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Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) |
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Argentine writer, one of the great masters of the fantastic short story, who has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges. Many of Julio Cortázar's stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions. Central themes are the quest for identity, the hidden reality behind the everyday lives of common people, and the existential angst. The author's debt to the French Symbolism and Surrealists has been demonstrated in a number of studies. Unlike Borges, Cortázar became a political radical who was involved in anti-Peronist demonstrations and supported the Cuban revolution, Allende's Chile, and Sandinista Nicaragua. "Now that I'm writing this, it might like roulette or the racetrack to others, but it wasn't money I was looking for; at some moment I'd begun to feel, to decide that a Métro window might give me the answer, the finding of a happiness, here precisely where everything happens under the sign of the most implacable break, in a below-ground time that traveling between stations sketches out and limits in that way, unappealingly under ground. I say break in order to get a better understanding (I've had to understand so many things since I've begun to play the game) of that hope of a convergence that I might receive from the reflection on a windowpane." ('Manuscript Found in a Pocket,' in A Change of Light and Other Stories by Julio Cortazár, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 103) Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, Belgium, of Argentine
parents, Julio and Mariá (Descotte) Cortazár, abroad on business. When he was four years old, his family
returned to Buenos Aires, where he grew up in Banfield, a suburb. Cortázar
attended the Escuela Normal de Profesores Mariano Acosta, a teachers'
training college. In 1935 he received a degree as a secondary-level
teacher. He studied then two years at the University of Buenos Aires
and taught in secondary schools in Bolívar, Chivilcoy, and Mendoza. At that time Cortázar was not much of a political person, but he managed to create controversy by refusing to kiss the ring of a visiting bishop; instead, he settled for shaking his hand. In 1944-45 he held a post as a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo, Mendoza. Cortázar joined there a protest against Peron and was briefly imprisoned. After being released Cortázar left his post at the university. From 1946 to 1948 he was a director of a publishing company in Buenos Aires. He passed examinations in law and languages and worked then as a translator. In 1951, in opposition to Peron's regime, Cortázar travelled to Paris, where he lived until his death. In 1953 he married Aurora Bernárdez. They separated and Cortázar lived with Carol Dunlop, an American writer and photographer, in later years. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a freelance translator. He translated among others Robinson Crusoe and stories of Edgar Allan Poe into Spanish – Poe's influence is also evident in his work. "No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost" 'Julio Cortázar, Stories,' in Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weingerger, New York, NY: Viking, 1999, pp. 514-515) Los Reyes (1949) was Cortázar's earliest piece of fantasy interest. The long narrative poem constituted a meditation on the role and fate of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Cortázar's first collection of short stories, Bestiario (1951) included 'Casa tomada' (A House Taken Over), in which a middle-aged brother and sister find that their house is invaded by unidentified people. The story was first published by Jorge Luis Borges in the magazine called Los anales de Buenos Aires; Borges's sister illustrated it. "That story was a very fine story, and the only thing I've read by him, called "La casa tomada," "The House Taken Over." I saw him no more. We met once in Paris and he reminded me of the episode—and that's that. You see, I am old, blind, I do not read my contemporaries." (Borges at Eighty: Conversations, edited and with photographs by Willis Barnstone, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 77) 'Casa tomada' set the pattern for a typical Cortázar story –
it begins in the real world, then introduces fantastic elements, which
changes the rules of reality. In the title story a young girl senses
that a tiger is roaming through her house. Other collections followed: Final
de juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Historias
de cronopios y de famas (1962), which included 'The Instruction
Manual', one of his most loved pieces, Todos los fuegos el fuego
(1966), which was written after a visit in Cuba and contained the short
story 'Meeting' (Che Guevara read it but did not consider it
interesting), Octaedro (1974), and Alguien que anda por ahí
(1977). 'Las Babas del Diablo' from Las Armas Secretas was
filmed by the Italian director Michelangelo
Antonioni under the title Blow-Up (1966). In Cortazár's
story, set in Paris but in Antonioni's version in the London fashion
world, the protagonist is Roberto Michael, an amateur photographer, who
sees a teenage boy and a young woman on a square, and shoots the scene.
He develops the roll, enlarges the picture, and realizes that the woman
was seducing the boy for a man in a car. The picture becomes Michael's
life, he speaks of himself both in the fist person and third persons in
the story. "I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way to tell it, and I'm not afraid of repeating myself. It's going to be difficult because nobody nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I'm seeing (clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if, simply, I'm telling a truth which is only my truth, and the is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is." ('Blow-Up,' in Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazár, translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn, Toronto: Collier Books, 1969, p. 101; Originally published under the title End of the Game and Other Stories by Pantheon Books, 1967) Antonioni used in his film version the theme of appearance versus reality and created around it a murder mystery, which he leaves open. Reality becomes in the film merely a subjective statement. "It is a resolution that leaves behind such mundane questions as who killed whom, and why, and how and when murder will out. Events are important only as material for art. And in the world of art, in the triumph of artifice, life itself in an illusion, a Dionysian celebration of masked and anonymous revels." ('The Triumph of Artifice: Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966)' by Neil D. Isaacs, in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, edited by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981, p. 143) As a novelist Cortázar gained first attention with Los premios (1960), which appeared when the author was 46. The story centered on a group of people brought together when they win a mystery cruise in a lottery. The ship-of-fools becomes a microcosmos of the world order. Cortázar's masterpiece, his most famous book, was Rayuela
(1966, Hopscotch), an open-ended anti-novel, in which the reader has
two routes through the material. Most of the novel Cortázar wrote in
France. The protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, is an Argentinian writer and
bibliophile living Paris. "So they had begun to walk about in a fabulous Paris,
letting themselves be guided by the night-time signs, following routes
born of a clochard phrase, of
an attic lit up in the darkness of a streets end, stopping in a little
confidential squares to kiss on the benches or look at the hopscotch
game, those childish rites of a pebble and a hop on one leg to get into
Heaven, Home." (Hopscotch, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 20; first published with the title Rayuela, by Editorial Sudamericana Sociedad Anonima, 1963) Oliveira is surrounded by a circle of bohemian friends, who call themselves "the Club". His great love and mistress is La Maga: "Oh, Maga, whenever I saw a woman who looked like you a clear, sharp pause would close like a deafening silence, collapsing like a wet umbrella being closed." (Ibid., p. 3) After her disappearance, Oliveira returns to Buenos Aires where he works in odd jobs. He meets his childhood friend, Traveler, with whom he operates an insane asylum. He seduces Traveler's wife Talita, who is a reader of encyclopedias, and ends on the border of insanity himself. Oliveira seeks a new world-view outside what is called reality,
but the story doesn't propose any
solution. Oliveira's quest is
depicted with anarchic humor,
imagination, and optimism. He concludes: "The idea is that reality,
whether you accept the version of the Holy See, or of René Char, or of
Oppenheimer, is always a conventional reality, incomplete and divided.
The surprise some guys show in front of an electron microscope doesn't
seem to be any more fruitful to me than the one concierges show at the
miracles of Lourdes." (Ibid., p. 435) There are two narrative sections: chapters 1-36,
which are set in Paris, and chapters 37-56, set in Buenos Aires. The
third selection is entitled "Expendable Chapters." The hopscotch
progress begins at chapter 73. For this reading, led by the directions,
the reader jumps forward and backward through the book Along with such names as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garzía
Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa,
Cortázar became known as one of the major representatives of what was
called the "boom" in Latin American Literature. Rayuela was
intended to be a revolutionary novel; a Latin American equivalent to
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-1767). Sterne's name is not mentioned in the story, Joyce appears once. Latin American critics praised the work as highly original. Some American reviewers were less enthusiactic. The critic and writer Emile Capouya wrote: "At first, from moment to moment, the reader has the conviction that he is in the hands of a master artist. It is only after some time he finds the art to have been improvisation only." ('Cortazár, Julio,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 332) In 62: Modelo para armar (1968) the reader has less instructions to arrange the disconnected parts. Cortázar refers in his introductory note to chapter 62 of Hopscotch, in which the avant-garde novelist Morelli sketches the outline of book he had been planning. Libro de Manuel (1973) focused on the political condition of Latin America. In this case the various characters shuttle from a mysterious Zone and the City according to Godgame-like instructions they cannot understand or disobey. The novel formed a manual for the child Manuel, a sort of collage of press clippings, and among others revealed torture techniques used by U.S. soldiers in the Far East and juxtaposed them to similar tortures suffered by Latin American political prisoners. Cortázar visited Cuba after the revolution, and in 1973 he travelled in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. In the 1970s Cortázar became a member of the Second Russell Tribunal for investigation of human rights abuses in Latin America. He also gave the Sandinistas the royalties of some of his last books and helped financially the families of political prisoners. When the seven-year ban on his entry into Argentina was lifted, he visited his home country and Nicaragua in 1983. In
1975 Cortázar was a visiting lecturer at the University of
Oklahoma, and in 1980 he was a lecturer at Barnard College in New York.
The eight lectures he delivered in Spanish at the University of
California, Berkley, in 1980, were translated and collected in Literature Class (2017). President
Mitterand issued a degree granting him in 1981 French citizenship. Cortázar received numerous awards, including Médicis Prize for Libro de Manuel in 1974 and Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence in 1983. Julio Cortazár died of leukemia in Paris on February 12, 1984. His friend Christina Peri Rossi later pondered in her book Julio Cortázar y Cris (2001) did the author die of AIDS instead of leukemia. Cortázar's works have been translated into several languages, among others into Finnish. "Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed," the Chilean Nobel writer Pablo Neruda once said. However, only ten years after Cortázar's death, he was also characterised as typical for the lost golden age of Latin American letters. For further reading: Cortázar y los libros by Jesús Marchamalo (2022); Cortázar and Music by Nicholas Roberts (2019); Julio Cortázar, una biografía revisada by Miguel Herráez (2011); Julio Cortázar y Cris by Christina Peri Rossi (2001); Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction by Ilan Stavans (1996); Hatful of Tigers: Reflections on Art, Culture and Politics by Sergio Ramirez (1995); Cortázar: l escritor y sus contextos by Estela Cedola (1994); Julio Cortázar: una estética de la búsqueda by Carmen Ortiz (1994); Julio Cortázar's Character Mosaic by Gordana Yovanovich (1991); Como leer a Julio Cortázar by Alicia H. Puleo (1990); Otro round; estudios sobre la obra de Julio Cortázar, edited by Dale E. Carter (1988); La fascinación de las palabras by Omar Prego (1985); En busca del unicornio: los cuentos de Julio Cortázar: elementos para una poética de lo neofantástico by Jaime Alazraki (1983); Julio Cortázar, edited by Pedro Lastra (1981); The Novels of Julio Cortázar by Steven Boldy (1980); The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar, edited by Ivan Ivask and Jaime Alazraki (1978); Julio Cortázar by Evelyn Picon Garfield (1975). Suom: Cortázarilta on suomennettu kokoelmat Salaiset aseet (1984), Bestiario (1999), Tarinoita kronoopeista ja faameista (2001) sekä romaani Ruutuhyppelyä (2005). Selected works:
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