quintessence of what had come to be known as the Boom, a new kind of novel from Spanish America: experimental, highly intellectual, hilarious, and irreverent. And it seemed to come out of nowhere: while Cortázar’s first novel, The Winners (1960), does have some avant-garde touches, it really presents the situation of post-Perón Argentina as a ship-of-fools allegory.

  Before 1960, Cortázar was famous as a writer of short stories, which he first published in 1949 in Jorge Luis Borges’ magazine Los Anales de Buenos Aires. Until 1960, most of his readers assumed that Cortázar would follow in Borges’ footsteps, in the sense of being an all-around man of letters—shortstory writer, essayist, and translator. Invisibly, slowly, Cortázar (1914-1984) was developing into a writer very different from Borges. As a young man, he aspired to be a poet, because in Spanish America, poetry was considered the supreme literary art form. His first book, Presencia (Presence), published in 1938 under the name Julio Denis, was a collection of Mallarmé-inspired sonnets. It is now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible.

  Cortázar finished the manuscript of Final Exam in 1950. A few friends read it, but for political and personal reasons, the book would not appear until 1986. So if we were to ask 1950 Buenos Aires literati who Cortázar was, they would probably answer that he was an essayist and, occasionally, a translator. It is in his essays, beginning with his 1946 Symbolist reading of Keats, “The Grecian Urn in the Poetry of John Keats,” where Cortázar tries to define the nature of literature and to determine how it should be written. These articles, published in a variety of Buenos Aires literary magazines, constitute a kind of literary autobiography, the intellectual foundation of his artistic career.

  The principal tension in Cortázar’s esthetics is between art-for-art’s sake, which derives from his reading of Mallarmé and other French Symbolist poets, and art as provocation, which he discovered in Surrealism. French Existentialism is yet another presence in Cortázar’s intellectual development, though in his case its effects would have more to do with art than politics. In fact—and Final Exam bears this out—Cortázar is remarkably apolitical until the sixties, when, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, he becomes a man of the left. Politics, usually from a moral rather than a rigorous, ideological point of view, becomes his second career during the sixties, eventually eclipsing his literary production.

  But in the forties, Cortázar is a man searching for a method, a writer trying to decide what kind of fiction to produce before taking the first step. So the major theme of his essays is the novel, which for him is the product of Europe or North America, since he rarely refers to Latin American literature during those years. It is a genre in need of rejuvenation. How to do it? One way, he suggests, is to make novels more like poems in the sense that novels should be stripped of explanatory passages that help the reader along. This means that characters would be shorn of psychology: the reader is responsible for creating them through interpretation. In this we also see the didactic element in Cortázar, who as a young man trained to be a teacher.

  Cortázar never abandons the esthetic principles he discovers during the forties. They constitute the intellectual foundation of his major fiction, Hopscotch, and reappear in the gnomic utterances about literature made by one of its characters Morelli, a dying avant-garde writer. But to see these ideas in their purest form, the reader must turn to Final Exam, which summarizes all of Cortázar’s thinking during the forties.

  Unlike Hopscotch, Final Exam deals with a totally Argentine, actually Buenos Aires (porteño), world. The story is simple even if the novel itself is quite dense: Juan and Clara are about to take their final university examinations: they are to appear before a committee and answer a question chosen lottery style by a professor. They are nervous and over-prepared, so they decide to stay up all night and walk around Buenos Aires with three friends; a couple: Andrés, an intellectual dropout who prefigures Horacio Oliveira in Hopscotch, and his not overly bright girlfriend Stella; and a newspaper reporter referred to simply as “the chronicler.”

  The Buenos Aires they inhabit is filled with a mysterious fog. Public services like subways and trolleys are on the verge of total breakdown; the streets are caving in, and there is a bizarre ritual taking place in Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of the Argentine nation. Thousands of people from all over the republic are visiting a small bone on display in a huge tent. The visitors are treated to speeches, music, and various mysterious rites. The friends who read Cortázar’s manuscript in 1950 began to regard him as a prophet in 1952, when Eva Perón died and her cadaver became an object of veneration.

  Juan and Clara are also being stalked by a former friend, Abel, now insane, who seems to have been (like Andrés) one of Clara’s lovers. There is, then, a double frame around the action: social anxiety on one hand and revenge on the other, the collective and the personal. It is tempting to read the novel as Cortázar’s autobiography, but that is inaccurate, even though he infuses many of his literary and esthetic beliefs into Juan and Andrés. For example, Andrés, like Cortázar himself, is dazzled by Jean Cocteau’s Opium, which opens the door to Surrealism.

  Above all, Final Exam is a novel about Buenos Aires, but it is Buenos Aires transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Other writers, the Argentine Roberto Arlt and the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, had seen the city through a distorted, Expressionist optic, but Cortázar, as he does in his best fantastic stories, walks a very fine line between realism and hallucination.

  We must take into account the Argentina in which Cortázar grew up. When he was two years old, Hipólito Yrigoyen, last of the old-style, nineteenth-century political bosses, became president of Argentina. When Cortázar was sixteen, in 1930, Yrigoyen was swept out of office by General Uriburu in a military coup. Between 1930 and 1943, a combination of military men and civilians bumbled along until the next military coup, which takes place on June 14, 1943. This marks the advent of Juan Perón and his wife Evita Duarte.

  Cortázar witnessed a great deal of political unrest and violence before his definitive departure for Paris in 1951, when he took a position with UNESCO as a translator. This too is relevant to Final Exam, which juxtaposes the crises of personal life (broken relationships, jealousy) with the perpetual crisis of Argentine civil society. The main characters love being Argentine—they refer to the tango even in their most heated literary debates—but they view the nation as pure façade, a fraud. This phoniness appears in the novel’s pseudo-climax, the final examination, which turns out to be nothing more than a hoax.

  Not surprisingly, Cortázar’s characters constantly wonder how it is possible to write under such circumstances. They have no real answers and can only fall back on the solutions they find in the Western tradition, which are not totally relevant to Argentine reality. In many ways then, Final Exam is Cortázar’s farewell to Argentina, the country he loved but had to leave to become the kind of novelist he hoped to be.

  Often to the dismay of younger readers, Final Exam is also a summary of Cortázar’s readings during the forties, from the forgotten detective novels of Nigel Balchin to the almost forgotten Existentialist novels of André Malraux. The presence of Edgar Allan Poe, whose prose works Cortázar translated into Spanish, is also a strong one here, not because Cortázar was especially fascinated with nineteenth-century American literature, but because Poe, translated by Baudelaire, was part of the internationalized French culture that permeates the novel. There are many writers, public figures (the boxer Primo Camera for example), or literary characters (Balzac’s Eugenie Grand
et) who may well be unknown to today’s general reader. Not to worry! Cortázar’s depiction of social disintegration and the vicissitudes of love are so powerful that a few enigmatic allusions will not prevent the reader from understanding the action. Leave the archeological investigation for a second reading!

  Alfred Mac Adam

  A N o t e o n t h e T r a n s l a t i o n

  In Final Exam, Cortázar employs a technique he uses throughout his career, the mixture of very vulgar Argentine street Spanish with high-flown esthetic concepts. This generates irony and humor, but is virtually impossible to replicate in English, where regional dialects lead inevitably to caricature. There is a great deal of Italian mixed in as well, because there were (and are) so many Italians living in Buenos Aires.

  A u t h o r’s N o t e

  I wrote Final Exam midway through 19501 in a Buenos Aires where the imagination only had to add the slightest touch to history to obtain the results the reader will soon see.

  It was impossible to publish the book then, so only a few friends read it. Later on and from very far away, I learned that those same friends believed they saw in certain episodes a portent of the events that illuminated our annals during 1952 and 1953.2 Scoring that necrological and governmental bulls-eye brought me no joy. In point of fact, it was too easy: the Argentine future so insistently repeats the present that exercises in prophecy have no merit whatsoever.

  I publish this old tale today because I irremediably enjoy its free language, its fable devoid of moralizing, its Buenos Aires melancholy, and also because the nightmare from which it was born is still awake and prowling the streets.

  J. C.

  1 The text published by Sudamericana is dated “September 21, 1950.’

  2 Cortázar refers to the death of Eva Perón in July of 1952; in April of 1953, Perón’s supporters rioted, attacking the offices of opposition political parties and burning the Jockey Club, symbol of upper-class Buenos Aires.

  “Ily a terriblement d’années, je m’en allais chasser le gibier d’eau dans les marais de l’Ouest—et comme il n’y avait pas alors de chemins de fer dans le pays où il me fallait voyager, je prenais la diligence …”1 You have a good time, and 1 hope you bag many, many partridges, thought Clara, walking away from the classroom door. She could no longer hear the voice of the Reader. How wonderfully isolated the rooms in the House were, all you had to do was step back a few yards to re-enter the mildly buzzing silence of the gallery. She walked toward the stairway, but, undecided, stopped when she came to another hallway. From there, she could hear clearly the Readers in Section A, Modern English Novel. But it was unlikely Juan would be in one of those classrooms. The annoying thing is that with him you just never know. Then she decided to go look and find out for sure, angrily squeezing her notebook. She turned left, though it didn’t matter which way she went. “‘Was there a husband?’ ‘Yes. Husband died of anthrax.’ ‘Anthrax?’ ‘Yes, there were a lot of cheap shaving brushes on the market just then …’”

  Nothing wrong with stopping for a second to see if Juan—

  “‘some of them infected. There was a regular scandal about it.’ ‘Convenient,’ suggested Poirot.”—but he wasn’t there. 7:40, and Juan said he’d meet her at 7:30. The jerk! He was probably in one of the classrooms, mixed in with the parasites of the House—listening without hearing. Other times, they’d met on the ground floor next to the stairway, but Juan had probably gone up to the second floor. What a jerk! Unless, he’s late, unless … Maybe the other gallery, he’s probably there someplace …

  “dans les mélodies nous l’avons vu, les emprunts et les échanges s’effectuent très souvent par- …”

  But no, he wasn’t there. This Reader has a good voice, she told herself, stopping near the door. The room was brightly lit, and she could see the little sign announcing the title of the book: Le Livre Des Chansons, ou Introduction à la Chanson Populaire Française (Henry Davenson). Chapter II Reader: Mr. Roberto Chaves.

  This must be the man who read La Bruyère last year, thought Clara. A light voice devoid of emphasis, well able to withstand the five-hour stretch of reading. Just then, the Reader paused, dropping a silence as if it were a spoonful of tapioca pudding. The length of the silence told the listeners if it was a full stop or a footnote. A footnote, thought Clara. The Reader went on: “Voir là-dessus la seconde partie de la thèse de C. Brouwer, Das Volklied in Deutschland, Frankreich …” A good Reader, one of the best. I couldn’t do it, I get distracted, and then I run on like a dog. And that nervous yawning after reading aloud for a while, she remembered that in fifth grade, Miss Capello made her read passages from Marianela. For the first few pages, everything went fine, but then came the yawning, the slow tightening slowly but surely taking control of her throat and mouth, and Miss Capello with her angelic face, listening in ecstasy. The forced pause to control the yawn—she seemed to feel it all over again, transferred it to the Reader, and regretted it for his sake, poor devil—and again reading until the next yawn, no, she most certainly was not suitable for the House. There’s Juan! Here he comes, happy as a lark, his head in the clouds as usual.

  But it wasn’t Juan, only a fellow who looked like him. Clara was livid and stalked over to the other side of the gallery where there were no readings in progress, but she could smell Ramiro’s coffee. I’ll ask Ramiro for a cup to drown my rage. She was annoyed that she’d confused Juan with another man. That fatso Herlick would have said, “See? Tricks of the gestalt: three lines given, use your imagination to complete the picture. Given: a rather skinny body, chestnut-colored hair, and a certain way of walking—as if he were dragging a Buenos-Aires idleness along with him—and you see Juan.” The gestalt could … Ramiro, Ramiro, how I could go for a cup of his coffee, but it’s only for the Readers and for Dr. Menta. The House: coffee and readings. And now it’s 7:45.

  Two young women left a classroom almost running. They exchanged phrases the way birds exchange pecks and didn’t even see Clara in their haste to get to the stairs. The kind who run and listen to another chapter of another book, as if they were switching the dial from a tango to Lohengrin, to the stock-market report, ads for refrigerators, Ella Fitzgerald… The House ought to prohibit that kind of promiscuity. One at a time, dear members of the radio audience, you don’t take up Stendhal until you finish Zogoibi.

  But it was Dr. Menta, slave to culture, who ruled the House. Read books and you’ll find yourself. Believe in the printed word, in the voice of the Reader. Accept the spiritual bread. Those two are the kind who’d go up to listen to some Russian novel read by Menghi or Spanish poetry recited so nicely by Miss Rodriguez. They swallow everything without chewing, and when they leave they eat a sandwich in the House snack bar so they won’t lose time—and then off they go to a film or a concert. They’re so cultured, they’re just divine. Never in my life have I seen pedantry raised to so high a degree of excellence … Because it would have been useless to ask one of those girls what she thought about things going on in the city, the provinces, the country, the hemisphere, in the entire blessed world. Information? All you want: Archimedes, a famous mathematician, Lorenzo de’ Medici; the son of Giovanni; “Puss ’n Boots,” a charming tale by Perrault, and so on … She was in the first gallery again. Some doors were closed, an annoying buzz, the Reader. Les Temps Modernes, Number 50, December, 1949. Reader: Mr. Osman Caravazzi.

  I should try out this idea of listening to magazines, thought Clara. It could be fun. First one subject and then another, like a continuous show at the movies: the reading begins whenever you arrive. She felt tired and walked over to where the gallery opened onto the patio below. There were stars and lights. Clara sat down on one of the cold benches and felt for her chocolate bar, a Dolca with almonds. From a window above, came a dry, clear voice. Moyano, or perhaps Dr. Bergmann, who’d read all of Balzac in three years. Unless it was Bustamante … That was probably Dr. Wolff up on the fourth floor, all nasal with her Wolfnaselgang Goethenasal; and from somewhere else littl
e Mary Robbins, Reader of Nigel Balchin.

  Clara felt her compassion aroused by the chocolate, she was no longer angry with her husband. 8:00, and she wasn’t annoyed by the bell tolling from the huge clock on the corner. After all, it was her fault for coming to the House; the readings didn’t matter a bit to Juan, damn him. These days it was difficult to find interesting courses, or original lectures—the House served the purpose of keeping the spiritual bread hot. [Sic.] What it was really good for was to meet with some friend and chat in a low voice while the grand program of useful works created by Dr. Menta and the Dean of the Faculty was simultaneously put into practice.

  She could just hear them: “Of course, doctor, but of course: young people are always young people, they never study at home. On the other hand, if you make them listen to the works, recited by our first-rate Readers.” (Those horns of plenty were paid professorial salaries, you know.) “You’ll find you can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. Isn’t that the case. Dr. Menta? Dr. Menta, …” But if I keep on reconstructing each and every one of his crimes, thought Clara, I’ll end up believing in the House. I’d rather bite right through my Dolca bar. The House wasn’t so bad after all. Under the pretext of passing on world culture, Dr. Menta had given jobs to dozens of Readers; the Readers read and the girls (especially those who were always such good little students and so attentive to the grand program of useful works) listened. Something would remain of all that, even if nothing more than Nigel Balchin.

  “Tomorrow night,” explained Juan over the phone. “The final examination. Yes, but of course we’re going to have lunch. And go to the concert, for sure. The exam’s at night, there’s time for everything.”

  When he hung up, furious that the telephone connection had been so bad and that he’d barely been able to hear his father-in-law, furious about how late it was, he saw Abel walking into the bar through the door on Carlos Pellegrini Street. Wearing blue, Abel was extremely pale and thin; as usual, he looked no one in the eye and made his way crabwise, avoiding faces even more than tables.