The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.22 (2018): 97-106

Visual Theory in Antonioni’s Blow-Up and
its Source, Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo”:
A Psychoanalytic Point of View
IJUIN Takayuki

Shimane University, Matsue

Introduction
Michelangelo Antonioni based Blow-Up (1966) on Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Las babasdel diablo” (1959)[1], but, it is difficult to see any similarities beyond the most obvious. Indeed,on the surface, Antonioni’s “existentialistic” and “absurd” film barely resembles Cortázar’s“fantastic” short story. Yet when we examine both works from a psychoanalytic point of view, wefind that they have an Oedipal scenario, and that both authors choose the photograph torepresent the castration complex[2].
As is well known, Cortázar was influenced by Freud, and his works are often examined in
the light of psychoanalysis theory[3], and there are also psychoanalytic interpretations of BlowUp. In the first place, naturally enough, most articles on Cortázar do not refer to Antonioni’
Blow-Up, and since the psychoanalytic articles on Blow-Up use psychoanalytical theories only
to explain Thomas’ strange behavior, most of them neglect to compare Blow-Up with its source,“Las Babas del diablo”.
So, this paper regards both works as representations of both authors’ dreams told by freeassociation, and tries to clarify the close relationship of the works and both authors’ common
understanding of the photograph, by using psychoanalytic theory.

1. Outlining “Las babas del diablo” and Blow-Up
Before discussing both works, we should confirm their outlines. I commence with “Lasbabas del diablo”.
One Sunday, in November, Michel, a professional translator and amateur photographer,sees a couple who at first seem like a boy and his mother, but the woman appears to be seducing
him. Michel is intrigued and takes their photograph. At that instant, the woman notices him anddemands the film. But as he refuses, they have a quarrel. During that time, the boy flees. Then,an ominous man with a clown-like white face gets out of a car parked nearby and joins the woman.
Unnerved, Michel also flees. A few days later, Michel enlarges the photograph of that scene tothe size of a poster, and puts it on the wall in front of his desk. After that, he sometimes looks at
the photograph and indulges in erotic reverie about the couple. At other times, he interrupts his
work to examine the woman’s face and the blots on the railing in the photograph. In the last
analysis, he thinks taking the photo had been a good act.
But one day, the blow-up becomes a moving image and shows what would have occurred if
he had not been there to snap the picture. The woman encourages the boy to look at the ominous

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man’s car, which is out of the frame. Michel notices that he was wrong. The woman was a lure
for the man to procure the boy. Michel cries helplessly. Then, somehow, his cry reaches into theworld of the photograph and the woman looks back in surprise. Then the camera pans to the
man and zooms in on him, and at the same time the blot moves out of frame. Surprised andangered, the man looks at Michel with black holes in the place of eyes. At that instant, something
like a large bird passed across the frame and the boy once again flees successfully. Out of breath,
Michel stand in front of the man and the woman, and then the man pushes his hands towards
Michel until his hand blocks out the photograph. Michel closes his eyes involuntarily. When heopens them again, the photograph shows a blue sky with floating clouds and he has become acamera either psychologically or physically.
Next, the outline of Blow-Up[4].
One day Thomas, a fashion photographer, sees a couple, a young woman and an old man
embracing each other, and snaps away. Then the woman notices him and demands the film, but
he refuses. They have a quarrel that gets nowhere. So she gives up and leaves. But actually, shefollows him from the park and demands the film again, by offering herself. Thomas gives her afake film, and they are about to enter the bedroom, when the delivery of a propeller he bought
earlier that day is delivered, preventing them from having sex.
After she leaves, he develops the film, examines the prints, and finds a blot at the end of herline of sight. To discern what it is, he repeatedly enlarges it. At first, he cannot understand what
it is, so, he prints all the frames and arranges them in sequence. The photographs then becamea primitive montage, revealing the blot to be a pistol. Because of Thomas’ presence, it appears,
what would have been a murder ended in a mere attempt, and as a result, he thinks, he saved
someone’s life. Thomas feels excited about this, but it is not true. After a while, he discovers
another blot in another print. He photographs the photograph and blows it up repeatedly until
the photograph takes the appearance of a mesh of silver-halide dots. The blot now seems toreveal the corpse of a man.
Though it is midnight, Thomas returns to the park for the second time and actually finds thecorpse. He touches it. Then he hears a twig snap and hurries away. He goes to visit his painterfriend, Bill, but he is making love with his girlfriend. When he returns to his studio, he finds that
all his negatives and prints have been stolen except for an exaggeratedly enlarged photograph ofthe blot that shows the corpse. Then the painter’s girlfriend visits him. Thomas shows her theremaining blow-up, and she is reminded of her partner’s abstract paintings. After that, Thomas
attempts to talk to his editor friend Ron about the corpse, but Ron is intoxicated and can’t takeseriously what Thomas says.
In the morning he returns to the park for the third time and the body is missing. Thomas is
at a loss. Then white faced students acting like clowns come along, and a couple start to play agame of tennis without any balls. Thomas watches them from a distance. In the rally, theimaginary ball flies over the fence. The female player encourages him to toss it back. He hesitatesa moment, but eventually he runs up to where the imaginary ball fell, and imitates throwing it
back. The mimes resume the game, and we can hear the sound of a ball that does not exist. Thena camera catches him in the center of the lawn, until at last he disappears, leaving the field empty.

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2. The Psychoanalytical interpretation of both works
Now that we have outlined both works, let us look for similarities from a psychoanalytic
point of view.
They each have a core constellation of a woman, a crime, and a photograph, and both end
in seemingly inexplicable conclusions. In particular, the most salient feature of both works is thephotograph, which shows what was really happening at that time, in “Las babas del diablo” by
the still image turning fantastically into a movie; and in Blow-Up by becoming movie-like by thearrangement of photographic frames into a primitive montage. At first, however, we are unable
to see any similarities beyond the most obvious.
It is a common thought that Cortázar combines existential questioning with experimental
writing techniques in his works, and we can therefore say that Cortázar and Antonioni arecontemporaries within the same existentialistic background. However, only a few critics havecompared both works. The works seem so different that, for many scholars, it seems that BlowUp was only loosely based on Cortázar’s story. So, most critics think that the works only have aslight connection, and that their main themes are completely different. “Las babas del diablo” isa story in the ‘fantastic’ genre. On the other hand, Blow-Up is an ‘absurd’ story, like Antonioni’s
other previous ‘existentialistic’ films. Of course, there are some critics who analyze Blow-Up
from the existentialistic point of view. They feel that both works share something, but they do
not develop the idea[5].
On the other hand, among the dozens of commentaries, only a few try to establish a close
relationship between “Las babas del diablo” and Blow-Up, and what most of these commentaries
focus on is the photographs. Nevertheless, their interpretations are problematic because every
critic uses the words “camera” and “photograph” as if they are the almost same thing, andbecause they try to analyze both works based on a simplistic and nonprofessional understandingof photography. Consequently, every critic automatically misses the important fact that botheach protagonist changes his way of seeing the scene of the couple. Initially, the protagonists see
the couples “through the viewfinder of a camera”, but when they see it again, it is not through aviewfinder but “through a photograph”[6]. I will discuss this crucial difference later in this article,
in association with my psychoanalytic interpretation of both works.
To make matters worse, critics to date presume that Michel represents Cortázar qua writer.
But Cortázar is actually not only a writer but also an amateur photographer like Michel.
Nevertheless no critics postulate that Michel represents Cortázar the photographer. This might
be because of the famous beginning of “Las babas del diablo”, where Cortázar, using the voice ofthe hero as narrator, talks about the limits of verbal language. Subsequently, many critics thinkthat both works treat the limits of the two respective media and the differences between them:the camera-and-photograph compound for Cortázar represents his writing, and the camera-andphotograph compound for Antonioni represents his cinema.
But, in my interpretation, Cortázar’s camera is neither a substitute for the writer’s typewriter
nor a symbol of his literature, and Cortázar does not contrast photography with language toexplain his literature. Instead, Cortázar’s literature is rather a substitute for his photography.
That is to say, “Las Babas del diablo” is written from a photographic point of view. We should

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not forget Cortázar the amateur photographer, who published his own photo book Porsa delObservatorio (From the Observatory) in 1972.
In short, both works are so difficult, so ambiguous and so unusual that each critic interpretsthem as they wish without sufficient evidence. However, both are nightmarish stories, where we
get lost between reality and fiction, and we can’t overlook the uncanny and anxious atmospherein both works. So, what evokes the nightmarish atmospheres in both works?
As is well known, Cortázar was influenced by Freudian theory, and for him writing shortstories was a sort of therapy for his neurosis, instead of psychoanalysis. As he used his neurotic
symptoms as inspiration for his short stories, he did not go to a psychoanalyst[7]. In fact, in the
beginning of “Las babas del diablo”, there is a description suggesting that this story is Cortázar’s
own nightmare. The story’s narrator is the hero himself, who is a translator and amateur
photographer like Cortázar. And the hero, without exactly knowing why, says that he tries to “toget rid of a tickle in the stomach” by telling his weird thing[8]. This attempt to treat neurotic
symptoms by talking is thus like “free association”. If we regard this story as author’s neurotic
symptomology told by free association, we can change the question asked above into thefollowing: What repressed impulse or idea can we find in the uncanniness and anxiety in “Lasbabas del diablo”? And can we find the same impulse in Blow-Up?
According to Freud, the sense of the “uncanny” derives from the castration complex. In “The‘Uncanny’” (1919), Freud, interpreting E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man” (1815), retraces theuncanny elements in the “Sand-Man” to the anxiety caused by the infantile castration
complex[9]. The castration complex comes from the anxiety when the child fears his father will
castrate him to punish his Oedipal wish to eliminate the father and to possess the mother. So, todeal with the castration complex, the child tries to repress his Oedipus complex to overcome his
castration complex. But when the Oedipus complex is stimulated for some reason, we feel a fearof castration again. And it appears for us as the “uncanny”.
Well, can we find symptoms of the Oedipus complex and the castration complex in both
works? Yes, we can find them easily. In “Las babas del diablo”, we can regard the boy as a child,the elder woman as a mother, and the ominous man as a father. In this case, a father’s threat ofcastration corresponds to the ominous man’s intention of homosexual child abuse. And
moreover, if we regard the boy as the double of Michel, the scene where the ominous man gets
angry with Michel instead of the boy, also means the threat of castration [10].
In Blow-Up too, we can find the infantile Oedipal wish and the castration complex. Thomas
tries to have sex with a young woman. Then later, he finds the dead body of a middle-aged manin the photograph. In these scenes, we can find the Oedipal wish fulfilled by “displacement”. In
addition, there is also the motif of the double in Blow-Up. Thomas’ double is the young man who
peers at him and his friend Ron from outside the restaurant. The young man has blond hair like
Thomas. Moreover, we can find another resemblance between the shot taken by Thomas’ camera
and the one fired from the killer’s gun. So, if we can regard Thomas as the child, the woman as
the mother, the man as the father, and the third man as the double of the child, we can find an
Oedipal scenario in Blow-Up.
Now let us confirm the castration complex in Blow-Up. If the embracing couple, peeped atby Thomas, represents the father and the mother, this scene is the “primal scene”. According toVisual Theory in Antonioni’s Blow-Up and its Source, Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo”

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Freud’s “From the history of an infantile neurosis” (1918 [written in 1914])[11], the primal
scene is the coitus of the parents as witnessed by the child. Freud analyzes the dreams of the“Wolf Man”—his case name for the patient from the article—and thinks that the “Wolf Man”
witnessed his parents engaged in rear-penetration, or “wolf-style”, coitus. We can follow his
account as below.
When the “Wolf Man” first sees the primal scene, he cannot understand what it means. But,
when he comes to notice the anatomical differences between his parents and connects them withthe primal scene, he reconstructs the scene as the castration of his mother by his father.
The memory of his father’s violent action, the satisfied look on his mother’s face and thewound, that is, her genitals, is combined with his insufficient knowledge about the anatomicaldifferences between the two sexes. Then, castration becomes real for the “Wolf Man”, and he istormented by a conflict; “If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father, you must allow yourself
to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that”[12]. Freud thinks that because of this conflict,the “Wolf Man” developed a neurosis.
In Blow-Up too, the photograph morphs into a nightmarish, primal-scene image. Before
developing the film, Thomas thinks his photograph will show a “peaceful and still” scene. But,
when he blows the pictures up after the woman leaves, one frame becomes a scene of an
attempted murder, and the other frame becomes the image of a corpse. Thomas later returns to
the park, and actually finds the dead body.
In addition, Blow-Up also has a scene corresponding to the mother’s satisfied face in the
primal scene. Thomas goes to Bill’s home after returning from the park. Then he sees his friend
making love with his girlfriend through the venetian blinds. She notices him and he attempts toleave, but she stops him with her gaze. She shows an enraptured look on her face while they
continue looking at each other. As Thomas looks away, the camera, acting as Thomas’ eyes,
wanders over the surface of Bill’s Pollock-like painting on the wall above the bed, as if it reflects
Thomas’ disturbance by the woman’s looking back at him.

3. The change of visuality as castration anxiety
Here we compare both works. First, let us compare the scenes of both heroes’ voyeurism. Of
course it must be admitted that the symbolism of the couple in the park in Blow-Up is not
identical with that of the couple in “Las babas del diablo”. The couple in “Las babas del diablo”
represents a mother and her son, while the couple in Blow-Up represents parents. However,
because Michel’s peeping represents the Oedipal wish and Thomas’ peeping represents theprimal scene, we can safely say that both scenes represent one phase of the Oedipus complex.
Then let us compare the scenes where the photographs show the truth in both works. They
give us very different impressions. In “Las babas del diablo” the photograph tells the truth in a
fantastic way, while the photograph in Blow-Up does so in a realistic way. Yet both scenes
represent the same thing, that is, the threat of castration.
Here we should notice both heroes change their way of seeing. Both heroes see the couple
twice, though in different ways. At first they see a couple through a viewfinder, and both regard
the scenes as beautiful. Then, when the heroes see the scenes of the couples again, not through102

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the viewfinder, but on prints, the blown-up images show the horrible truth in their different ways.
Of course, the viewfinder aspect and the photographic image are both connected with thecamera. But they give the heroes completely different visions. We can explain the reason as below.
The viewfinder, such as a reverse Galilean viewfinder of the Contax1.1.2 in “Las babas deldiablo” and a SLR (single-lens reflex camera) viewfinder of the Nikon F in Blow-Up, consists ofmany lenses. So it is similar to a telescope that reinforces the naked eye, and it is, moreover,closely related to a Renaissance-painting perspective, whose very subjective vison gives theviewer a privileged point of view. But, the vision through a photograph is different from the one
through a viewfinder. As Walter Benjamin said in “Little History of Photography” (1931), inphotographic images “a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informedby the unconscious” and it gives us a “shock” effect[13]. The heroes also see in their photographs
what their subjective visions of the naked eye had overlooked or repressed, when theirphotographs become movie-like.
Yet in both works, the unconscious which appears in the printed photos presents not justthings overlooked by human eyes, it reveals the author’s own and his hero’s Oedipal complex
and castration complex. Thus photography gives the hero a “traumatic” experience. In “Lasbabas del diablo”, the photograph becomes animated, like a movie, when the blots in thephotograph disappear in accordance with the movements of the camera, and the photographtransforms to show the “uncanny” reality. On the other hand, in Blow-Up, “uncanny” images,
such as the pistol and the corpse, appear on the exaggeratedly enlarged blots in the photographs,
which take hold of the hero. In both works, these blots trigger “the uncanny”.
So we should refer here to the idea of the “punctum” by Roland Barthes in La Chambreclaire (1980), rather than Benjamin’s “shock”. For Barthes, photography is an indefatigable
expression of Lacan’s “tuché” (Greek: τύχη, túchē, chance, fate)[14]. Using Lacan’s term in the
beginning of his book, Barthes explains that a “punctum” is a “blot” which pricks me[15]. So,
what is tuché?
In Seminaire XI (1973), Lacan names “the encounter of the real” as tuché. When “the real”
that was repressed by a language appears through a seam (mesh, network) of the symbolic orderof language, the viewer feels it looks back at us. So, Lacan calls the breakthrough of “the real” as“the gaze”. In a famous discursive example, Lacan compares this “gaze” to the blot of Holbein’s“Ambassadors” (1533). When you view the painting from a certain angle, you can make out thatthe blot is a skull, painted in anamorphic projection, and it looks back at you.
We can notice here that the blots of Michel’s and Thomas’ photographs are similar to theapparently amorphous blur in the “Ambassadors”. When these blots stop being blots by being
seen from a different angle, or by enlargement, the pictures change their meaning, break theviewer’s subjective way of seeing, and traumatize them[16]. Now we can sum up the common
points of both works as below.
By viewing again the scenes of the couples as a primal scene, this time not through aviewfinder, but through a photograph, neither hero is any longer the privileged viewer. Bothheroes are no longer subjects who dominate the objects which they are looking at, but they
become controlled by the “uncanny” gaze looking back at them from photographs as “a space
informed by the unconscious” and “an indefatigable expression of Lacan’s tuché”. At this point

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in both works, the photographs become movie-like. The “uncanny” appears in their photographs
to look back at them; the one in “Las babas del diablo” is the ominous man’s intention ofhomosexual child abuse, and the other in Blow-Up is of the phallic imagery of the gun and thedead body. The loss of position as privileged viewer would, accordingly, stimulate both heroes’
repressed castration complexes.
Moreover, from our interpretation given above, we can now understand that Antonioni
developed, through cinematic montage, the theme of the change of visuality as castration anxiety.
In the beginning, the hero of Blow-Up plans to publish a photographic collection about themiseries of the lower working class in London. One of the photographs taken in the park would
appear on the last page of the book. Thomas intends to contrast these photographs of the lower
class with the one of the couple in the park. At first, he intends only to express his vision of
London by the arrangement of his photographs. But, when he blows his photographs up andarranges them to find out why the woman wanted the film roll so much, the series of prints shows
something unexpected, two blots in two different photographs, one a gun, the other a dead body.
We can see here two different kinds of cinematic montage. The first arrangement ofphotographs is a type of montage that creates the continuity of time and space, that is, a fictional
story. Therefore such a montage conceals the truth, like a dream which can be a substitute for“the repressed”. On the other hand, in the second arrangement of photographs, the hero makesa montage to find the woman’s “wish”, and therefore he interprets the photographs, much as a
psychoanalyst interprets a dream to find a repressed “wish” of a patient. So, in this montage, hedoes not arrange the photographs to create his story. Instead, the photographs rather encourage
him to arrange them. In a sense, the photographs here look back at him.
Thus, in Blow-Up, by becoming a psychoanalysis of a dream, the second montage unveils
the truth in the blots as the “uncanny” in the photographs, much as the animated photographdoes in “Las babas del diablo”. In consequence, Antonioni does not base Blow-Up loosely on the
short story of Cortázar. Instead, Antonioni successfully develops its themes with special care in
his own field of cinema.

Conclusion: Final Scenes as the Acceptance of Castration
As explained above, when we compare both works psychoanalytically, it turns out that thephotographs that become movie-like represent the fear of castration. Antonioni further develops
this theme in his cinematic field. So, can the heroes, who represent the boys Oedipal boys,
overcome their castration complexes? In closing this paper, I confirm that they did.
According to Lacan’s theory, which differs from Freud’s explanation of castration anxiety,the acceptance of castration makes it possible for a child to repress the Oedipus complex and thecastration complex. Lacan’s thought is as below. In Lacan’s mirror stage, the child identifies
himself as his mother’s lost penis. Therefore, the person who is castrated is not the child but themother, and the acceptance of castration means to break the bond between the mother and thechild [17].
So, when we follow this thought, the fact that at the end of the story Cortázar’s hero saysthat he becomes the impotent lens of a camera signifies that the child was cut off from the mother104

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and has lost the omnipotence that the mother gave him.
Then, can we find a scene in Blow-Up where these complexes are repressed? Yes, we can see
this in the scene of an unseen tennis game. Initially, like the “Wolf Man”, a child feels the fear of
castration because of his incomplete anatomical knowledge. But actually the mother was not
castrated, and never had a penis at all. So, when the child understands that the mother’s penis is
not castrated but was always absent, he is released from the fear of castration and also from thebond with his mother. Then he steps in to a new world dominated by the father.
According to Lacan, this repression of desire for the mother occurs especially in and throughlanguage. For a child who lives in the world dominated by vision[18], man is superior to woman
because the penis is prominent and the vagina is hidden and difficult to see. So, the child knows
only the penis out of the two sex organs, and thinks of the woman as a man without a penis:
castrated. But the words, “man” and “woman” are equal and incompatible at the same time. So,
when a child learns this pair of words, they enter the dimension of language, and both sexes
become equal in the mind of a child. Later, a child understands that his mother is not castrated
and she has the other sex organ. After that, the child will not identify with the mother’s penis any
longer.
As a typical scene where a child learns a pair of words, Lacan takes Freud’s grand-son’s gamewith a small bobbin, mentioned in “Beyond the pleasure principle” (1920). According to Freud,his grand-son played with bobbin, throwing it over the bed and pulling it from there. Then herepeatedly pronounced the opposition of the words “fort–da”, meaning “here–there”, or“present–absent”.
In the repeated “appearance and disappearance” of a bobbin without words, the presence ofthe bobbin would be superior to its disappearance. But when a child throws and pulls it with thepair of words; “fort” and “da”, both situations are situated equally. Unlike in the world dominatedby vision, there is no superiority or inferiority in the world dominated by two opposite words.
The story line of Blow-Up follows this theory accurately. The dead body corresponds to themother’s penis, which is both the object of her desire and what the child tries to find. As the childtries to solve the problem of the whereabouts of the mother’s penis, Thomas also looks for the
woman’s desire in the photographs and tries to find the dead body (a phallic thing). And as thechild begins to understand that the mother doesn’t have a penis, Thomas also understands
eventually that the dead body doesn’t exist.
In the final scene, Thomas is watching an imaginary tennis game played by a couple withclown-like faces. An invisible ball flies over the fence and the woman encourages him to pick it
up. He finds it and throws it back. At that time, he could understand that his one-night adventure
was possible even without a dead body. Then, like a penis, the dead body changes fromsomething lost to nonexistent, and, like a child who steps into the world of the father, Thomas
also disappears, by fading out while standing in the middle of the screen image of the green
rectangle, the grassy field of the park that fills the screen[19].
This green rectangle corresponds to the blue sky which the photograph shows at the end of“Las babas del diablo”. In the end of the short story, the silence of blue sky would represent thedisappearance of the fear of castration, after the acceptance of the primal scene. The green
rectangle in Blow-Up works in a similar way. If Thomas, in the green rectangle, signifies the blot

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in the photograph, and Thomas’ disappearance from it signifies the disappearance of the blot in
the photograph, the last shot also signifies that the anxious regard looking back at Thomas; thefear of castration, is repressed. So, the blue sky in “Las babas del diablo” and the green rectangle
in Blow-Up are concluding counterparts. Of course, Thomas does not stand in the same position
as Michel who sees the movie-like photograph at the end of the story. Instead, we the spectators
stand there, so this enables us, the spectators, to be in Michel’s position, and therefore we canaccept the theme of “change of visuality” as our own experience more directly than “Las babasdel diablo”[20].
Note
[1]
[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

Julio Cortázar, “Las Babas del Diablo,” Las Armas Secretas, Sudamericana, 1959. Edición de
Susana Jakfalvi, Cátedra, 2012.
Several articles that make a psychoanalytic interpretation of Blow-Up. I am indebted to the ones
listed below. However, these works use psychoanalytic theory to explain Thomas’ strange behavior,and therefore most of them do not compare Blow-Up with its source, “Las Babas del diablo”.
Melvin Goldstein, “Antonioni’s Blow-Up: From Crib to Camera.’ American Imago, 32 (Fall 1975);
Jacob A. Arlow, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene”, Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 28, 1980; Daniel Dervin, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply,
Analytic Press, 1985; Robert T. Eberwein, “The Master Text of Blow-Up”, Close Viewing, ed. byPeter Lehman, Florida State University Press, 1990.
See René Prieto, Body of Writing, Duke University Press, 2000, p.258; see also Cynthia SchmidtCruz, Mothers Lovers, and Others, State University New York Press, 2004, pp. 76-77. Using
psychoanalytic theory, both books analyze the power relationship between femininity andmasculinity in his works.
See Blow-Up: A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, Modern Film Scripts, Simon and Schuster, 1971.
See Peter Brunette, The films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.
109; Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World, University of California Press,
1985, pp. 139-140.
For example, Marvin D’Lugo thinks that both heroes identify with their technology, and by saying
so, he ignores the differences in seeing a couple in two scenes. As a result, he concludes both heroes’
excessive identification with their technology caused their tragedies (Marvin D’Lugo, “Signs andMeanings in Blow-Up: From Cortázar to Antonioni”, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 3, 1975,
Salisbury State College). However, perception through a viewfinder dates back to the Renaissancetechnology of geometric linear perspective, while seeing through a photograph belongs tonineteenth-century chemical technology. The respective visual technologies come from very
different eras. Yet, as he does not distinguish clearly the terms of “camera” and “photography”, hecan conclude as described above.
“Perhaps it is an exaggeration to state that all successful short stories, and especially the fantastic
ones, are neurotic products, nightmares, or hallucinations which are neutralized as theymaterialize into concrete forms and are removed from the original seat of the neurosis . . . in any
case, in any memorable short story this polarity can be seen, as if the author had wanted to rid
himself of the creature as quickly and as completely as possible, exorcising it in the only way
possible for him: writing it.” Cortázar, “Del cuento breve y sus alrededores,” Ultimo Round, p. 37,
quoted and translated by Evelyn Picon Garfield, in Julio Cortázar, Frederick Ungar, 1975. See also
Ilan Stavans, “Justice to Julio Cortázar,” in Julio Cortázar, ed. and with an introduction by Harold
Bloom, Chelsea House, 2005, p. 199.
Julio Cortázar, “Blow-Up”, in Blow-Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn, Pantheon Books,

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[9]
[10]

[11]
[12]
[13]

[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]

[20]

IJUIN Takayuki

1963 (under the title End of Game), p. 116.
Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche”, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 12, Imago Publishing, 1940, S. 23846.
We can continue our psychoanalytic interpretation of “Las babas del diablo” as below. According
to Cortázar’s biography, when he was four years child, his father left his family and he grew up
surrounded by women. In the fatherless family, he would develop a close love-hate relationshipwith his mother. It is easy to see in his many short stories his unresolved Oedipal desire, and the
seductive, threatening nature of the mother in the absence of a father figure (see especially his
stories “Cartas de mama”, “La salud de los enfermos”, “La señorita Cora”, “En nombre de Boby”).
But different from these stories, “Las babas del diablo” does have a father figure, and we can see in
him not only the positive Oedipal complex, but also the negative Oedipal complex in Cortázar.
Unlike positive oedipal complex, when the subject wishes to possess the parent of its own sex andregards that of the opposite sex as its rival, it was called “negative Oedipus complex”. For Cortázar
the boy, the absent father would be not only the object of his hate but also the object of his affection,and if it is true, we can regard the uncanny man’s homosexual conspiracy as Cortázar’s wish to be
loved by his father instead of his mother.
Sigmund Freud, “Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose”, Gesammelte Werke Bd. 12.
Ibid. S. 74.
Walter Benjamin, “Little Story of Photography”, Selected Works, vol. 2, part 2, The Belknap Press
imprint of Harvard University Press, [1931–34] 1999, pp. 511-12, p. 527. See also, “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” Selected Works, vol. 3, 2002, p. 117.
Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Seuil, 1980, p. 15.
Ibid. p. 27.
See Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XI, Seuil, 1973.
See Jacques Lacan, “ch. 10 Les Trois Temps de l’ Œdipe,” Seminaire V, Seuil, 1998.
Michel and Thomas as photographers represent this.
In Through a Freudian Lens Deeply, Daniel Dervin finds that this scene represents “the possibilityof restoring the child–mother bond placed jeopardy by the primal scene witnessing, but only if it
is to be placed on another level and radically redefined”. And in the notes he also says that “One isput in mind of the child’s game of losing and finding (“fort–da”) his toys to deal with his mother’sabsence: to pick up and throw the ball is to regain mother (see Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, andAnxiety, 1926)” (Through a Freudian Lens Deeply, Analytic Press, 1985, p. 86). Following Freud’s
thought, Dervin understands that this scene shows how a child compensated or reassured himself
by staging the disappearance and return of the bobbin within his reach. I also agree that theimaginary tennis game by the clown-like couple corresponds to the “fort–da” imaginary game. But
I think that the bobbin in the game of “fort–da” represents a child himself as his mother’s penis (achild who links inseparably with his mother) rather than his mother. The reason is because, as I
mentioned in my text, I think this scene shows that a child learns the impossibility that he is amother’s penis by introducing the pair of words in this game.
I wish to thank Peter Cheyne (my colleague, Shimane University, British Literature and Culture),
Matthew Bannister (Waikato Institute of Technology, School of Media Arts) and Stephen Hayne(English teacher) for comments that have helped to improve this article.

* This paper is based on my previous article;「「悪魔の涎」の翻案としての映画『欲望』――精神分析的解釈から明らかになる両作品の共通点について」/ “Antonioni’s Blow-Up as Adaptation of Cortázar’s“Las babas del diablo”: The Correspondence of these works, made clear from a psychoanalytical point ofview”, in Bigaku, No. 247 (The Japanese Society for Aesthetics, 2015, pp. 85-96). But I here developedand expanded its theme, emphasizing the aspect of visual theory in both works.