Eddie Watkins's Reviews > 62: A Model Kit

The impetus, or even the blue-print, of this novel is Chapter 62 of Cortazar’s own novel Hopscotch. In that chapter a “chemical theory of thought” is referenced; a theory that posits a wholly materialistic basis for psychological processes and human motivations and desires, reducing human behavior to by-products of neural activity. In this chapter the narrator sketches the idea of a novel that would replace individual human behavior by social behavior and neural activity by character activity. Reading Chapter 62 gives the impression that 62: A Model Kit would be coldly analytical, abstract, un-feeling; which in a way is true, but somehow it also manages to be deeply moving.

It opens with a character experiencing a plexus of coincidental events while sitting in a Parisian café on Christmas Eve, and (at least in my reading of the novel) his stabs at trying to comprehend the elusive but obvious significance of these events bring the rest of the novel into being. “Elusive but obvious significance” applies as well to the rest of the book, in that the reader turns page after page, compelled by something very difficult to pinpoint – characters rarely become more than their names and professions, stories told exist in clouds of abstract language so the reader must latch on to the few tangible words/images offered to get his/her bearings, and to top it all it is very difficult to discern who is talking where and when – but that somehow manages to be deeply moving.

How is this possible?

My theory is that while deploying the usual phalanx of “narrative voices” – 1st person, 3rd person, snail – 62: A Model Kit manages to be told in the voice of consciousness itself, what I would call a voice from the “collective conscious”. From paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence, the voice constantly shifts from third to first to snail, from inner to outer, from omniscient to limited, from snail to carefree imbecile. This voice from the collective conscious, even with all its abstractions and elusiveness, manages to bind the characters and the narratives they inhabit together in a social fluidity that transcends them all on a fundamental level, on the deeper levels of interpersonal consciousness itself. This sets up a very lively web of social interconnectedness that remains lively and life-affirming even in the face of infidelity, love lost, and death, because the individual him/herself is subsumed in something larger and longer lasting, thus freeing the individuals from the narrow confines of the personal ego. This freeing of the characters from their own personal egos creates a comparable feeling in the receptive reader, and it’s the combination of transpersonal interconnectedness and freedom from self that manages to be deeply moving; that and the implication that we are who we are through our interactions with others.

It’s like a system of metaphysics that replaces abstract theorizing with narrative voices. But like a system of metaphysics it can be very offputting at first, until one finds one's footing in the verbal cloud-cuckooness.

This may sound like a lofty intention on Cortazar’s part, but he was quite a guy, extremely intellectual yet also playfully profound, and this is one of those books I hope to be compelled to reread and reread by its “elusive but obvious significance” that never quite gets pinpointed; an elusive and obvious significance that could all point to nothing but I know it doesn’t because I can feel it in my small part of the collective conscious.