The Night Face Up (2012) Based on the short story by Julio Cortázar. Directed by Hugo Covarrubias. Produced by Maleza and Zumbastico Studios with Filmosonido. © 2012 Maleza / Zumbastico Studios / Filmosonido

The Night Face Up (1956) is a short story included in the third section of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s book, End of the Game. It was a book that I read in high school and I still think about to this day for its incredible language and usage of perception as it explores the various themes of magical realism that marked Latin American literature during the epoch. More than a story that I enjoyed as a teenager, it is a story that has come up in thought various times while exploring concepts of media theory and memory. 

In summary, the story starts with a man riding down the streets of a modern town in his motorcycle. As he crosses an intersection he is distracted by the sudden appearance of a girl in the middle of the road. The rider breaks, collapsing his vehicle resulting in a visit to the hospital. The general progression of the story then becomes a parallelism between two alternating realities. The man as he is taken down the hallways of the hospital begins to hallucinate himself as an indigenous Moteca man in the middle of persecution during the Florida war in the period of the Incas. The Moteca runs through the jungle, fearing his life as the patient gets rolled through the hallways of a hospital. The patient lays face up in a dimly lit room on a hospital bed as his fever brings him to and from a past reality. As the patient continuously falls asleep he imagines himself as the Moteca, tied face up on the floor of a dimly lit cave. The elements of sounds and sensations continuously shift from experience and perspective. Elements like the knife of the Moteca, used for protection or the Inca’s sacrificial knife used for death, mirror the syringes and operating knives used for life and salvation that are used on the sick rider. As the story progresses, and in a sadly spoiling fashion for the benefit of this post, the Moteca finds himself face up on a sacrificial stone as the Inca warriors slice a knife through his heart. As the rider’s consciousness shifts he soon realizes that he was not a man feverly imagining a historic past, but a man of the past imagining himself in a future where he is free. The Moteca’s experience is reality and the creation of the future, coherent with the reader’s perspective, is a figment of imagination. 

Before examining aspects of truth, perspective and memory, I want to dive into the story’s unexpected twist. In a preliminary view the ending comes to quite a shock to the reader’s perspective and constructed rationality of what constitutes as truth. As readers we connect to the reality of the rider imagining the past as a probability of coherence to repetition and myths to what is more practical to our personal reality of truth. It is unfathomable to imagine a historical man imagining a reality that so closely resembles our present since we ourselves cannot possibly comprehend a future that resembles our current speculation. The effect works so well because of the textual mediation of time. The interpretant understands historical context as the object and can only refer to the sign as the past because of the logical chronology of time. If we reimagined the story with the rider imagining a far future where he is escaping an intergalactic war, then the effect and meaning of the story is lost. It is a shift in Eco’s pact of pretending, where we accept the reality that we are given as an irrefutable truth to later understand that our rational misconceptions can be malleable. 

Now if one analyses the text in depth one can figure out that the story itself has been revealing the twist all along. Throughout the text Cortázar is able to hint towards the story’s end through what I would constitute as a rendition of a sensorial unconscious. By sensorial I am alluding to what we have learned during the course as the Benjaminian conception of the optical unconscious and MacArthur’s adaptation to the auditory unconscious in her text The Siri Erfharung. Whether it is the ability for photography to unveil aspects of reality unseen by the human conscious or the ability for the auditory experience to reject conscious reflection and create an embodiment of internalisation in the unconscious, the senses have the ability for individuals to experience something beyond what is in the surface level. This text is highly elaborate in the creation of a sensorial environment. It dives deep into the emotions and associations of sight, touch and hearing with the key difference of smell. The text only associates smell with the experiences of the Moteca. It is a key aspect of understanding the true reality as humans do not have the ability of smelling inside our dreams. Smell reveals the hidden reality not through the sensorial experience but lack thereof. His consciousness is guarded by sensorial hallucinations that create an escape to reality and only penetrated by the disregarded sense that divides reality from dream. 

Now understanding the sensory unconscious that comes into play, one can shift gears to the story as evidence of the embodiment of prosthetic memory. Clearly the Moteca does not have any way of acquiring a futuristic prosthetic memory, but the means by which the consumption of mass media create these experiences, and the effect they have on individuals clearly mimic the ways in which the Moteca escapes his reality. For Landsberg while quoting Blumer, prosthetic memories through their emotional possessive effect create a decentering of lived experience. They intertwine reality with the emotional connection of fiction to construct a sense of identity. In the case of the Moteca, his consciousness creates a world fiction to forge an identity and a reality based heavily in the emotional and sensorial environment to protect his subconscious as he deals with his dooming reality. This connects to Mitchell’s idea of the mind as a medium for reproduction where individuals internalize imagery as subjective mental processes. The creation of a better reality by means of prosthetic memory production in the protection of his psyche is internalized by the individual as objective truth since it resembles his reality in symbol form through parallelism, but resembles it to the point where it removes the hardship of his reality. This is again much like Mitchell’s conception of the image as having the power of resemblance. 

We can push another interpretation of the text connecting to ideas from the Frankfurt School. The idealisation of a future of freedom or a misinterpretation of a Utopia lies heavily on the reliance of progress. In this case we could refer to the progression of technological advancements as a false means to escape a devastating reality. But in the moment it is these technological advancements that hinder our existence. The reality of the Moteca is not particularly technological but the parallelism between the tools of salvation versus the tools of death reveal a basis of the idealisation of a future while the current reality hinders us. The knife of sacrifice and the hope of a knife for salvation. It is much like Benjamin’s Angel of History where progress leaves behind devastation or Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticism of enlightenment and progress as forms of domination. 

To conclude I want to shift gears to the genre of the text. Magical realism takes historical moments or established, mundane realities that resemble our own and places them through a fantastical, surreal scope. It in a sense mediates reality to process a sense of memory and tragedy in a way that is accessible without the continuation of trauma. In this same way, prosthetic memory creates and is created by the emotive responses in our memories to place experiences foreign to our own, to shift our realities, in an attempt to protect ourselves from ourselves. Magical realism becomes a prosthetic fiction to the realities and histories that are hard to experience or reflect upon.