RESIDENTIAL UNHOMES IN SHORT STORIES BY

JULIO CORTÁZAR AND ILSE AICHINGER

AMANDA HOLMES

Department of Hispanic Studies, McGill University, 688 Sherbrooke Street West,

Room 425, Montreal, Quebec H3A 3R1, Canada
E-mail: amanda.holmes@mcgill.ca

Abstract

Julio Cortázar and Ilse Aichinger’s short stories question the significance of home in
two postwar cities – Buenos Aires and Vienna – by using the concept of the unheimlich
or the unhomely to evoke uneasy private settings. This essay considers the ambiguous
liminal spaces in the texts through a study of the respective urban architectural contexts,
an interpretation of the relationships between personhood and home, and finally through
an analysis of the multiple border crossings in the stories.

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In his short story “Casa tomada,” Julio Cortázar creates what Anthony
Vidler calls an “unhomely house” – a house that prevents the dweller
from experiencing the comfort and shelter that a home should other-
wise offer. Characters feel ill-at-ease inside these houses, fleeing them
to escape the disquieting inner environments as the once cosy spaces
become unhomely. Cortázar’s urban home loses all signs of safety as
the siblings leave its confines to escape the invading Other. The
dichotomy of heimlich and un-heimlich converges in this residence
through the incursion of an exterior force onto the interior.
As the Other in “Casa tomada” enters the house, the brother and
sister progressively close off those sections that have been appropri-
ated. Finally the occupants find themselves in the middle of the night
without access to the kitchen or the bathroom, they hurriedly abandon
their home and, once safely outside, discard the key. The Argentinean
Cortázar (1914–1984), most renowned for his novel Rayuela [Hopscotch]
(1963), important for its experimental narrative structure that encourages
the reader to jump around in the book, has enjoyed extensive debate con-
cerning “Casa tomada,” his first published short story.1 Some of the most
prominent analyses of this story by literary scholars see the experience
of Cortázar’s characters as similar to that of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden (Alazraki 1983), a baby in the mother’s womb (Andreu 1968),
excrement in the intestines of the body (Ramond 1985), or the bour-
geois elite in Peronist Argentina (Concha 1975). I will examine “Casa

Neophilologus 87: 247–264, 2003.

 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
248 Amanda Holmes

tomada” as it resonates comparatively with another short mid-century

narrative “Wo ich wohne” [Where I Live] (1952) by the Austrian author
Ilse Aichinger. As Cortázar explores connections between subject identity
and the home, Aichinger imagines the dramatic retreat into the self caused
by an equally unnerving experience of a redefined familiar interior.
Aichinger’s “Wo ich wohne” features a narrator who returns home from
a concert to find that his or her apartment has moved down from the
fourth to the third floor until, by the end of the story, the narrator is living
in the basement and wonders where he or she (the protagonist’s gender
is never defined) will live next.
Ilse Aichinger (1921–) has won several important awards for her work.
In 1952, the year of publication for “Wo ich wohne,” she became the first
woman to win an award from the Gruppe 47 – the German literary
circle established after World War II to try to develop a language that
could deal with the legacy of the Nazi era. She has written several col-
lections of short stories, poetry and radio plays, as well as one novel
Die größere Hoffnung [Herod’s Children] (1948), which relates the war-
time experiences of a half-Jewish girl. Aichinger’s work contends with
the Austrian environment as it was influenced by the Nazi era, her inter-
pretations of spaces resist construction through referential language as
she unabatedly destabilizes the role of words and their ability to create
meaning. By placing Aichinger’s “Wo ich wohne” alongside Cortázar’s
short story, I consider the significance of the individual’s relationship
to both language and space in the post-World War II urban setting.
Both authors use the interaction between the inhabitants and the micro-
cosm of the urban home to respond to social and political tensions
inherent in these cities of this time-period. The architecture of the homes
bears the mark of the past in both stories, locating the buildings in the
midst of mid-century urban conversations between past grandeur and
present-day discord. As the vehicle for nostalgia, the architectural styles
of the fictional buildings come to represent divisions between past and
present, as well as between private and public space. The imposition
in both stories of some inexplicable Other on the individual residence
probes the concept of home in mid-century Vienna and Buenos Aires,
underscoring the inescapability of the city’s impact on the lives of its
inhabitants and questioning the nature of the walls, both architectural and
linguistic, that separate Self from Other.
Although both stories take place within private homes, the city func-
tions as an active protagonist in them as well. An unexplained urban
entity influences the living spaces of the characters, challenging their
understanding of security and comfort. The urban sites are the instiga-
tors of fear, and the architecture of the city homes draws that fear into
the lives of the main characters. The walls of the buildings do not serve
their purpose of protecting the inhabitants from the outside, but rather
Residential Unhomes 249

allow for an inexplicable intrusion of the urban space into the private
lives of the characters.
Theoretically, walls are created for protection from the elements and
the exclusion of strangers, producing ambiguous feelings of both security
and fear. Peter Marcuse claims that “walls today represent power, but
they also represent isolation; security, but at the same time fear.” This
dual symbolism rests in the function of walls as dividers between victim
and oppressor:
Boundary walls have come to reflect one of the chief characteristics of our historical expe-
rience: that those who oppress are themselves limited by their oppression, those that
[sic] imprison are themselves imprisoned, that power dehumanizes those that [sic] exercise
it as well as those against whom it is exercised. [. . .] We accept walls that divide people
and rigidify the relations among them as inevitable. They pervade our cities, they are
visible (or block our sight) wherever we look, they symbolize status, rank, and power
(or its lack), they are taken for granted and accepted as desirable, in one form or another,
by everyone. (104)

The ambiguous representational system inherent in city walls becomes

the framework for the imaginary buildings defined by Aichinger and
Cortázar. By exploiting this ambiguity, the authors challenge feelings
of security and protection of the traditional home, presenting the urban
un-home. Both authors emphasize the power inherent in a building,
especially in buildings that have absorbed historical significance. With
opposing attitudes towards the histories of their cities, the authors
comment on the capacity of the present to destroy our relationship to
the past by creating stories in which present and past meet inside
representative buildings. Both authors use architecture as the element that
spans the temporal trajectory. To this end, I will relate the works of
Aichinger and Cortázar to the history of the architectural styles of homes
in both Vienna and Buenos Aires, as well as to the social and political
histories represented by these styles to demonstrate, finally, how archi-
tectural and linguistic ambiguities in these stories interrogate the concept
of home under the oppression of postwar urban space.

The impact of World War II on the two fictional urban environments

acts as a remnant of the real, linking the imaginary cities of the stories
with their real counterparts. In “Casa tomada” the first-person narrator
wants to read French literature, but finds that “Desde 1939 no llegaba
nada valioso a la Argentina” [Since 1939 nothing of value reached
Argentina];2 in “Wo ich wohne” the elevator has not functioned since
the war – “der Lift ist seit dem Krieg nicht im Betrieb.”3 The war
creates a cultural deficiency for the inhabitant of Buenos Aires, whereas
for the Viennese it directly impacts the physical space of home.
Both narrators see World War II as an event that structures their
understanding of the social reality that surrounds them, a perception
250 Amanda Holmes

that seems odd in the case of Buenos Aires. Cortázar’s narrator appears
excessively distanced from his immediate habitat, focusing more on
what is happening across the Atlantic Ocean, bemoaning the fact
that the war has curtailed his ability to stay up-to-date on literary
happenings. The narrator apparently sees no value in literature other
than that produced in France, but also only notices his immediate
political surroundings in its relation to his residence. He worries that
his European-style urban mansion will be demolished, and feels uneasy
living in the front of the house, in a space the size of an apartment like
“los que se edifican ahora, apenas para moverse” [the ones they build
now, with hardly enough space to move] (12). For Cortázar’s narrator,
the good literature comes from Europe as do the showy homes, but he
is unwilling to accept the new urban architectural structure of the apart-
ment, which incidentally also comes from Europe. His understanding
of Europe ends with the beginning of the war or even before, with a
time when urban mansions were still a part of European urban reality.
In both stories, the relationship between the buildings, the charac-
ters and World War II demonstrates the narrators’ attitudes towards
modernity. A broken elevator for Aichinger’s narrator points to the
paralysis of postwar Vienna;4 Cortázar’s narrator is stuck in the past,
in a nostalgia for Europe and its literary classics, undesirous of moder-
nity. The characters all seem incapacitated. Aichinger’s narrator feels she
cannot even mention the strange movement of the apartment, and she
tells nobody.5 The same is true of the neighbors, who do not discuss
the unusual situation, and the narrator attempts to adapt to the movement
of the apartment as readily as possible. The brother and sister in Buenos
Aires are not surprised by the noises behind the oak door of their house.
They seem to have an implicit understanding of what or who has invaded
the home, but the reader is never complicit in this knowledge. The
siblings act alone in their attempts to protect themselves and save their
house from the intrusion. These attitudes of silence and self-protection
vis-à-vis a persistent oppressor are fundamental to both stories.
However, the characters embrace different methods for self-preser-
vation: Aichinger’s narrator chooses to remain entirely passive and does
not consider vacating her apartment; the Cortázar couple actively close
off portions of their home and finally leave the space. The narrator of
“Wo ich wohne” is trapped, whereas in “Casa tomada” the brother and
sister manage to escape. Indeed, Aichinger’s narrator is surrounded by
an identical personal space on each level of her descent: at every level
she still hears the student breathing on the other side of the wall and
her apartment walls and furnishings never change; even the bread remains
where she has left it before returning home. The narrator is encom-
passed by her space, surrounded by her furniture, but incapable of
preventing the apartment as a whole from moving. Analogous to the
Residential Unhomes 251

population of mid-century Vienna, trapped inside an occupied city with

architecture that points to a thriving imperial past, the narrator of “Wo
ich wohne” descends silently along with her apartment. 6 Her primary
concern is how her lifestyle will change when she finds herself in the
sewer, or even worse, in “d[en] Feuer[n] im Innern der Erde” [the fires
of the inner earth] (58). She approaches her entrapment with an attitude
that seems to express her determination to keep one aspect of life intact:
at least she still knows “where she lives.”
The irony inherent in the title of Aichinger’s piece resonates with
the mid-century Viennese residential experience. For much of the
Viennese population, the experience of residing in Vienna from the 1920s
to the 1950s was one of displacement, uneasiness and, during the Nazi
occupation, terror. Aichinger herself lived in apartments in Vienna
throughout her childhood and World War II, spending the war with her
mother of Jewish heritage in a room on the same block as the Gestapo
headquarters. Aichinger’s half-Christian heritage saved her and her
mother, as her daughter’s guardian, from the Nazis, although those on
her mother’s side of the family all died in concentration camps. 7 When
Aichinger and her mother looked for a new apartment after the war, all
the downtown residences had already been rented, and they had to move
to the outskirts of the city.
The architecture of apartment buildings in Vienna – from the apart-
ments on the Ringstrasse to Red Vienna’s functionalist housing
complexes – in many ways symbolizes the rise of modernity. One famous
multi-story apartment project emerged in the 1860s out of the develop-
ment of the Ringstrasse by the Emperor Franz Joseph during the
modernization project of the city.8 At the turn of the century, zoning laws
were implemented and apartment buildings were limited to a certain
number of floors depending on location.9 New architecture for apart-
ment buildings was developed between the World Wars, this time by
the Social Democrats who inaugurated the subsidized housing projects
for low-income families of Red Vienna.10 The short description of the
apartment and the building in “Wo ich wohne” signals its state of
disrepair by its focus on the inoperative elevator. A symbol of moder-
nity, the building of “Wo ich wohne,” like the real Vienna of the time,
has become rundown; its maintenance neglected.
Aichinger’s narrator remains both dislocated and trapped inside her
own residence, unable to escape the nostalgic ties to her home, but also
lacking any control over her small urban space. While residents of
postwar Vienna grappled with this contradictory relationship to the city,
some inhabitants in mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires also felt isolated
from their immediate surroundings. Indeed, the architecture of the
urban homes of mid-century Buenos Aires also pointed to a glorious past,
but in this city, rather than reflect architecture that originated in Latin
252 Amanda Holmes

America as the Viennese apartment building reflected a Viennese archi-

tectural past, the building styles of Buenos Aires matched those of
nineteenth-century Europe, particularly of France and Italy.11
In Buenos Aires, the urban mansion symbolized the city’s aristo-
cratic past. After Independence, Buenos Aires and Spanish American
cities in general rejected colonial architecture in favor of that of France,
Italy and Britain.12 Architects were repeatedly brought from Europe by
the government to design buildings or even to create new plans for the
city of Buenos Aires. Along with the large population increase in turn-
of-the-century Buenos Aires – due to immigration from overseas and
migration from the countryside – came a need for new housing. City
housing projects after 1870 created a small number of tenements that
housed six people to a room, often with residents of different cultural
backgrounds sharing the small space (Gutiérrez 480). Under the new
governance of the Radical Party after 1916, the European-style archi-
tecture that had symbolized the authority of the aristocracy began to
be replaced by new apartment buildings and housing projects for the
middle class. The narrator’s claim, at the beginning of Cortázar’s “Casa
tomada,” that today “las casas antiguas sucumben a la más ventajosa
liquidación de sus materiales” [old houses succumb to the most advan-
tageous sale of their materials] (7), alludes to the new housing strategies
of the era.13
The Viennese apartment building and the urban house of Buenos Aires
represented the grand past for the respective cities. In “Wo ich wohne,”
the apartment for the Viennese protagonist is the style of home that she
proudly, albeit uneasily, inhabits; the Buenos Aires couple of “Casa
tomada” prefers a spacious European-style home and considers living
in an apartment the beginning of an inevitable end. Indeed, when the
siblings are pushed out of the back part of the house by the invaders,
they dislike living in the front because it resembles one of the contem-
porary apartments with hardly any room to move – “apenas para
moverse” (12). This arrogant attitude towards their modern space under-
scores the isolation of the siblings as they live their daily lives. Lacking
any interest in modernity, the siblings strive to enclose themselves in a
space that represents the urban past of Buenos Aires: the expansive
downtown house. Although at home in this limited space, the siblings
seclude themselves from the contemporary experience of the city. As a
result, they live as outsiders surrounded by a city that understands a
modern reality very different from theirs. It is this city that finally
expels them from their home.

While in “Wo ich wohne” the socio-political web around the story points
to the feeling of entrapment in postwar Vienna, in “Casa tomada” the
connection between the fictional architecture of the home and that of
Residential Unhomes 253

the real Buenos Aires of the time-period, as well as the location of the
home in the city create a caricature of the contemporary urban polit-
ical scene. The authority that controls the siblings supernaturally haunts
their private space, scaring away the unproductive urban elite. As this
scenario parodies a Peronist Buenos Aires, it also underscores Latin
American debates concerning the role of Europe in post-colonial space.14
The colonists of this story develop from the nineteenth-century col-
onization of European ideas from Italy, Germany, Britain and primarily
France. Following interpretations of regionalist literature of the first
half of the twentieth century, it is tempting to characterize this dichotomy
of oppressor and oppresssed as one between populist and cosmopolitan,
or even using the classical binary of civilization and barbarity.15 Each
of these binaries too narrowly defines the two entities of inhabitants
and intruding Other. Rather, the attachment of Cortázar’s strange siblings
to France and Brussels signals their outdated, indeed, colonialist attitude
towards their immediate surroundings of Buenos Aires.
In this context, Cortázar’s short story both revives the globally appre-
ciated uncanny tale of haunting and reflects political realities of Argentina
during this time period. As part of the production of Boom literature,
Cortázar’s tale rejects colonial domination of Latin American space,
but also critiques what has become of Buenos Aires without the European
influence. Cortázar bases the oppression in his fictional story on one
that is grounded in the real text of the postcolonial city. As in “Wo ich
wohne,” the cultural echoes of the surrounding city stand out as principal
features for the interpretation of the story. Each of the three references
to Buenos Aires in Cortázar’s text – trips to the downtown bookstores,
the name of the street where they live, and the description of the city dust
– opens up a series of connotations.
Uninterested in validations of Latin American culture and society,
the narrator explicitly looks to Europe for cultural experience: his
Saturday excursions downtown which involve seeking out the latest
French novel, characterize the narrator as fostering an intellectual detach-
ment from Buenos Aires. Indeed, his disappointment that nothing of
importance has reached Argentina since 1939 (11) forces him to reread
the French books in his library. As the Other enters the house, it moves
in from the back – “la parte más retirada” (12) – the part of the house
that contains the library of French books.
This library side of the house also faces a named street, Rodríguez
Peña, associating the intrusion with an explicit location in Buenos Aires:
downtown, close to the governmental buildings, in a central location
for involvement in city activity. In addition, the name signals a histor-
ical text: Rodríguez Peña was an influential organizer for Argentinean
independence.16 The named street runs behind the house, as if the building
sought to conceal its actual location, for the reader never discovers the
254 Amanda Holmes

name of the street that would give the house its official address. The
invading Other moves from the back to the front of the house, or from
the section that locates the story in the “real” Buenos Aires outside of
the text to the part that remains anonymous and must be imagined without
any “real” referent. Buenos Aires intrudes into the siblings’ Europeanized
haven.
One of the only reasons the siblings have to venture into the back
of the house is to do the cleaning, and it is through this household chore
that the city of Buenos Aires impacts their hermetic lives. Indeed, the
narrator explains that:

casi nunca íbamos más allá de la puerta de roble, salvo para hacer la limpieza, pues es
increíble cómo se junta tierra en los muebles. Buenos Aires será una ciudad limpia, pero
eso lo debe a sus habitantes y no a otra cosa. Hay demasiada tierra en el aire, apenas
sopla una ráfaga se palpa el polvo en los mármoles de las consolas y entre los rombos
de las carpetas de macramé; da trabajo sacarlo bien con plumero, vuela y se suspende
en el aire, un momento después se deposita de nuevo en los muebles y los pianos.
(12–13)
[we would almost never go beyond the oak door, except to do the cleaning, it is just
incredible how much dust collects on the furniture. Buenos Aires might be a clean city,
but that’s because of its inhabitants and nothing else. There’s too much dust in the air,
with just a small puff of wind the dust collects in the marble surfaces of the console
tables and between the diamonds of the macramé table covers; it’s a lot of work to get
rid of it all with the duster, it flies and suspends itself in the air, a moment later it settles
down again on the furniture and the pianos.]

Along with the irony inherent in the focus on the dusty air of “Buenos
Aires” (literally “good air”), this passage shows the narrator’s defini-
tion of the city to consist of the space independent of its inhabitants:
“Buenos Aires será una ciudad limpia, pero eso lo debe a sus habi-
tantes y no a otra cosa” [Buenos Aires might be a clean city, but that’s
because of its inhabitants and nothing else] (13). Here the “city” is
separate from the people who reside there. The inhabitants can do only
so much to maintain a clean city, according to the narrator, but in essence
Buenos Aires is a dirty place. Although the siblings clean regularly,
they are forced to accept the dust’s penetration into their home, as they
are forced later to accept the incursion of the Other.
Cortázar’s “Casa tomada” explores the modern city in conflict with
a city that rested on the past of another space: Europe. Although moder-
nity in architecture meant a return to Hispanic architectural styles as well
as indigenous ones – styles that had developed in the Americas during
the colonial past –, it also meant a break from French, Italian, German
and British architectural models. Architects in mid-century Buenos Aires
finally looked for methods to create a modern American city, rather
than a modern European one. Cortázar’s story responds to this attempt.
European traces no longer belong in Buenos Aires, although Cortázar’s
Residential Unhomes 255

haunting Other, the bullies that force out the old elite, hardly form an
appropriate political alternative. Cortázar parodies both old and new
Buenos Aires, suggesting skeptically that neither political control holds
the key to modernity.

In postwar Vienna, modernity has also been thwarted. In Aichinger’s “Wo

ich wohne,” the thriving modern state, like the elevator in the Viennese
apartment building, has been left in disrepair since World War II.
Although modernity hovers in all aspects of the narrator’s experience
of urban life – the narrator attends concerts, rides the tram, and presses
a timed button in the hallway of the apartment building – the building
has now become uncannily animated, beyond human control. While
Cortázar’s characters act to isolate the invaders in one part of the house,
the narrator of Aichinger’s story finds herself paralyzed as she faces
the disquieting situation of a moved apartment. The terror of social inter-
action moves her to passivity and she remains alone in her apartment
imagining uneasy situations. She worries that, if she were to walk up
to the original floor of her apartment and ask around, other inhabitants
of the building would confront her with the question “Was suchen Sie
hier?” [What do you want here?] (56). This question fills the narrator
with horror: “Und diese Frage, von einem meiner bisherigen Nachbarn
gestellt, fürchte ich so sehr, daß ich lieber liegen bleibe, obwohl ich weiß,
daß es bei Tageslicht noch schwerer sein wird, hinaufzugehen” [And
this question, posed by one of my previous neighbors, frightens me so
much that I would rather stay lying down here, although I know that it
will be even more difficult to go upstairs and ask by daylight] (56).
The logic that daybreak brings will heighten the illogical perception of
the movement of the apartment. However, the same neighbors, whose
judgement the narrator fears, are also presumably struggling with the
same conflicts of identity: if they speak they are judged insane; if they
don’t speak, they will have to allow the manipulation of their person-
hood.
The interiority implicated in the silent act finds a response in written
language according to Aichinger. In an interview in 1971, the author
explains that she sees writing as the best means of achieving silence:
“[Schreiben] bedeutet für mich den Versuch, zu Schweigen, vielleicht
schreibe ich deshalb, weil ich keine bessere Möglichkeit zu schweigen
sehe” [[Writing] means for me the attempt to remain silent. Perhaps I
write because I see no better possibility to keep silent] (Moser 26). As
Aichinger retreats into writing she marks her understanding of written
language as the means of communicating the emotional impact of the
War. The only language that can communicate is that of her fictional
texts, stories that record visions which haunt her imagination.
The contradictions inherent in Aichinger’s comments on silence and
256 Amanda Holmes

writing are voiced also by the narrator of her story. The narrator’s terror
of voicing words and communicating through spoken language, her
extreme introversion and fear of the wrath of others cause her to keep
her thoughts inside herself. She entices the reader into the narrative
with her whispered confession: “Ich will es nicht laut sagen, aber ich
wohne tiefer” [I don’t want to say it out loud, but I live lower] (55).
As she confides in the reader, she exposes her desire to be heard. The
narrator finds a need to transfer her thoughts in an act of communica-
tion that is also silent: the written word.
The narrator feels so connected to her apartment that she feels its
movement marks her as physically unusual, and that people can notice
this strange domestic experience on her person: “In der Straßenbahn über-
rascht es mich, daß der Schaffner mich behandelt wie die übrigen
Fahrgäste und niemand von mir abrückt” [In the tram I am surprised
that the conductor treats me like the other riders and no one moves
away from me] (58). Even inside her building, the narrator physically
reacts to the space. Her exhaustion after climbing three flights of stairs
signals to her that she already must have climbed the four flights to
her apartment: “Gewöhnlich überfällt mich im dritten Stock eine Art
von Erschöpfung, die manchmal so weit führt, daß ich denke, ich müßte
schon vier Treppen gegangen sein” [Regularly on the third floor I am
overcome with a kind of exhaustion that sometimes goes so far that
I think I must have already climbed the four flights of stairs] (55).
Her physical interaction with the building helps her recognize her own
apartment, and the first move down one floor seems almost in response
to a wish that she expresses: she wishes she were already home – “Ich
wollte, ich wäre schon hier!” (55). To her dismay, this fairy-tale wish
comes true, and her apartment is indeed now on the third floor of the
building.
The wish-come-true scenario and the narrator’s decision to lie down
and rest from her exhausting climb up the stairs lead to the possible inter-
pretation of the text as merely an hallucination. However, the layers of
imagination surpass the prescriptions of a simple frame story. The narrator
imagines confrontational retorts by her neighbors as well as humili-
ating dialogues with her landlord and cleaning lady in her fancied struggle
to appeal the relocation of her apartment. Her imagined interactions
with others reveal her perception of the city as a judgemental, unsym-
pathetic, unreliable space. The home to which she clings surpasses her
control, as she is left in her apartment wondering how she will fare in
further movements down to the depths of the earth. Lacking personal
dominion over her living space, she does not have the ability to control
her own movement from one home to the other. Rather the space controls
her, moves her, and forces her to live where it prescribes. She remains
trapped.
Residential Unhomes 257

The added emphasis in “Wo ich wohne” on one specific event – the
descent of the apartment – demonstrates the uneasiness that the situa-
tion causes in the narrator’s mind and the un-homeliness of her own
space. The concentration on one unusual object or event to emphasize
the feeling of the uncanny is a technique used frequently by Aichinger
in her stories, including “Mein grüner Esel” [My Green Donkey] and
“Die Puppe” [The Doll] among others. In these stories, Aichinger
creates situations which question the sense of ownership that inhabi-
tants feel towards their environments. The narrator of “Mein grüner
Esel” seeks ownership of an animal – a green donkey – that likely does
not exist. The need for attachment is juxtaposed in each instance
with the rejection and oppression of the city. In later stories, Aichinger
focuses on specific architectural features, such as a balcony in “Zweifel
an Balkonen” [Doubts about Balconies] or a crossbeam in “Der
Querbalken,” to evoke this contradictory attitude towards urban space.
Like many of Aichinger’s later prose texts, “Zweifel an Balkonen”
(1972) has no recountable storyline. Here Aichinger avoids traditional
narrative techniques that focus on relationships between characters, and
chooses the balcony as the focus for a discussion on homelands. She
writes with linguistic associations, not with relationships, bypassing
words such as “during” and “because.”17 The uncanny, in this story,
emerges in the haziness of the border between human and thing as well
as through the provocation of language to become unrepresentational;
at times in the text even the man becomes indistinguishable from the
balcony. The reader stumbles through the text as if through a labyrinth,
always searching for comprehension. The story repeatedly leads from the
abstract back to the literal; from balconies as representatives of the
ideology of home, back to balconies as material objects. A balcony is
a place for drinking coffee, where one plays Halma, where soldiers throw
their caps when they come home from war, but it also symbolizes the
Heimatgefühl [feeling of home].18
In the balcony text, Aichinger uses the word balcony so frequently
– twenty-one times in the first paragraph – that it becomes incompre-
hensible, the attention of the reader redirected towards the keyword of
the text: homelands (Lorenz 176). In “Wo ich wohne” and “Mein grüner
Esel” the focus on a single object stands out. The emphasis on object
in “Zweifel an Balkonen” reaches an extreme. Language itself hovers
between representation and misrepresentation. Aichinger’s associations
in the text persistently evade a clear transitional quality, and the reader
is left groping for answers. In comparison with this story, the symbolic
descent of an apartment becomes a traditional means to represent oppres-
sion. In “Zweifel an Balkonen” language itself oppresses the reader as
the architectural structure of the balcony slides through representations
causing the reader doubts about language as a communicative device.
258 Amanda Holmes

The vacillation between familiar and unfamiliar uses of language

causes a disquiet in the reader trying to interpret Aichinger’s story.
Likewise, the narrator of “Wo ich wohne” cannot find the language to
convey her disturbing discovery of the relocated apartment. For Cortázar
the language of fiction also moves beyond that of conventional com-
munication. Jaime Alazraki explains:
Reliving language meant for him [Cortázar] what it has always meant to literary art:
converting the signs of its code into means of expression of a new code, that of litera-
ture. A notion or situation inconceivable in the language of communication – a person
turned into an insect – becomes possible through the language of fiction. Fiction speaks
where language remains silent. Furthermore, fiction dares to enter that region which is
out of language’s reach: a space irreducible to physical scales, a time outside the clock’s
domain, emotions not yet recorded in psychology manuals. (Alazraki 1999, 135)

In Alazraki’s analysis, Cortázar’s perception of language is similar to

Aichinger’s claim that she writes because she has found no better way
to stay silent. According to Alazraki, Cortázar understands that “fiction
speaks where language remains silent.” Both authors provoke their
readers to understand language that lurks not in reality but beyond, in
our imagination of the real. With fiction, Aichinger calls on the young
people to work with their dreams: “die Träume aus dem Schlaf zu holen,
sie der Ernüchterung auszusetzen und sich ihnen doch anzuvertrauen” [to
take dreams out of sleep, to sift out the disillusionment and to make them
a part of you] (Aichinger, “Rede an die Jugend” 20). Fiction allows
Aichinger to express emotions that have not yet found a place in refer-
ential language. Cortázar also explores this linguistic space.
In “Casa tomada,” as well as in stories such as “Después del almuerzo”
[After lunch], Cortázar uses a symbol to represent this unique capacity
of fiction. They refer to unspecified others by personal pronouns: in “Casa
tomada” it is a “they” that invades the home; in “Después del almuerzo”
it is the “él” [he/it] that the boy takes for a walk in downtown Buenos
Aires. In each of the stories, the characters have more information than
is imparted to the reader. The reader is unable to identify the “they” or
the “he/it,” and it is left up to speculation: in “Casa tomada” the “they”
is in some way connected to the city; in “Después del almuerzo” the
“he/it” is in some way a member of the family – a handicapped child,
an old man, or perhaps even some fantastical being.
These unidentified subjects represent Cortázar’s perception of fiction
as a language that reaches beyond conventional communication. Without
a specific referent, the “they” or the “he/it” remain in the realm of the
language of fiction for the reader. Cortázar creates a sense of the unnamed
entities for the reader, ushering in an uneasy aura surrounding them.
The reader empathizes with the characters who obviously fear – in the
case of “Casa tomada” – or resist – in “Después del almuerzo” –
these beings without stable referents. The unrepresentational quality of
Residential Unhomes 259

these entities recalls the haziness of misrepresentational language in

Aichinger’s “Zweifel an Balkonen” and the fear of language described
in “Wo ich wohne.” The word “they” without definition of its referent
can signify so much that it cannot be controlled. The reader’s imagina-
tion fans out through the possibilities, and an uneasiness sets in.
In “Casa tomada,” the feared “they” becomes associated with an archi-
tectural element of the old home, namely the oak door. This door divides
the front from the back of the house and is slammed closed by the narrator
to prevent the entrance of the Other into the front of the house. In this
way, the narrator divides the house between the home and the un-home,
and a fear of the door reflects the fear of the “they”:
De día eran los rumores domésticos, el roce metálico de las agujas de tejer, un crujido
al pasar las hojas del álbum filatélico. La puerta de roble, creo haberlo dicho, era
maciza. En la cocina y el baño, que quedaban tocando la parte tomada, nos poníamos a
hablar en voz más alta o Irene cantaba canciones de cuna. (16; My italics)
[During the day, there were domestic sounds, the metallic brushing of the knitting needles,
a creak when turning the pages of the stamp album. The oak door, I think I already
said, was massive. In the kitchen and the bathroom, that touched the part that was taken
over, we started to speak in louder voices or Irene sang lullabies.]

By tucking this depiction of the door between elaborations of their

lives, the text underscores the narrator’s uneasiness with this wooden
structure as it signifies what lurks behind it. Instead of describing their
perception of the “they,” the narrator replaces the “they” by the door. The
oak door represents the dual characteristics of walls identified by Peter
Marcuse: both connector and divider, protector and excluder. Here,
Cortázar uses this dualism in his construction of a penetrable fictional
wall. The door protects from the intruders, but not enough to guarantee
the security of the inhabitants. The brother and sister still have trouble
sleeping and toss in their beds listening intently to the sounds of the
house, “de noche se escuchaba cualquier cosa en la casa” [at night one
would hear all sorts of things in the house] (16).
The language of fiction allows Cortázar to explore a “they” that can
penetrate a wall, but also portrays an entity that is inescapable. In this
case, that entity is the modernity of the city, as the narrator and his
sister have resisted any desire to leave the past behind. The door’s closure
causes the inhabitants to change their routine. They no longer need to
do the cleaning in the back part of the house, and they restrict themselves
to the apartment-sized space in the front as well as to the items of enter-
tainment that they have in that part of the house. The door changes the
perception of space within the house:
Cuando la puerta estaba abierta advertía uno que la casa era muy grande; si no, daba la
impresión de un departamento de los que se edifican ahora, apenas para moverse; Irene
y yo vivíamos siempre en esta parte de la casa, casi nunca íbamos más allá de la puerta
de roble . . . (12)
260 Amanda Holmes

[When the door was open one noticed that the house was very big; if not, it seemed
like an apartment like the ones they are building now, with hardly enough room to move;
Irene and I always lived in this part of the house, we would almost never go beyond
the oak door . . .]

When the door is open it exposes the spaciousness of the enormous house
by revealing the length of the hallway that extends from the back to
the front of the house. When it is closed, the brother and sister live in
the present, in the small apartment typical of the time in Buenos Aires.
The siblings experience a change of identity with the closing of the
door and the creation of the wall: from one attached to the maintenance
of the house to a focus on pure survival. After the residents close
off the back part of the house, they stop thinking, indicating their
overwhelming concern for survival: “Estábamos bien, y poco a poco
empezábamos a no pensar. Se puede vivir sin pensar” [We were fine, and
little by little we started not to think. One can live without thinking] (16).
The characters do not have personal dominion of the spaces that define
their identity. Like the relationship between the narrator of “Wo ich
wohne” and her apartment, this home oppresses not only the charac-
ters’ bodies by subjugating them to undesired living accommodations,
but also their identities. The narrator of “Wo ich wohne” attempts to
accustom herself to the lack of control she has over her home and lacks
the confidence to discuss it with her neighbors. The siblings of “Casa
tomada” finally relinquish all concern for the house, throwing the keys
in the gutter for fear that another would enter the home and be exposed
to the Other’s oppression. This radical adaptation to the strange situa-
tions highlights the passive reaction of individuals towards an oppressive
controlling Other.
The limitations of language explored by Cortázar in his short stories
are often conflated with symbolic spatial barriers, such as the divisions
between rooms in “Bestiario” [Bestiary] the walls of the aquarium in
“Axolotl” and the door in “La puerta condenada” [The Condemned Door].
For Cortázar, these barriers are flexible: the rooms that house the tiger
in “Bestiario” are sometimes off-limits, sometimes not; the walls of the
aquarium in “Axolotl” do not stop the narrator from turning into a fish
and encountering Mexican cultural heritage in the process; in “La puerta
condenada,” Cortázar speculates on the limits between the real and the
imaginary through the object of a hotel door. In this story the narrator
hears a baby crying behind a closed door between his room and another
in a hotel. When he asks the hotel managers about the woman and her
baby, he is assured that there is no baby and that the crying is a part
of his imagination. Here, as in “Casa tomada,” a wooden door empha-
sizes the sense of hearing in the character restricted to one side of the
wall.
A closed door accentuates the desire to know what is happening on
Residential Unhomes 261

the other side because of its potential to be opened. In “Casa tomada”

the protagonists know what is on the other side but, in their fear, remain
obsessively attentive to any noises they hear, whereas in “La puerta
condenada,” the narrator seeks to clarify sounds that only he seems to
hear in order to validate the perception of his own senses. The door of
“Casa tomada” divides private spaces within a house that is almost too
familiar to its occupants. “La puerta condenada” explores the limits
between public and private space in a hotel where visitors come and
go, defining rooms as their own private spaces for a few days and then
moving on.
As Carlos Alonso and some contributors to a recent volume have
argued, the uncanny for Cortázar is located in a condition of “between-
ness”: it is the limit, the barrier, or the wall that runs between reality
and the supernatural. The short stories “Lejana” [Distant], “Cartas de
mamá” [Letters from Mother], and “El otro cielo” [The other sky/heaven]
all use doubles to question the nature of subject identity and nation-
ality. In each case the division between the Self and the Other involves
an imagining on the part of the Self of the Other’s identity. Language
often plays an integral part in this quest for understanding as is explicit
in “Lejana,” in which the protagonist Alina Reyes believes that her double
exists as the final part of the anagram of her name “es la reina y . . .”
[is the queen and . . .] (Cortázar, “Lejana” 36). The imagined end of
the sentence becomes the reality: her double survives scantily in
Budapest. The divider here involves reality and fantasy, language and
fiction as well as the physical locations.
The walls and barriers of the fictions of Aichinger and Cortázar are
unstable obstructions that can be crossed, providing no security and no
division. Physical walls at times provide only flimsy protection as is
the case in “Casa tomada” and “La puerta condenada,” or lose their
stability and move by themselves as in “Wo ich wohne.” The language
of “Zweifel an Balkonen” moves easily between referential and non-
referential language, and the characters of “Axolotl” and “Lejana”
transform unhesitantly into others. Walls of architecture, language and
personhood are deconstructed in these texts by Aichinger and Cortázar
and replaced by unstable barriers that can be moved and penetrated,
shifted and destroyed. The stories rest on these barriers, they warp them
and redesign them, flirting with the reader’s understanding of city and
text, real and imaginary. Walls that should both protect and exclude do
both at the same time, thereby canceling out the signification: the Other
penetrates, controls and oppresses the Self in each story, as the charac-
ters attempt to protect themselves by familiar walls and barriers. The
language of silence is the language of fiction, a language that rests in this
uneasy space between reference and nonreference, one that relies on
dreams as well as reality.
262 Amanda Holmes

Notes

1. “Casa tomada” was first published by Jorge Luis Borges in the Buenos Aires
journal Sur. Later editions include this story as the first of the collection Bestiario, in
which many of the stories parody Peronist Argentina.
2. Julio Cortázar, “Casa tomada,” Casa tomada y otros relatos (Barcelona: Plaza y
Janés, 1995) 11. All subsequent references from this edition.
3. Ilse Aichinger, “Wo ich wohne,” Wo ich wohne: Erzählungen, Gedichte, Dialoge
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1963) 55. All subsequent references from this
edition.
4. After World War II, Vienna was occupied by the four allied forces and did not
gain autonomy until 1955.
5. The gender of Aichinger’s protagonist is never defined in the story. Other inter-
pretations of the story have considered the protagonist to be male. Because the story is
written by a woman and reflects aspects of her biography, I will consider the protago-
nist to be female.
6. Hans Wolfschütz touches on this interpretation in his brief discussion of “Wo
ich wohne” when he describes the narrator as “a prisoner of the old-established ways.”
He claims that “the narrative “I” cannot even begin to think in terms of protest; it
remains transfixed by its own helplessness and vulnerability, finding some fleeting con-
solation in the fact that up to now the narrower ‘world’ of its own home has at least
stayed the same” (Wolfschütz 167).
7. Aichinger’s grandmother and her mother’s sister and brother were all sent away
to Minsk in 1942. Aichinger’s twin sister Helga managed to escape to England in July
1939 to join her aunt, two months before the outbreak of war, during one of the last
waves of immigration. Aichinger and her mother could not get a visa. For more details
about Aichinger’s biography see Reichensperger.
8. The large apartment buildings constructed around the Ringstrasse were designed
with four to six floors, usually with no more than sixteen units. These buildings were
modelled on the British style and were set up as multiple-family dwellings in which the
first floor held the commercial space, the second floor had spatious apartments for higher
classes, and the third floor was often further divided into smaller dwellings. The designs
of the façades and the windows became less lavish the higher up in the building (Schorske
46–51).
9. For a discussion on urban planning ideas in turn-of-the-century Vienna see Banik-
Schweitzer.
10. These projects – called the Gemeindebauten – improved on earlier low income
housing designs and especially on the hated Gangküchenhaus [corridor kitchen tenement].
The Gemeindebauten created small, bright interconnected rooms with toilets, running water
and gas contained within the apartment. These new apartments most importantly got rid
of the long corridors with shared taps and toilets that had been typical of low income
housing (Blau 206–207).
11. For a concise overview on the influence of European urban planning ideas on
Latin America see Hardoy 20–49.
12. Francisco Bullrich sees this as an extreme shortfall for Argentinean architecture
as he perceives the nineteenth-century European architectural styles as lacking origi-
nality at that time period. He bemoans the focus on revivalist architectural movements
in Europe (Renaissance, Gothic, etc.) and Argentina’s loss of beautiful Hispanic archi-
tecture of the pre-Independence era such as the Cabildo (Bullrich 14).
13. With the rise of industrialization, European cities had modernized and moved into
new housing ideas that attempted to consolidate cities with highrise or at least multi-
story apartment buildings. The French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier gave a
series of nine talks in Buenos Aires in 1929. Le Corbusier’s ideas on city planning included
Residential Unhomes 263

a plan for the city of Buenos Aires and other Latin American and Third World cities.
One of Le Corbusier’s main concerns was traffic flow. To relieve this, he proposed a
city made up of twenty-four sixty story skyscrapers for offices and hotels for 10,000 to
50,000 people, surrounded by multiple housing units of six stories with sunroofs for
600,000 people surrounded again by Garden Cities that would house two million people.
He envisioned Latin American cities as the ideal space for the completion of his ideas,
however forgot that Latin America lacked the economic and political superstructure
necessary to create such designs (Hardoy 36–41). See also Ortiz 121.
14. For an analysis of how Cortázar’s depiction of Latin America coincides with other
mid-century Boom writers, see Amar Sánchez 19–35.
15. Carlos Alonso’s discussion of autochtonous writing becomes compelling here
as it complicates the relationships between author and cultural heritage in Latin America.
In Cortázar’s story this dialogue is enacted between the characters and the Other in the
city.
16. Nicolás Rodríguez Peña, a member of the military that successfully defeated
the British during their invasion of the River Plate (1806–1807), was also one of the
organizers of the secret society in favor of Argentinean independence. He supported the
May Revolution of 1810 that spurred an insurrection against the Spanish colonial gov-
ernment.
17. Aichinger claims this in a piece that begins the collection of stories in which
“Zweifel an Balkonen” appears called “Schlechte Wörter” [Bad Words] (Aichinger,
Schlechte Wörter 8).
18. Contrary to the claims of several critics that Aichinger’s text need to be taken
at face value – Heinz Schafroth claims that Aichinger’s texts need should be read “ohne
Umwege über Symbolik, Mystizismus, Hermetik” [without detours through symbolism,
mysticism and hermeticism] – I argue that the balcony clearly has a symbolic resonance
(Schafroth 129).

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