All Pandemics the Pandemic: On Julio Cortázar's "All Fires the Fire"

Julio Cortázar | All Fires the Fire | New Directions | April 28, 2020 | 160 Pages | Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

The world is strange, and Julio Cortázar knows it. We’re stuck in place, illness abounds, and time is distorted. In his collection, Todos los fuegos el fuego, Cortázar tracks all these markings of the COVID moment, painting a picture of claustrophobia and strained connection that is familiar to all of us today. 

Except, he wrote it in 1966. 

The short stories of Todos los fuegos el fuego,  republished as All Fires the Fire late last month, might not appear to have much of a throughline: their contents span from Cuba to the Grecian islands, from two sickbeds to a gladiatorial arena. Yet, they give voice to the feeling of upheaval, as it traverses time, place, and scale. 

Cortázar was familiar with life’s disruptions. Raised near Buenos Aires, where he spent much of his youth in a sickbed, he eventually moved to Paris to escape the military regime in his home country. From abroad, he dedicated himself to leftist causes of anti-Perón demonstrators in Argentina, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and revolutionaries in Cuba. His radical politics emerge in the ambitious scope and formal experimentation of his writing. Like Borgesian mind experiments, he extends situations to their extremes, unveiling the absurd structures that control our lives. However, Cortázar’s stories are infused with a human tenderness and particularity, so that you can never tell if he is writing about all situations or a specific situation (all fires? The Fire?). Reading a Cortázar story is like waking from a dream where, steeped in emotion, you scramble to grasp meaning before it dissipates in the light of day. 

Of the eight stories in All Fires The Fire only one features real fire — the eponymous story, in which two men burn to death in fires of their own making. If here, the fire is literal, in the remaining seven stories in the anthology, it takes on a metaphorical quality. Plane crashes, romantic blunders, and war are all coated in a sheen of unreality as if there is a single disruption from which they all stem. Catastrophe, upheaval, isolation envelop the whole collection in their flames. It is appropriate that the English translation comes to us in the  time of coronavirus, for All Fires the Fire gives us a language of the absurd with which to ask: What do all disasters share? And what is particular about the fire of pandemic? 

The first story in the collection, “The Southern Thruway,” speaks directly to the experience of quarantine. In it, a traffic jam extends for days, and passengers transition from frustration at a temporary inconvenience into acceptance that life will be different, indefinitely (I squirm from my 26th day on my sofa). Time and space coalesce for “there was so little to do that the hours began to blend together, becoming one in [memory].” In this seemingly single chunk of time, passengers mark progress through the physical space that they’ve moved. A patch of shade fifty meters away becomes more significant than the hour on their watches, which they cease to check. A period of heat transitions to an era of cold nights, from hunger to boredom. Just as a baker might come to measure COVID days between mixing ingredients and proofing dough; or a teacher, in blocks between Zoom conferences — Cortázar suggests that the way that we demarcate time molds our days and minds. The dissonance between the mundane passage of time and the existential — the fear of death and the underlying question: when will this end? — animates the entire collection and our entire world. These large fluctuations in scale are part of what allows Cortázar to make the familiar feel surreal, and the surreal feel utterly sensible. 

We never get an explanation for the traffic jam, and a nameless government fails to help the passengers. In the stories, water and sweaters — not ventilators and toilet paper — are scarce, but there is a familiar sense that some structure should be in place to help protect these people, and that structure is missing. These Kafka-esque bureaucracies, and invisible threats hover over all of the stories, punctuated by moments of personal connection. In Cortázar’s writing, as in a life spent between White House Briefings and sharing the kitchen with Mom, impersonality and intimacy do a twisted dance. Nowhere is this more clear — in Cortázar’s world, and in our own — than in the case of illness. In “Nurse Cora,” a boy’s sickness is the unseen, impersonal menace, but the relationship between patient and nurse is a perfect example of the way that calamity, disaster, chaos blur traditional boundaries between people, creating a nameless, potent intimacy.

Cortázar pinpoints a dynamic that has recently received much attention: that of healthcare workers and patients. In the story, a sick teenager navigates a crush on his young nurse (Cora). Their lives overlap as the patient’s most private rituals, his bodily functions, become Nurse Cora’s daily tasks and she becomes obsessed with his recovery. Even the sentence structure cannot clearly delineate perspectives, and consciousnesses shift mid-sentence between different characters. The story resembles an endlessly revolving door; we may not be going anywhere, but there is the sense of velocity, as though each sentence unveils a different layer of psychology. Cortázar is known for this kind of experimentation. His magnum opus, Hopscotch (published in 1963 by Pantheon Books), is written in a series of chapters that can be pieced together in different orders; the act of reading becomes the act of making meaning. Similarly, in “Nurse Cora,” these formal twists have a point: it can be exhausting to absorb all these characters’ feelings at once, but it also mimics the shared burden of infirmity. These interlacing perspectives evoke images of COVID where nurses FaceTime relatives, where heartbreak, fear, and love jostle together in the space between patient, caretaker, and family. Illness for Cortázar, like illness for us in 2020, isn’t just one person’s physical journey, but a collective, emotional experience. Illness is a sort of war, a fire, or indefinite traffic jam. 

All Fires the Fire is dedicated to giving language to these liminal moments of upheaval; the result is a mixture of the bizarre and familiar, large and small, specific and universal — qualities that might provide a strange comfort in a pandemic. And yet, Cortázar is ultimately more concerned with what these disasters reveal about our everyday life. Each of these stories shines a light on the complacency, inequality, and corruption deeply embedded around us. For brief flashes — in pandemic, in war, in death— structural imbalances are laid bare. As one man drives home from the traffic jam, he realizes with horror the mindless world to which he returns. He wonders, “why all this hurry, why this mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead.” In the collection, we get the deflating sense that the real disaster is not the illness, or the fire, but the indifference of ordinary life. Cortázar does not condemn the ones who fall back into natural cycles of consumption and banality, but rather bemoans the ease of forgetting these brief moments of insight. Again, it’s not hard to make the comparison to today, where the pandemic exposes environmental corrosion, moral decrepitude, gender, racial, and class disparities. These disruptions, Cortázar tells us, are not unique to 2020. What is true about all fires, he suggests, is that they lift the veil of artifice. What is not written into the script is how each of us will respond.