Axolotl

“Axolotl,” by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, is a short story representative of the works produced during the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Consistent with the writing of this literary movement, “Axolotl” is an experimental story that uses point of view shifts, metafictional elements, and an ambiguous ending to explore themes of The Dissolution of Identity, Transformative Obsession, and The Desire to Understand the Other. The story was first published in Cortázar’s 1956 collection Final del juego (The End of the Game). “Axolotl” is told from the perspective of an unnamed first-person narrator whose obsession with visiting the titular axolotls in a zoo eventually leads him to believe that he has become an axolotl. The short story is regarded as an example of magical realism.

Cortázar is most often remembered for his National Book Award-winning 1963 novel Rayuela (Hopscotch). Rayuela is a stream-of-consciousness novel with an unusual structure: It can be read in a linear fashion or by “hopscotching” between chapters, thereby allowing the reader to find unexpected relationships between the novel’s characters and themes. Prior to the publication of Rayuela, Cortázar published four collections of short stories: Bestiario (Bestiary) in 1951, Final del juego (The End of the Game) in 1956, Las armas secretas (The Secret Weapons) in 1959, and Historias de cronopios y de famas (Cronopios and Famas) in 1962. The stories in these collections, including “Axolotl,” exhibit many of the experimental approaches to fiction that Cortázar employs in Rayuela and that would go on to define the Latin American Boom.

This guide refers to the English translation of the story in the collection Blow-up and Other Stories, published by Pantheon Books in 1963 and translated by Paul Blackburn.

The unnamed first-person narrator of “Axolotl” explains that after a period of going to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to watch the axolotls, he has now become an axolotl. The narrator then backtracks to the spring morning when he first visits the aquarium and sees the axolotls. The fish don’t interest him, but he watches the axolotls for an hour and leaves completely preoccupied with them.

The narrator then goes to the library to learn more about axolotls. He discovers that they are the larval stage of a specific species of salamander and that they are capable of surviving droughts by living on dry land when there’s no available water.

The narrator returns to the aquarium the next day and continues to return every morning afterwards to see the axolotls. The aquarium guard seems confused by this fixation, but the narrator finds his actions to be perfectly reasonable because of the kinship he feels with the axolotls: “I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together” (4). At one point, he begins to feel that there is something untoward about his voyeurism. The narrator copes with this by choosing only one axolotl to fixate on. He describes this creature in great detail, noting its feet that end in “minutely human nails” (5), its head that looks like “a statuette corroded by time” (5), and its “inexpressive” features (4). It’s the axolotl’s eyes in particular that obsess the narrator; they suggest to him an entirely different worldview.

The narrator affirms the validity of his intense connection with the axolotls by emphasizing just how different they are from humans. In his mind, it would be easy and obvious to find a reflection of his own humanity in a more humanoid animal, like a monkey. The fact that he’s able to form a bond with a creature so distinctly inhuman proves that the connection must be real.

The narrator begins to imagine what it feels like to be inside the body and consciousness of an axolotl. He thinks that they must be prisoners seeking to transcend time and space, confined as they are inside of a terrarium and seemingly unwilling to move inside of even this small enclosure. This imagining begins to affect the narrator’s own physicality: He feels “muted pain” as he hypothesizes that the axolotls perceive him with the same acuity with which he perceives them and that they are “attracting [his] strength to penetrate into the impenetrable thing of their lives” (7).

The aquarium guard mocks the narrator for his close observation of the axolotls, but the narrator rejects the idea that he is the one doing the observation. In fact, as he presses his face against the glass, he realizes that he is actually seeing his own face and that his perspective is now coming from inside the axolotls’ enclosure. When an axolotl’s foot brushes his face, the narrator understands that he is also an axolotl. As he looks at his own human face on the other side of the glass, he realizes that his human self can never understand the axolotls.

Now fully transformed, the narrator reflects on whether or not it was ever possible for the version of himself that was a man to comprehend the interiority of the version of himself that is an axolotl. He observes that initially he (the axolotl) was able to kindle an interest within the man and that there was some possibility for limited understanding within that interest. His eventual conclusion, though, is that “what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life” (9). The narrator ends the story by musing that perhaps the man is going to write a story about axolotls.