Free-Floating Levity

CRONOPIOS AND FAMAS by Julio Cortazar. 161 pages. Random House. $4.95.

While Vishnu dreams, says the Hindu, the world is born. Private dreams are subcontracted out of this cosmic snooze with the understanding that when Vishnu wakens, all subordinate dreamers will be rubbed out like morning eyecrust.

Until that dawn of destruction, the best advice is to go merrily, merrily. For "the deepest insights sometimes emerge from a joke, a gag, or a slap in the face," says Argentina's Julio Cortazar, author of the highly praised fantasy-novel Hopscotch and of Blow-Up, the short story turned hit movie by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Cortazar's Cronopios and Famas is an assortment of free-floating insights of varying specific levity. Some never quite surface. They are the blind fish of his inspiration, stunted in the sealed caves of his most private fantasy.

The need for originality is much prized by Cortazar. He once cast Theseus as a dullwitted, conventional, sword-swinging Victor Mature hero pitted against the Minotaur--seen as a poet-victim being set upon for his incendiary ideas. In a chapter of Cronopios and Famas, he offers Hamlet as a man obsessed with finding a five-leaf clover--a quest worthy of his proud and exceptional nature.

Cortazar displays his own exotic humor best in a section entitled "The Instruction Manual." As if briefing a group of anthropologists from Uranus, he details precise ways to cry, sing, climb stairs and comb hair: "There's something like a bone wing from which extends a series of parallels, and the comb isn't the bone but the gaps which penetrate space." Cortazar's ability to present common objects from strange perspectives, as if he had just invented them, makes him a writer whose work stimulates a sense of rare expectation.

The manual also contains instructions on how to make oneself afraid, including terse scary stories. One is about a man who squeezes a tiny woman out of a tube of toothpaste. Another poor fellow discovers blood leaking from minuscule teeth marks under his watch band. Not bad--though for chilling empathy, neither surpasses an anonymous genius's unpublished masterpiece about sliding down a bannister and having it suddenly change into a razor blade.

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