seek the leaks

I want to expand on my previous entry about the illustration of the house from “House Taken Over”. This blueprint allows me to label the house as another character of this story, because I am able to give traits to it. It’s big and empty and hallow and silent; It’s very passive aggressive. It works in tandem with the incomprehensible noises to ultimately push the brother and sister out of their own home.

Section by section, the two main characters seal off different parts of the home. If the house was a person, it would make sense that people would gradually distance themselves from someone who is passive aggressive. The house is indirectly hostile towards its dwellers. By working with the silent noises, the house prohibits the main characters from living out their comfortable, daily lives. By creating this pattern of resistance and restriction, it hinders the dwellers from performing normal behavior.

I think the reason that the dwellers ultimately get pushed out of their home, almost voluntarily, is because the house is a house– not a person. If it was an actual person, they could respond back– through resistance, confrontation, or even a civil discussion. But they cannot take this action against a house. That is why it brings me chills; simply turning this character into a house, the author eliminates any chance of rebellion from the dwellers.

This, then, makes me wonder why Julio Cortazar wrote this story with this character as an inanimate object. Is he trying to make some comment about how the Peronist regime oppresses its people in a way that they cannot even fight back? Through personifying the house, I wonder if the people of the Argentinian society even understood that they were being so sinisterly exploited, because if they thought of the government just as a house, they wouldn’t even realize they were being so oppressed, or know how to respond.

Because it’s just a house.

I found a very interesting piece of what the house described in House Taken Over may look like– illustrated by Juan Fresan (1969). Not only are these drawings composed from analyzing the narrated space, but also really uses the “floor-plan as the scenario of the narration, turning it into one of the characters of the story.”¹ This really opened my eyes, because the whole time, I had just been concentrating on the brother, his sister, and possibly the noises as the only characters of this story.

The layout of the house is described as: “The dining room, a living room…the library and three large bedrooms…Only a corridor with its massive oak door separated that part from the front wing, where there was a bath, the kitchen, our bedrooms and the hall…You had to come in through the vestibule and open the fate to go into the living room…the doors to our bedrooms were on either side of this…” (Norton World Literature, Volume F, 690).

Julio Cortázar often explored the line between the fantastic and the real in his writing. He has become very preoccupied by situations under Latin American regimes that his stories often have “very precise references to ideological and political questions” leaked into them¹. His stories are still, however, of the fantastic. He envelopes his writings on political content with literature. Some critics say that Cortázar used House Taken Over as an opportunity to comment on society “under the authoritarian regime of Perón, or as a critique of the backwardness and conservation of postwar Argentine society” (Norton World Literature, Volume F, 689).

Former President Juan Domingo Perón (of Argentina) led a movement known as Peronism. This movement rejected the extremes of capitalism and communism and worked to ameliorate social and economic tensions among the classes². Perón appealed to workers in a patriotic light.

Cortázar wrote House Taken Over with enough ambiguity in order to “resist efforts at final interpretation” (Norton World Literature, Volume F, 689). The incomprehensible noises that slowly but surely take over the big, quiet house that the main characters live in, eventually push them out. The brother and sister have been living comfortably in the house their whole lives, not even needing to work to earn money themselves since they already have money coming in from the field. Once noises begin to take over the house, Irene and her brother begin sealing off certain sections of the house. Little by little, they are required to leave behind so many things in the areas that had been taken over– the brother’s French literature, Irene’s slippers and stationary set, a bottle of Hesperidin (691). Although they both looked at each other sadly at times, they accepted this without resistance.

During this time, Perón’s dictatorship was very powerful and oppressive. The force within the characters’ home could represent this power– a power that takes away freedom, access, and a peaceful mind from the characters. The characters (the oppressed) do not have the voice nor the courage to stand firm against the force. Even Cortázar has suggested that this political aspect (of oppressing groups under the regime) could have had a psychological influence on his dream, which is how this story first came to him³.

“House Taken over may well represent all my fears, or perhaps all my dislikes, in which case the anti-Peronist interpretation seems quite possible, even emerging unconsciously.” — Julio Cortázar