5 Uncanny Urodeles: The Case of Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl”

Writers including Aldous Huxley, Giorgio Agamben, and René Daumal have deployed the little salamander to better explain theories of infancy, immaturity, and societal liberation. The axolotl has also permeated popular culture, with the example of Frank Herbert’s ghola clones being produced in an Axolotl tank in the Dune trilogy, inspired by the salamander’s neoteny and regenerative properties, and Japanese artists Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori have taken inspiration from its form to create not one but two creatures for their world-phenomenon Pokémon. The axolotl has been most welcomed, however, to crawl all over the pages of Latin American literature, prominently featured by authors such as Roger Bartra, Octavio Paz, Juan José Arreola, José Emilio Pacheco, Mario Bellatin, and the topic of this chapter, Julio Cortázar. Bestowed with seemingly ever-lasting youth, an enigmatic smile, and unsettling eyes, the axolotl and its passivity have, on many occasions, been perceived as sinister, uncanny. Slimy, squirmy, sometimes sexual, but above all, autochthonous, the axolotl is a symbol of a people, of what they have lost, and an ominous promise of return. This chapter will analyze the function of the salamander as a catalyst of the uncanny, that eerie feeling so characteristic of Julio Cortázar, in his famed short story, “Axolotl,” first published in 1952 in the magazine Buenos Aires Literaria.

To understand the axolotl and its surroundings as vessels for the uncanny in Cortázar’s short story, a brief understanding of the salamander’s main qualities and history is necessary. Despite having been discovered relatively recently when compared to, say, the lion or the phoenix, the axolotl holds a sector of the literary imagination disproportionate to its size. Refusing to metamorphose into its adult form (ambystoma tigrinum velasci), the axolotl originally hails from the Xochimilco lake in Mexico City. German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt brought two axolotls to Paris and handed them to French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier, who was forced to revise his classification of the animal from larva to a perennibranch, for the axolotl, able to keep its gills throughout its life, defied the scientific logic of the time (Bartra 2011: 78). The axolotl is also of extreme interest to scientists due to its ability to repair and replace almost all its tissues, including parts of the brain, believed to be due to its neoteny, the capacity to retain juvenile properties by adults (85). Luis Zambrano, biologist from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, hypothesizes that the Aztec system of irrigation, apantles, provided an ideal environment, creating a symbiotic man-axolotl relationship which changed greatly with the arrival of the Spanish (Zambrano 2011: 233). Over time, urbanization and other engineering projects, as well as the introduction of foreign species into the lake have greatly diminished the axolotl population, making it so the number of axolotls in labs and captivity overpower those in their natural habitat. These biological attributes, when added to their mythical past and etymological qualities, explain much of the fascination and pull of the axolotl, as well as the reasons for its uncanny, ubiquitous presence.

In 2003, Nicholas Royle published the first book-length study on the uncanny, a concept that he briefly introduces in the preface as “a flickering moment of embroilment in the experience of something at once strange and familiar. Uncanniness entails a sense of uncertainty and suspense, however momentary and unstable” (2003: vii). The feeling that something is uncanny, though experienced by all, is difficult to describe and analyze; flipping the sensation over to get a close look to its underbelly often churns up unpleasant sensations. The concept, along with much of the psychoanalytic process and mythology, arrived late to Argentina, not until 1942. Its influence, however, had been around for at least two decades prior, evidenced by Germán Greve’s presentation “Sobre psicología y psicoterapia de ciertos estados angustiosos” at the Congreso internacional americano de medicina e higiene in Buenos Aires (Plotkin 1997: 53). Freud’s method thus began to circulate in society as well as in literature, as exemplified by Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (1929) and Los Lanzallamas (1931). Influenced by the theories that uncovered a world well beyond the tangible, and much bigger than the individual, Cortázar in a 1983 interview with El juglar admitted to having read Freud’s complete works. John Zilcosky and Anthony Vidler also identify a renewed interest in the uncanny whenever societal turmoil arises. Both authors identify the post-WWI landscape of Europe, replete with dismembered limbs, severed heads, and seizing bodies as fundamental in Freud’s attributing of bewitched, fairytale-like elements to the uncanny. The circulation of psychoanalytic concepts during a period in which many Argentines began to question the colonial past from which their identity stemmed made the perfect broth for the uncanny to stew in.

To better understand the uncanny concept and the particular shade of fear it elicits, a delineation of its history is appropriate here. Ernst Jentsch published his essay on the uncanny in 1906, arguing that the feeling stems from intellectual uncertainty. The uncertainty could hinge on not knowing whether something or someone is dead or alive, animate or inanimate. Jentsch gives the example of a person resting on a tree trunk, who, much to their horror, discovers that the log begins to move and reveals itself to be a giant snake (1906: 11). After conjuring up real-life scenarios in which the feeling could occur, Jentsch inaugurates the tradition of exploring fiction, narrative, and storytelling as the areas in which the uncanny flourishes. In his quest for literary occurrences of the uncanny, he analyzes E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816): “In story telling, one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him in the case of a particular character” (Jentsch 1906: 13). Hoffman, according to Jentsch, creates an uncanny feeling in the reader through his use of the humanoid automaton Olympia, the nature of whom is never fully revealed. From Jentsch’s observation we can extrapolate and extend the artistic device to include not just automatons, but humanoid qualities attributed to nonhuman actors.

Without doubt, the most widely circulated writings on the uncanny were penned by Sigmund Freud in 1919, who found inspiration in Jentsch’ analysis of the concept yet deemed it incomplete. Using Jentsch’s hypothesis on the uncanny, as well as his own literary analysis of “The Sandman” as a starting point, Freud then draws from several disciplines, including literature, etymology, the oneiric, and the superstitious to offer the reader a unique and revealing study that often reads like a piece of literature in and of itself. Freud admits to only having read Jentsch’s thoughts on the topic, and agrees with his colleague, attributing a certain amount of intellectual uncertainty to the uncanny feeling. He insists, however, that several instances exist in which the uncanny feeling is produced by other agents; severed limbs, re-animated corpses, repetitive coincidences, the omnipotence of thoughts, magic and witchcraft, and animism are all factors that can turn something fearful into something uncanny (Freud 2003: 150). In the case of “The Sandman,” for instance, Freud argues that the uncanny feeling in the story is not caused by uncertainty about Olympia’s identity. Instead, the repressed affect manifesting in Nathaniel’s fear of losing his eyes is the veiled dread of castration – Oedipus’s blinding, for reference, “is merely a mitigated form of the penalty of castration, the only one that befits him according to lex talionis as fitted for him” (139).

Freud, perhaps inspired by Jentsch’s analysis of Hoffmann, considers the writer “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud 2003: 141). This is, in part, because of the way in which Hoffmann manipulates the tone of his story, that is, a mundane, realistic tone, amplifying the sensation. Freud thus dissects “The Sandman,” slowly crystallizing what would later be agreed upon by theorists, psychoanalysis, and literary scholars – the uncanny is at its most powerful in fiction. If Hoffmann had presented us with a fairytale world, or a story that allowed spiritual entities such as Dante’s Inferno or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the reader would not require that the lights be on while reading. Literature thus presents a paradox: “that many things that would be uncanny if they occurred in real life are not uncanny in literature, and that in literature there are many opportunities to achieve uncanny effects that are absent in real life” (155–6). Hoffmann and, as we will see shortly, Cortázar are able to deploy and assert the uncanny by pretending to move in the world of common reality:

At first glance, the German term unheimlich is an obvious negation of its root word, heimlich or heimisch, which means “familiar,” “native,” and “belonging to the home.” Freud, however, dives into the etymology and surfaces with a wealth of nuances and meanings attributable to the term. Freud lists several languages’ definitions for the term, and notes that many languages do not have a word for it – for the reader’s curiosity, the Spanish words he picks are “sospechoso, de mal agüero, lúgubre, siniestro” (2003: 125). Freud then lists all meanings attributed to the German heimlich, which include animals compatible to men, something that is friendly, intimate, and homelike, something that is concealed, kept from sight (126–34). The German etymology is important because it solidifies that “the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (124). Freud later adds the thought that, if one is to accept the psychoanalytic axiom that emotional affect is transformed into anxiety, then “there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect” (147–8). The uncanny, then, is familiar yet repressed, and seeps out through agents including uncertainty and doubles to disturb those not willing to acknowledge that which the subconscious is attempting to regurgitate. The present chapter will point to the many ways in which Julio Cortázar, avid reader of Freud’s work and master of the uncanny, uses the above-mentioned concepts to infuse many of his short stories with all things unheimlich.

Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” was first published in 1952 in the magazine Buenos Aires Literaria and then again in 1956 as part of the short-story collection Final del juego. In the story, a man becomes transfixed by the axolotls housed at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The first three sentences of the story hint at its uncanny nature: “Hubo un tiempo en que yo pensaba mucho en los axolotl. Iba a verlos al acuario del Jardin des Plantes y me quedaba horas mirándolos, observando su inmovilidad, sus oscuros movimientos. Ahora soy un axolotl” (Cortázar 2021: 159). Day after day, the narrator shuffles past an intrigued guard to press his nose against the glass of the aquarium to stare at the floating salamanders. After countless visits, he suddenly finds his consciousness transferred onto one of the creatures in the aquarium tank, and watches as his human self continues to observe from outside the glass. The axolotl, as well as the unfolding and attachment of the narrator’s consciousness from human onto amphibian, have been the subject of countless interpretations, ranging from the axolotl as the final form of self-actualization (Bernstein 1980; Rosser 1983) to a symbol of the Aztec civilization (Maxey 2018; Ortega 1989). While these interpretations will surface throughout the present analysis, this chapter focuses on the factors contributing to the story’s uncanny atmosphere, seeking to pinpoint the mechanisms behind the fearful sensation.

Setting, context, and tone, as briefly mentioned in this chapter’s theoretical introduction, greatly influence whether something is or is not uncanny. The ordinary, quotidian stage on which “Axolotl” unfolds proves the perfect setting for the uncanny to take hold. Anthony Vidler, author of Architectural Uncanny, holds that the publication date of Freud’s essay, 1919, was not coincidental. Post-WWI Europe was an uncertain time in which “the notion of a unified culture was broken, bringing a powerful disillusionment with the universal ‘museum’ of the European ‘fatherland’” (Vidler 1992: 7). The broken sense of familiar wholeness or heimlich experienced in the aftermath of the war spilled out of European homes and entered the public sphere, gnawing at and corroding shared buildings and city arteries. Cortázar was not solely European, nor did he write in a post-WWI context. His time in Paris, however, did see the Euro-Argentine’s growing awareness of his political conscience, which resulted in the re-affirming of his solidarity with oppressed groups indigenous to Latin America (Kauffmann and Bartra 2001: 227). This gradual change in perception, happening at the heart of a former colonial power, would, if not dislodge, at least give a reasonable shake to one’s sense of identity, making the familiar, comfortable, and expected suddenly seem less so. Inner turmoil splatters onto people and things, and Cortázar, like the European populations after 1915, projected the internal onto his surroundings, including the dimly lit, unseasonably humid aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes.

If the uncanny undertones in Cortázar’s writings were fed by his circumstances, they were nourished by his preferred narrative style, magical realism. Succinctly yet generally defined as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe,” the sober and believable writing style lures the reader into a false sense of security, inviting them onto a rug that will soon be dislodged (Strecher 1999: 267). To magical realism we can add the fact that Cortázar considered his style “fantastic.” The word “fantastic” here is not used in a fairytale sense, but rather as an alternative to “false realism,” meaning the sense that “everything can be described and explained in line with the philosophical and scientific optimism of the eighteenth century, that is, within a world governed by a system of laws, of principles, of causal relations, of well-defined psychologies, of well-mapped geographies” (Rosser 1983: 419). For Cortázar, the fantastic in his stories permits access to Otherness, which serves to defamiliarize everyday life, disturbing the sense of ease and routine of the modern world (Kauffmann and Bartra 2001: 226).

Holding both the key characteristics of magical realism and Cortázar’s delight in undermining the veneer of agreed-upon reality, we can deduce that should the story have taken place in a magical, underwater seascape filled with mermaids and talking animals, the transferring of a man’s consciousness onto an amphibian would be merely another plot point, perhaps not even the climax. The effect, however, is strengthened by the banal details the narrator gives us about his eccentric albeit entirely plausible and ordinary routine: the Parisian landmarks, including the Jardin des Plantes, Port-Royal Boulevard, and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the ticket he purchases, and the iron railing that surrounds the aquariums, the indifference of the axolotl crowding the tank. Even the day in which he first encounters the object of his obsession reads like a consolation prize for a more desirable plan: “Era amigo de los leones y las panteras, pero nunca había entrado en el húmedo y oscuro edificio de los acuarios. Dejé mi bicicleta contra las rejas y me fui a ver los tulipanes. Los leones estaban feos y tristes y mi pantera dormía” (Cortázar 2021: 159). These mundane, deflated events and descriptions serve to strengthen the magical realism of the story, the screen onto which Cortázar projects the uncanny. Both Jentsch and Freud, and, eventually, other critics and theorists highlight the effectiveness of literature as a medium for hosting the uncanny: “In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact” (Freud 2003: 19). The sober tone of “Axolotl,” as well as its mundane stage function in tandem to create an atmosphere in which the uncanny will fester, gripping and destabilizing the reader in fewer than five pages.

As mentioned, in 1906 Jentsch introduced intellectual uncertainty as the main contributing factor to an uncanny atmosphere, a concept further cemented by Freud. Both authors write that one of the most effective ways of instilling the doubt necessary for the particular shade of fear into the reader is to play with the binaries dead/alive and animate/inanimate. In addition to Jentsch’s tree that turns out to be a snake, or lovely maiden who is in fact an automaton, Freud also wrote that “To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” (2003: 148). As we have just seen, the feeling can be further exploited if these appearances take place in the realm of the quotidian and can be made more acute still if whether one is truly before a dead body remains a mystery. Cortázar was fond of bringing people back from the dead in his short stories, as exemplified by “Cartas de mamá.” In the story, Nico is the dead brother of Luis and the ex-husband of Laura. Luis and Laura become a couple after Nico’s death, and, while honeymooning in Paris, horror grips them as the dead man returns to life through his mother’s correspondence with the couple. The uncertainty Luis and Laura feel gives way to dread, as that which should have remained underground seems to be crawling back up, through indirect, murky avenues.

In “Axolotl,” this uncertainty is built by turns of phrase that obscure the true nature of the subject at hand and cause the reader to take pause. The reader might, for instance, question whether the objects of the narrator’s obsession, the axolotl in captivity, are alive or dead: “Un rostro inexpresivo, sin otro rasgo que los ojos, dos orificios como cabezas de alfiler, enteramente de un oro transparente, carente de toda vida pero mirando, dejándose penetrar por mi mirada que parecía pasar a través del punto áureo y perderse en un diáfano misterio interior” (Cortázar 2021: 161). Where one might have expected a routine encounter with a zoo-arrested beast, they find instead an inexpressive, featureless face, floating somewhere between life and death, passively accepting the narrator’s gaze. The axolotl here reminds us of Hoffmann’s automaton, Olympia, or Jentsch’s obscured snake, and causes us to squirm and wonder whether the creature is dead or alive, animate or inanimate. Further descriptions of the axolotl as “esas figuras silenciosas e inmóviles aglomeradas en el fondo del acuario” prolong the feeling, leaving the reader with the image of a floating pink, fleshy mass – better suited for a mad man’s subterranean storage, not a renowned tourist destination. Cortázar adds that the three branches “era lo único vivo en él, cada diez o quince segundos las ramitas se enderezaban rígidamente y volvían a bajarse,” recalling the stiffness of rigor mortis, an unsettling condition in a living creature (160–1).

This uncertainty is not limited to the content of the story, but also its narrative structure. Cortázar weaves unease and discomfort by constantly fluctuating between narrating as the observer and observed. The reader can never be sure of which side of the aquarium glass they find themselves on. Cortázar writes that “Los axólotl se amontonaban en el mezquino y angosto (sólo yo puedo saber cuán angosto y mezquino) piso de piedra y musgo del acuario” (2021: 160). A few moments later, the narrator states, “A veces una pata se movía apenas, yo veía los diminutos dedos posándose con suavidad en el musgo. Es que no nos gusta movernos mucho, y el acuario es tan mezquino; apenas avanzamos un poco nos damos con la cola o la cabeza de otro de nosotros; surgen dificultades, peleas, fatiga. El tiempo se siente menos si nos estamos quietos” (161). The passages start in the third person, plural and singular, and then turn to using the first person, plural and singular as well. Cortázar, at times within a single sentence, turns from man to salamander, and then snaps back to man. After explaining how he and his axolotl kin pass time, the narrator gives the reader whiplash by stating “Fue su quietud lo que me hizo inclinarme fascinado la primera vez que vi a los axólotl” (161). Nicholas Royle’s notions on the uncanny as contingent upon language explain the effect: “Above all, the uncanny is intimately entwined in language, with how we conceive and represent what is happening within ourselves, to ourselves, to the world, when uncanny strangeness is at issue” (2003: 2). Discomfort is thus created in the reader through this oscillation that elasticizes familiarity and stretches the little creatures to be both same and other.

The elasticized concept of familiarity interpellates Freud’s lengthy etymological listing of the nuance housed in the term unheimlich. Although at first the encounter between narrator and axolotl seems purely coincidental – he was, after all, looking for familiar felines – bits of information begin to leak, alluding to a deeper familiarity than that initially revealed “No hay nada extraño en esto, porque desde el primer momento comprendí que estábamos vinculados, que algo infinitamente perdido y distante seguía sin embargo uniéndonos” (Cortázar 2023: 160). After several days of observation, the narrator deepens his reflection:

The narrator grapples with a truth that seems to lie just beneath the surface. There is a similarity, a familiarity, a pre-existing link between the beings on both sides of the aquarium crystal. This sensation of an a priori connection with the axolotl, unshakable to the narrator, compiles with the oscillation between first and third person to bring forth another aspect of the uncanny. In Freud’s etymological analysis of the word, the overly familiar (heimlich) can, along the lines of a continuum, cross over and become opaque, obscured, unfamiliar (unheimlich) as he illustrates with an entry from Daniel Sander’s Wöterbuch der Deutschen Sprache:

The question thus stands, what is so heimlich and unheimlich, so familiar and yet uncanny and unsettling, about the axolotl? Here we can piece together information drawn from Freud’s etymological dive, as well as Cortázar’s hints and secondary writings on the same. “Native” is one of the possible meanings attributed to the root word heimlich. Slowly, the narrator’s obsessive flow of consciousness betrays what lies hidden deep within him. The realization is not immediately obvious to him, it mulls in the back of his mind and flickers to the forefront every few sentences or so. Hints of a different way of seeing appear, “Los ojos de los axolotl me decían de la presencia de una vida diferente, de otra manera de mirar,” then the origin of the axolotl is confirmed, “Que eran mexicanos lo sabía ya por ellos mismos, por sus pequeños rostros rosados aztecas y el cartel en lo alto del acuario” (Cortázar 2021: 162, 159). Gold and corroded ruins are leimotifs that decorate the story, and obsessing, the narrator “Un delgadísimo halo negro rodeaba el ojo y lo inscribía en la carne rosa, en la piedra rosa de la cabeza vagamente triangular pero con lados curvos e irregulares, que le daban una total semejanza con una estatuilla corroída por el tiempo” (161). A crescendo is reached, and all caution is thrown to the wind, when the narrator identifies his unease as the result of feeling judged by the creatures before him:

Accepting the word “native” as one of the translations of heimlich applicable to this story reveals another device behind the sinister feeling in the same, the one Freud identified as its strongest proponent: “that the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (2003: 124). Much of the unheimlich feeling palpable through “Axolotl” is caused by the repressed indigeneity of the narrator. Roger Bartra, undisputed authority on all matters larva, underscores the axolotl’s pesky proclivity for inconveniencing hegemony, its ability to slip through cracks and disrupt truth: “El axolotl, como puede comprobarse si se hacen las debidas investigaciones, ha estado presente en los momentos críticos culminantes de la historia mítica de los mexicanos; pero ha sido un testigo incómodo que se ha ocultado cuidadosamente. Para muchos es mejor que permanezca escondido, pues cuando se asoma produce extraños efectos que desequilibran las cuentas históricas” (Bartra 2011: 23). Its mere existence is enough to unsettle historical accounts, not to mention the sanity of Cortázar’s narrator. With the discovery of each minuscule amphibian feature, waves of realization wash over the narrator and he faces off with the sole reminder of a civilization that has long disappeared, a persistent symbol of atrocious past crimes. The captivating qualities of the axolotl remind the narrator that despite walking in the palatial surroundings of Paris, his identity is largely caught up in the water of the aquarium before him.

“Axolotl” is not the first of Cortázar’s stories to play with the notion of an alternative, Aztec reality; Final del juego also includes “La noche boca arriba,” a story in which, once again, a Latin American man switches back and forth between a life in urban, modern civilization and a pre-Colombian existence. The axolotl, floating and implacable, stands as something ancestral that, in its Parisian surroundings, hints to something which should have been long extinct. R. Lane Kauffmann and Roger Bartra point out that the axolotl is Mexican in origin, difficult to categorize, nomadic as evidenced by the exemplars found in Africa, perpetually underdeveloped as seen by its refusal to leave its larval stage, and consumed and exploited by Europeans (2001: 227). Recalling Anthony Vidler’s notion of the uncanny being able to haunt architecture itself helps to deepen the cause behind the sensation in the story, especially when we recall that the axolotl’s home has been by and large reduced to fish tanks the world over. Because Lake Xochimilco is now a shadow of what it once was, and despite efforts to re-introduce axolotls to naturally occurring habitats in Mexico, most axolotls are behind glass cages, be it in wet labs, pet stores, or family homes. Luis Zambrano, a biologist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, speaks to the habitat devastation which led captive axolotl to outnumber wild axolotl: “Tampoco es acertado asumir su desaparición en Xochimilco mientras se le rescata poniéndolo en acuarios a fin de ser admirado -como si su grandeza pudiera encerrarse en una pecera-; eso sería conducir a la tortura a un animal que no le gusta ser observado. Luego, pierde el apetito, las branquias y enferma. Por eso el ajolote de exhibición suele ser reemplazado en cuestión de días” (2011: 239). As for the axolotl’s new and far more common habitat, one would be hard-pressed to find a more sinister place than an aquarium, with its cool-hued lights, shimmering and shifting as they filter through ominous vats of water, encased in materials of steel and glass, with deafening silence and the lidless stare of countless floating creatures.

The axolotl, displaced from its home and non-native to France – quite literally unhomely – and the loss of Aztec civilization are solidified in the text. The narrator stares at the axolotl, as if trying to recognize a face out of context, hearing the tiny, silent creatures plead “sálvanos, sálvanos” (Cortázar 2021: 163). By mentioning gold, Aztec features, and corroded statues, Cortázar hints at the fall from status suffered by the axolotl, and by proxy that of the Aztecs: “Espiaban algo, un remoto señorío aniquilado, un tiempo de libertad en que el mundo había sido de los axólotl. No era posible que una expresión tan terrible, que alcanzaba a vencer la inexpresividad forzada de sus rostros de piedra, no portara un mensaje de dolor, la prueba de que esa condena eterna, de ese infierno líquido que padecían” (164). He intuits or remembers a destroyed hierarchy and social structure, a world before Spanish arrival. The liters of water before him, vast as the depths of the unconscious, hold the axolotl along with the narrator’s until now repressed Indigenous identity.

Much like the Zecks in Freud’s example were characterized by a buried spring or dried-up pond that might spit up water if walked over, the axolotl exists as an ominous presence, quietly floating and forcing the narrator to remember that which the collective has worked to subdue. Harry L. Rosser holds that the axolotl, as part of a powerful collective image, forces a sudden realization for the narrator, surfacing all that had been previously repressed: “In Jungian terms the unconscious component of the self” – that is, those personal psychic activities and contents that are “forgotten, repressed or subliminally perceived, thought, and felt” – erupts into consciousness. The axolotl functions as an Aztec avatar whose current torture reminds the narrator of crimes committed by his European ancestors, explaining the narrator’s ambivalent reaction of fear and pity, guilt and identification, culminating in the cannibalism of gold that avenges said crimes (Kauffmann and Bartra 2001: 228–9). According to Thomas J. Knight and Alize H. Kroll, the story dramatizes the Latin American man’s search for identity, the division between pre-Columbian and Spanish, the attempt to blend both into a present image (Ortega 1989: 137). Bertín Ortega, in the tradition of Roger Bartra, also highlights the clear comparison between axolotl and Latin America – transformation, metamorphosis from larval state to adult salamander is blocked for axolotl much in the same way that Latin America cannot jump from its split Indigenous/European identity to achieve a synthesis of its own (137–8). Cortázar’s description of his “fantastic” fiction as an alternative to “false realism” is what allows a Mexican salamander to function as a symbol of what has transpired in Latin America. The climax of the story therefore comes as a resolution, a relief as the narrator is able to join his kin, no longer alienated nor haunted by the guilt and repression he felt before the subjugated creatures.

The narrator’s burgeoning consciousness vis-à-vis the realities of a colonial past, a complex cultural inheritance, and a growing solidarity with the original populations of America culminate in a splitting of the self, and the consequential creation of a double. According to Otto Rank, Austrian psychoanalyst and theorist, a positive correlation has always existed between interest in the double as a theme and major upheavals of society (1971: xix). An undisputed agent of the uncanny, the double is a division of the self, originally seen as an insurance against the destruction of the ego. Though the original double of the body was the immortal soul (Freud 2003: 142), Rank also touches upon various other possible manifestations, including reflections, shadows, and paintings. In “Axolotl,” these possible versions of the double take root in the etymological and mythological inheritance of the amphibian, for Xolotl is, among other things, the god of duality and monstrosity. To better understand Xolotl as a double, it is important to briefly mention Quetzalcoatl, a main deity in Aztec mythology. Often referred to as the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl is responsible for creation, transformation, and associated with the Sun. His beauty sometimes prompts his name to be translated as “beautiful twin,” contrasting with his counterpart Xolotl. Xolotl, the dog god, lurks among all things deformed and, covered in blisters and boils, was as ugly as Quetzalcoatl is beautiful (Ortega 1989: 135). The etymological inheritance and mythological past, as well as the eventual transference of consciousness onto the amphibian, reveal the axolotl as a double to the narrator, encapsulating a foregone alternative existence and a final mechanism behind the story’s unheimlich atmosphere.

Where species and habitat preferences are concerned, the axolotl is not an obvious double for Cortázar’s narrator. Rank, however, describes the double having connections with mirror-images, shadows, guardian spirits, the doctrine of the soul, and fear of death. His ethnographic study of the matter yields that, across cultures, what he deems “civilized nations” and “savages” alike hold strong superstitions about their shadows, believing that injury upon a shadow will cause harm to its owner (Rank 1971: 51, 57–8). Similarly, he traces the universal superstition that permitting one’s portrait to be painted will result in death (66). Finally, he points out that, amongst the Indics and Greeks, there exists the rule to not gaze into one’s reflection in water, since it will result in death (66). Throughout his narrative, Cortázar builds the axolotl as a double by describing its Aztec, humanoid features, especially its little hands and nails as “minuciosamente humanas” (2021: 161). Doubles aid in generating the uncanny for the sensation in part “has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves” (Royle 2003: 6). Another hint at the axolotl as double theory comes from the observable behavior of the narrator, beyond the ongoing internal dialogue. The obsessed manner in which the narrator stares at the axolotl reminds us of Narcissus, who discovered his own reflection and became enthralled.

Often, doubles communicate telepathically with the original being. Freud once again references Hoffmann’s work to better depict uses of the double device in literature:

With the concept of the double introduced, and the axolotl acknowledged as the narrator’s other existence, an unsettling question thus surfaces: if the double can be used to avoid death, or, perhaps, extinction, who is being doubled in this story – the man or the axolotl? Is the core narrative voice that of man or beast? Cortázar’s turns of phrase obscure the narrator’s identity, making it unclear as to whether the voice speaking is that of a man or an axolotl. Some critics such as Kauffmann acknowledge this uncertainty by calling the narrative voice “ajolote-narrador.” Martha E. Sánchez points out that “the narrative goes through the major poles never really fixing itself at any of them: it is always off-center with one or another pole, because there is always the implication that the axolotl is both man and animal” (1982: 18). The question goes unanswered, and the double functions as a manner of representing that which is repressed, that is, the Aztec origins of both man and creature, oscillating within the intellectual uncertainty so intrinsic to the uncanny sensation.

Despite calling a dwindling lake in Mexico City home, the axolotl transcends its diminishing territory by proliferating in laboratories, aquariums, and even in family fish tanks. Several of the axolotl’s biological properties, especially as depicted by the narrator, convey vestigial signs that all is not as it seems: its tiny, humanoid hands and nails, its eyes of gold, its head, simultaneously reminiscent of the Aztec people and a statue corroded by time. These properties, in addition to the axolotl’s literal unheimlich-ness – that is, the fact that its natural habitat has all but disappeared since the time of Aztec chinampas – transform the creature into a reminder of a genocide persistent in time, and the unease felt by those who have inherited both European and Indigenous blood. Supported by the work of Sigmund Freud, Ernst Jentsch, Anthony Vidler, and Otto Rank among others, the analysis offered by this chapter identifies several of the factors behind the unease experienced by the reader: intellectual uncertainty, a sense of the re-emerging repressed, and axolotls as doubles capable of inhabiting an alternate existence. Cortázar unsettles his reader, conjuring up the uncanny by employing the axolotl’s baggage, expert turns of phrase, and the powerful effects of injecting the quotidian with the supernatural, evoking that shade of fear that weaponizes the familiar. The methodology, applicable to many other of Cortázar’s short stories, encourages a search for what is encoded in the beasts that, caged or free, hold captive the imagination of the reader.