SOURCE: Musselwhite, David. “Death and the Phantasm: A Reading of Julio Cortázar's ‘Babas del Diablo’.” Romance Studies 18, no. 1 (June 2000): 57-68.

In the following essay, Musselwhite considers the model of the phantasm in “Babas del Diablo” and other stories collected in Las armas secretas.

‘Babas del diablo’ is probably Cortázar's best known short story, and in spite of the quite extraordinary amount of commentary dedicated to it,¹ it still remains one of his most problematic,² quite apart from the notoriety that accrued to it from being the text on which Antonioni based Blow-up. There are many things that are confusing: the hesitancy as to the person of the narrator, the grammatical permutations, the mixture of first and third person narration, the double time of the narrative—first the original scene at the parapet of the Quai de Bourbon and then the recurrence or repetition of the scene...