The dream of a passion; about Julio Cortázar's story The Other Sky.

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at the psychoanalitic comprehension of a fas-cinating literary creation, which tries to go through the gorge of the space ―between‖ both disciplines.
All the story is a search through the mediocrity of a certain way of living, which takes place between banality and the fleeting intensity of passions. It is the story of a life, which in its permanent and indolent flow, summons up the protagonist to be responsible for his passions, his drive to live. Since the very beginning, all the agreements become disagreements.
The plot seems to be continuously evoking a detained time, since the character wanders in a space and temporality where he only manages to survive. It is a plain and simple story, setuled in the routine of failure, in which all secrets: whether fantastic or frightful, painful or hopeful become concealed.
In “The other sky”, intelligibility, like a spiral of paradoxes, threads its succesive images through repetitive anecdotes that lead to a peculiar time, where the indecision of a cyclic beginning reigns. It is the time of psychoanalysis: time in spiral, time in torsion.
The text is a route chart that gradually opens up the doors of Cortazar‘s universe. Adolescence, sexuality, fantasy, women, the fascination for death, the difficulty, and at the same time, the
imperious yearning for love and friendship go marching along its lines.
In a meticulous description of odours and colours, sounds and emo-tions, the peculiar weft of time and memory designs an improptu in which the voluptuosity of love and the joy of the senses break into every now and then. Nevertheless, the narrating-character experiences the vicissitudes of a consciousness torn and overwhelmed by an unelaborate guilt, emerging from the temptation of the archaic. Then, inmersed in the cold panic of a ―too‖ close disolution of existance, he ―fabricates‖ ―another sky‖ to escape from that terrifyng world of incest, madness and death.
The feminine figures seem to support the ―necessary escision‖, —for this character— between sexual excitement and tenderness. ―Paternal insufficiency‖ becomes a character in itself which embodies its role in the void of negativity. The paternal function is an essentially symbolic entity, orderer of subjectivity.