Like most of Cortázar's short stories, ["Las babas del diablo"] is primarily a tale about the impossiblity of telling and about the frustration of seeing—twin expressions of the ontological dilemma that defines man, for Cortázar, as an irreducible separateness that recognizes similarly hermetic presences, without ever being able to establish more than a surface contact with them, without being able to assimilate them through either perception (sight) or definition (telling). The dramatic tension of Cortázar's stories derives from the exacerbation of their people's attempts to cancel and transcend their ontological sentence. They fail, but their efforts are sometimes of such magnitude as to alter forever the order of the natural world in which they previously dwelled.

Michel is a translator: his job is to understand telling and to make it intelligible to others…. But as a consequence of his unearthly adventure Michel will sense...