Julio Cortázar is one of those writers who is mentioned far more often than actually read; most people know that he wrote Hopscotch, a novel often mentioned as a precursor to hypertext fiction, or that he wrote the short stories that became Antonioni’s Blow Up and Godard’s Weekend. I’ve been belatedly making my way through his works over the past year, a pleasurable endeavor that I’d commend to anyone. For all the pleasure of his fiction, there’s a great deal that still bears consideration, especially in the English-speaking world where Cortázar hasn’t been widely read.
“We Love Glenda So Much” is the title story of one of Cortázar’s last collections of short stories, unfortunately out of print in English but easily available online. It’s a short Borgesian piece, told in the first person plural, and the premise is quickly related: the anonymous narrators idolize the movie star Glenda Garson and constitute a secret fan club for the most devoted fans who understand that her films are the only ones that matter. Things quickly escalate: though the members believe Glenda’s work to be perfection, they acknowledge that her films are perhaps not quite perfect. They laboriously gather up all the prints and re-edit them, creating not a director’s cut but a fans’ cut; the recut films are redistributed to an unsuspecting public; the differences between the new films and those released years before are chalked up to the vagaries of memory. All is well in the world; until Glenda decides to return from her retirement, at which point her fans lethally prevent her from sullying the perfection they have helped her achieve.
We Love Glenda So Much was originally published in 1980, just before the VCR became ubiquitous; it’s unclear when the story is set, but it presumes a world where all the copies of Glenda’s films can be gathered in by her hard-working (and conveniently rich) fans. Read 29 years later, it’s a remarkably different text: while fans are still reliably crazy, the way that the entertained interact with entertainers and that the media can be controlled – or not – has been transformed so much as to render Cortázar’s story a strange postcard from a forgotten land. Subcultures no longer exist in the way they did in the way Cortázar describes, even in the way they existed a dozen years ago, when it was necessary to hold fast to your own personal Glenda because of the investment, cultural or economic, that you’d made in loving her above everyone else. With ubiquitous media, everyone is free to be a dilettante.
More importantly, though, there’s been a shift in the center of control. When Cortázar wrote, the producers maintained control tightly; since then, media control has been dispersed to the point where it’s meaningless. (Cortázar’s language suggests a focus on this power shift: the members of the club that loves Glenda, a movement to seize power from Glenda’s producers, announce that think of themselves as a “nucleus,” suggesting a center of force, rather than a simple “club.”) It’s not hard to re-edit any movie you like to your pleasure; however, making your cut – even if you’re the director – the definitive cut is increasingly impossible. I’m not trying to argue that Cortázar was unperceptive and didn’t see the future coming; the story is a fabulation through and through, and I don’t imagine for a minute that Cortázar thought that what he was describing could happen in the real world. But I don’t think that it’s out of line to read Glenda, whose fans know better than her what she should do or not do, as a portrait of the artist himself. This story did appear in his penultimate collection of short stories, released four years before his death, and he may well have had posterity on his mind. Authorial intent is quickly dispensed with after the death of the author: the past year, for example, has seen new editions of the work of Hemingway, Carver, and Nabokov that would almost certainly violate authorial intent.
What makes “We Love Glenda So Much” interesting to me is how it points out this world of transformation that we’ve lived through. When looked at in terms of control, there’s also a distant echo of another transformation – Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press – which similarly dispersed control from the center to the masses. The generally accepted narrative of history has it that the coming of printing led directly to the massive societal upheaval that was the Protestant Reformation: the ability to quickly disperse texts led to a plurality of viewpoints. Gutenberg’s contemporaries aren’t noted for having had any idea how quickly their world would become utterly unrecognizable. Nostradamus, who might have, would arrive a generation later, just in time for the printing press to distribute his prophecies. One wonders how much of an idea we have now.