Reincarnation: A Yellow Flower

The whole time I was reading Cortazar’s “A Yellow Flower,” I was thinking about the idea of reincarnation. The belief goes that once a person dies and leaves one life, they become reincarnated into another person (or plant or animal) in another life. Cortazar’s proposal in this story that we are all immortal would make sense if reincarnation were really true because technically our souls would never die, they would just inhabit new bodies, which is immortality in some form. The story of the first mortal man seems to make the assertion that reincarnation exists. He never names it per se, but his statement that Luc (his reincarnated self) would someday die “and another man would relive Luc’s pattern and his own pattern until he died and another man in his turn enter the wheel” (57) pretty much outlines the concept of reincarnation. When one form of your being falls out of existence, another form takes its place, and this cycle goes on endlessly. Reincarnation is a really interesting idea that I’m not actually sure if I believe in or not. I suppose I can understand how people might feel they’ve been things “in a past life,” but whether I feel I have been something in a past life or will be something in a future life, I’m not sure. Cortazar’s take on reincarnation is really quite thought-provoking. At one point, the mortal man states that similar things that happened to him as a child were happening to Luc. But he states Luc was not “the perfect copy” (54). For example, the mortal man had measles as a child and it took him two weeks to recover, whereas Luc had scarlet fever and he was “better in five day, well, you know, the strides of science, etc” (54). This quote lends itself to the idea that our reincarnated selves are always improving and altering our story just a little bit. They are not carbon copies, but they contain the same spirit that dwells within each of us. This idea kind of makes me think that if reincarnation does exist, then perhaps it’s to improve our lives. Maybe what reincarnation works toward is self-improvement and a happier life for each reality our soul inhabits. Regardless of what it means, the idea of reincarnation remains prevalent in this piece. It’s interesting to note that this piece is considered magical realism as it implies that the concept of reincarnation is supernatural and “uncanny.”

As a side note, I’ve always wondered about how deja vu and reincarnation are linked. My personal opinion is that when one experiences deja vu, you are actually living out something that you have unconsciously dreamt (which means you probably don’t remember it, but you still get an eerie feeling that you’ve experienced it before). I suppose an argument could be made that dreams are images of your past life and so deja vu is a result of experiencing something in both your past life and your current life. Just a thought…

If reincarnation does exist, I think perhaps I might have been a lion in a past life. Here’s a picture I took when I was South Africa a couple years back: 

House Taken Over

Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” was a really great story, but one I don’t entirely understand. Perhaps I’m not supposed to. But regardless, I cannot help but feel dissatisfied with the ending. Who has taken over the house? It’s never answered, or maybe I didn’t read closely enough. Cortazar has a knack for great descriptions and imagery. The brother and sister of the story are described in such a fashion that I could picture them immediately, cooped up in their house. They appear to very dull people, always with the same routine, day in and day out. They both clean the house, eat lunch at precisely noon, and then go off to separate activities. Irene does her knitting, while the narrator reads his books (he mentions bookstores and his books a lot). The narrator seems to take a sweet satisfaction in watching Irene knit – he loves to see the tangled wool lying on the floor. One night, the narrator hears a noise on the other side of the oak doors. He bolts the doors immediately and  tells Irene that “they’ve taken over the back part.” Irene seems to know exactly who or what her brother is talking about, but the reader is left in the dark.  The narrator talks about how everything, aside from the noises they make in their sleep, is quiet in the house. The people or things on the other side of the oak door apparently make no noise. By the end of the story, “they” have taken over the entire house. Irene and her brother leave, but not before the brother locks the door of the house and throws the key down a sewer because, as he puts it, “it wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over.” So clearly from this last line, robbers are not who took over the house in the first place. In fact, the narrator’s sympathy for any possible robber who might come across the house implies that those who have taken over the house are a whole lot worse than a few petty criminals. But what has taken over the house? They seemed to be expected by Irene and her brother. Could they be spirits? Demons? Cortazar never defines it, which I suppose lends itself to the magical realism of the story, but it’s quite frustrating not to know what has consumed this house and frightened the narrator and Irene so much that they leave the house that they were supposed to die in someday. “They” seem to be described like humans (‘having muted conversations”), but for all I know they could be giant bugs or flying carpets. Cortazar leaves this up to the imagination, and to me, it seems that it would be demons or the spirits of those who have lived in the house that have taken it over. But I guess we’ll never really know.