Hopscotch

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African American Kate Chopin Henry James

Poets: Wheatley– Agatha Christie James Joyce
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Jonathan Swift
Julio Cortázar
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
®
©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
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Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloom, Harold.
Julio Cortázar / Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN 0-7910-8134-6 (alk. paper)
1. Cortázar, Julio—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ7797.C7145Z5947 2004
863’.64—dc22
2004026652
Contributing Editor: Elizabeth Beaudin

Cover designed by Keith Trego
Cover photo: © Bettman/CORBIS
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of
publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may
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Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure
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did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in
locating the original source will find bibliographic information on the first page of each
article as well as in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume.
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch 3

Jaime Alazraki
Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing 27

Roberto González Echevarría
Libro de Manuel 41
Steven Boldy
Woman as Circe the Magician 71

Ana Hernández del Castillo
An Interpretation of Rayuela Based on the Character Web 101

Gordana Yovanovich
Grammar Trouble: Cortázar’s Critique of Competence 149

Doris Sommer
Cortázar: On Critics and Interpretation 183

Isabel Alvarez Borland
Justice to Julio Cortázar 195

Ilan Stavans
vi Contents
The Trumpet of Deyá 215

Mario Vargas Llosa
Betwixt Reading and Repetition

(apropos of Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit) 227
Lucille Kerr
“Press Clippings” and Cortázar’s Ethics of Writing 245

Aníbal González
Chronology 267
Contributors 271
Bibliography 275
Acknowledgments 279
Index 281
Editor’s Note
My Introduction centers upon Cortázar as a short story writer, since I prefer

his Borgesian tales to his novels and purely experimental works.
Jaime Alazraki, in a fully informed overview of Cortázar, emphasizes
this fabulist’s art of hindering the reader’s presuppositions, while Roberto
González Echevarría illuminates a Nietzschean element in Cortázar’s
“mythology of writing.”
A Manual for Manuel, a political novel, is judged by Steven Boldy to be
a richly confused work, after which Ana Hernández del Castillo traces the
effect of John Keats upon Cortázar’s work (a radically misread Keats),
particularly in regard to visions of the Circe-like goddess la Maga in Rayuela
(translated as Hopscotch).
Rayuela, a novelistic labyrinth, returns in Gordana Yovanovich’s
interpretation, which concludes that the reader must tease out the meanings
strictly for herself, while Doris Sommer discovers in the jazz novella The
Pursuer Cortázar’s profound critique of his own narrator, a jazz critic.
Isabel Alvarez Borland extends this critique by suggesting that for
Cortázar the critic must become the artist’s double, after which Ilan Stavans
defends Cortázar against those who might see him as a writer of period
pieces. For Stavans, Cortázar was the true heir of Surrealism, and as an
endless experimenter was central to the era of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-
called “Counterculture.”
The major writer Mario Vargas Llosa memorializes Cortázar as a great
fantasist, while Lucille Kerr gives us an appreciation of the indescribable text
62: A Model Kit.
In this volume’s final essay, Aníbal González analyzes the story “Press
Clippings” as an instance of Cortázar’s curious variety of “the ethics of reading.”
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Despite the indisputable influence upon him of his fellow Argentine, Jorge
Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar preferred to see himself as a writer more in the
mode of their common ancestor, Edgar Poe. The American Romantic was
safely distant, in time and place, and more deliciously unhealthy than the
personally staid Borges. Cortázar, like Borges, evaded Freud, as did
Nabokov, another elegant fantasist. The evasions seem curious in Cortázar,
who must have known that Surrealism, his preferred aesthetic, had Freudian
sources and affiliations.
Hopscotch remains the most famous of Cortázar’s longer fictions, but I
fear that it eventually will seem a period piece, as will One Hundred Years of
Solitude, the equally illustrious narrative of Gabriel García Márquez. Both
novels wear out further for me with each rereading. García Márquez did
better with the later Love in the Time of Cholera, and Cortázar seems most
effective to me in his tales, which are at once varied and off-the-beat, like the
Bop jazz he admired.
The novella called, in English, The Pursuer is Cortázar at his
impressive best. It is a kind of elegy for Charlie Parker, founder of Bop with
Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, and Max Roach among
others. They had a long foreground in jazz masters from Louis Armstrong
through Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum and other strong
precursors, yet they were as much a breakthrough as Walt Whitman and
Charles Baudelaire had been. Parker appears in The Pursuer as Johnny
Carter, down and out in a wretched Parisian hotel room, his alto saxophone
lost in the Metro. Bruno, an admiring but self-serving critic, narrates this
extraordinary and celebratory lament for the greatest jazz artist after Louis
Armstrong but, unlike the wise Armstrong, addicted to alcohol and heroin.
1
2 Harold Bloom
There are apocalyptic overtones in The Pursuer, and yet the story is a
naturalistic triumph, far removed from Surrealism. The pathos of Charlie
Parker, a genius trapped by his self-destructive temperament, is conveyed
with superb clarity. But so is the human inadequacy of the critic Bruno, who
apprehends greatness, but stands aside from the apocalyptic abyss of Parker’s
fate.
Michael Wood wisely said of Cortázar that the art of his stories “is the
avoidance of allegory where it seems virtually unavoidable.” Allegory is a
kind of extended irony, in which you say one thing yet mean another. What
you mean wanders off anyway in irony, and Cortázar, unlike Borges, is not
essentially an ironic storyteller. Borges truly resembles Kafka, who made
himself uninterpretable. Cortázar, closer to Poe, longs both for fact and
fantasy, and so far as I know was the first translator of Poe into Spanish.
The mingling of bisexual fact and sublime fantasy is absolute in the
wonderful “Bestiary,” which condenses a novella into just twenty pages.
Isabel, an adolescent, goes off to spend a summer with her aunt-by-marriage,
Rema, at a country house inexplicably containing, at intervals, a tiger. In love
with Rema, Isabel contrives the devouring of Rema’s brother-in-law, a
sadistic fellow called “the Kid,” by the convenient tiger. Cortázar subtly
implies a lesbian passion between Isabel and Rema, which is expedited by the
demise of the Kid.
Cortázar himself was bisexual, and is believed to have died of AIDS.
The tiger in “Bestiary” is not an allegory; sometimes a tiger is only a tiger.
“Bestiary” may be an unusual love story, but it is an endearing and persuasive
one. Like Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Isaac Babel, Borges
and Calvino, Cortázar was one of the canonical story-writers of the twentieth
century.
JAIME ALAZRAKI
Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch
J ulio Cortázar, the most Argentine among Argentine writers, is also,

together with Borges and Octavio Paz, the most universal in a generation of
Spanish American writers which has so definitely changed the status of its
literature and its place in the letters of our time. Hopscotch was the turning
point. Published in Spanish in 1963, it was successively translated into
French, English, Italian, Polish and Portuguese. The English translation by
Gregory Rabassa received the first National Book Award given in this
country for the work of a translator. It was greeted by The New Republic’s
reviewer, C.D.B. Bryan, as “the most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and
visions to emerge from the post-war generation of international writers,” by
the London Times Literary Supplement as the “first great novel of Spanish
America,” and by Carlos Fuentes, who reviewed the book for the prestigious
magazine Commentary, as the novel which “in its depth of imagination and
suggestion, in its maze of black mirrors, in its ironical potentiality-through-
destruction of time and words, marks the true possibility of encounter
between the Latin American imagination and the contemporary world.”1
Donald Keene reviewed Rayuela’s English version for The New York Times
Book Review and concluded that if The Winners, published in English a year
earlier, “earned respectful reviews, Hopscotch, a superb work, should establish
Cortázar as an outstanding writer of our day.”2 A year later the American
From The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. © 1978 University of Oklahoma Press.
3
4 Jaime Alazraki
reader was to discover that the author of one of the most prominent novels
of the century was also a master of the short story. A selection of his short
fiction, translated by Paul Blackburn, was published under the title End of the
Game and Other Stories (Pantheon, 1967).
Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentine parents whose

descent included Basque, French and German forebears. This apparent non-
Argentine background is, however, his most Argentine asset, if one
remembers that 97% of the population in Argentina is of European
extraction. About the circumstances of his birth, he has explained:
My birth in Brussels was the result of tourism and diplomacy. My

father was on the staff of a commercial mission stationed near the
Argentine legation in Belgium, and since he had just gotten
married he took my mother with him to Brussels. It was my lot
to be born during the German occupation of Brussels, at the
beginning of World War I. I was almost four when my family was
able to return to Argentina. I spoke mainly French and from that
language I retained my rolling r which I could never get rid of. I
grew up in Bánfield, a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in a
house with a large garden full of cats, dogs, turtles and parrakeets:
paradise. But in that paradise I was already Adam, in the sense
that I don’t have happy memories from my childhood—too many
chores, an excessive sensitivity, a frequent sadness, asthma,
broken arms, first desperate loves (my story “The Poisons” is very
autobiographical).3
As for his beginnings as a writer, he made the following comments:
Like all children who like to read, I soon tried to write. I

finished my first novel when I was nine years old ... And so on.
And poetry inspired by Poe, of course. When I was twelve,
fourteen, I wrote love poems to a girl in my class ... But after that
it wasn’t until I was thirty or thirty-two—apart from a lot of
poems that are lying about here and there, lost or burned—that I
started to write stories. I knew instinctively that my first stories
shouldn’t be published. I’d set myself a high literary standard and
was determined to reach it before publishing anything. The
stories were the best I could do at the time, but I didn’t think they
were good enough, though there were some good ideas in them.
I never took anything to a publisher.
I’m a schoolteacher. I graduated from Mariano Acosta School
in Buenos Aires, completed the studies for a teacher’s degree, and
then entered the Buenos Aires University School of Liberal Arts.
I passed the first-year exams, but then I was offered a teaching job
in a town in the province of Buenos Aires, and since there was
little money at home, and I wanted to help my mother, who
educated me at great cost and sacrifice—my father had left home
when I was a very small child and had never done anything for the
family—, I gave up my university studies at the first chance I had
to work, when I was twenty years old, and moved to the country.
There I spent five years as a high school teacher. And that was
where I started to write stories, though I never dreamed of
publishing them. A bit later I moved West, to Mendoza, to the
University of Cuyo, where I was offered to teach some courses,
this time at the university level. In 1945–46, since I knew I was
going to lose my job because I’d been in the fight against Perón,
when Perón won the presidential election, I resigned before I was
backed against the wall as so many colleagues who held onto their
jobs were. I found work in Buenos Aires and there I went on
writing stories. But I was very doubtful about having a book
published. In that sense I think I was always clear-sighted. I
watched myself develop, and didn’t force things. I knew that at a
certain moment what I was writing was worth quite a bit more
than what was being written by others of my age in Argentina.
But, because of the high idea I had of literature, I thought it was
a stupid habit to publish just anything as people used to do in
Argentina in those days when a twenty-year-old youngster who’d
written a handful of sonnets used to run around trying to have
them put into print. If he couldn’t find a publisher, he’d pay for a
personal edition himself ... So I held my fire.4
Cortázar’s reference to the anonymous twenty-year-old author of a

book of sonnets describes his generation’s hasty attitude toward publishing,
but it also alludes to his own first collection of sonnets published in 1938
under the title Presencia and pseudonymously signed Julio Denís. This is, so
far, the earliest evidence of his writings and the only book he never allowed
to be reprinted. Copies of this limited first edition, not available today in
6 Jaime Alazraki
most libraries or collections, circulate nonetheless among friends and

devotees, sometimes in xeroxed copies of the original. Cortázar doesn’t care
to talk about this early volume and discards the collection altogether as a
“very Mallarméan” type of poetry. The presence of Mallarmé is apparent,
but in addition Baudelaire, Rosetti and Cocteau are quoted in three
epigraphs, and two poems are devoted to Góngora and Neruda. His reading
of Rimbaud is also evident, supported by one of his earliest prose pieces,
“Rimbaud,” published in 1941 in the literary magazine Huella. Cortázar
acknowledges Rimbaud as one of the most influential poets on his generation
and on surrealism because, he explains there, “Rimbaud is above all a man.
His problem was not a poetic problem but one posed by an ambitious human
realization, to which end the Poem should he the key. This brings him near
to those of us who see poetry as the fulfillment of the self, as its absolute
embodiment and its entelechy.”5 In later essays Cortázar further elaborates
and refines this point concerning surrealism as a world view and poetry as
“an extension of life.” As a young poet he voiced some of the preoccupations
of his generation: poetry as a journey to the self; life as an insoluble mystery;
authenticity as the ultimate test; time, solitude and death. The tone is grave,
elegiac and at times sibylline: “Because this that you call my life / Is my death
feigning my life.”6 One thinks of Quevedo, but from the quotation heading
the poem Cortázar makes clear that his context is not the Spanish conceptist,
but a writer who is to leave a strong impression on him—Jean Cocteau.
Presencia also reveals Cortázar’s early enthusiasm for music in general and for
jazz in particular, and more revealing still is one sonnet in which his
fascination for the fantastic finds a first formulation in a closing triplet:
And what once was true is no longer true,

And night enters through the windows
Open to the realm of the unknown.7
One can understand Cortázar’s reluctance to permit the reedition of this

early volume and his dismissal of its literary merits. As much as he displays
profuse and at times cryptic language and handles the sonnet form with the
skill of a virtuoso, this poetry is still the probing of a poet attitudinizing,
echoing the prestige and elegance of a polished dictionary, conjuring the spell
of the old masters. Cortázar has not yet found his own poetic voice, which
when fully achieved in his more mature poetry of Pameos y meopas, published
in 1971 but including poems written as early as 1951, will prove to be of such
different tenor and timbre—straightforward, attuned to his circumstance, free
of any affectation, masterfully plain and yet by far more complex and intense
than his early attempts. His first volume of poems is reminiscent of the
literary beginnings of another Argentine, Borges, who never allowed the
reprinting of his first three volumes of essays because, he has explained,
I began writing in a very factitious and baroque style. I believe

that what happened to me was happening to many young writers.
Out of timidity, I thought that if I used a plain language people
would suspect that I didn’t know how to write. I felt compelled to
prove that I knew many rare words and that I knew how to
combine them in a surprising way.8
Curiously, it was Borges who published Cortázar’s first short story,

“House Taken Over,” in Los anales de Buenos Aires, a literary journal he edited
and which, together with Sur, was among the most influential literary
magazines published in Argentina at the time. The year, 1946. Talking about
these early contacts with Cortázar, Borges observed:
I don’t know Cortázar’s work at all well, but the little I do know,
a few stories, seems to me admirable. I’m proud of the fact that I
was the first to publish any work by him. When I was the editor
of a magazine named Los anales de Buenos Aires, I remember a tall
young man presenting himself in the office and handing me a
manuscript. I said I would read it, and he came back after a week.
The story was entitled “La casa tomada” (House Taken Over). I
told him it was excellent; my sister Norah illustrated it.9
It couldn’t have been a more auspicious beginning for Cortázar as a fiction

writer. A year later the same journal published his second short story,
“Bestiary,” and a third, “Lejana” (The Distances), appeared the year after in
Cabalgata, a Buenos Aires monthly magazine of arts and letters. It was not
until 1951, the year he left for France not to return except for occasional
visits, that he collected these three stories together with five others in a
volume entitled Bestiario. The book was published at the insistence of a few
close friends who read the stories in manuscript form. About his
unhurriedness, Cortázar has explained: “I was completely sure that from
about, say, 1947, all the things I’d been putting away were good, some of
them even very good. I am referring, for example, to some of the stories of
Bestiario. I knew nobody had written stories like those before in Spanish, at
least in my country. There were others, the admirable tales by Borges, for
instance, but what I was doing was different.”10
8 Jaime Alazraki
And indeed it was. There are some stories whose subjects bring to mind
those of Borges, sort of variations on a same theme; but even when that is the
case, the common subject only underlines the differences. A good example is
Borges’s “Streetcorner Man” and Cortázar’s “El móvil” (The Motive). Both
stories deal with a similar character (the compadre as the city counterpart in
courage and sense of honor to the gaucho in the countryside), both present
a similar plot (an infamous act that must be avenged), and both surprise the
reader with an unexpected turn in the sequence of events leading to their
denouement. Yet Cortázar’s treatment of this common theme differs
considerably from the one adopted by Borges. While Borges follows a linear
unfolding of the basic conflict, in Cortázar’s story the plot ramifies into a
double conflict, thus creating within a single narrative space two spaces that
the reader must discover as a hidden double bottom. Stylistically, Borges has
fused some living speech patterns of the compadre with a language in which
the reader recognizes the traits of Borges’s own playful style. This deliberate
hybridization works, because in re-creating the compadre’s speech as the
narrator of the story, Borges proceeds with the knowledge that the problem
confronting a writer is not that of reproducing with the fidelity of a tape
recorder the voice of his protagonists but that of producing the illusion of his
voice, and this illusion is based on a literary convention. Cortázar’s stylistic
solution, on the other hand, is different. Since his character-narrator lives in
an Argentina contemporaneous with his own writing, he rejects the use of an
exclusive vernacular to adopt instead a Spanish closer to that used by a
Porteño type he is fully familiar with and not too different from his own—in
summary, a Spanish which best captures the tone of the narrative, which best
fits the theme and intention of the story and which becomes its most
powerful vehicle of characterization.
This stylistic answer typifies Cortázar’s overall approach to the use of
language in his stories. He himself has pointed out that:
... in a great style language ceases to be a vehicle for the

expression of ideas and feelings and yields to a borderline state in
which it is no longer a mere language to become actually the very
presence of what has been expressed.... What is told in a story
should indicate by itself who is speaking, at what distance, from
what perspective and according to what type of discourse. The
work is not defined so much by the elements of the fabula or their
ordering as by the modes of the fiction, tangentially indicated by
the enunciation proper of the fabula.11
In most of his stories the challenge lies precisely in the search for a voice
without falsetto, a genuine voice through which his characters embody
themselves. In a strange way, mimesis at its best, the author keeps quiet so
that the narrative can speak for itself, from within, and find the language
which suits in the most natural manner its inner needs and own intents, a
paradoxical immanence by means of which the characters lend their voices to
the author.
It has also been a facile operation to throw Borges and Cortázar into
the same bag loosely labeled as the fantastic. The truth is that neither of
them has much in common with the nineteenth-century European and
American writers who, between 1820 and 1850, produced the masterpieces
of the fantastic genre.12 Sensing the imprecision of the designation, Cortázar
himself has said about this, “Most of the stories I have written belong to the
genre called fantastic for lack of a better name.”13 And on the same subject,
he has explained to the interviewer of La Quinzaine Littéraire:
Le grand fantastique, le fantastique qui fait les meilleurs contes,

est rarement axé sur a joie, l’humour, les choses positives. Le
fantastique est négatif, il approche toujours de l’horrible, de
l’épouvante. Ça a donné le roman “gothique,” avec ses chaînes et
ses fantômes, etc. Puis ça a donné Edgar Allan Poe qui a vraiment
inventé le conte fantastique moderne—toujours horrible aussi. Je
ne suis pas arrivé á savoir pourquoi le fantastique est axé sur le
côté nocturne de l’homme et non sur le côté diurne.14
Neither Borges nor Cortázar is interested in this nocturnal side of man, in

assaulting the reader with the fears and horrors which have been defined as
the attributes of the fantastic.15 Yet it is clear that in their stories there is a
fantastic dimension which runs against the grain of the realist or
psychological forms of fiction, allowing for uncanny events intolerable
within a realist code. Accepting this fact, and acknowledging at the same time
that the definition of “fantastic” for this type of narrative is incongruous, I
have suggested elsewhere to refer to them as “neofantastic” as a way of
distinguishing them from their distant, nineteenth-century relatives.16 This
is not the place to expand on a proposal for a poetics of this new genre, but
it seems reasonably acceptable to view certain works by Kafka, Blanchot,
Borges, Cortázar and several others in Latin America as expressions of the
neofantastic. Rather than “playing with the readers’ fears,” as the fantastic
sought, the neofantastic, as Cortázar has put it in defining his own short
fiction, “seeks an alternative to that false realism which assumed that
10 Jaime Alazraki
everything can be neatly described as was upheld by the philosophic and

scientific optimism of the eighteenth century, that is, within a world ruled
more or less harmoniously by a system of laws, of principles, of causal
relations, of well defined psychologies, of well mapped geographies.”
Cortázar concludes, “In my case, the suspicion of another order, more secret
and less communicable, and the fertile discovery of Alfred Jarry, for whom
the true study of reality did not rest on laws but on the exceptions to those
laws, were some of the guiding principles of my personal search for a
literature beyond overly naîve forms of realism.”17
Much as Borges and Cortázar approach the fantastic in an effort not to
terrify the reader but to shake his epistemological assumptions, to immerse
him in a world where “the unreal” invades and contaminates the real, their
stories can be described as the obverse and the reverse of that same effort.
Borges has said that everything that has happened to him is illusory and that
the only thing real in his life is a library. This would be a dubious statement
were it not for the fact that the world, as we know it, is a creation of culture,
an artificial world in which, according to Lévi-Strauss, man lives as a member
of a social group.18 Leaning on the nature of culture as a fabrication of the
human mind, Borges has written, “We have dreamed the world. We have
dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in
time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of unreason in its
structure so we may know that it is false.”19 Borges penetrates these illogical
interstices in an attempt to unweave that tidy labyrinth of reason woven by
culture to find finally that art and language (and science, for that matter) are,
can only be, symbols—however, “not in the sense of mere figures which refer
to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but
in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own.”20
Motivated by this inference, Borges finds the road that leads to the
universe of his fiction: “Let us admit what all idealists admit the hallucinatory
nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us seek
unrealities that confirm that nature.”21 He has found those unrealities not in
the realm of the supernatural or the marvelous but in those symbols and
systems which define our own reality in philosophies and theologies which in
some way constitute the core of our culture. Hence the countless references
in his stories to authors and books, to theories and doctrines; hence the aura
of the bookishness and intellection that pervades his work; and hence his
constant insistence on his having said nothing new, because what he wrote
was already written in other literatures. It was written in the same way that
the Quixote had been written before Pierre Menard, but Menard’s merit lies
in his reading the Quixote as it couldn’t have been read in Cervantes’s time.
Borges, for whom “one literature differs from another, either before or after
it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read,”22
reads that “respected system of perplexities we call philosophy” in a new
context. The ingredients do not change, just as the number of colored glass
bits contained in a kaleidoscope is always the same, but with each movement
of the tube the symmetrical image does change. Borges deals with human
culture as if he were holding a kaleidoscope, but after his master stroke the
image is no longer the same. The alchemy consists in presenting our reality,
what we have come to accept as our reality, transfigured in a dream, in one
more phantasmagoria of the mind which has little or nothing to do with the
real world it seeks to penetrate.
Cortázar’s fictional world, on the other hand, rather than an
acceptance, represents a challenge to culture, a challenge, as he puts it, to
“thirty centuries of Judeo-Christian dialectics,” to “the Greek criterion of
truth and error,” to the homo sapiens, to logic and the law of sufficient
reason and, in general, to what he calls “the Great Habit.” If Borges’s
fantasies are oblique allusions to the situation of man in a world he can never
fully fathom, to an order he has created as a substitute labyrinth to the one
created by a divine mind, Cortázar’s stories strive to transcend the schemes
and constructs of culture and seek precisely to touch that order Borges finds
too abstruse and complex to be understood by man. The first stumbling
block Cortázar encounters in this quest is language itself: “I’ve always found
it absurd,” he says, “to talk about transforming man if man doesn’t
simultaneously, or previously, transform his instrument of knowledge. How
to transform oneself if one continues to use the same language Plato used?”23
He found a first answer in surrealism. As early as 1949 he defined surrealism
as “the greatest undertaking of contemporary man as an anticipation and
attempt toward an integrated humanism.”24 Cortázar saw in surrealism not
a mere literary technique or a simple esthetic stand, but a world view or, as
he said in the same article, “not a school or an ism but a Weltanschauung.”
When surrealism settled for less than “an integrated humanism,” Cortázar
confronted some of its inconsistencies through the pages of Hopscotch. One
of its characters, Étienne, says in chapter 99:
The surrealists thought that true language and true reality were
censored and relegated by the rationalist and bourgeois structure
of the Western world. They were right, as any poet knows, but
that was just a moment in the complicated peeling of the banana.
Result, more than one of them ate it with the skin still on. The
surrealists hung from words instead of brutally disengaging
12 Jaime Alazraki
themselves from them, as Morelli would like to do from the word

itself. Fanatics of the verbum in a pure state, frantic wizards, they
accepted anything as long as it didn’t seem excessively
grammatical. They didn’t suspect enough that the creation of a
whole language, even though it might end up betraying its sense,
irrefutably shows human structure, whether that of a Chinese or
a redskin. Language means residence in reality, living in a reality.
Even if it’s true that the language we use betrays us ..., wanting to
free it from its taboos isn’t enough. We have to relive it, not re-
animate it.25
The second obstacle Cortázar stumbles upon in this search for

authenticity is the use of our normative categories of thought and
knowledge, our rational tools for apprehending reality. He believes in a kind
of marvelous reality (here again the affinity with surrealism is obvious).
“Marvelous,” he explains, “in the sense that our daily reality masks a second
reality which is neither mysterious nor theological, but profoundly human.
Yet, due to a long series of mistakes, it has remained concealed under a reality
prefabricated by many centuries of culture, a culture in which there are great
achievements but also profound aberrations, profound distortions.”26
Among those distorted notions which obstruct man’s access to a more
genuine world, Cortázar points a finger to our perception of death and to
two of the most established concepts in the Western grasp of reality—time
and space.
The notions of time and space, as they were conceived by the

Greeks and after them by the whole of the West, are flatly
rejected by Vedanta. In a sense, man made a mistake when he
invented time. That’s why it would actually be enough for us to
renounce mortality, to take a jump out of time, on a level other
than that of daily life, of course. I’m thinking of the phenomenon
of death, which for Western thought has been a great scandal, as
Kierkegaard and Unamuno realized so well; a phenomenon that
is not in the least scandalous in the East where it is regarded not
as an end but as a metamorphosis.27
As much as Cortázar sees the East as an alternative to this preoccupation

with time and space, he also realizes that it cannot be an answer for Western
man, who is the product of a different tradition, a tradition one cannot
simply undo or replace. If there is an answer to the questions of time and
space, it lies in a relentless confrontation with them in a manner similar to

the struggle Unamuno memorably represented in the fight between Jacob
and the Angel. “Rayuela, like so much of my work,” Cortázar says, “suffers
from hyperintellectuality. But, I’m not willing or able to renounce that
intellectuality, insofar as I can breathe life into it, make it pulse in every
thought and word.”28
It is this kind of coalescence between two diametrically opposed
dimensions—one natural and one supernatural, one historical and one
fantastic—that constitutes the backbone of Cortázar’s neofantastic short
fiction. The beggar whom the protagonist of “Lejana” meets in the center of
a bridge in Budapest, the noises that expel the brother and sister from their
“house taken over,” the rabbits that the narrator of “A Letter to a Lady in
Paris” helplessly vomits, the tiger that roams freely through the rooms of a
middle-class family’s house in “Bestiary,” the dead character who is yet more
alive than the living ones in “Cartas de mamá,” the dream that becomes real
and converts its dreamer into a dream in “The Night Face Up,” the reader
who enters the fiction and ends up fictionalizing reality in “Continuity of
Parks”—these are but a few examples of how the realist code yields to a code
which no longer responds to our causal categories of time and space. In these
stories the reverse side of the phenomenal world is sought, an order
scandalously in conflict with the order construed by logical thinking; hence
the incongruities we call “fantastic.”
But the fantastic event in these tales does not aim, as it did in the
nineteenth century, at assailing and terrifying us with “a crack,” as Roger
Caillois says of the fantastic genre.29 From the outset the realist scale is
juxtaposed with the fantastic one. In “Axolotl” the opening paragraph reads,
“There was a time when I thought a great deal about axolotls. I went to see
them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching
them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an
axolotl.”30 In this text there is not, as is the case in most neofantastic fiction,
a gradual process of presentation of the real which finally yields to a fissure
of unreality. In contrast to the nineteenth-century fantastic fiction in which
the text moves from the familiar and natural to the unfamiliar and
supernatural, like a journey through a known and recognizable territory
which eventually leads to an unknown and dreadful destination, the writers
of the neofantastic bestow equal validity and verisimilitude on both orders.
They have no difficulty in moving with the same freedom and ease in both.
This unbiased approach is in itself a profession of faith. The unstated
assumption declares that the fantastic level is just as real (or unreal, from a
realist standpoint) as the realist level. If one of them produces in us a surreal
14 Jaime Alazraki
or fantastic feeling, it is because in our daily lives we follow logical notions

similar to those that govern the realist mode.
The neofantastic writer, on the other hand, ignores these distinctions
and approaches both levels with the same sense of reality. The reader senses,
nevertheless, that Cortázar’s axolotl is a metaphor (a metaphor and not a
symbol) that conveys meanings unconveyable through logical
conceptualizations, a metaphor that strives to express messages inexpressible
through the realist code. The metaphor (rabbits, tiger, noises, axolotl,
beggar) provides Cortázar with a structure capable of producing new
referents, even if their references are yet to be established or, to use I. A.
Richards’s terminology, the vehicles with which these metaphors confront us
point to unformulated tenors. We know we are dealing with vehicles of
metaphors because they suggest meanings that exceed their literal value, but
it is the reader’s task to perceive and define those meanings, to determine the
tenor to which the vehicle points.
When personally asked about the meanings implied in those
metaphors, Cortázar has answered: “I know as much as you do.” This is not
a subterfuge. He once explained, “The great majority of my stories were
written—how should I say—in spite of my own will, above or below my
reasoning consciousness, as if I were but a medium through which a strange
force passed and manifested itself.”31 Some even originated as dreams or
nightmares:
Il est vrai que certain de mes contes sont nés directement de

cauchemars ou de rêves. Un des premiers contes que j’ai écrits,
“La maison occupée”, procède d’un cauchemar. C’en est la
transcription très fidèle bien que travaillée littérairement,
évidemment.... Si je faisais une statistique de ceux de mes contes
que je dois aux rêves, ils se situeraient en nette minorité.
Quelques-uns évidemment sont faits de lambeaux de rêves, mais
c’est lorsque je suis éveillé que le fantastique tombe sur moi
comme une pierre.32
All this may sound too close to the surrealist explorations of the unconscious,
to the prescriptions included by Breton in the Manifestos regarding automatic
writing and transcription of dreams. Any page written by Cortázar will
suffice, however, to dispel that impression. If he, on one hand, acknowledges
the strong influence surrealism had on him at the beginning of his work, it is
equally true, on the other, that it was an influence on outlook and philosophy
rather than on technique and style. Cortázar’s stories are built with the
rigorous precision and, at the same time, subtle naturalness of a cobweb. The
text flows with the same perfection one finds in those fragile fabrics
beautifully spun between two wires of a fence or in the branches of a tree.
But there is nothing fragile in the texture of any of his stories. Quite the
contrary. The text displays such an economy of means, it streams with such
ease and determination, it arrives so convincingly at its destination, one is
tempted to say the story has been told by itself, that what the reader has in
front of him is a structure woven by the text itself and that, like those
seashells which have engraved on themselves with silent perfection traces of
undefiled beauty, on that limpid surface nothing is in excess and nothing is
lacking.
Cortázar likes to think that with his novels, and more specifically with
the long story “The Pursuer,” he begins to unloose the stylistic perfection
with which his stories are knitted. He also believes that with this change he
moves to a new stage in his development as a writer.
When I wrote “The Pursuer,” I had reached a point where I felt

I had to deal with something that was looser to me. I wasn’t sure
of myself any more in that story. I took up an existential problem,
a human problem which was later amplified in The Winners, and
above all in Hopscotch. Fantasy for its own sake had stopped
interesting me. By then I was fully aware of the dangerous
perfection of the storyteller who reaches a certain level of
achievement and stays on that same level forever, without moving
on. I was a bit sick and tired of seeing how well my stories turned
out. In “The Pursuer” I wanted to stop inventing and stand on
my own ground, to look at myself a bit. And looking at myself
meant looking at my neighbor, at man. I hadn’t looked too closely
at people until I wrote “The Pursuer.”33
But, of course, the new linguistic mood he finds in this long story, and later
in his subsequent novels, is not the deterioration of his previous style but a
new form of expression which tackles more effectively the nature of his new
concerns. Cortázar defines those new concerns as “existential and
metaphysical” as opposed to his esthetic pursuits in the short story.
The truth is, though, as Cortázar well knows, that his short stories and
his novels are motivated by a common search, by a quest for authenticity
16 Jaime Alazraki
which is of one piece in both genres. Otherwise, how does one understand
his own definition of Hopscotch as “the philosophy of my stories, as an
examination of what determined, throughout many years, their substance or
thrust”?34 Hopscotch articulates the same questions around which the stories
are built; but if the novel is a reflection, an effort to brood upon those
questions the stories are narrative translations of those same questions.
Hopscotch traces the mandala through which the characters of the stories are
constantly journeying. Those characters do not speculate or intellectualize;
they simply deliver themselves to the passions and games sweeping their
lives, moved and battered by forces they don’t understand. Hopscotch seeks to
understand those forces, and as such it represents the intellectual bow from
which the stories were shot. The proof that this is indeed the case lies in the
fact that some of the central inquiries found in Hopscotch were already
outlined in the early essays and reviews Cortázar wrote before and during his
writing of the short stories. His tales were fantastic responses to those
problems and questions which occupied his mind at the time and which
eventually found a masterful formulation in Hopscotch. It goes without saying
that Hopscotch’s hyperintellectual ponderings alone do,not explain the stories;
Cortázar combined his intellectual spurs with his own passions and phobias,
and the latter are as enigmatic to him as to the reader.
If Horacio Oliveira seeks through the pages of Hopscotch a second
reality which has been covered by a it and culture in our present version of
reality, and Johnny Carter in “The Pursuer” perceives through intuition and
artistic imagination dimensions of reality which have been buried by
conceptualization, the characters of the stories also find their ultimate
realization on a fantastic plane that is the reverse of that stiff reality to which
habit and culture have condemned them. In “Lejana,” for instance, one of
Cortázar’s earliest short stories, the protagonist searches for a bridge at
whose center she hopes to find that part of her self rejected and suffocated
by family, friends and environment. She does find it, as a beggar waiting on
a Budapest bridge, a beggar in whom she recognizes her true self, a sort of
double whose reality bursts from her imagination, like a fantastic event, onto
a historical plane. Similarly, the protagonist of “The Pursuer,” a jazzman
modeled after saxophonist Charlie Parker, searches for “a reality that escapes
every day” and that sometimes presents itself as “holes”: “In the door,” he
explains, “in the bed: holes. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air:
everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining
itself....”35 Those holes, invisible or covered for others, are for Johnny the
residence of “something else,” of a second reality whose door Johnny senses
and seeks to open: “It’s impossible there’s nothing else, it can’t be we’re that
close to it, that much on the other side of the door ... Bruno, all my life in
my music I looked for that door to open finally. Nothing, a crack....”
(215–16). What is behind that door is a world that Johnny sees only on one
occasion, through his music, but whose substance one glimpses throughout
the narrative. A good example is the biography of Johnny written by Bruno:
very well informed, very complete, very successful, but with one omission—
the biographee. Or as Johnny puts it, “It’s very good your book.... You’re
much better informed than I am, but it seems to me like something’s
missing.... Don’t get upset, Bruno, it’s not important that you forgot to put
all that in. But Bruno, ... what you forgot to put in is me” (207, 212).
Cortázar has acknowledged that Johnny Carter is a first draft of
Horacio Oliveira, a precursor in that search which takes the protagonist of
Hopscotch into a revision of the very foundations of Western culture—its
writers and artists, its music and language, its philosophy and ethics, its
religion and science—a task Oliveira undertakes together with his friends of
the Serpent Club with the casualness and poignancy that makes fiction more
credible and convincing than pure intellection. Jung has said of Freud that
“he has given expression to the fact that Western man is in danger of losing
his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and
of identifying the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific
rationalism.”36 This is also Oliveira’s concern; but to show that man has
become “the slave of his own fiction, and that a purely conceptual world
progressively replaces reality,” as Jung has said of the products of man’s
conscious activity, Cortázar proceeds to disassemble that fictitious apparatus
manufactured by culture to show that it has become a substitute of reality, a
mask that must be removed if man is to retain touch with the real world and
with himself. In this sense, Hopscotch is a devastating criticism of rationalism:
... this technological reality that men of science and the readers of
France-Soir accept today, this world of cortisone, gamma rays, and
the elution of plutonium, has as little to do with reality as the
world of the Roman de la Rose.... Man, after having expected
everything from intelligence and the spirit, feels that he’s been
betrayed, is vaguely aware that his weapons have been turned
against him, that culture, civiltà, have misled him into this blind
alley where scientific barbarism is nothing but a very
understandable reaction. (444–45)
As in “The Pursuer,” in Hopscotch reality lies also somewhere behind:

“Behind all that (it’s always behind, convince yourself that this is the key idea
18 Jaime Alazraki
of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which

weeping darkly seeks the land of Hurgaly?” (377). How does one get there?
How does one reach that center, the “kibbutz of desire” which Oliveira
seeks? In his short stories the road is a fantastic event; the conflict between a
hollow reality and one which, like an epiphany, reveals to the characters a
time outside time and a space that transcends geometric space, resolves itself
in metaphors that by defying physical laws appear as fantastic occurrences. In
“The Pursuer” Johnny Carter peeps through those “holes” of a second
reality via his jazz music; the artistic phenomenon becomes what it has always
been—“a bridge toward true reality,” in Nietzsche’s dictum—but now
Johnny transports his visions to the trivial act of riding a subway and indicts
the fallacy inherent in our concepts of time and space. In Hopscotch our
logical order of reason and science is described as totally absurd: “Reason is
only good to mummify reality in moments of calm or analyze its future
storms, never to resolve a crisis of the moment.... And these crises that most
people think of as terrible, as absurd, I personally think they serve to show us
the real absurdity, the absurdity of an ordered and calm world” (163–64).
Oliveira muses on this absurd world when he concludes that “only by living
absurdly is possible to break out of this infinite absurdity” (101). Hopscotch
offers an answer different from the one found in the short stories and even
in “The Pursuer,” where Johnny, as much as he lives a life which in Bruno’s
eyes can only be described as “absurd,” engages in a life style of a musical
genius who indulges in his allotted share of “absurdity”; it is music which in
the end provides for Johnny a bridge to those “holes.” The characters of
Hopscotch, on the other hand, are unprofessional, simple, though extremely
well-read and informed people who, as much as they live a bohemian life,
share the pettiness and trivia of plain people.
Thus the solution Hopscotch resents to Cortázar’s basic quest for
authenticity is a kind of existential absurdity, a solution that also had a very
strong appeal to surrealists since Mallarmé’s Igitur: “Igitur is a person ‘who
feels in himself, thanks to the absurd the existence of the Absolute.’ After him
the Surrealists will enlarge and maintain the domain of the absolute through
this very same type of cult of the absurd which will tend to become the basis
of artistic creation and a means of liberating art from the finite or natural
aspects of things and beings.”37 It is in this context that some of the most
momentous chapters of Hopscotch should be read: the concert by Berthe
Trépat, the death of Rocamadour, the encounter with the clocharde, the
episodes of the board, the circus and the mental clinic. These seemingly
preposterous situations impress us as a absurd because they run against the
grain of our accepted order, which for Oliveira has become absurdity at its
best. For him, reason contains a sophism as huge as the world it has created,
and logic leads to a gargantuan and catastrophic nowhere. To pull out from
this dead end, Oliveira embarks on feats and situations which, though they
offer him on one hand a route to further exploration of that dead end, act on
the other hand as a modified virus of the same disease which hopefully will
immunize him. And although Hopscotch presents no answers, no prescriptions
for guaranteed salvation it offers a possibility of reconciliation. Toward the
end of his absurd odyssey Horacio meditates on the significance of his friend
Traveler’s last efforts to lend him a helping hand. Horacio seems to have
reached the last square of his hopscotch:
After what Traveler had just done, everything had something like
a marvelous feeling of conciliation and that senseless but vivid
and present harmony could not be violated, could no longer be
falsified, basically Traveler was what he might well have been
with a little less cursed imagination, he was the man of the
territory, the incurable mistake of the species gone astray, but
how much beauty in the mistake and in the five thousand years of
false and precarious territory, how much beauty in those eyes that
had filled with tears and in that voice that had advised him:
“Throw the bolt, I don’t trust them,” how much love in that arm
that held the waist of a woman. “Probably,” Oliveira thought
while he answered the friendly gestures of Dr. Ovejero and
Ferraguto, ... “the only possible way to escape from that territory
is to plunge into it over one’s head.” (347)
Cortázar’s next novel, 62: A Model Kit, derives from chapter 62 of

Hopscotch and represents his novelistic answer to Oliveira’s search for
alternatives to that fabricated reality criticized in the earlier novel. In chapter
62 Morelli sketches the outline of “a book he had been planning but that
never got beyond a few scattered notes.” “If I were to write this book,” he
continues, “standard behavior ... would be inexplicable by means of current
instrumental psychology.... Everything would be a kind of disquiet, a
continuous uprooting, a territory where psychological causality would yield
disconcertedly, and those puppets would destroy each other or love each
other or recognize each other without suspecting too much that life is trying
to change its key in and through and by them, that a barely conceivable
attempt is born in man as one other day there were being born the reason-
key, the feeling-key, the pragmatism-key” (363). 62: A Model Kit is the
implementation of this attempt.
20 Jaime Alazraki
The novel is, as Cortázar advances in the foreword, a transgression, not

only at the most manifest level of language but also as an effort to understand
life by cognitive means other than the ones rationally codified by science.
Hence psychology is no longer the yardstick. What replaces psychology as
the criterion to measure human behavior? A mixture of game, vampirism38
and an intangible magnetic force that groups people into what Cortázar calls
figuras or human constellations. The notions of time and space as
traditionally accepted are no longer the ordinate and the abscissa which
frame and regulate life. In 62 the action takes place in Paris, London and
Vienna, but the characters move and act in these different cities as if they
were one single space referred to as la ciudad (the city). This new space is no
longer a confining area which imposes on the characters the limitations of its
own perimeter; it is a new medium that the characters stretch, shape and
dispose of like a chessboard to play their own games. It matters not if Marrast
and Nicole are in London, Hélène and Celia in Paris, Juan and Tell in
Vienna; they move and interact from one city to the other horizontally,
vertically and diagonally, using the cities as square spaces for their traps,
gambits and inevitable checks. But they ignore the rules of the game they
play. Their movements are controlled by forces they dimly grasp and which
ultimately escape their consciousness, like chess pieces unaware of the
player’s designs and strategies. Physical or conventional time also recedes to
a sort of mythical time in which “the before and the after touch and are one
and the same.”39 The characters’ nights and days are pivoted around the
ominous and invisible rule of the Countess (Erszebet Báthory), whose
legendary past marks the birth of vampirism. That past becomes present, and
the present in which the characters reside sends them back to that legendary
past, in which context one begins to understand in part the patterns that
shape their destiny.
The model kit in the title alludes, as Cortázar points out in the
foreword, not so much to the structure of the novel as to the task of
assembling an intimated meaning by putting together the various elements
of a possible combinatoria. In form, the novel is built with the precision and
cleverness of a clockwork. The first thirty pages that introduce the rest of the
narrative contain, like the slide in Nicolas Roeg’s memorable film Don’t Look
Now, the basic ingredients of which the novel is made: the name of the
restaurant, the mistranslation of a customer’s order, Juan’s own order of a
bottle of Sylvaner, the book Juan carries and opens by chance to a certain
page, the date (Christmas Eve) and fragments of the story the novel is about
to unfold. In this long soliloquy that streams through Juan’s consciousness as
he sits facing a mirror in the restaurant, Cortázar has disclosed the leading
strands that tie together the meandering ramifications of the entire novel. In
this sense, the overture is like a cocoon which already holds the full length of
the thread the text patiently and skillfully unwinds. The mirror Juan faces in
the restaurant anticipates the reflective quality of the introductory passage
and also defines the mirrorlike symmetries with which the novel is
constructed. Each character seems to be a reflection or double of another:
Frau Marta echoes Erszebet Báthory, and the English girl she violates has a
counterpart in Celia, who is violated by Hélène, who in turn seems to be
under the spell of Countess Báthory; Marrast loves Nicole, who loves Juan,
who loves Hélène; the seduction of an adolescent girl (Celia) is matched by
the seduction of an adolescent boy (Austin); Polanco and Calac are each like
the inverted image of the other; the long section about Frau Marta and the
possession of the English girl parallels and crisscrosses, at the same time, the
equally long section about the possession of Celia by Hélène, and the doll
made by monsieur Ochs that Juan gives to Tell and Tell sends to Hélène
bridges the two sections as the clue to both stories. Finally, Hélène is guilt-
ridden by the death of one of her patients, who hauntingly reminds her of
Juan, and toward the end of the novel she is killed by Austin, who loves Celia;
Hélène is thus the vertex of two triangles, in each of which there is a deceased
and in each of which a member of one sex is linked to two of the other:
Hélène–Patient–Juan and Austin–Hélène–Celia.
The text itself, as discourse, shares these equidistances: first, in the
relation between the introduction and the body of the novel in a proportion
similar to the one between a code and its decoder; second, in the way the
myth of the Countess Báthory and the “blood castle” at the very beginning
of the novel exchanges signals toward the end with a second myth, the story
of Diana and Acteon from Greek mythology, mentioned by Juan on page 235
and subsequently discussed by him and Hélène in the following pages; and
third, the black pontoon that mysteriously appears at the end of the
introduction carrying Frau Marta and reappears towards the end of the novel
with Frau Marta on it, but this time bewitching Nicole, who also travels
through the canal on “the same” black pontoon. In addition, the scene in the
restaurant is described as the point where the various pieces of a puzzle
finally fall into place, bringing the bizarre and liquid ingredients of Juan’s
blood story to “coagulation,” to a curdling point and a frozen time where for
Juan “the before and the after had fallen apart in his hands, leaving him a
light, useless rain of dead moths” (24).
But if for a moment this curdled figura, which creates its own space and
generates its own time, which seeks to perceive and define reality in terms
that defy causality, makes us think of or suspect a flight from history, it is only
22 Jaime Alazraki
so because we have tended for too long to associate the concern for man and
his social plight with facile pamphlets mistakenly taken as “literature” of
protest. Cortázar knows too well that there are no easy answers, that the fires
and horrors of history cannot be put out or even placated by making
literature impersonate roles and gestures which create false illusions and
hollow expectations and end up adulterating and finally canceling its true
capabilities. His next and latest novel so far, Libro de Manuel, is an effort to
show that a writer can undertake to deal with the social problems of his time
without turning into a puppeteer whose script has been set beforehand as an
adaptation of political slogans and ideological platitudes. Cortázar is torn in
this novel between his responsibilities as a writer who respects and values his
craft and his responsibilities as a man who lives immersed in his time and
feels part of the Latin American destiny. And again the answer is neither
simple nor clear-cut. In Hopscotch Horacio ponders the dilemma and its
double-edged nature:
Besides, what was the true morality of action? A social action

like that of the syndicalists was more than justified in the field of
history. Happy were those who lived and slept in history.... There
was no objection to that action as such, but he pushed it aside
with doubts about his personal conduct. He would suspect a
betrayal the moment he gave in to posters on the street or
activities of a social nature; a betrayal disguised as satisfactory
work, daily happiness, satisfied conscience, fulfilled duty. He was
too well acquainted with certain communists in Buenos Aires and
Paris, capable of the worst villainy but redeemable in their own
minds by “the struggle,” by having to leave in the middle of
dinner to run to a meeting or finish a job. Social action in those
people seemed too much like an alibi, the way children are
usually the alibi for mothers’ not having to do anything worth
while in this life, the way learning with its blinders is useful in not
learning that in the jail down the street they are still guillotining
guys who should not be guillotined. False action is almost always
the most spectacular, the kind that tears down respect, prestige,
and whequestrian wheffigies. (417–18)
Andrés, the protagonist of Libro de Manuel and a sort of outgrowth of

Horacio Oliveira, seeks a political answer without suppressing his human
condition and without impinging on his individual rights and endeavors.
Thus his political search becomes an act of assertion of his freedom and of
his personal realization. The road leading to this ultimate goal is a tortuous
and agonizing one, since in the long run any genuine social struggle implies
the suppression or assimilation of personal struggles, or at least their
postponement, to the cause one is engaged in. In his last conversation with
Lonstein, Andrés defends his rights up to the last, sensing that the slightest
form of mutilation conceals a betrayal:
—You, sir, want a lot of things, but you don’t give up any.
—No, I don’t give up anything, pal.
—Not even a tiny bit? Say, an exquisite author? A Japanese
poet known only to you?
—No, not even that.
—What about your Xenakis, your aleatory music, your free
jazz, your Joni Mitchell, your abstract lithographs?
—No, brother. Nothing. I take everything with me wherever
I go.
—You really have it your way. don’t you?—said Lonstein—.
You want to have the pie and eat it too, right?
—Yes sir—said Andrés.40
But as much as this novel takes Cortázar into exploring his own social and
political concerns, Libro de Manuel is also, like his previous works, part of his
relentless effort to liberate man. This new man should be the product of a
new kind of humanism Cortázar has striven to outline throughout his poetry,
essays and fiction. Each of them is a stretch of a route seeking to arrive at a
center, at a final island, at a world that “exists in this one” but that “one has
to create like the phoenix.” As there are no easy answers for Cortázar, there
are no final answers either. He is a nonconformist, a rebel or, what amounts
to the same thing, a poet who searches through literature “to earn the right
to enter the house of man.”
NOTES
1. Carlos Fuentes, “A Demanding Novel,” Commentary (New York), October 1966,

pp. 142–43.
2. Donald Keene, “Moving Snapshots,” The New York Times Book Review, 10 April
1966, p. 1.
3. Graciela de Sola, Julio Cortázar y el hombre nuevo, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana,
1968, p. 9 (my translation).
4. Luis Harss, Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream, New York, Harper & Row,
1967, pp. 214–15.
24 Jaime Alazraki
5. Julio Denís (Julio Cortázar), “Rimbaud,” Huella (Buenos Aires), no. 2 (July 1941);
Quoted by G. De Sola, p. 14.
6. Julio Denís (Julio Cortázar), “Quitadme,” from his Presencia, Buenos Aires, El
Bibliófilo, 1938, p. 40 (my translation).
7. Ibid., p. 94 (my translation). The Spanish pun cierto/incierto is lost in translation.
8. James E. Irby, “Encuentro con Borges,” Vida universitaria (Monterrey, Mex.), 12
April 1964, p. 14.
9. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices, New York, Vintage, 1973, p. 108.
10. Harss, p. 61.
11. Julio Cortázar, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1967, p.
94. In the second part of the quotation Cortázar cites a passage by Michel Foucault, as he
clearly indicates in his book.
12. See Roger Caillois, Imágenes, imágenes ..., Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1970, pp.
23, 24.
13. Julio Cortázar, “Algunos aspectos del cuento,” Casa de las Américas (Havana), 1962,
nos. 15–16, p. 3 (my translation).
14. C.G. Bjurström, “Julio Cortázar, Entretien,” La Quinzaine Littéraire (Paris), 1
August 1970, p. 17.
15. See Caillois, op. cit.; Louis Vax, L’art et la littérature fantastique, Paris, 1960; and
Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Literature, New York, 1965.
16. See my article “The Fantastic as Surrealist Metaphors in Cortázar’s Short Fiction,”
Dada/Surrealism (New York), 1975, no. 5, pp. 28–33.
17. “Algunos aspectos del cuento,” pp. 3–4.
18. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arte, lenguaje, etnología (Entrevistas con Georges
Charbonier), Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1968, p. 132.
19. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, R. L. Simms, tr., New York, Washington
Square, 1966, p. 120.
20. See Ernest Cassirer, Language and Myth, New York, Dover, 1953, p. 8.
21. Borges, p. 120.
22. Ibid., p. 173.
23. Harss, p. 235.
24. Julio Cortázar, “Irracionalismo y eficacia,” Realidad: revista de ideas (Buenos Aires),
nos. 17–18 (September–December 1949), p. 253.
25. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Gregory Rabassa, tr., New York, Pantheon, 1966, p. 441.
Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.
26. Margarita García Flores, “Siete respuestas de Julio Cortázar,” Revista de la
Universidad de México (Mexico City), vol. 21, no. 7 (March 1967), p. 11 (my translation).
27. Harss, p. 219.
28. Ibid., pp. 244–45.
29. Caillois, p. 14.
30. Julio Cortázar, Blow-Up and Other Stories, Paul Blackburn, tr., New York, Collier,
1968, p. 3.
31. “Algunos aspectos del cuento,” p. 7.
32. Bjurström, p. 17. In this regard Cortázar also noted in one of his lectures at the
University of Oklahoma in November 1975: “And since I have mentioned dreams, it seems
appropriate to say that many of my fantastic stories were born in an oneiric territory and
that I had the good fortune that in some cases the censorship was not merciless and
permitted me to carry the content of the dreams into words.... One could say that the
fantastic which they contain comes from archetypal regions which in one way or another
we all share, and that in the act of reading these stories the reader witnesses or discovers
something of himself. I have seen this phenomenon put to the test many times with an old
story of mine entitled “The House Taken Over,” which I dreamed with all the details
which figure in the text and which I wrote upon jumping out of bed, still enveloped in the
horrible nausea of its ending.” From “The Present State of Fiction in Latin America,”
Margery A. Safir, tr., Books Abroad 50:3 (Summer 1976), p. 522–32, and included in this
volume.
33. Harss, p. 224.
34. La vuelta al día, p. 25.
35. Blow-Up and Other Stories, pp. 190–91. Subsequent quotations are from this
edition.
36. C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Boston, Little, Brown, 1957, p. 82.
37. Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, New York, Noonday, 1959, p.
12.
38. On game, see Linda Cummings Baxt, “Game in Cortázar,” unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation (Yale University), 1974; and also my article “Homo sapiens vs. homo ludens en
tres cuentos de Cortázar,” Revista Iberoamericana (Pittsburgh University), nos. 84–85
(July–December 1973), pp. 611–24. On vampirism in 62: A Model Kit, see chapter 8 of
Baxt’s dissertation; and also Ana Maria Hernández, “Vampires and Vampiresses: A Reading
of 62,” Books Abroad 50:3 (Summer 1976), pp. 570–76, included in this volume.
39. Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, Gregory Rabassa, tr., New York, Pantheon, 1972,
p. 148. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
40. Julio Cortázar, Libro de Manuel, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1973, p. 343 (my
translation).
R O B E RT O G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E VA R R Í A
Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing
A lthough I refer to Los reyes in my title, I do not intend to carry out an

independent literary analysis of what no doubt is a callow work of Cortázar’s.
My design, at once broad and reductive, is to deal with the somewhat dated
and embarrassing problem of how to read an author, not a book.1 Is
“holistic” criticism viable? Is it possible, in other words, to read Cortázar
instead of engaging in a series of isolated exegeses of his works? And if it is
worth attempting such a reading, how does one avoid turning it into a
thematic gloss, a formalistic reduction or a biographical narrative? How,
other than as a rhetorical license, can we continue to use Cortázar’s name in
reference to what is already a vast and diverse body of writing, encompassing
texts belonging not only to various genres but also to criticism and theory?
And what can one make of a text as bizarre as Los reyes? In what way is it also
Cortázar’s?
These questions do not arise from an abstract, speculative whim, but from
Cortázar’s work itself. They are, as I hope to be able to argue here, the
fundamental questions posed by Cortázar’s texts, and not only by such obviously
autobiographical books as La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, Ultimo round and
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales. I intend to use Los reyes to sketch a
primal scene, to delineate what might very broadly be called Cortázar’s
conception of writing—conception, that is, both in its etymological sense of
From The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. © 1978 University of Oklahoma Press.
27
28 Roberto González Echevarría
insemination or generation, and in its more common meaning of notion or

idea. By determining Cortázar’s conception of writing in both these senses, I
hope to legitimize a critical discourse that will atone for its seductiveness by
providing a critical insight into the totality of a literary enterprise.
While discussing a problem similar to the one just sketched, Roland
Barthes remarks in Critique et vérité:
There is no doubt that the “civilized” work cannot be dealt with

as myth, in the ethnological sense of the term. But the difference
[between the “civilized” work and that of the “primitive”] has less
to do with the signature of the message than with its substance.
Our works are written; that imposes upon them certain
constraints of meaning that the oral myth could not know. It is a
mythology of writing that awaits us, which shall have as its object
not certain determined works, that is to say, which are inscribed in
a process of determination where a person (the author) would be
the origin, but works traversed by the great mythic writing in
which humanity tries out its significations, i.e., its desires.2
As often happens in discussions of myth, whether they be “civilized” or not,

Barthes’s own formulation has become part of the myth that it attempts to
uncover. For if there is a modern mythology of writing, it centers on the
question of authorship versus general determination—a question, in other
words, of the origin or generation of writing. That “great mythic writing” of
which Barthes speaks has as its object the disappearance of the author, or in
more current critical idiom, the abolition of the subject; it is a search for
meaning in a universe abandoned both by man and the gods.
While current and certainly modern, the abolition of the author is not
new. In The Dehumanization of Art, synthesizing a whole current of modern
thinking, Ortega said that “the poet begins where man ends,” and added,
referring to Mallarmé, that the fate of the “poor face of the man who
officiates as poet” is to “disappear, to vanish and become a pure nameless
voice breathing into the air the words—those true protagonists of the lyrical
pursuit. This pure and nameless voice, the mere acoustic carrier of the verse,
is the voice of the poet who has learned to extricate himself from the
surrounding man.”3 The work of philologists and mythographers during the
nineteenth century (the Grimm brothers, later Bédier and Menéndez Pidal)
brought to the fore the question of authorship. As Foucault has shown, once
representation as a synchronic, complete system mediating between the
subject and the world is shattered, the various languages of literary
expression, as well as the question of being, become historical—language and

being become a matter of depth.4 Philology seeks the origin of language, just
as ontology seeks the origin of being in man’s passions (Rousseau). The
urgency of this question of origins—in its double thrust: language, being—
determines that most salient characteristic of modern writing, self-
referentiality. By alluding to itself and by probing into its own mode of being,
modern wasting is always in the process of offering an implicit statement
about its own generation, a conception of its conception, as it were.
It would be a naîve and predictable undertaking to show that self-
referentiality occurs in Cortázar, since Hopscotch has already become a classic
of self-referential writing. But it is precisely in self-referentiality that the
mythology which I intend to isolate manifests itself. As Hyppolite has shown
in his study of Hegel, self-reflexiveness is a regressive movement, a circular
journey back to the source.5 In literature self-referentiality is a return to
origins in order to take away from conception its claim of originality, of
constituting a single, fresh moment of beginning, an ordering principle and
principium. Rather than the joyful game that it is often taken to be, self-
referentiality is a deadly game in Cortázar, a violent ritual where Cortázar is
at stake. Los reyes, the first book that he signed with his own name (as is
known, an earlier work had appeared under a pseudonym), presents, under
the guise of the Theseus myth; this ritual. By the reenactment of this ritual,
Cortázar’s writing labors to define itself, to cope with the opposition of the
individual/original versus the general/collective, in short, the issue of
generation. Who writes?
The most superficial consideration of Los reyes immediately leads to the
issue of individuality and origin. The very appeal to classical mythology, to
the dawn of Western literary tradition, is suggestive of a concern about the
beginning of writing. The recourse to classical mythology is in itself hardly
original, but rather a characteristic of the modern tradition: Nietzsche,
Freud, Joyce, Pound, Unamuno; all take recourse to classical figures. In
Latin America there is a strain of classicism of this sort that runs from
Lugones and Borges through Reyes, Carpentier and Paz. It is not a
neoclassical spirit that leads these modern writers to the classical tradition,
since they do not imitate classical models, but instead (particularly in
Nietzsche and Freud) a philological quest for a mythology of origins: a
perfect example of this would be Carpentier’s story “Like the Night,” which
begins and ends with an episode drawn from the Iliad, a double thrust away
from and back to the origin of Western literary tradition. There is
throughout Cortázar’s work a recurrence of classical motifs and figures that
answers to this general philological trend.
All myths, as we know, appear in many versions; but if one reads the
most complete account of the Theseus myth, that of Plutarch, one is struck
by the confusing number of contradictory accounts extant of this particular
story. The charm, in fact, of Plutarch’s rendition is his juggling of so many
different versions in one and the same text, versions that cancel each other
and blur or abolish altogether the possibility of a master version. To read
Plutarch is to realize that the myth, while organized around a certain implied
narrative core, is not a fixed text but a set of superimposed narratives. Thus
we already have in the myth chosen by Cortázar the outlines of the question
of conception: while being set at the dawn of Western tradition that classical
mythology represents, the myth cannot claim originality in the sense of
constituting a single source.
If the versions of the myth of Theseus offer, simultaneously, the
promise of uniqueness and multiplicity, of singularity and plurality, so do the
many readings of which the particular incident of the Minotaur has been the
object. Theseus’s slaying of the Minotaur and his escape from the labyrinth
have often been interpreted as the victory of reason over ignorance, so much
so that to some the myth is a parable of the Greeks’ founding of Western
thought after conquering superstition. According to this reading the Theseus
myth would mark the birth of reason. Moralistic interpretations also abound
in the form of allegories, particularly in the Middle Ages. A creature half bull
and half man is the image of man driven by his lower instincts, imprisoned
in the materiality of his senses, unable to exercise his spiritual and intellectual
powers. Dante’s inversion of the figure, making the lower half of the
Minotaur the animal part, points to such a moralistic interpretation.6
Theseus’s victory would in this case be a moral one, the triumph of the
higher faculties of man over his lower instincts. His victory would thus mark
the birth of morals. A political reading is also possible and common.
Theseus’s victory over Minos is the triumph of political principle over
arbitrary rule, of Athens over Crete, the defeat of the old order and the
coming of the new. The very abstractness of these readings underscores
again the question of singularity, of individuation: Theseus’s victory is that of
reason, of higher instincts, of political principle. The specificity of the text
vanishes as we glide into allegorical abstraction and accept the plurality of
potential readings that the myth contains.
The same problematics appear when it becomes evident that Theseus’s
slaying of the Minotaur displays a series of elements that relates the episode
to other myths. The confrontation of Theseus and Minos is the well-known
struggle between the old king and the prince; Theseus’s journey into the
labyrinth, the regressive voyage in search of origins, the slaying of the
Minotaur (who is after all also a young prince), the hero’s struggle to assert
his individuality—all of these elements link the myth to other myths of
generation, such as the Oedipus myth. It might be remembered here that
Theseus not only defeats Minos, but also, though inadvertently like Oedipus,
kills his own father Aegeus by forgetting to change the sails. Moreover, as in
the cases of Oedipus and the Minotaur, Theseus’s origins are clouded by
mystery: it is not clear whether he is the son of Neptune or the son of
Aegeus. His journey to the center of the labyrinth, like his earlier journey to
Athens, is a journey back to the source to establish (or reestablish) his own
beginning. As soon as we insert the Theseus story into a general mythology,
it begins to lose its specificity; its own origins begin to recede into infinity or
to dissolve and multiply as if in a gallery of mirrors. The thematics of
genealogy that pervade the readings of the myth—it represents the birth of
reason, of morals, of political principle—perhaps reflect this dialectic that
subtends its structure.
What we find in Los reyes is then necessarily not a version but a
subversion of the myth of Theseus. To begin with, as Cortázar himself has
emphasized on many occasions, his Ariadne gives Theseus the clew only in
order to free the Minotaur, once the monster has killed the hero. As Alfred
MacAdam perceptively notes, Los reyes contains a “double tragedy.”7 Instead
of a triumph, Cortázar’s version offers a mutual defeat: Theseus’s quest leads
not to heroic distinction, but to indifferentiation. The Minotaur, who would
represent such indifferentiation and thus be the victor, is dead. Theseus’s
pursuit of individuation is thwarted from the start: he constantly recognizes
himself in others, not only in the Minotaur, but also in Minos. What is
emphasized in Cortázar’s version is the violence that Theseus commits
against himself in defeating Minos and killing the Minotaur. Instead of the
erection of individual presence, Theseus’s regressive voyage creates a vacuum
at the center; the Minotaur is dead, Theseus has fled. The clash, the violence
of conception suggested by the erotic act contra naturam by which the
Minotaur was conceived, is repeated at the end of Theseus’s journey. The
blood of Pasiphae has been spilled again. Whereas previously the labyrinth
was inhabited by the “lord of games” (the Minotaur),8 it now stands as an
empty gallery of winding walls. Theseus’s victory has led to that other
labyrinth suggested by Borges: the labyrinth of total indifferentiation, the
desert, the white page. The I, the you and the we float in a space without
perspectives and dimensions, as interchangeable masks of primeval chaos and
apocalypse.
This confrontation of the monster and the hero constitutes the primal
scene in Cortázar’s mythology of writing: a hegemonic struggle for the
center that resolves itself in a mutual cancellation and in the superimposition

of beginnings and ends. The very image of man unborn, the Minotaur is the
possessor of the immediate but naîve knowledge of man before the Fall. His
speech is the incoherent, symbolic language of a savage god. Theseus, on the
other hand, is not only a dealer in death, but is the very image of death. His
linear, cogent language is temporal, discursive—it is discourse. In his
enclosure the Minotaur speaks a perishable language that is not temporal but
that is reinvented every day. The words he utters are, even if momentarily,
attached to the things they represent:
Oh, his pained monologues, which the palace guards heard in

wonder, without understanding them. His profound recitals of
the recurring waves, his taste for celestial nomenclatures and the
catalogues of herbs. He ate them pensively, and then gave them
names with secret delight, as if the flavor of stems had revealed
their names to him ... He raised the whole enumeration of
celestial bodies, and seemed to forget it with the dawn of a new
day, as if also in his memory dusk dimmed the stars. And the next
night he took delight in inaugurating a new nomenclature,
ordering sonorous space with ephemeral constellations.9
If in other versions of the myth the birth of reason, morals or politics is at

stake, what we have in Los reyes is the violent birth of writing. The catalogue
of herbs that the Minotaur “tastes” is a series of disconnected words, without
syntactical and therefore temporal structure, linked to their individual origin
through their “stems.” By killing the Minotaur, Theseus attempts to replace
the perishable sound of individual words with the linear, durable cogency of
discourse, a cogency predicated not on the stems of words but on their
declensions, on the particles that link them in a structure whose mode of
representation would not be sonorous but spatial—writing. The irony, of
course, is that once writing is instituted, Theseus does not gain control of the
labyrinth but becomes superfluous and flees. Because writing cannot be
dimmed like the stars with each dawn, because it is not a memory whose
traces can be erased, Theseus is not needed to reinvent it, as the Minotaur
reinvented his nomenclatures every day. Writing is the empty labyrinth from
which both the Minotaur and Theseus have been banished.
This primal scene appears with remarkable consistency in Cortázar’s
writing. I do not mean simply that there are monsters, labyrinths and heroes,
but rather that the scene in which a monster and a hero kill each other, cancel
each other’s claim for the center of the labyrinth, occurs with great
frequency, particularly in texts where the nature of writing seems to be more

obviously in question. The most superficial consideration of Cortázar’s first
novel, The Winners, will no doubt reveal the existence of the primal scene.
But I would like to examine two briefer texts, “All Fires the Fire” and “The
Pursuer.”
The title of “All Fires the Fire” is drawn from Heraclitus and suggests
the indifferentiation obtained when all things return to their primal state and
ends and beginnings resolve into one.10 The story is in fact two stories that
reflect each other, being told simultaneously. One is a lover’s triangle taking
place presumably in contemporary Paris and told for the most part through
a telephone conversation. The other also involves a lover’s triangle of sorts:
it is the story of a gladiator who is made to fight a gigantic black slave by a
Roman consul who is jealous of his wife’s interest in the gladiator. In the first
story (I use first here for the sake of clarity, but there is no hierarchy of this
kind in the text) Sonia calls Roland to plead with him and to announce that
Irene is on her way to his apartment. Their conversation is made difficult by
a bad connection. A mysterious voice in the background keeps reading a
series of figures—is it a gambler? These figures, in their stark
meaninglessness, are remindful of the Minotaur’s “celestial nomenclatures.”
They oppose the flow of speech, the discursiveness that Roland wants to
achieve. The dark depths from which the sounds in the telephone line seem
to emerge also evoke the labyrinth and Ariadne’s clew. Roland’s cool and
logical entreaties to Sonia, who finally commits suicide, are Theseus-like in
their reasoned discursiveness. There is, furthermore, although very obliquely
suggested, a potential monstrosity in Sonia, whose interest in Irene seems to
be as strong as her interest in Roland. In the other strand of the story the
primal scene is present in much more obvious fashion. The hero-monster
confrontation is clear, and there is, moreover, an echo of one of the versions
of the Theseus myth offered by Plutarch in which the Minotaur, instead of
being a monstrous creature, is a powerful and hateful man named Taurus,
whom Theseus defeats in combat at the Cretan games.11 Although, naturally,
some of the details are different in Cortázar’s story, the basic situation is
essentially the same. The young gladiator has risen from the ranks because
of his heroic deeds to become known as an individual, and by competing for
the affections of the consul’s wife he has also become a potential usurper.
There are other, more direct echoes of the primal scene in the text of
the story. When the black giant enters the arena, he does so through the
gallery used by the beasts, and the description of the gate through which he
passes evokes the act of birth: “They have raised the creaking gates of the
dark passage where they have wild animals come out, and Marcus sees the
gigantic figure of the Nubian retiarius appear, until then invisible against the
background of mossy stone.”12 The labyrinth is evoked in the description of
the arena, where it appears sketched on the sand as a trace, “the enormous
bronze eye where hoes and palm leaves have sketched their curved paths
darkened by traces of preceding fights.” It is, of course, at the center of that
maze that Marcus and the Nubian retiarius stage their combat.
As in Los reyes, there is no victory at the end of “All Fires the Fire,” but
rather a mutual annihilation. The fight between the Nubian retiarius and the
gladiator is resolved when both fall dead upon each other in the sand. The
mutual killing and the sand, which suggests the desert, prefigure the fire that
kills everyone at the end, the fire that destroys the arena and which also levels
the apartment building where, centuries later, Roland and Irene have fallen
asleep on each other, like the dead gladiators, after making love. The stories
merge at the end, not only on the level of the action but also at a conceptual
level; love and war, presumably opposites, mingle to evoke the topic of the
ars amandi, ars bellandi. Like the two gladiators and the lovers, the two stories
have a common end that abolishes their difference and returns the text to the
indifferentiation of origins—all texts the text.
In “The Pursuer” the various elements of this mythology are even
more directly related to writing. The story tells of the last months in the life
of the jazz saxophonist Johnny Carter, as reported by Bruno, a writer who
had previously published a biography of the musician. It is rather easy to
discern in the story the general outline of the primal scene. Bruno’s visit to
Johnny as the story opens is reminiscent of Theseus’s journey into the
labyrinth; the jazzman lives in a small, dark walk-up apartment, a sort of lair,
and he is described in animal terms: “But he’s making gestures, laughing and
coughing at the same time, shivering away under the blanket like a
chimpanzee.”13 Johnny is also described as a huge fetus or newborn monster,
naked and coiled onto himself and making inarticulate sounds: “And I saw
Johnny had thrown off the blanket around him in one motion, and I saw him
sitting in the easy chair completely nude, his legs pulled up and the knees
underneath his chin, shivering but laughing to himself” (184).
While Johnny appears as a monstrous fetus, Bruno, the writer, stands
for order and profit. Bruno wants to “regenerate” Johnny, to make him
abandon his intuitive cavils about time, his drugs and his visions. But
Bruno’s apparent good intentions conceal his desire to kill Johnny, to reduce
him to that image of him which he has created in his book. Johnny’s death
at the end of the story appears to take place in order to round out Bruno’s
book:
All this [Johnny’s death] happened at the same time that the
second edition of my book was published, but luckily I had time
to incorporate an obituary note edited under full steam and
inserted, along with a newsphoto of the funeral in which many
famous jazzmen were identifiable. In that format the biography
remained, so to speak, intact and finished. Perhaps it’s not right
that I say this, but naturally I was speaking from a merely
aesthetic point of view. They’re already talking of a new
translation, into Swedish or Norwegian, I think. My wife is
delighted at the news. (220)
The last two sentences, which are the conclusion of the story, indicate the
measure in which the death of Johnny also signals Bruno’s defeat. The
allusion to the translations, and particularly the vagueness of the allusion,
shows to what extent the text has already been taken away from Bruno—how,
in a sense, he is out of the picture. The laconic last sentence, in its homely
triviality, reinforces this notion by showing how the pleasure generated by
these new versions of the biography is deflected away from Bruno. Like the
labyrinth, the text is empty at the end. The book has become a funeral
monument, a tomb.
But in a sense it is the whole story that reveals Bruno’s defeat. In spite
of his naîve assertion that his book is “intact and finished,” “The Pursuer” is
a postscript or supplement to that earlier book, and more than the story of
Johnny, it is the story of Bruno’s futile attempts to commit Johnny to writing.
Bruno’s writing of “The Pursuer,” his return to the book that he had already
written, is like Theseus’s journey into the labyrinth, the very image of self-
reflexiveness. The pursuer is Bruno, not Johnny, who on the contrary is the
epitome of hieratic immobility. Johnny lives unreflexively, a sort of
inarticulate monster who is more on the side of things than of words—his
means of expression, the saxophone, is not verbal. The rivalry between
Johnny and Bruno is apparent from the beginning in their playful banter, in
which the musician mocks the writer’s practical sense. Bruno himself is aware
that his relation to Johnny is an exploitative one, that he and all the others
who hover around him are “a bunch of egotists”: “Under the pretext of
watching out for Johnny what we’re doing is protecting our idea of him,
getting ourselves ready for the pleasure Johnny’s going to give us, to reflect
the brilliance from the statue we’ve erected among us all and defend it till the
last gasp” (182). Johnny’s retaliation is to tell Bruno that his book has missed
the point, that the real Johnny is absent from it: “‘Don’t get upset, Bruno,
it’s not important that you forgot to put all that in. But Bruno,’ and he lifts a
finger that does not shake, ‘what you forgot to put in is me’” (212). Bruno
winds up writing about himself, subjecting himself to the same operation to
which he submits Johnny. The text of the story is in the end Bruno’s pursuit
of himself, a pursuit that turns into a flight—the vanishing of infinitely
receding sequences. “The Pursuer” is a postscript to Bruno’s biography of
Johnny, but it is also a postscript to the story that it tells, a postscript that can
only be a prologue to a further story.
As in the previous texts analyzed, the hero’s regressive quest leads not
to individuation and difference, but to a notion of indifferentiation: empty
labyrinth, desert, fire, the infinite where ends and beginnings merge and
dissolve. A reflection of Bruno’s brings out, in a metonymical play, this
dialectic of ends and beginnings:
It drags me to think that he’s at the beginning of his sax-work,

and I’m going along and have to stick it out to the end. He’s the
mouth and I’m the ear, so as not to say he’s the mouth and I’m
the ... Every critic, yeah, is the sad-assed end of something that
starts as taste, like the pleasure of biting into something and
chewing on it. And the mouth [Johnny] moves again, relishing it,
Johnny’s big tongue sucks back a little string of saliva from the
lips. (167)
We shall have to look at this passage in the original, not only because the
translator, Paul Blackburn, got carried away and became too explicit, but
because there is in it an anagrammatic clue that is important to note:
Pienso melancólicamente que él está al principio de su saxo

mientras yo vivo obligado a conformarme con el final. El es la
boca y yo la oreja, por no decir que él es la boca y yo ... Todo
crítico, ay, es el triste final de algo que empezó como sabor, como
delicia de morder y mascar. Y la boca se mueve otra vez,
golosamente la gran lengua de Johnny recoge un chorrito de
saliva de los labios.14
There is a complex and compelling metonymical and anagrammatic network

here that leads to the notion of the mutual cancellation of Johnny and Bruno.
If Johnny is the mouth and Bruno the ear, or the anus, they both stand for
absences, holes, and what remains between them is the saxophone, a curved
gallery of air, or, to continue the physiological metaphor, the labyrinthine
digestive track (or the Eustachian tube). This imagery of absence is the same
as that in Octavio Paz’s poem “La boca habla,” incorporated by Severo

Sarduy into Cobra:
La cobra
fabla de la obra
en la boca del abra
recobra
el habla:
El Vocablo.15
It is an imagery of absence conveyed by the repetition of the o’s, a figure of

the hole, as in “El es la boca y yo la oreja, por no decir que él es la boca y yo ...”
It was not reticence that kept the obvious word out, since it is more
conspicuous in its absence, but the desire both to create a gap at the end of
the sentence and to stop on “yo.” That “yo” is already, by its very
orthography, the hole, the void, the last letter of Bruno’s name, but also the
beginning of Johnny’s—“Jo.” In fact, by taking the beginning of Johnny’s
name and the end of Bruno’s, by practicing with their names the operation
that the sentence quoted suggests, we have “yo no.” Ends and beginnings
merge, and the result is a negation, a canceling out.
Cortázar plays this philological game, more often than has been
suspected, to undermine the notion of individuality. A clear instance of this,
but on another level, is Francine in Libro de Manuel, who so obviously stands
for France and French values that she becomes an ironic abstraction. Not as
obvious, though here the literary device is much more traditional, is Andrés,
the protagonist of that same novel, whose name means, of course, everyman,
or man in general. One might further note in this connection that the o plays
a key role in the names of many of Cortázar’s characters: Nora, Wong,
Oliveira, Roland, Romero, Roberto. That o, or zero, is the grapheme that
designates an absence, a dissolution of individuality, a sphere demarcating
nothingness. In chapter 148 of Hopscotch Cortázar quotes one of Aulus
Gellius’s etymologies in which it is suggested that the origin of the word
person is related to that o that occupies its center:
A wise and ingenious explanation, by my lights, that of Gabio

Basso, in his treatise On the Origin of Words, of the word person,
mask. He thinks that this word has its origin in the verb personare,
to retain. This is how he explains his opinion: “Since the mask
covers the face completely except for an opening where the
mouth is, the voice, instead of scattering in all directions, narrows
down to escape through one single opening and therefore

acquires a stronger and more penetrating sound. Thus, since the
mask makes the human voice more sonorous and firm, it has been
given the name person, and as a consequence of the formation of
this word, the letter o as it appears in it is long.”16
The suggestion that the voice would then be the distinguishing mark is clear;
but the voice is no mark at all. In the case of Johnny, where the voice is made
firmer and more sonorous by his musical instrument, we would find the mark
in the saxophone, not in him.
But if “yo no” is the cryptic message of Cortázar’s mythology of
writing, what then of our initial question about how to read an author? And
if conception denies the possibility of conception, if a cogent and
distinguishing theory of literature appears to be foreclosed by the ultimately
negative gesture of self-referentiality, how is Cortázar’s literary production
held together? What can we retain as the distinguishing mark of his work?
It is not by accident that Cortázar’s mythology of writing, as I have
represented it here, should bear a Nietzschean imprint, since it is a
Nietzschean problematic that seems to generate it. “Who writes?” is an
essentially Nietzschean question. The struggle between the Minotaur and
Theseus is analogous to that between Dionysus and Apollo in The Birth of
Tragedy. In “The Pursuer” this Nietzschean quality is particularly evident.
Johnny, whose musical instrument is a direct descendant of the Dionysian
aulos, exists as if in harmony with the vast forces of the universe—with truth
and actuality—and suffers as well as experiences joy for it. Bruno, on the
other hand, the Apollonian seeker of light, deals in illusions; his aim is to
domesticate Johnny’s savage wisdom. The birth of tragedy, according to
Nietzsche, is generated by the confrontation of these two figures, a birth that
signaled the victory of Dionysus over Apollo, for tragedy could only emerge
when the god of reason spoke the language of the god of music. In Nietzsche
there remains a vestigial theodicy that confers meaning to the death of the
hero. It would be reassuring to be able to say the same about Cortázar. But
the analogy between the birth of tragedy and Cortázar’s version of the birth
of writing can only be carried so far, and beyond that point is where Cortázar
emerges. Nietzsche, still the philologist in this early work, traces a curve that
represents the birth of tragedy and its gradual decline, a decline provoked by
the counteroffensive of Apollonian powers. Not so in Cortázar, where, as we
have seen, each confrontation leads to a mutual cancellation, each
conception carries with it its concomitant death. Writing in Cortázar must
be born anew in each text; the whole of writing must emerge with each word,
only to disappear again—not an eternal return, but a convulsive repetition of

construction and deconstruction. A formal reflection of this might be found
not only in the heterogeneity of Cortázar’s longer texts, but also in their
reliance on dialogue.17
Cortázar emerges, then, at the point of the cancellation, of the
negation. He must therefore be read whole, establishing no generic
distinctions nor privileging either the fictional or the expository texts. Each
text must be read as if it were the totality of Cortázar’s production, given that
each begins and ends in a question so fundamental as not to be transferable
from one to the other, but must rather be repeated in each text and in each
reading—a kind of spasmodic eschatology. Only the double thrust of the
question can be retained. Holistic criticism is not a process of accumulation
whereby details are gathered, stored, to construct with them the image of an
author, but instead one where the impossibility of assembling the fragments
in a coherent whole can provide a glimpse of totality.
There is an ultimate meaning to Cortázar’s mythology of writing that
belies its negativity, one that is performative rather than conceptual. What
Theseus’s self-reflexive quest shows is that literature, in the long run, cannot
say anything about itself. The countermodernist position that decries
literature’s purity, its refusal to signify something other than itself, fails to
recognize that, on the contrary, literature is always having to signify
something else, and to implicate someone else. And indeed here we are
reading, talking, writing about Cortázar, or better yet, reading, talking,
writing Cortázar. Minotaur, Theseus, Johnny, Bruno—we as readers also
drift into our own textual journeys, to turn reading once more into the ritual
confrontation where you and I and we share for one moment, in each other,
the illusion of meaning.
NOTES
1. See Eugenio Donato, “Structuralism: The Aftermath,” Sub-Stance, no. 7 (Fall

1973), pp. 9–26. Neither Anglo-American “new criticism” nor French structuralism really
ever abandoned the notion of authorship. It is always found, albeit relegated to a self-
consciously marginal position, as a rhetorical license that is tolerated but not questioned.
It is only in what Donato calls the aftermath of structuralism that the notion of authorship
has been subjected to a radical critique.
2. Paris, Seuil, 1966, pp. 60–61. My translation.
3. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture
and Literature, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 31–32.
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New
York, Pantheon, 1970, pp. 217–21.
5. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, Samuel
Cherniak, John Heckman, trs., Evanston, Il., Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 160.
6. See Borges’s commentary in The Book of Imaginary Beings, rev. & enl. ed., Norman
Thomas di Giovanni, tr., New York, Discus, 1970, pp. 158–59.
7. El individuo y el otro. Crítica a los cuentos de Julio Cortázar, New York, La Librería,
1971, p. 34.
8. Los reyes, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1970, p. 73.
9. Ibid., p. 49. My translation.
10. The title may come from fragment 28 of Heraclitus: “There is exchange of all
things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and of gold for wares.”
Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus, New York, Atheneum, 1971, p. 37.
11. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, John Dryden, tr., Arthur
Hugh Clough, ed., New York, Modern Library, 1932, p. 11.
12. All Fires the Fire and Other Stories, Suzanne Jill Levine, tr., New York, Pantheon,
1973, pp. 116–17.
13. Blow-Up and Other Stories, Paul Blackburn, tr., New York, Collier, 1968, p. 169.
Subsequent page numbers refer to this edition.
14. Las armas secretas, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1964, p. 108.
15. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1972, p. 229.
16. Hopscotch, Gregory Rabassa, tr., New York, Signet, 1967, p. 436. Cortázar takes
this excerpt from Noches Aticas, Francisco Navarro y Calvo, tr., Madrid, Biblioteca Clásica,
1893, vol. 1, p. 202. The relevance of Gellius’s book in relation to Cortázar’s novel is
greater than might be suspected. In his preface Gellius says the following about the
composition of his book: “In the arrangement of the material I have adopted the same
haphazard order that I had previously followed in collecting it. For whenever I had taken
in hand any Greek or Latin book, or had heard anything worth remembering, I used to jot
down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any definite plan or order;
and such notes I would lay away as an aid to my memory, like a kind of literary storehouse,
so that when the need arose of a word or a subject which I chanced for the moment to have
forgotten, and the books from which I had taken it were not at hand, I could readily find
it and produce it.” The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, John C. Rolfe, tr., Cambridge, Ma.,
Harvard University Press, 1970, p. xxvii. Cortázar has of course followed this same method
of composition in the “dispensable” chapters of Hopscotch, as well as in Libro de Manuel. In
fact, just as Ludmilla composes the Libro for Manuel’s future enlightenment, so did Gellius
assemble his “in order that like recreation might be provided for my children, when they
should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds.”
17. For further commentary on The Birth of Tragedy and “The Pursuer” see Djelal
Kadir, “A Mythical Re-enactment: Cortázar’s El perseguidor,” Latin American Literary
Review, 2 (1973), pp. 63–73.
STEVEN BOLDY
Libro de Manuel
INTRODUCTION
Socialism and literature: the debate
A fter the complex, subtle, and ultimately minority novels Rayuela and 62,
we are faced with a very different sort of literature in Libro de Manuel,
published in 1973. The literary level is patently lower. The repetition of
structure and character types from earlier works is mechanical; the language
is often stereotyped Cortázarese bordering dangerously at times on rhetoric.
It is nevertheless a brave and honest book, and is an important experiment
within the political fiction which characterizes the seventies (1970, Vargas
Llosa’s Conversación en la catedral; 1974, Carpentier’s El recurso del método;
1975, Roa Bastos’s Yo el supremo and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca;
1978, Fuentes’s La cabeza de la hidra). Perhaps more radically if not
necessarily more successfully than the authors mentioned here, Cortázar in
this novel faces up to the tension between a politically committed message,
and serious literary experimentation which often tends towards a
relativization of any message. Libro de Manuel was written quickly and was
designed to reach a wide reading public. It is thus unfair to judge it
exclusively according to the same purely literary criteria as his other novels,
or in isolation from its context.
From The Novels of Julio Cortázar. © 1980 Cambridge University Press.
41
42 Steven Boldy
The ‘double text’ of earlier works provides the structure with which he
approaches the problem. A new discourse is articulated through another,
more conventional one, which it uses but subverts and attempts to renew. In
Rayuela, the alienated discourse corresponds to the conventional world of
Traveler which Oliveira wants to join but must first infiltrate and modify. In
Libro de Manuel, dogmatic Marxism and literary realism are taken as a
partially alienated main discourse and vehicle, through which and against
which a secondary, irrational, erotic and taboo discourse is established to
liberalize and widen the first.
To understand the emphasis of Libro de Manuel it must be placed in the
context of the debate on socialism and literature in which Cortázar was
involved before its publication and which reached a crisis point with the
imprisonment of the Cuban poet Herberto Padilla in 1971.
Since 1961, after a visit to Cuba, Cortázar has unequivocally
proclaimed his adhesion to the cause of socialism in Latin America.1 In Viaje
alrededor de una mesa (1970), an account of a round table on commitment in
literature, in which Vargas Llosa also participated, he forcefully criticized the
attitude of many revolutionaries who, in the name of the socialist ‘new man’
of the future, proscribe from literature those aspects of man not directly
accessible to rational analysis:
[Neo-social realism implies] a perspective where many subjects

which are delicate and equivocal but which are just as genuine a
part of human personality as political faith and economic
necessities (I am referring among many others to eroticism, play,
imagination beyond any subject matter which can be checked out
against reason or ‘reality’) are proscribed or mutilated in the
name of a certain notion of the hombre nuevo which, in my
opinion, would have no reason for coming into being if he were
condemned to read what he is offered by those who obey similar
concepts of revolutionary freedom (VM 28–9).
In a reply to this and other similar declarations, Miguel Alascio

Cortázar, in Viaje alrededor de una silla, accuses Cortázar of various heresies:
the irrationalism he practises leads to confusion, a state propitious to the rise
of fascism;2 his distance from social reality leads Cortázar to view any
revolutionary change as spontaneous, a position which leads to repentismo,
anathema to the classical Marxist;3 Cortázar’s claim, after Plato, that art is
one of the highest forms of eroticism (VM 51) is countered by an assertion
that Plato was essentially a reactionary whose eroticism was but an apology
Libro de Manuel 43
for the elegant vices of the aristocracy,4 and that Cortázar’s eroticism simply
uses the ideal of widening the horizons of literature for the hombre nuevo as
a pretext for writing little more than commercial pornography.5 The
Colombian Oscar Collazos, in ‘La encrucijada del lenguaje’, repeats many of
these arguments, and suggests that the formal difficulty of texts by Cortázar
and Fuentes springs from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Europeans and
an attempt to prove themselves superior to the barbarie of Latin America:
‘We can and must be capable of being superior to our barbarism. We too are
capable of reaching the “heights” that they have achieved’ (LR 31). Perhaps
the most important accusation of Alascio Cortázar and Collazos is that
Cortázar condones a dichotomy between the politics and literature of a
writer, leading him to ignore reality: ‘Cortázar’s basic approach, reading
between the lines, is simple: to authorize, to “legalize”, to present this
dichotomy, the split of the literary being and the political being, not only as
possible, but as valid too. But also to establish a deep scorn for the reality he
suspends’ (LR 15).
Cortázar’s answer to all this is that ‘reality’ is far more than the ‘socio-
historical and political context’; that any literature worth its name
‘approaches man from all angles’ (LR 65); that what is needed is writing
which is revolutionary in itself rather than writing dictated by revolutionary
theory (‘the revolutionaries of literature rather than the literary men of the
revolution’ (LR 76)) if revolutionary language is to be cleansed of the ‘rotten
corpses of an obsolete social order’ (VM 33). Repeatedly, however, he
demands a great personal sense of responsibility in the writer if these ideas
are not simply to embody escapism (e.g. LR 57). The general affirmation
from the time of Rayuela is still basically valid: ‘Historical results like
Marxism or whatever you like may be achieved, but the Yonder is not exactly
history’ (R 509).
What Fuentes has called the ‘tragicomic’6 case of Padilla constitutes an
important crisis in Cortázar’s theoretical position. Padilla was arrested in
1971 by the Cuban authorities for anti-revolutionary attitudes: pessimism,
escapism, individualism, etc. His autocrítica brought a strong reaction from
left-wing writers in Latin America and Europe. Cortázar signed the letter of
protest. Castro’s reply was devastating. He would have nothing to do with
‘pseudo-revolutionaries’, ‘bourgeois liberals’ writing from the ‘bourgeois
salons’ of Europe, unaware that the real problems of Cuba were not the
temporary imprisonment of a poet, but underdevelopment, education, the
real threat of invasion, the blockade. ‘But as for Cuba’, he concluded, ‘they
will never be able to utilize Cuba again, never!, not even by defending it.
44 Steven Boldy
When they are about to defend us we will say to them: “Don’t defend us,
friend, please don’t defend us. We are better off without your help”’ (CP
119–20). Cortázar was strongly affected. He did not sign the second letter of
protest, but published his ‘Policrítica a la hora de los chacales’ (CP 126–30).
While defending the writer’s right to criticism and creative freedom, he
denounced facile liberalism, and reaffirmed his adherence to the Cuban
revolution:
You are right, Fidel: only in combat do we have the right to be dis-
[contented,
criticism, the search for better formulae, can only come from inside,
yes, but inside is sometimes so outside,
and just because today I abandon for ever violet scented liberalism, the
[signatories of virtuous texts
be – cause – Cu – ba – is – not – that – which – their – wri – ting –
[desk – sche – mas – de – mand,
I know I am not an exception, I am like them, what have I done for
[Cuba beyond love,
what have I given for Cuba beyond a desire, a hope.
But now I abandon their ideal world, their schemes,
just now when
I am shown the door of what I love, I am banned from defending it,
right now I exercise my right to choose, to stand once more and more
[than ever
by your Revolution, my Cuba, in my own way (CP 128).
Such statements cannot be ignored when considering the genesis of

Libro de Manuel, nor the fact that the royalties were given to organizations
defending political prisoners in Argentina. The central mystery of the novel
is a set of instructions given to the main character by a cigar-smoking Cuban
which can only be known once they have been carried out. The open eyes of
the corpse at the end of the novel reminded Cortázar, after the novel had
been published, of those of Che Guevara.
The ‘dispensable chapters’ of Rayuela, where the readers and the
characters too in many cases are exposed to the cultural context of the
author, are replaced in Libro de Manuel by newspaper cuttings on current
Latin American political issues (plus information on political violence in
France and torture in Vietnam). Cortázar himself, as he says in the prologue
to the novel, was rather disappointed by this experiment—he transcribed all
the important news items of certain days in the hope that this somewhat
Libro de Manuel 45
aleatory way of introducing political reality into the lives of his characters
would radically affect their personal trajectories (7–8).
Cortázar’s somewhat contradictory attitude to his own creation cannot
however be ignored. In the prologue to the novel, he announces the
‘convergence’ of his two roles of political essayist and novelist: ‘If for years I
have written texts concerned with Latin American problems, and at the same
time novels and stories where those problems were absent or only came in
incidentally, here and now the waters have merged’ (7). In an interview given
after the publication of Libro de Manuel, however, he admits that, due to the
nature of his literary texts, his political commitment would have to find its
expression in separate activity: ‘I do not believe that we should falsify our
goals as writers for the sake of so-called political commitment. The problem
is how to insert that political commitment, if one cannot do so in the book
because the book is, as you say, “hermetic”, then in other lines of behaviour.’7
A more interesting contradiction concerns the level at which the
writing of the novel is pitched. In ‘Corrección de pruebas en Alta Provenza’,
written while proof-reading the novel, Cortázar claims that the urgency of
the information contained in the novel forced him to write ‘horizontally’,
that is, to follow a traditional, linear narrative mode, thus excluding formal
innovations which take time for the reader to assimilate, a time-lag which
was not important for Rayuela:
But right from the start I realized that, paradoxically, if this was a
book of our here and now, i.e. of the immediate, it did not make
sense to distance it through experimentation and technique: the
deepest contact would be blocked by the very methods applied to
establish it (C 19–20).
But Cortázar later firmly rejects the possibility of lowering his standards or
abdicating his literary personality in order to make his work more accessible: ‘You
hinted at the possibility of lowering one’s tone to make literature more accessible.
I am totally opposed to this option [...] because I believe that every writer has his
own destiny.’8 When taken in isolation, such statements are simply contradictory.
In the novel, however, Cortázar’s by now familiar use of two discourses, two
‘authors’, explores such contradictions thoroughly and dialectically.
Irrationalism and revolution in Libro de Manuel
Cortázar is well aware of the kind of argument which links irrationalism with
totalitarianism, Nietzsche with Hitler, Unamuno with Franco. His views on
46 Steven Boldy
the subject were well defined as far back as 1949, as can be seen in his reply
to Guillermo de Torre, where he makes the point that only combined with
the strictest rationalism can irrationalism become a collective danger. His
views are summarized here by García Canclini:
Reason is an ally of our aims, and it is up to us whether it is

creative or destructive. Cortázar explained this intelligently in a
reply to Guillermo de Torre, who held existentialist irrationalism
responsible for the crimes of the Nazis. The desire for such
crimes, which was an irrational impulse, would never have
become a bloody reality if it had not been programmed by
rigorous reason. The irrational is never a collective danger per se;
only when organized by reason can it engender inquisitions,
torture techniques and death chambers.9
The same idea is present throughout the work in often surprising forms. In
‘Simulacros’, from the ‘Ocupaciones raras’ section of Historias de cronopios y
de famas, a family builds a scaffold in its front garden, but does so with the
sole purpose of having dinner there and perhaps scandalizing the neighbours.
The even less likely superman-like figure Fantomas repeats the point in
comic-strip language: ‘The world won’t be destroyed by books, Steiner, but
by men. Men exactly like you!’ (F 34).
One of the most important points made in Libro de Manuel is that the
revolution must aim to transform the whole of man, not just those aspects of
him defined by Marxism. As Lonstein says, ‘I’m referring to man himself,
what he is and not what the others see of him from the Capital outwards’
(226). Breton proposes a synthesis of Marx and Rimbaud (‘“Transformer le
monde”, a dit Marx; “changer la vie”, a dit Rimbaud: ces deux mots d’ordre
pour nous n’en font qu’un’)10 which is taken up by Ludmilla in Libro de
Manuel: ‘I wonder if there was all that much difference between Lenin and
Rimbaud’ (60). A similar comment is made in Prosa del observatorio: ‘Thomas
Mann said that things would be better if Marx had read Hölderlin; but on the
other hand, madam, I agree with Lukács that it would also have been
necessary for Hölderlin to read Marx’ (PO 71–2). Cortázar believes with the
surrealists that there is little point in breaking the dualism capital/labour if at
the same time parallel dualisms such as dream/waking life,
imagination/reality, unconscious/conscious, illicit and licit sex, all variations
on the same ‘terrible interdit’11 are not abolished.
Benedetti, whom Collazos quotes in order to criticize Cortázar, makes
a similar point, defending the free imagination of the writer within the
Libro de Manuel 47
revolution and pointing to the convergence of imagination and revolution in

the ‘événements de mai ‘68’:
A revolution must encompass everything: from ideology to love

[...]. A writer, an artist, must use his imaginative capacity to
defend, within the revolution, his right to imagine more and
better.
It is perhaps in that word, imagination, where culture and
revolution can really meet. ‘L’imagination prend le pouvoir’, read
an inscription on the steps of the Faculty of Social Sciences in
Paris during the recent May revolution.12
It is thus not surprising that the ‘May revolution’ had a strong surrealist
element. Its slogan, according to Cohn-Bendit, was ‘sous le pavé, la plage’.13
What its enemies denied was ‘personal liberty, the innocence of desire, the
forgotten joys of creativity, play, irony, and happiness’.14 Cortázar’s own
interest in these aspects of the Paris events is well documented in his
‘Noticias del mes de mayo’ (Ultimo round).
Such faith in gratuitous humour and ‘pataphysical’ irrationalism
explains the occasionally delirious methods Cortázar has his revolutionaries
use. In order to finance the kidnapping of the leader of an anti-revolutionary
group presumably connected with the CIA, they smuggle counterfeit dollars
into Europe in a container carrying a turquoise penguin and two armadillos,
which are later to be seen walking by the Seine. In what is denominated the
pre-Joda, they seriously shake the absolute faith of the Parisians in the
infallibility of their government institutions by inserting old cigarette stubs
in apparently untouched packets, violate their everyday order by effusively
thanking the bus-driver for a pleasant drive,15 standing up to eat in elegant
restaurants,16 and other similar Dadaist provocations.
‘Madness’, according to one character, is a way of disconcerting
political enemies, as it was used by Morelli in order to descentrar, desencasillar
the reader. But it is also a means of self-defence, a way of avoiding falling into
the strategies used by the enemy and perhaps reproducing his ideology in a
future socialist state: ‘Binary revolutions [...] are condemned before they
triumph because they accept the rules of the game. While they believe they
are smashing everything, they become so deformed you wouldn’t believe it.
How much necessary madness, my friend, intelligent and aggressive madness
to finally dislodge the ants’ (200). (The ‘ants’, enemy agents, have
connotations similar to those of the ants of previous works, minus the
positive aspects.) The pre-Joda is thus, in general, a continuation of the
48 Steven Boldy
provocative activity of Marrast. The madness referred to above is a

development of the final madness of Hélène, itself inherited from Oliveira.
The most surprising symbol of the necessity of ‘superfluous’ beauty in
the revolution is the mushroom for which Lonstein insistently demands such
attention: ‘the superfluity of certain beauties, certain toadstools in the night,
all that which can make any project for a future meaningful’ (183).
LONSTEIN: A NON-DUALISTIC LANGUAGE
Lonstein, in many ways the Morelli of Libro de Manuel, decries in the other
characters the dichotomies which Cortázar tries to reconcile in the novel, the
dualism between love and politics, chance and will, etc.: ‘In all of you there
is a binary functioning which would have sent even Pavlov to sleep watching
you behave in the Joda or in sex’ (335). He develops an ideolect, an almost
private language, composed of what he calls ‘fortrans’, neologisms
combining two normally exclusive lexical items, which are interspersed with
innumerable gallicisms. The ‘fortrans’ point towards a new mental structure,
‘a new struculture’ (structure, culture) (338), which would transcend the
‘binary functioning’ of the others.17
It is highly ironical but characteristic and significant that the term
‘fortran’, chosen by Lonstein to express his new ‘struculture’, should be
taken from computer technology. Throughout the novel, computers are an
image of an alienated discourse: Lonstein’s poem ‘Fragmentos para una oda
a los dioses del siglo’ is described as ‘cards to feed an IBM’ (83); Francine,
the representative of the intellectual Paris bourgeoisie in the novel, is seen as
‘a little IBM machine’ (131). Lonstein’s attempt to ‘artifucklate [articulear:
articular, culear] the wholworld’ (338) within but against an alienated
language and discourse is an image of the task of the novel as a whole. It
demands that the sign of this discourse should be changed from negative to
positive, turned upside-down in the way Oliveira transforms the meaning of
piedad. Like Marrast with his statue, like Jai Singh with the cold fatality of the
stars in Prosa del observatorio, Lonstein is an ‘inverter’: ‘but man there, the
inverter, he who turns destiny upside-down, the acrobat of reality: against
petrified ancestral mathematics’ (PO 42). If the enterprise were at all
successful, the ‘lorpro’ (‘logical organization of any programme’) of the
deterministic world of computers (of the social novel, of fanatics) would
become ‘ilorpro’ (‘the illogical organization of any programme’) (200).
Miguel Alascio Cortázar’s accusing Cortázar of being a pornographer
is perhaps not irrelevant to the latter’s attempt in Libro de Manuel to treat the
erotic, and especially tabooed sexuality (masturbation, sodomy), with great
Libro de Manuel 49
honesty, with ‘that delirious degree of verbal nudity’ that he found to be a

necessary purification before any revolutionary change, ‘an indispensable
condition for Verrières on Friday night’ (219). El que te dije aspires to a style
which would not change key on approaching such subjects: ‘The problem is
closer to us: to search for something like not noticing it when we move from
one area to another, and we’re not capable of that yet. Paradoxically, we look
on prohibited themes as special’ (232). There are indications that Cortázar
found such a resolution highly embarrassing at times:
I drop my biro and pick it up again, these hairy cheeks of mine

blush because I find it hard to talk about fingers up arses [...], but
I pick up my biro, take the fluff off it and start writing again and
feel disgusted, I’ve got to go and have a shower, I feel like a slug
or like when you slip on a pile of shit. (233)
Lonstein, more than any other character, is aware of the censorship

inherent in language and tries especially hard to talk openly about taboo
subjects, those which fundamentally contradict the laws and logic of his
society, such as his relationship with the corpses he washes in the morgue.
It is mainly through the ‘fortrans’ that he attempts to solve this problem,
which Andrés defines as ‘naming the things that it was impossible to
describe’ (213). Bataille, who fought a parallel battle at the limit of language
and thought, comments succinctly that ‘les mots disent difficilement ce
qu’ils ont pour fin de nier’.18 One of his characters, l’Abbé C., uses a
language which may well have inspired the ‘fortran’ in this context. He
believes that the only way to express the indicible is in the form of an enigma:
‘Il serait donc apparemment, dans la nature de cet objet de ne povoir être
donné comme le sont les autres: il ne pourrait être proposé à l’intérét que
sous forme d’énigme...’19 The same character can only express himself to
his loved one by defecating under her window and writing highly enigmatic
letters to her. Both these elements are combined with a series of gallicisms
in the following passage of Lonstein:
I can’t keep conjugating my boulow at Marthe’s bistrow, as my

coupans say, and that condemns me to silence besides which as
I am a bachelor and a chastonanist I am left with no other outlet
but solliloquy apart from the toiletbook where from time to
time I defeposit (defepoango) one or two turdscripts (sorescriptos).
(40)
50 Steven Boldy
Defepongo (defecar, deponer) is very similar to Bataille’s ‘soulépadé-

pone’20 (souiller, padir, déposer), which is even more disguised than
Lonstein’s neologism, as ‘sous le petit pont’.
VERTICAL OR HORIZONTAL WRITING: THE TWO AUTHORS
Cortázar claims that in order to explore ‘vertically’, deeply, the experience

recounted in the novel, he found himself obliged to write ‘horizontally’,
linearly: ‘And thus, through one of those curious workings of the world of
communication, I realized that only by writing “horizontally” could I
transmit vertical movements of meaning, a questioning of frontiers, without
too much loss’ (C 19–20).
A difficult issue is at stake in this paradoxical assertion, which is at the
nerve centre of the formal tensions of the novel. Eco provides a clear
introduction to the problem in his Opera aperta. A language is a system of
predetermined probabilities.21 Intelligibility and information (i.e. a new
message) are in opposition. Any information represents an element of
disorder in the established code: ‘the message introduces a crisis into, the
code’;22 ‘the more clearly the message communicates, the less it informs’.23
A large amount of information, a very new message, runs the risk of creating
chaos, incomprehension. The only way of transmitting this message is thus
a dialectic between a conventional code and the message which threatens it:
‘Between the offer of a plurality of formal worlds and the offer of
undifferentiated chaos, void of any possibility of aesthetic enjoyment, the
distance is short: only a pendular dialectic can save the composer of an open
work.’24
Andrés, the Oliveira-Juan of Libro de Manuel, and also its ‘final’ author,
faces this problem on listening to Stockhausen’s Prozession. He finds that he
is alternately able and unable to concentrate, that he can concentrate only on
the passages where the piano is used among the electronic sounds. Prozession
had represented for him the music of the hombre nuevo, yet, in the midst of
this new experience, ‘even so the old man is still alive and remembers’ (26).
It becomes clear to him that although intelligibility demands the presence of
the old code (of expression, of behaviour), this code is likely to project into
the future the alienated structures to be transcended:
And now it is even simpler to understand how history, temporal

and cultural conditioning is inevitably fulfilled, because every
passage where the piano is predominant sounds to me like a
recognition which concentrates my attention, wakes me up more
Libro de Manuel 51
acutely to something which is still attached to me by that

instrument which serves as a bridge between the past and the
future. (26)
Andrés believes that the novel will only be valid if understood: ‘A bridge is a
man crossing a bridge, mate’ (27). The problem is thus posed of
communication through a medium which implies an alien view of the world.
He asks how one can ‘find the way to say intelligibly, when perhaps your
technique and your deepest reality are demanding the burning of the piano
and its replacement by some other electronic filter’ (27). His choice between
the two alternatives available to him is unequivocal. He decides to trust in the
comprehension of future generations, ‘to build the bridge anyway and leave it
there; from that suckling infant in the arms of its mother, a woman will walk
away some day and will cross the bridge on her own [...]. And then the piano
will not be necessary’ (28). When Patricio complains that no one will ever
understand the scrapbook finally compiled by Andrés, the latter answers,
‘Manuel will understand, [...] Manuel will understand some day’ (385)
The ‘horizontality’ referred to by Cortázar finds its main expression in
the ‘plot’. This plot is almost a commonplace: a group of revolutionaries in
Paris kidnap an important official in order to secure the release of political
prisoners in Latin America. The characters converge on Verrières to carry out
these plans, and such a simple narrative structure and well-defined action allow
and oblige Cortázar to combine the difficult symbolism of the rendezvous (as
discussed in 62) with the ‘real’ problems he has newly decided to approach.
The plot imposes a certain discipline on material which otherwise might take
on a circularity that would exclude a wider reading public.
Within this framework, there are two clearly discernible types of
causality, corresponding to the two authors Andrés and el que te dije, which I
will follow in the next two sections. The first is what might be called the
mystically horizontal trajectory of Andrés from a state of uncommittedness
to a participation in the events at Verrières, and reflected in his ‘later’ writing
or rewriting of the novel. The second is the linear causality that el que te dije
tries to impose on the lives of the characters by deterministic logic,
classification and selection of the elements of the narrative. This imposition
is parallel to the censorship imposed by ‘my paredros’ in 62. His motivations
are strictly and limitedly ‘revolutionary’ and his (unfinished) discourse forms
the alienating and official code against which Cortázar’s own causality (the
writing of Andrés?) expresses itself, thus forming the dialettica pendolare
referred to by Eco.
52 Steven Boldy
ANDRÉS
The dream
The position of Andrés at the beginning of the novel is much the same as that
of Oliveira in Paris. His life is plagued with dualism and he is symbolically
torn between two women: Ludmilla, like la Maga, a totally natural and ‘true’
figure who ‘seems to have a sort of right to violate all chronology’ (15), and
Francine, like Pola,25 middle-class, cultured and significantly the part owner
of a bookshop ‘The man astride the roof trying to encompass the Ludmilla
world and the Francine world [...] and of course the continual buffeting from
the binary, the irreconcilable double view from the ridge of the roof ’ (167).
His attempt to break with what he considers the bourgeois institution of the
couple is only partially honest in that he takes a lover in a totally ‘bourgeois’
fashion, wishing to maintain the status quo with Ludmilla. He himself
realizes the difficulty of knowing whether his choices are made freely or
dictated by unconscious taboos: ‘When I choose what I believe to be a
liberating line of conduct, a widening of my world, I am perhaps obeying
pressures, coercions, taboos, or prejudices which spring precisely from the
side which I am wanting to leave behind’ (168). As in the case of Oliveira,
Andrés’s lucidity and intellectuality, his incapacity to choose between the
piano and the electronic filters, leads him into a state of total inactivity.
In the dream, Andrés enters a cinema to see a mystery film, which
indicates that he is a spectator in life. In the cinema, there are two screens,
an indication of the duality of his life. A waiter approaches and menacingly
informs him that a Cuban is demanding to see him. When he comes out
from the interview with the Cuban (Castro), he realizes that the scene has
been cut in the dream, that he has been given a message to deliver, a mission,
but he does not know what it is. He is now, however, both an actor in the film
and a spectator, but before he finds out the conclusion of the film (his
mission), he is woken by the postman.
The almost obligatory nature of the reference to the writing of
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (103) must not make one underestimate the
importance of the unconscious in the dictation of the message. The idea is
also reminiscent of other works: El sueño de los héroes by Bioy Casares, where
the hero has to re-enact a dream in order to find out its conclusion; García
Márquez’s ‘Ojos de perro azul’, where the hero, on waking every day, forgets
the password by which he will recognize the ‘real’ lover he meets in his
dreams; in a different way Borges’s ‘Inferno 1, 32’ from El hacedor.
The cut in the dream is referred to as the ‘black blot’ (mancha negra)
Libro de Manuel 53
and has extremely wide and paradoxical implications. It is censorship in that

it separates Andrés from a knowledge of his destiny, and, as such, is
connected with many other alienating manifestations of taboo in the novel,
and thus demands destruction. It is the bulwarks cutting off access to the
stern in Los premios and the string barrier between Oliveira and the other side
of his reality, Traveler, which creates the ‘black mass’ in Rayuela. Yet at the
same time, on returning to the film, there is absolutely no dualism in Andrés
for the first time: ‘But all this about it being double is what I say now I’m
awake, there was no doubleness in the dream, I perfectly recollect that while
I was returning to my seat I felt all this which I am now segmenting in order
to explain it, however partially, as one single block’ (103).
Paradoxically, only by doing what he has to do will he be able to know
what it is: ‘Rather as if only thanks to that action which I had to carry out
could I find out what the Cuban had said to me, a completely absurd
inversion of causality, as you can see’ (103). A very similar reversal of
causality was important in Oliveira’s behaviour in the second part of Rayuela:
‘I have the impression that as soon as I’ve got nice straight nails I’ll know
what I need them for’; ‘First the nails and afterwards the purpose of the nails’
(R 278). The connotations of such a reversal are complex and work on
different levels. In Rayuela, we sensed a faith in the spontaneity prescribed by
Zen, and in an impersonal causality or force which would direct Oliveira’s
action.
The problem becomes clearer when Andrés, after tortured attempts to
penetrate intellectually the ‘black blot’, comes to the conclusion that ‘I can
no longer search with reason’ (292). This is, of course, the position reached
by Oliveira, largely through the example of la Maga. Intelligence is seen as
accomplice of the barrier of the ‘black blot’, as in Los premios. The theorizing
of Andrés leads him into a vicious circle of dualism and inactivity. The
possibility of looking beyond revolutionary action to a hypothetical and very
different future is considered in very similar terms in Callado’s Bar Don Juan:
‘We cannot think consecutively. We cannot manage to produce integrated
analytical thought. Our barrier of guts and blood is too dense. We think with
our whole body, inside the problem.’26 Thus the ‘black blot’ denotes both
the impossibility of thinking beyond revolutionary action towards the state
such action might produce and also the necessity of renouncing a type of
thought alien to the revolution.
There is also a much simpler moral side to the issue. The sort of
intellectual activity symbolized by Prozession is a luxury which Andrés has to
win the moral right to indulge in. To renounce intellectual thought in favour
of pure and purifying action and violence will transform this thought in the
54 Steven Boldy
same way as Oliveira abandons la piedad (conventional human sentiments) in

order to return to it in a freer, less alienated form:
Mais viendra le moment où il comprendra que pour écouter

Prozession, il faut d’abord gagner le droit á l’écouter, et pour cela,
remplir certains devoirs, accomplir certaines tâches, jouer
certains jeux. Un jour, alors, oui, on peut s’asseoir dans un
fauteuil et écouter Prozession, sans que ce soit, une fois de plus,
l’égoisme, le solipsime, la solitude, l’échec.27
Andrés does go to Verrières and thus, symbolically, joins the

revolution. The question of what sort of causality it is which leads him
straight to this destination remains. His poem ‘Maneras de viajar’ and the
fact that he travels to Verrières by underground and by train are reminiscent
of the city in 62, and suggest the passivity of an unconscious destiny. Such a
destiny is reflected in a mystical faith on the part of Andrés himself: on
reaching a fork in the road to Verrières, he blindly but with obvious
symbolism takes the left-hand turning, exclaiming in the words of St John of
the Cross (‘aunque es de noche’),28 ‘Let us turn left, even though it may be
night, my beloved Juan de la Cruz’ (352). El que te dije, again quoting St John,
rejects such mysticism a priori: ‘A la caza darle alcance, etcétera. No’ (13).
Curiously, this same phrase, ‘even though it may be night’, is used by João in
the novel by Callado quoted above.29 In addition to the meaning of barrier,
the ‘black blot’ takes on the second meaning of a ‘dark night of the soul’.
A parallel could be drawn between the Cuban’s message, discovered and
perhaps fulfilled in the journey of Andrés, and Cortázar’s concept of narrative
as discussed with reference to 62, where the intention significative with the
mediation of la parole was seen to discover, by saying it, what was to be said.
One must not forget that this reversal of traditional logic also contains
a clear statement on revolutionary strategy—that revolutionary praxis and
theory cannot be separated. Hence Cortázar’s and Andrés’s mistrust of
preceptive politicians as typified by Lucien Verneuil. His quotations in
‘Noticias del mes de mayo’ of Sartre’s denunciation of the reactionary role of
the Communist Party in ‘mai ‘68’, and his comments on the Cuban
revolution, are relevant here: ‘What is admirable about the case of Castro is
that theory was born from experience instead of preceding it’ (UR a 50).
Debray in his controversial Revolution in the Revolution? expands this point:
revolutionary theory and morality were forged not in the city by party
workers, but in the sierra. This work would seem to be known to Cortázar.
His article ‘Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura’ is an
Libro de Manuel 55
obvious parallel to Debray’s title. One should avoid confusing Cortázar’s

enthusiasm for the more surrealist aspects of ‘mai ‘68’ with a belief in
spontaneous revolution. The lack of explicit revolutionary theorizing in Libro
de Manuel is explained by el que te dije (252).
The arrival at Verrières: return to the childhood garden
Borges tells us that in ‘La muerte y la brújula’, a story based like Libra de
Manuel on the ambiguity between personal motivation and destiny, he was
able, through ‘that voluntary dream called artistic creation’,30 to describe
what he had tried unsuccessfully to describe for many years: the atmosphere
of the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This he does effortlessly, for he had—
consciously—tried to describe not the Androgué of his youth but the estate
of Triste-le-Roy near Paris.31 Similarly, Andrés, on arriving at Verrières, is
reminded of his childhood in the Buenos Aires suburb of Bánfield
My grandmother taught me in a garden in Bánfield,

a sleepy suburb of Buenos Aires,
—Snail, snail,
bring out your horns into the sun.
That must be why in this suburban night there are snails. (353)
For Andrés to reach Verrières is thus to return to his childhood, to his

origins. The stern in Los premios and the blind impulse of the eels through
their life cycle to their origins in the Sargasso Sea in Prosa del observatorio
have similar connotations. The journey of the eels in this last work is as
distorted by the classification and separation of the scientists as the journey
of Andrés would have been by analysis and consciousness. We will later see
the importance of a provincial garden in the trajectory of Oscar towards
revolutionary commitment. With the importance of the origins in mind, it
may well be relevant to the failure of el que te dije as author of Libro de Manuel
that, on beginning to write, he turns his back on his childhood garden, on
the table his grandmother has set and on the light around which the insects
are flying (24), an image of the original intention significative. The origins will
take on greater significance in our discussion of taboo.
Synthesis or schizophrenia?
The journey of Andrés to Verrières, in spite of its mystical directness, is as

ambiguous as that of Julien Sorel to the Verrières of Le rouge et le noir. It is
56 Steven Boldy
haunted by a duality which points either to a vital synthesis of the personal

and political, or to the schizophrenia attributed to Cortázar by Collazos.
Andrés has personal, individual reasons for going to Verrières:
Ludmilla is there with Marcos, the leader of the revolutionaries, whose lover
she has become on leaving Andrés. It is suggested that by arriving late he
brings the enemy agents, the ‘ants’, after him (358). One interpretation
would be that it is his individualism that has introduced the ‘ants’, with all
their connotations, into the revolutionary action. This interpretation
corresponds, however, to only one reading of his relationship with Ludmilla,
that is, that he is motivated exclusively by jealousy in going to Verrières. It
may be licit to recall from Rayuela that Traveler’s interpretation of Oliveira’s
actions in Buenos Aires, strongly coloured by jealousy, is an instance of bad
faith aimed at distorting the causality which culminates in the synthesis
Talita–la Maga.
But the ‘ants’, according to Lonstein (368), had already been hiding at
Verrières four hours before the arrival of Andrés, and a very different reading
becomes equally possible. Andrés’s male-centred triangle had been an
indication of his insincerity: ‘Might not a lot of us be trying to smash the
bourgeois moulds on the basis of equally bourgeois nostalgias?’ (168). On
going to Verrières, however, he accepts a triangle centred round Ludmilla, a
far more difficult exercise for a male ‘Argentinian’. This inversion of a
triangle formed by one man and two women into one formed by one woman
and two men constitutes an important structural link with Rayuela: the
triangle Ludmilla–Andrés–Francine becomes Andrés–Ludmilla–Marcos in
the same way as the triangle la Maga–Oliveira–Pola becomes
Oliveira–Talita–Traveler.
Though the inversion of the triangle is important, the symbolic role of
Ludmilla must be considered the prime factor in the deep causality of the
journey of Andrés. Ludmilla is another Maga and, though the monstrous
attributes of the latter are considerably sublimated in her, the spontaneity,
naturalness and ‘trueness’ remain, as does the force of the monster. Ludmilla
joins the revolution, and for Andrés to recover her or at least to rejoin her is
to join the revolution, to accept its essence, the most valid forces behind it.
The parallel with la Maga is absolute: Ludmilla is frustrated by Andrés, who
gives her no children (92–3), is made egoistic and superficial, as reflected in
her profession of actress (la Maga sings Hugo Wolf and Rocamadour is
abandoned to a nourrice); she leaves Andrés for Marcos, whose wounds she
cures (214) (la Maga looks after the sick Pola); on disappearing to join the
revolution, she is purified by her new role as is suggested in the symbolic
shower scene (238) (la Maga is cleansed of her ‘monstrosity’ by her death or
Libro de Manuel 57
disappearance); Andrés rejoins her and at the same time accepts and is
integrated into the revolution (Oliveira recovers la Maga through Talita and
is thus reconciled with reality, breaking the dualism which plagued his
relations with it).
The synthesis achieved in Rayuela, symbolized and effected by the
syncretism of Talita and la Maga, becomes in Libro de Manuel the synthesis
of the individual and the universal and collective. This, for Cortázar, is the
highest aim of socialism:
Not only can society as conceived by socialism not annul this

concept of the individual, but aspires to develop him to such a
point that all the negativity, all his demoniacal aspects which are
exploited by capitalist society, will be transformed by a level of
personality where the individual and collective dimensions will
cease to confront and frustrate each other. (LR 64–5)
Andrés, on approaching the house, cannot reconcile being an

Argentinian (i.e., as in Rayuela, a historical individual) and being where he is,
involved in revolutionary action: ‘what a strange thing to be an Argentinian
in this garden and at this time’ (355). The paradox is expressed in the
macaronically successful ‘and the poor taita fell, the taita who read
Heidegger’ (355). The nightingale which appears just before the ‘black blot’
is dispelled is perhaps a symbol of the resolution of this tension. The most
universal of birds is brought together with the teros and bichofeos of Andrés’s
youth: ‘with something singing up there, perhaps the legendary nightingale,
I have never heard a nightingale, being brought up on teros and bichofeos in
Bánfield’ (355).32
We will examine the effect and implications of separating the individual
from the political or collective in el que te dije’s treatment of Oscar.
The message
The synthesis we have mentioned is further explained by the message which

is revealed to Andrés as he approaches the house, and in turn helps to explain
this enigmatic message. The message is ‘Wake up!’ (356). Our hypothesis
about all the process is strengthened by Cortázar’s essay ‘Espeleología a
domicilio’, where he stresses how, in a dream, the subject and his action are
not separated by the conscious mind: ‘in that pure living experience where
the dreamer and his dream are not distanced by categories of understanding,
where every man is his dream, his dreaming of the dream and the subject of
58 Steven Boldy
the dream’ (UR b 50). He mentions the myth of Bluebeard’s injunction to his
wife not to open the door of the room where he kept the bodies of his
previous, murdered wives. This door, for Cortázar, is ‘underneath your
eyelids’ (UR b 50),33 is the door which separates the conscious from the
unconscious. He proposes a violation of this prohibition: ‘In the light of
archetypal figures every prohibition is a clear piece of advice: open the door,
open it right away’ (UR b 50). The way to open the door is ‘to wake up in
one’s dream’:
One has only to open it [...] and the method is the following: You
must learn to wake up within your dream, impose your will on
that oneiric reality of which up till now you have only passively
been author, actor and spectator. He who succeeds in waking up
to freedom within his dream will have opened the door and
gained access to a plane of being which will at last be a novum
organum (UR b 50–1).
‘Wake up’ is thus an order to free the liberatory strength of man’s other
side, his oneiric world. This is none other than the surrealist programme
which has always been more or less implicit in Cortázar’s work. Breton talks
of ‘cette volonté désespérée d’aujourd’hui [...] d’opérer à chaque instant la
synthèse du rationnel et du réel’,34 and describes the surrealist enterprise in
the following way: ‘Au point de vue intellectuel il s’agissait, il s’agit encore
d’éprouver par tous les moyens et de faire reconnaitre à tout prix le caractère
factice des vieilles antinomies destinées hypocritement à prévenir toute
agitation insolite de la part de l’homme.’35
The message does not refer exclusively to the life of the individual, but
also to the parallel barriers in social reality, as is suggested in a poem by
Cortázar which was inspired by the graffiti and posters of ‘mai ‘68’. One
slogan demands ‘be realists, ask for the impossible’, to which Cortázar
replies: ‘We are realists, compañero, we are going / hand in hand from dream
to wakefulness’ (UR a 51).
The door of the Ultimo round passage is the ‘black blot’ of Libro de
Manuel. The incitement to disobedience refers to prohibitions, taboos and
censorship on various levels: social, in writing (the censorship of memory by
el que te dije), and the ‘door of horn and the door of ivory’ (150) of sexual
taboo. The rebellion and turning upside-down of 62, closely connected with
the theme of monsters, thus reappears. The monsters of Libro de Manuel are
seen, if with less mystery, with greater clarity than elsewhere. We can now
understand that the Cuban’s message can only be carried out if, at the same
Libro de Manuel 59
time as Andrés abandons conscious thought, such prohibitions are violated in

order that the repressive order they represent should not return, vampire-
like, after the ‘dark night’ of Andrés.
EL QUE TE DIJE
Chronicler of the Joda
El que te dije is the first author of Libro de Manuel. His writing is, to a certain
extent, a caricature of the demands from certain Marxist quarters that Cortázar
should write something close to social realism, and contains a large element of
an almost positivist causality. This tendency in el que te dije, however, though
never complete or fully realized, produces the rudiments of an alienated and
exclusive discourse, the code which, according to Eco and as we have seen in
previous novels, is a necessary base against which a new message and causality
(symbolized by the journey of Andrés) can be dialectically developed.
El que te dije is, nevertheless, a complex character and is presented with
some sympathy. His personal position is very liberal. His very name suggests
that he is the ‘my paredros’ of Libro de Manuel, that the other characters have
delegated to him, through pudor, their own acts. El que te dije seems to mean
‘the person I told you about’, an ellipsis of ‘it wasn’t me who did it, but...’.
He has at his disposal all the information on the revolutionary enterprise,
registered in a chaotic pile of index cards and scraps of paper. The
information is seen, as in 62 by ‘my paredros’, as insects flying around a light:
the empty intention signicative. Cortázar has always demanded a ‘previous
opening’ on beginning a novel, that the elements of the novel should
generate the causality which would link them:
One thing was clear [...]: the incapacity I still have to build a novel
until the novel itself decides the process, and sometimes it finds
it hard. I know that it is impossible but I also know its deep
causes, the refusal of literature conceived as a humanistic,
architectonic project, the need for a previous opening, that
freedom demanded by everything I am about to do and, to that
end, there can be no clear idea, no formal plan. (C 18)
Demands, however, of immediate intelligibility and clarity are made on el que

te dije as chronicler of the Joda. This is the defining difference between his
position and that of Andrés: ‘In my case [Andrés] it was something personal
and I had no need to project it onto a sort of clarity for a third party, but el
60 Steven Boldy
que te dije was in a different position’ (212). The personal aspects of the
narration can but be neglected or distorted by el que te dije due to his very
nature as a collective double.
Great stress is laid on the ‘neutrality’ of el que te dije’s position and
narrative: ‘then el que te dije goes to his neutral corner, which is anywhere, not
necessarily in a corner’ (175); ‘this neutrality had led him from the start to
stand sort of sideways on, always a risky operation in narrative matters’ (11).
Yet Andrés, getting his own back for el que te dije’s attacks on him, is anxious
to explain that this neutrality is not at all honest: ‘El que te dije was like that,
as far as he could, he dealt the cards in his own way’ (48). More importantly,
the ideological character of seemingly neutral concepts such as memory is
carefully brought out. At first, el que te dije explains away the exclusion of
names and passages from his narrative as a simple whim, asking ‘why
memory should not have its whims’ (47). Later, however, after conversation
with Lonstein, he realizes how memory functions as a defence of ‘everyday
life’, that is of the ‘precious daily ego’: ‘Forgetfulness and memory are
endocrine glands just like the hypophysis or the thyroid glands, libido
regulators which decree vast twilight zones and brilliantly illuminated crests
so that everyday life will not bloody its nose too often’ (230).
We have already noted the inseparability of personal and political
motivations in Andrés. Lonstein, in his turn, stresses the importance of
irrational elements (which the ‘technocrats of the revolution’ would consider
irrelevant) in the workings of reality and consciousness: ‘They are the
technocrats of the revolution and think that joy, toadstools and my landlady
are not part of the dialectics of history’ (144). He consequently mixes
together all the heterogeneous information he receives in ‘one big meta-Joda
salad’ (108). Even Marcos, the leader of the revolutionaries, insists that one’s
personal and political lives cannot be separated, whereas this is exactly what
el que te dije does: ‘Why that obsessive habit of chopping things up as if they
were salami? A slice of Joda, another of personal history, you remind me of
el que te dije with his problems of organization, the poor chap does not
understand and he would like to understand, he’s a sort of Linnaeus or
Ameghino of the Joda’ (239).
El que te dije is not opposed to the conclusion of others such as Oscar
who come to see the revolution as a wide, all-embracing movement: ‘how
everything tended to be the same thing, to be the Joda right here or far away,
in Verrières or la Plata, Gladis or Silvia’ (305). If he could manage not to
change key when writing about erotic experiences, then ‘he would begin to
feel that everything is Joda and that there are no personal episodes between
one moment and another of the Joda’ (232).
Libro de Manuel 61
But el que te dije works deductively, starting with the theory. Moreover,
the pudor inherent in his constitution prevents him from writing in the way
described. Consequently, at certain points, he excludes the personal
analogies which are so important in the work: ‘this café in the rue de Buci
had nothing to do with the bar in the calle Maipú’ (48). Similarly, he refuses
to accept any relation between the memories of the garden of his childhood
and the present: ‘All this is of little relevance today, after so many years of
good or bad life’ (23). Hence, when he receives the trajectory of Oscar, the
details of the organizational and political aspects of his involvement in the
Joda together with seemingly frivolous newspaper cuttings which had
fascinated Oscar, el que te dije rigorously classifies and separates it: ‘one big
meta-Joda salad which el que te dije had to reclassify, putting the astrological
cutting from Horoscope and the one sent by Oscar on one side, and the
problem of old Collins and the counterfeit dollars on the other side’ (108).
The inadequacy of his position is finally illustrated when, confronted
with the chaotic fight with the ‘ants’, he is overtaken by events and can only
revert to a parody of the Iliad before apparently dying: ‘This cannot happen
like this and here and tonight and in this country and with these people; it’s
all over, mate (se acabó, che)’ (363). His words curiously echo the last
moments of Oliveira: ‘paf se acabó’.
El que te dije and Oscar
There is in Oscar a progressive understanding of his own situation and of the

forces which dictate his revolutionary action. The barriers in him which
obstruct this understanding (memory, separation) are paralleled by el que te
dije’s manipulation of the facts of his life. There is an analogy between the
alienated discourse which el que te dije attempts to impose on his material and
the effect of Oscar’s superego on his own consciousness. The reader is thus
cleverly placed in the same position as Oscar.
El que te dije tries to explain the trajectory of Oscar in one of his many
diagrams, the only virtue of which is that it explains absolutely nothing,
rather like the taxonomy of Ceferino Piriz. The issue centres mainly around
a newspaper article about the escape from a boarding-school in La Plata of a
number of young girls, which Oscar sends before him from Argentina with a
nostalgic account of his life in doña Raquela’s pensión, of the scent of the
jasmines and his amorous adventures in the light of the full moon. The press-
cutting, where no mention is made of the full moon, rather of ‘the shortage
of light’ (109), is surreptitiously introduced as ‘the cutting on the full moon’
(108). It immediately finds an echo in Monique, who says that ‘it was perhaps
62 Steven Boldy
the full moon as Oscar says’ (110) (the reader has not yet heard Oscar’s
version), and recounts a parallel rebellion in a Strasbourg establishment.
As Oscar flies over the Atlantic to join the ‘revolution’, and tries hard
to concentrate on how he is going to get the counterfeit dollars into France,
he becomes increasingly obsessed by the notion of the full moon in the
escape of the girls. The infiltration of the full moon into his consciousness is
expressed typographically by smaller print over the main text. He has the
impression that something is wrong or missing in his understanding.
Whereas he himself imagines the girls scaling a wall in the light of the full
moon and sexually excited by its influence, the article talks of ‘a surprise
black-out’ (109) and claims prosaically that ‘the cause of the trouble was the
advertising of carnival dances by neighbouring night-clubs which craze the
boarders’ (110). A parallel may be drawn between the ‘surprise black-out’
referred to by the article and the ‘black blot’ of Andrés, also referred to as a
‘total black-out’ (267). The suggestion is that there is also some form of
censorship at work in the article. To explain the reaction of the girls by the
effect on them of the advertisements for dances is equivalent to limiting the
motives of a revolutionary to the theory of dialectical materialism.
The full moon which impelled the young girls over the wall is the same
full moon Oscar remembers from doña Raquela’s boarding house. He recalls
how ‘in doña Raquela’s patio the full moon was an imperious call, an impulse
which sent out of orbit one’s skin, one’s [...]’ (127). This image of a vital,
irrational impulse is not alien to Oscar’s decision to join the Joda. Indeed, it
is suggested that such seemingly irrelevant images can dictate the whole
course of a life: ‘There is a sort of surreptitious recurrence of the joke or
word play or gratuitous act which creeps up onto what is not a joke, onto the
plinth of life, and from up there gives out oblique orders, modifies
movements, corrodes customs’ (125).
The separation of this motivation from his ‘real’ life (‘the flight across
the wasteland, nothing to do with this room at the other side of the world’
(185)), imposed by his superego and the manipulation of el que te dije, leaves
the revolutionary present and future he is entering empty and meaningless:
‘Opening his eyes [...] tipped Oscar into something with no real hand-holds,
the perfect, miniskirted and deodorized silhouette of Gladis [...], all that
absolutely hollow’ (128).
Gladis at this point is significantly described as being ‘deodorized’.
There are two very different types of ‘washing’ in the novel. This first
instance corresponds to the sterilizing influence of the morality of Francine,
which is ‘as automatic as deodorant on one’s armpits’ (266), and to the
censorship of el que te dije. Consequently, when Oscar finally understands his
Libro de Manuel 63
own position, his memory is like ‘an odour before the shower’ (164). The
other type, essentially in good faith, is, for example, the shower of Ludmilla
on leaving Andrés, Lonstein’s and Andrés’s washing baby Manuel (341),
Lonstein’s job of washing corpses, symbolically washing away taboo, ‘the
ancient, rotten corpse of time and taboos and incomplete self-definitions’.
(233). There is also in Libro de Manuel the paradoxical washing and
purification by a self-immersion in filth, corresponding to Oliveira’s night
with Emmanuèle, the self-burial of Heraclitus in the dungheap to cure
himself of dropsy. Lonstein’s dissertation on masturbation leaves him ‘with
his face all new and awake and as if washed’ (227). Andrés’s visit to the strip-
club with Francine and his feeling that he ought to let a drunkard vomit on
him respond to the same intention.
In his hotel room, in the state of semi-wakefulness when the ‘scissors
of wakefulness’ (142) are relaxed, Oscar allows all the heterogeneous
thoughts in his mind to mix together freely: ‘It was better to go to sleep and
let it all merge since there was no way of separating so many things from
one’s memory or from the present’ (195). Listening on the wireless to
Puccini’s Turandot, he is reminded of his childhood, when he had loved this
music, and at the same time of the pensión of doña Raquela. (A link would
seem to be established between the pensión and his childhood.) He
remembers that Puccini had died before finishing the work, that it had been
completed by someone else, and muses that so many things are given a false
appearance of completeness—newspaper articles, the prehistoric animals
reconstructed by Ameghino from one bone. (Marcos, as we noted earlier,
refers to el que te dije as the Linnaeus or Ameghino of the Joda.) His own
personal version of the girls’ escape is then probably right; the hole that the
journalist claimed the girls had opened in the barbed wire themselves was
already there: ‘who knows whether the hole might not have been there
already’ (164). The ‘previous opening’ demanded by Cortázar had been there
all the time, ignored by el que te dije in the lamp in his childhood garden. The
barriers within the novel are not absolute, but created in part by the narrative
itself. One is reminded of the classification of the eel’s life cycle in Prosa del
observatorio, where Cortázar asks, ‘But what is the point of that “why”, when
all that is asked of the answer is to block off a hole?’ (PO 41–2).
We can thus see how memories from the past, enclosing an image of
the potentiality of the future, can break through the barrier of censorship.
The role of analogy in the discovery of the unconscious or repressed
motivating force, and in the actual functioning of this force, is essential: ‘But
it was not a metaphor, it came back in a different way, as if obeying an
obscure likeness’ (164). Its importance is also stressed in Prosa del observatorio:
64 Steven Boldy
‘Tout se répond, thought Jai Singh and Baudelaire with a century between
them’ (PO 20). Here as elsewhere, the analogy often works through word
play, as when Oscar is reminded of the full moon (luna llena) on eating a
croissant (medialuna): ‘It may only be the croissant but it is also the full
moon, the implacable machine of word play opening up doors and revealing
entrances in the dark’ (222).
Whereas el que te dije understands progressively less of what is
happening until his final break-down, Oscar comes to a privileged
understanding of the wide, often individual and irrational motives behind his
commitment. He realizes that there is absolutely no difference between the
girls’ scaling the school wall and his girlfriend Gladis, who loses her job as an
air-hostess in order to help him, that ‘everything tended to be the same
thing, to be Joda right here and far away’ (305). Lonstein initially asks, ‘what
sort of an idea do you expect Oscar himself to have about what he’s doing’
(105). Oscar is now in a similar position and able to assert that Lucien
Verneuil, apparently the most theoretically motivated member of the group,
is ‘obeying obscure allegiances to what he thought was pure and practical and
dialectic logic’ (306).
CONCLUSION
Politics, sexual liberation and monsters
The importance of eroticism in liberation has been a fundamental theme in

Cortázar’s work since Los reyes. The issue in Libro de Manuel is centred round
the fear of the recurrence of repressive structures in society after the
revolution. The strong link between political and sexual revolution is
implicitly expressed in the novel, and incorporated into the structures of its
text: Andrés can only go beyond the ‘black blot’ to Verrières after breaking
down the parallel ‘black blot’ of the taboo on sodomy. Sexual liberation in
the novel is thus not just a luxury of the revolution, but a necessary condition
to its lasting success. Though Cortázar gives few explicitly political
arguments, Lonstein significantly links the mental disturbances created by
taboo in the individual with the collective illnesses of society: ‘the daytime
harmony which so many people called morality and which then some odd
day, individually, became neurosis and the analyst’s couch, and which also on
some odd day, collectively, became racism and/or fascism’ (218). References,
however, are made to Stephen Markus (170) and to Wilhelm Reich (233)
who, in The Sexual Revolution, was probably the first to note and study the
survival in post-revolutionary Russia of reactionary sexual ideas in spite of
Libro de Manuel 65
the destruction of their economic base. Pointing out the cultural

backwardness of the old Russia, he stresses the need in the future for a theory
of sexual revolution.36
The ideas of Marcuse, however, provide the most useful theoretical
background to our discussion of the theme. In Eros and Civilization, the latter
makes a fundamental development in the study of the survivals to which
Reich refers. After Freud, he stresses the correspondence between the
phylogenetic and the ontogenetic, the repetition in the development of the
individual of the stages of the evolution of civilization. The guilt a child feels
when, in the Oedipal, stage, he symbolically kills his father in order to
possess his mother and rejects parental authority to seek gratification in
society causes the parental values he has rejected to be reproduced in his
superego, a process described as the ‘return of the repressed’. Similarly, when
the young men revolted against the patriarchal primal horde, where one
leader held all the women yet protected the men, the dominant structures of
the previous society were repeated, again through guilt, in the collective
superego or superstructure. The repetition of this process from generation
to generation has the effect of progressively strengthening the repressive
laws of the superego.
For Freud, repression, which is used as a blanket term, is inherent in
the very nature of civilization, and the process described above becomes a
vicious circle. Marcuse, with his distinction between repression and ‘surplus-
repression’, provides an insight which can break this vicious circle, if only in
theory. Eros is the tendency towards complete oneness with the world, but
the erogenous zones of the body (originally the whole body) have been
gradually reduced to the genitals in order to leave the rest of the body free,
as a tool, for the tasks of society. Marcuse argues that the scarcity which
justified this repression is no longer the rule, that a high level of repression
is no longer a historical necessity, but corresponds to the laws of capitalist
production which demands that more and more be produced in order to
maintain the money surplus. It is this no longer necessary repression that he
terms ‘surplus-repression.’. To present such repression as ‘natural’ is also to
naturalize the historical state which created it. This implies that the
destruction of capitalist modes of production opens up the possibility of the
reactivation of ‘earlier’ forms of sexuality, other than the exclusively genital.
In The Other Victorians, from which Cortázar quotes extensively,
Stephen Markus brings out the ideological connotations of various taboos—
the taboo on masturbation, for example, corresponds to the mechanistic view
of the world where the body was seen as a machine capable of producing only
a limited amount of semen.
66 Steven Boldy
The fear of return of the repressed, the perpetuation of alienating

structures, conveyed in the repetition of the figuras, has been a central theme
in all the novels. We have seen that the figuras point to a prohibition, but
indirectly indicate the liberating nature of the tabooed force, the ‘monster’,
which can be released if the alienating and dualistic prohibition is violated, if
Actaeon returns to possess Diana.
The monsters of Cortázar’s previous novels are presented in Libro de
Manuel without the mediation of literary or mythical figures, and simply
embody tabooed sexual activity. Masturbation in Libro de Manuel is
equivalent to the Minotaur in Los reyes. Lonstein describes the taboo on
masturbation as one of ‘the deep ogres, the real masters of the daytime
harmony’ (218). As in the case of the Minotaur, the only way to kill this ogre
(to destroy its monstrosity) is to accept it. This acceptance would have the
effect of turning the ogre into a prince (like the Minotaur, son of the queen
Pasiphae):
To tear Onan from the inner mass was to kill at least one of the
ogres and even more, to metamorphose him by bringing him into
contact with the daytime and the open, to de-ogre him, to
exchange his sad clandestine coat for feathers and bells [...], the
ogre which after all was a prince like so many ogres, just that you
had to help him to stop being an ogre at last. (218)
Cortázar comments in the context of Libro de Manuel that since Los reyes he
has taken upon himself the task of ‘watching over slandered dragons’ (C 23),
the natural forces that ‘the establishment defines as monsters and
exterminates as soon as it can’ (C 15). (The ‘ants’ significantly try to ‘slander’
the members of the Joda by killing their hostage and making it look as if the
leader of the group, Marcos, had been responsible. This distortion of events
is parallel to that effected by the authorities at the end of Los premios.)
There is the same suggestion in Libro de Manuel as elsewhere that the
monsters preserve the memory of the origins and that only the experience of
these origins can revitalize the future. For Andrés, to go to Verrières is to
return to his childhood, and in the light of this return, the insistence on the
pansexuality of children becomes significant. Children have been an image of
the origins throughout the novels, and this novel is explicitly written for baby
Manuel. The tender description of the rudimentary masturbation of Manuel
is an image of the innocence lost to the guilty world-view of the adults
looking on. It is a ‘smack in the face (but it was also a caress) given by lost
innocence to those who looked at reality in an adult fashion from the other
Libro de Manuel 67
bank, with their idiotic guilt, their stained yellow flowers from the corpses of
Hindus’ (90).
From the Hotel Terrass to Verrières
Libro de Manuel ends in a characteristically ambiguous and understated

fashion. Perhaps it ends in a confused fashion, but then ‘when there is talk of
confusion, what one usually finds is confused people’ (12). Without
exhausting all the possible readings of the last two episodes (the ‘rape’ of
Francine and Andrés’s arrival at Verrières), I have suggested a reading
involving the deep structure of recovery followed in earlier works. Though
Cortázar may not consciously be proposing such a reading, only this deep
structure seems able to account for the concatenation and logic of these
episodes.
In the pages before the rape of Francine, the social and sexual are
linked in that the ‘naturalness’ of the taboo on sodomy is presented as
parallel to the ‘naturalness’ of social deprivation in the Paris slums. The
taboo on sodomy is referred to as ‘the truth, of course, a truth which grows
in the earth of genealogical lies’ (310). Francine comments on their visit to
the slum areas: ‘There is no need to come like a cheap doubting Thomas to
check on all this inevitable filth’ (278). Andrés is quick to pick up the word
inevitable: ‘You said it, my girl, everything was going all right in your speech
but at the end you said that little word which is equally inevitable in your
Weltanschauung, for your world and mine all that is always inevitable, but we
are wrong’ (278). In a sense, both naturalnesses are broken down when
Francine admits that the sodomy has not been a rape, that ‘it was not
unbearable, that he was not raping her’ (313): ‘No, you haven’t degraded me’
(327).
But the experience is, at the time, presented as a partial failure in that
on the following morning both feel guilty: ‘Apart from the bed, we were
Adam and Eve at the hour of their expulsion, something full of shadows and
past, covering our faces so as not to see the daylight on the gravestones down
there’ (326). The reference to Eve suggests that guilt in Libro de Manuel
retains from 62 Christian connotations. We are also reminded that it is
Jehovah who strikes down Onan for masturbation (225). This failure (when
the episode is taken in isolation) is confirmed when Andrés crosses the bridge
back to the city, to normality. His attempt at liberation has been a ‘false
bridge’ (290), simply a ‘holiday’ as against the ‘work day’ (329) which he
rejoins in the city, restoring the old dualism. The dualism of his act, as at the
same time a liberation and simple escapism, is inherent in the nature of the
68 Steven Boldy
hotel as an institution. Its owner ‘guarantees a whole lot of Judaeo-Christian

values’ (287), while offering the therapy of irresponsibility: ‘A hotel room is
a mini-therapy, unfamiliar furniture, irresponsibility [...] nobody will come
and say you’re a lout’ (286).
But just as in 62 the rape of Celia by Hélène depends for its final value
and consequences on the activity and judgements of others, the outcome of
this episode is only decided by Andrés’s later action. The name of the hotel,
suggesting a terrace or balcony, indicates that Andrés is still a spectator, not
yet an actor. Only when the two categories of spectator and actor have been
brought together will the ‘black blot’ finally dissolve. It is the close relation
in Libro de Manuel, as in 62, between guilt and death which creates the deep
link between the two episodes.
Andrés chooses to carry out his transgression of taboo, to rape
Francine, in a room of the Hotel Terrass overlooking a graveyard, which he
describes as the ‘stupid perpetuation of original misery’ (292), apparently a
reference to original sin.37 The graveyard signifies the death of the other half
of the individual, that which lies out of bounds beyond the ‘black blot’.
Taboo, the rules and prohibitions of society, in the form of the penalties,
fines and traffic lights of the bridge across which Andrés returns to Paris, are
ironically seen as protecting the pedestrian from ‘death on four wheels’
(325). When Andrés ‘pataphysically’ shows Francine the cemetery, the ‘black
blot’ partially and momentarily disappears: ‘The black blot disappeared for
one fleeting second, [...] something in me had seen across to the other side,
there was a sort of final balance to the stock-taking’ (293).
The cemetery forms a parallel with the morgue of Lonstein, where the
corpses, despised and rejected by society, correspond to ‘the ancient corpse
rotten with time and taboos and incomplete self-definitions’ (233).
Lonstein’s washing the corpses (of guilt) and caring for them (in a way which
flows over into necrophilia) is presented as bringing them back to life, or at
least dealing a considerable blow to death (a euphemistic rendering): ‘una
buena manera de darle por el culo a la pelada’ (39). Both transgressions of
sexual taboo in the novel are described as descents to Hades. Lonstein’s
discussion of masturbation is ‘a grotesque saga, a descent like that of
Gilgamesh or Orpheus to the hell of the libido’ (218). Andrés says to
Francine, ‘I need to go down those steps of cognac with you and see whether
there is an answer in the basement, whether you can help me to get out of
the black blot’ (292).
The rape of Francine is thus clearly a repetition of Oliveira’s kissing
Talita in the morgue of the lunatic asylum, of Hélène’s raping Celia and
symbolically taking her blood to the hospital morgue. The descent is always
Libro de Manuel 69
effected, as we know, to bring someone back to life. Though no one is actually

dead at this point in the novel, the two characters who could be symbolically
recovered are Manuel and Ludmilla. Anxiety is expressed at various points
about the safety of Manuel, which links him with Jorge in Los premios. There
are more indications, however, that Ludmilla is the person symbolically dead
to Andrés. Andrés has lost Ludmilla in the same way as Oliveira loses la Maga
before symbolically recovering her. Evidence from 62 points in the same
direction. To go beyond the ‘black blot’ is equivalent to the destruction of the
contents of Hélène’s doll. This destruction opens up the possibility of
rendezvous between Juan and Hélène, and one may assume that the
disappearance of the ‘black blot’ in Verrières has a similar effect for Andrés as
regards Ludmilla. That Ludmilla should have received him coolly is in a sense
irrelevant, since what Andrés recovers is what Ludmilla represents, that is, the
‘essential’ Ludmilla: naturalness, spontaneity, revolution.
If at any point Libro de Manuel does reach the difficult ‘convergence’
between Cortázar’s twin preoccupations, it is in these final inconclusive
moments of the novel. Just as Oliveira reconciles having recovered the force
of the dead Maga with going to the pictures with Gekrepken, Andrés, on
joining Ludmilla, incorporates the values and force the latter has inherited
from la Maga into his real, though tardy, rather superfluous, and perhaps
disastrous act of adhesion to the revolution: ‘Tell me where there is a gun
because I may be drunk but in my time I passed all the tests at the Federal
Shooting Gallery, so’ (361).38
NOTES
1. See, for example, ‘Acerca de la situación del intelectual latino-americano’, in

Ultimo round.
2. M. Alascio Cortázar, Viaje alrededor de una silla (Buenos Aires, 1971), 29–30.
3. Alascio Cortázar, 22.
4. Alascio Cortázar, 34.
5. Alascio Cortázar, 45
6. ‘Documentos. El caso Padilla’, in Libre I (September–November 1971), 131.
Referred to henceforth as CP.
7. Carlos Díaz Sosa, ‘Diálogo con Cortázar’, in Imagen 101–2 (January–February
1975), 27.
8. Díaz Sosa, ‘Diálogo’, 27.
9. García Canclini, 29–30.
10. A. Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris, 1972), 95.
11. A. Breton, Les manifestes du surréalisme, 8.
12. ‘El boom entre dos libertades’, in M. Benedetti, Letras del continente mestizo
(Montevideo, 1969), 37.
70 Steven Boldy
13. Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative
(trans. A. Pomerans; Harmondsworth, 1969), 12.
14. Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism, 31.
15. See Macedonio Fernández’s ‘Bobo de Buenos’, in Papeles de Recienvenido, poemas,
cuentos, miscelánea (Buenos Aires, 1967), 147, and Museo de la novela de la Eterna, 199ff.
16. See Juan Goytisolo, Señas de identidad (Mexico, 1973), 84.
17. Similar enterprises are recorded in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Le matin
des magiciens (Paris, 1972): the ‘adjectifs à double face’ of Charles Hoy Fort designed to
express a ‘nouvelle structure mentale’, ‘un troisième veil de l’intelligence’ (202); an
Austrian professor’s ‘refonte du langage occidental’, where, for example, ‘le retard sur
l’avance que je souhaitais prendre’ becomes ‘l’atard’ (203).
18. L’Abbé C., in (Oeuvres complètes, III (Paris, 1971), 356.
19. L’Abbé C., 339.
20. L’Abbé C., 344.
21. This is also true of the literary code of verisimilitude which, as Sollers points out,
is highly ideological: ‘LE ROMAN EST LA MANIÈRE DONT CETTE SOCIÉTÉ SE
PARLE, la manière dont l’individu DOIT SE VIVRE pour y être accepté’ (Logiques, 228).
22. U. Eco, Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan,
1971), 107.
23. Opera aperta, 105.
24. Opera aperta, 116.
25. Both women have in their names (Pola París, Francine) a reference to France, i.e.
to culture and order.
26. Bar Don Juan (Rio de Janeiro, 1971), 13.
27. In an interview with F. Wagener, ‘Marier Joyce et Mao’, in Le Monde, 20
September 1974, 26.
28. St John of the Cross, Obras escogidas, 57.
29. Obras escogidas, 49.
30. Borges, ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’, in Discusión, Obras completas, 274.
31. ‘El escritor argentino’, 270–1.
32. Borges makes a similar use of what is presumably the nightingale in ‘Nueva
refutación del tiempo’ after the famous moment before the pink fence (Otras inquisiciones,
Obras completas, 765).
33. Oliveira, after the syncretism of la Maga and Talita, ‘emerged [...] into the world
under his eyelids’ (R 374).
34. L’amour fou, 106.
35. Les manifestes du surréalisme, 51.
36. W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution (London, 1969), 191.
37. In Prosa del observatorio (p. 67), we have the phrase, ‘We have not yet learned to
make love, [...] to strip death of its suit of guilt and debts.’ For more discussion of
transgression and death in Cortázar, see E. Rodríguez Monegal, ‘Le fantôme de
Lautréamont’, in Narradores de esta América, II; S. Sarduy, ‘Del Yin al Yang’, in Escrito sobre
un cuerpo; M.A. Safir, ‘An Erotics of Liberation: Notes on Transgressive Behaviour in
Rayuela and Libro de Manuel’, in The Final Island.
38. Within this reading, the death of el que te dije would indicate the abolition of the
duality between the two positions represented by himself and Andrés.
ANA HERNÁNDEZ DEL CASTILLO
Woman as Circe the Magician
The mother has from the outset a decidedly symbolical significance for a man,
which probably accounts for his strong tendency to idealize her. Idealization is a
hidden apotropaism; one idealizes whenever there is a secret fear to be exorcised.
What is feared is the unconscious and its magical influence.
—C.G. Jung
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother
Archetype,” Symbols of Transformation
The universal goddess makes her appearance to men under a multitude of

guises; for the effects of creation are multitudinous, complex, and of mutually
contradictory kind when experienced from the viewpoint of the created world.
The mother of life is at the same time the mother of death; she is masked in the
ugly demonesses of famine and disease.
—Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
I n his book on Keats, Cortázar repeatedly expresses his admiration for

Keats’s capacity to respond to “the promptings of the collective
unconscious.” From the ensuing discussions, however, it becomes clear that
Cortázar is mainly concerned with Keats’s response to one archetype in
particular: the archetype of the Great Mother, particularly in her aspect of
Terrible Mother. In Cortázar’s view, Keats becomes the fist of the Romantics
to rediscover the powerful symbolism of Mother Goddesses, whose worship
From Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis. © 1981 John Benjamins B.V.
71
72 Ana Hernández del Castillo
dates back to the dawn of man’s consciousness. In one of the most

impassioned passages of his book on Keats, Cortázar proceeds to present a
“statistics” showing the recurrence of matriarchal figures and matriarchal
rites in Keats’s poetry,1 emphasizing the uniqueness of Keats’s poetry in the
richness of its archetypal contents. He underplays, thus, the equally
important role of Coleridge’s “Christabel” or of the figure of Death in “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge had conceived these poems in
analogous trancelike states that could have been interpreted, likewise, as
“seizures by the archetypes of the collective unconscious”).
Cortázar’s appreciation of the important role played by goddess figures
in Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, is not groundless or far-fetched; Walter
Evert has stressed Keats’s special sensitivity to the figure of the moon
goddess, observing that “lunar references and encomia are abundant in his
pre-Endymion poetry, and that—as one might expect from a person of
Keats’s sensitivity—he was moved not only by the variousness of the moon’s
appearances but also by the appearances of other objects touched with its
light.”2 He proceeds to observe that not only in Endymion but also in “I
Stood Tip-Toe” and others of Keats’s early poems the moon receives the
paean otherwise reserved for Apollo; it is she who inspires the poet, she who
is associated with the principle of “light”: “She has for all practical purposes
become identical with him.”3 If Apollo is associated with the light of day, and
thus, of intellectual pursuits, Cynthia, as ruler of the night, guides the poet
into a more obscure, intuitive, and magical knowledge. Similarly, Robert
Graves, in The White Goddess, had seen Keats as a “goddess-poet,” that is, as
one who is especially receptive and responsive to the numinous projections
of the Feminine.4 As his major biographers—especially Aileen Ward and
Robert Gittings5—observe, there is an important link between Keats’s
difficulty in establishing relationships with “real” women and his portrayal of
the goddesses around whom his major poems are built. It has been
perceptively observed that there was in Keats’s mind—more than in any
other of the Romantic poets—a strong compulsion towards the realization of
physical love which conflicted with his idealization of woman as goddess:
consequently, Keats’s erotic scenes either flee too far away into mythology or
fall into segments of bad taste. Physical love can never be portrayed actually
and directly, but must be clothed in Renaissance garb (“Isabella”), medieval
lore (“The Eve of Saint Agnes”), or Greek myth (Lamia); a situation
involving an actual woman will be bound to create a dramatic crisis.6 Indeed,
women always perplexed Keats; his attitude towards them shows a mixture of
contempt for the superficiality of the “blue-stockings” and dread for the
magical powers of the “Charmians.”
In a letter to Bailey (22 July 1818) Keats had explored the reasons
behind his feeling of uneasiness when dealing with women, attributing it to
the disappointment he felt upon finding out that real women fell “so beneath
my Boyish imagination.... When I was a Schoolboy I though[t] a fair Woman
a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept,
though she knew it not.”7 He reveres the ideal concept of women that he
carries in his mind and feels somewhat guilty at the thought that he expects
too much from the real women he meets. Moreover, he longs for the
feminine presence, yet he feels extremely awkward in the company of most
ordinary women he meets. Further in the same letter, he tells Bailey: “I must
absolutely get over this—but how? The only way is to find the root of evil,
and so cure it ‘with backward mutters of dissevering Power.’ That is a
difficult thing; for an obstinate Prejudice can seldom be produced but from
a Gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravell(ed) and
care to keep unravelled.”8 Cortázar is right, then, when he perceives the
complexity of Keats’s relationship to women and establishes a connection
between his “Gordian complication of feelings” regarding real women and
the peculiar conception of his feminine characters. His interpretation takes a
definite turn away from conventional Keatsian criticism, however, when he
concentrates exclusively on the negative aspects of the Feminine presented in
Keats’s letters and works, disregarding all others.
Cortázar’s study singles out the figure of Circe (Endymion, III) as the
basic “constellation” of the Feminine in Keats’s early works and as the
nucleus from which the figures of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Lamia
later derived. Cortázar then establishes a connection between the basic
constellation of woman as “Circe the Magician” and the conflicts that
characterized Keats’s relationships to women. Next, Cortázar presents
Keats’s affair with Fanny Brawne as the poet’s desperate struggle for self-
preservation facing the deadly, absorbing, annihilating enemy: Woman.
Again, Cortázar’s interpretation is not wholly groundless; and Keats’s
early critics had, in fact, literally blamed Fanny Brawne for Keats’s death.9
Before meeting Fanny Brawne, Keats apparently tended to divide women
into two groups: those who were sexually attractive (the “Charmians”) and
those who were “good” (like Georgiana, his brother George’s wife).10 When
he met Fanny he was confronting, for the first time, a woman who was both.
The tragedy of Keats’s passion for Fanny Brawne and its effect upon the
poet’s physical and mental health has been the subject of endless controversy
among Keats’s critics, who are often at variance in their interpretation of how
“fatal” Fanny really was for Keats. It is indeed a difficult matter to deal with;
for if we take Keats’s last letters as the main evidence of the conflict—as
Cortázar appears to have done—the presence of Fanny appears to have been,

indeed, lethal. Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne describe a kind of feeling that
goes far beyond the “normal” passion of man for woman and closely
approaches the devotion of a would-be saint about to be martyred for his
religion. In a letter of 13 October 1819 we read:
I cannot exist without you—I am forgetful of everything but

seeing you again—my Life seems to stop here—I see no further.
You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment
as though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable
without the hope of soon seeing you.... I have been astonished
that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—
I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love
is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed
is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravish’d me away by
a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist until I saw you; and
even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason
against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more—the pain
would be too great. My love is selfish—I cannot breathe without
you. (Forman, Letter 16)11
Keats is “seized” by Fanny’s presence, seen as “a Power I cannot resist” and

as one he cannot explain away by means of reason. It is a passion that
threatens with the dissolution of the self, and yet it is a state that, once
known, cannot allow the poet to fall comfortably back into his former
existence. He must pursue the state of ecstasy even at the cost of his own
destruction. The expression “exquisitely miserable” illustrates, through the
power of the opposition of feelings in it, the central nature of his experience.
It is analogous to the “pleasurable pain” of the odes and of Lamia; it is a
feeling that combines the extreme of joy with the extreme of pain, attaining
a conjunction of opposites that blend as one in the instant where the self is
about to dissolve.
Most of Keats’s critics agree in drawing a relationship between the
poet’s meeting of Fanny Brawne and his conception of certain poems
centering on the identification of love and death and on the appearance, in
other poems, of the figure of the sorceress that provides both the acme of
sensuous pleasures and the destruction of the unwary man who succumbs to
her charms. The poem “Bright Star”—conceived soon after Keats met Fanny
Brawne—expresses a theme destined to become almost obsessive for the later
Keats: the identification of the moment of accession to the ideal with the
moment of death. Only in the image of a climactic death can Keats resolve
the opposing emotions aroused by Fanny: the longing to attain the most
intense joy of possession, and the dread of dissolution and loss of the self in
that very intensity. The erotic metaphor “to melt into” reappears in “The
Eve of St. Agnes” to refer to the consummation of Madeline and Porphyro’s
love. The idea that the star is a poetic transposition of Woman in general and
Fanny in particular seems confirmed by Keats’s letter to Fanny of 25 July
1819, where he calls her “fair star.”12 But the identification between love and
death, merely suggested up to this point, finds a definite expression in the
haunting poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” also written soon after Keats
met Fanny Brawne. In both “La Belle Dame” and the later and longer Lamia,
a sorceress charms an unwary dreamer, luring him away from his path and
sequestering him in an “elfin grot” or an enchanted palace, away from human
pursuits, and occasioning his death upon the withdrawal of her love. Both
poems display the same central idea, intimately related to the feeling in the
previously quoted letter from Keats to Fanny: once the heights of pleasure
derived from the possession of the ideal have been tasted, a return to
ordinary pursuits becomes impossible. The sorceress disappears, but her
memory remains to drive her victims insane and drain the life away from
them. Thus there were enough facts in Keats’s letters and late poems to lay
the foundations for a theory where Woman would appear as Keats’s arch-
enemy, and Cortázar’s own experiences made him intensify this aspect of the
poet’s relationship with women.
Cortázar was already thirty-five, and still unmarried, when he wrote
the book on Keats. According to his own declarations to Luis Harss, he was
a confirmed bachelor at the time, led a secluded life, and had few friends.13
He had lived with his mother until he was almost thirty; as previously noted,
he was abandoned by his father when he was five years old and was raised by
his mother and aunts in the Buenos Aires suburb of Bánfield. If—according
to Cortázar—the constellation of the Feminine as Circe, magician and
seductress, had been the predominant image in Keats’s unconscious, the
figure of Parsifal’s mother seems to have arisen as the basic constellation in
his own unconscious. Both in conversation and in a letter,14 the author spoke
of his identification as a youth with the hero of the Grail legend; and Austin,
the youthful hero of 62, is also likened to this hero (62, pp. 89, 172, 209). If
the constellation of the feminine archetype serves to determine—according
to analytical psychology—the nature of a man’s future relationships with
women, the images of Circe and Parsifal’s mother will help us to define the
basic difference between Keats’s and Cortázar’s conflicts with the Feminine.
Most of the artists best admired by Cortázar resemble him in one
central, extremely important point—they were fatherless. Keats and Poe, the
objects of this study, were no exceptions. However, unlike Keats, Poe—and
Saki, Baudelaire, Edward Lear, René Magritte, Ambrose Bierce, and other
writers with whom Cortázar liked to identify—led lives marked by incidents
and relationships which were analogous to incidents and relationships in
Cortázar’s life, thus favoring his identification with them. Identification at
the level of artistic aims was not sufficient for Cortázar; he needed to feel a
more personal bond with these authors, as well, in order not only to achieve
a “chameleonic” passage into their poetic selves but also to find a
confirmation and reassurance of his own existence through theirs: Saki,
Magritte, and Lear were also raised by spinster aunts; Baudelaire and Bierce
were uncommonly and even abnormally attached to their mothers; all were
pestered by asthmas, allergies, and other psychosomatic ailments associated
with mother-fixation. Yet, if Poe, Baudelaire, Bierce, and Saki displayed
sensitivities and aesthetic aims that were akin to Cortázar’s, Keats did not. As
I hope to have shown elsewhere,15 Keats’s sensitivity is so different from
Cortázar’s that Keats’s influence appears only in the form of certain images
or in general outlines of concepts that Cortázar completely reworked and
transformed, even though he still referred to these as “Keats’s principles.”
The difference between both authors’ sensitivities is dramatically manifested
in the contrasting constellations of the Feminine in each. Circe is basically
the sensuous enchantress, the “young witch” whose ambivalence as gate to
both positive inspiration and negative intoxication is partly linked to the
hero’s own attitude towards her. As previously discussed, Circe is the
archetypal manifestation of the negative anima and, as such, subject to defeat
by a hero capable of outwitting her or taming her through the body. Parsifal’s
mother is basically a spiritual figure; as mother—rather than anima—she
inspires a greater awe and, as such, a far greater danger. Parsifal’s mother—
who held fast to her son, dressing him in women’s clothes to prevent him
from joining the knights (as her husband, Parsifal’s father, had done) and
from leaving her side—has the symbolic power to emasculate and nullify; she
is the spiderlike, possessive, devouring Terrible Mother.16 If Keats’s early
poems show woman, primarily, as the young, sensuous enchantress and the
provider of pleasure, Cortázar’s stories symbolically show woman as a
disembodied, absorbing presence analogous to Poe’s maelstrom, seas, and—
most important—houses (“Casa tomada,” “Cefalea,” “Relato con un fondo
de agua”), and his later tales present the towering, spiderlike Mother of
“Cartas de mamá,” “La salud de los enfermos,” and “El otro cielo.”
In spite of this basic difference in the perception of the Feminine,
Cortázar seems to have compensated by emphasizing other points of contact
between himself and Keats that would favor a “chameleonic” incursion into
the latter’s world: both were inclined to prefer the “ideal” over the “real,”
both came from modest backgrounds in literary milieus dominated by the
upper classes, both possessed a certain unsophisticated naiveté in their early
careers which often made them the objects of scorn.17 A biographical detail
provided yet another: Cortázar fell in love with Aurora Bernárdez—who
became his wife in 1952—at the time when he wrote IJK. Through his
comments on Keats, he manifested feelings which were surprisingly akin to
those Keats himself had recorded on the margins of Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy at the time when he first felt attracted to Fanny Brawne.
Cortázar’s comments on Keats, like Keats’s on Burton, display a violent
misogynism, an intensely felt conflict between love and freedom, and a desire
to reject woman for the sake of poetry.18
Cortázar, exercising the chameleonism of his poetic theory, attempted
to place himself within Keats’s self in order to absorb the vision of the
Feminine that had so fascinated him. In the chapter on Fanny Brawne,
Cortázar speaks, almost in the first person, from Keats’s world; yet, the Keats
he presents us is a new Keats, fashioned after Cortázar’s own heart. For
Cortázar, Keats’s affective conflict appears as a mental problem; his anxiety
facing women, as an insurmountable dread and a desire to reject. Earlier in his
book, Cortázar had observed that in the sudden appearance of Miss Jane
Cox, Keats had seen “al enemigo, al usurpador” who pretended to
monopolize his attention and take him away from poetry. Keats’s letter,
however, states: “I always find myself more at ease with such a woman.... I am
at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble.
I forget myself entirely because I live in her.”19 But Cortázar, after describing
the profound impression Miss Cox had made on Keats, states that “con la
misma violencia del deseo surge el rechazo” (IJK, p. 169). Violent rejection?
What Keats actually says is “I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in
my Pocket not [for “nor”] do I fret to leave her behind me.”20 Yet Cortázar
claims that Keats “se alza violento contra la sospecha de que la mujer sea ese
símbolo engañoso de la pluralidad en la unidad, el abregé del mundo para
comodidad de poetas” (IJK, p. 169). What happens is, apparently, that
Cortázar interpreted the reference further in Keats’s letter to George and
Georgiana (“Since I wrote thus far I have met with that same Lady again,
whom I saw at Hastings and whom I met when we were going to the English
Opera”) as an allusion to Miss Cox (Charmian), and thus, he attributes
Keats’s repudiation of marriage in the same letter as a “violent rejection” of
Miss Cox. The “lady of Hastings,” however, was not Charmian, but Isabella
Jones; Cortázar’s mistake regarding the lady’s identity is understandable
enough, since “the lady of Hastings” was not identified as Mrs. Jones until
1952,21 this is, the same year Cortázar finished his book on Keats.
However, even if we were not to suspect—as we now do—that Keats’s
“violent rejection” of Mrs. Jones apparently ended in the poet’s affair with
that lady,22 we would still find Cortázar’s interpretation of Keats’s tirade
about women somewhat exaggerated. Here is the passage in question:
Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I

hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature
were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the
carpet were made of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds;
the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down; the food Manna,
the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander
mere, I should not feel—or rather, my Happiness would not be
so fine, a[nd] my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have
described, there is a Sublimity to welcome me home—The
roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window
pane are my Children. The mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty
in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic
happiness—an amiable wife and fine—Children I contemplate as
part of that Bea[u]ty—but I must have a thousand of those
beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every
day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this
world alone but in a thousand worlds.... These things combined
with the opinion I have of the generality of women—who appear
to me as children to whom I would rather give a Sugar Plum than
my time, form a barrier against Matrimony which I rejoice in.23
In it, most of Keats’s invectives—which are mild enough—are actually

directed against the institution of marriage, not against women themselves, as
Cortázar implies. Even the final remark about women achieves an
identification between them and children—it does not liken women to
Gorgons or spiders, as Cortázar’s interpretation seems to suggest.24
Neither in his comments about Keats’s meeting with Miss Cox nor in
the chapter about Fanny Brawne (Isabella Jones he completely disregards)
does Cortázar refer to Keats’s struggle to overcome his anxieties regarding
women; in Cortázar’s interpretation, Keats is as blasé as Baudelaire about his
misogynism. Nor does he ever allude to the positive aspects of Keats’s
relationship with Fanny Brawne. He observes that Keats’s love for Fanny was
not a passion but a destruction; thus, he literally interprets the bereaved and
terminally ill Keats’s accusations to Fanny as the poet’s final statement in the
affair. But he totally disregards that side of Keats’s love through which the
poet sought a fulfillment of his whole self. Cortázar overlooks the brighter
side of Keats’s love for Fanny (expressed in passages from his letters such as
the following: “I never knew before what such a love as you have made me
feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn
me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, ’twill not
be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with
Pleasures ...”).25 Cortázar declares that Keats retreats in horror when faced
with the possibility of love: “Su gusto por las mujeres que ofrecen una misma
sensualidad se ve de pronto helado ante la sospecha del encarcelamiento. ¿Y
el resto del mundo? ¿Y la libertad, la poesía, el dolce far niente, la llave de la
calle?” (IJK, p. 302).
A greater injustice is to be found in Cortázar’s portrayal of Fanny
Brawne. He presents Fanny as a vampire who will attempt—even
unawares—to suck the life out of a helpless, enthralled Keats. He observes
that Fanny will not be motivated to destroy Keats by any particular cruelty
of her own, but by her very feminine nature: because she is a woman. The
desire to possess, absorb, and destroy the male is, for Cortázar, the very
essence of the feminine nature. And so he observes:
El cometa Brawne entraña, más que una pasión, una destrucción, y

no es del todo casual que la primera crisis reveladora de la
enfermedad de John cerrara el año inaugural de su amor, que tan
amargamente lo había hecho feliz. Sin culpa de Fanny; nada que
reprocharle, pobre muchacha. En todo lo que sigue deberá
entenderse que no le pido peras al olmo, y que es John quien,
desesperadamente, busca ser leal a sí mismo en contra de Fanny,
busca que Fanny sea otra, sea lo que una mujer no puede ser. (IJK, p.
302; my italics)
Identifying with what he sees as Keats’s perception of the “evil” side of

women, Cortázar discusses the poet’s approach to the Feminine through
mythological allusions. He embarks on a consideration of what he sees as
the recurrence of matriarchal archetypes in Keats’s works in an attempt to
understand, absorb, and incorporate his procedures. But his discussion of
archetypal figures in Keats’s works follows the pattern previously established
in his discussion of the role of women in Keats’s life: he stresses only the
negative aspects of the matriarchal archetype manifested in Keats’s works,
disregarding all others. His study focuses on those mythological figures that
will later reappear as the feminine protagonists of his own novels and
stories.
In Cortázar’s discussion of what he sees as the martriarchal archetypes
presented in Keats’s works, he rightly observes that the episode of Circe’s
bower in Book II of Endymion contains the seeds of both “La Belle Dame
sans Merci” and Lamia. Likewise, in his discussion of “La Belle Dame,” he
expresses the opinion that this poem contains “la horrible revelación de que
la dulce y llorosa doncella que el caballero encontró a la vera del camino y
llevó es Circe la eterna, es la dominación y la degradación del amante bajo
los filtros de la Maga” (IJK, p. 219). In effect, while Book II of Endymion had
presented the bower of Venus and Adonis as the acme of sensuous love
(where a perennially childlike Adonis depended on the generous Good
Mother figure of Venus [axis M+ in my Schema II]), Book III does present
the contrasting bower of Glaucus and Circe, where the lover is degraded
under the spell of the sorceress, as Cortázar points out. Glaucus falls in love
with the nymph, Scylla, who rejects him. Seized with despair, Glaucus calls
Circe to his aid. She, however, offers him her own love instead, trapping him
in a net of love-dreams he cannot break away from:
Who could resist? Who in this universe?

She did so breathe ambrosia; so immerse
My fine existence in a golden clime.
She took me like a child of suckling time,
And cradled me in roses. Thus condemn’d,
The current of my former life was stemm’d,
And to this arbitrary queen of sense
I bow’d a tranced vassal ...
(III, ll. 453–60)
Circe acts first as a source of inspiration—in the role of anima—

provoking a state of sensuous “ecstasy” in Glaucus; however, as Cortázar
stated, she soon causes the reversal of this condition by. turning the ecstasy
into horror when she reveals her true face, mocking Glaucus’ weakness and
submission to her:
Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse

Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express
To cradle thee my sweet, and lull thee: yes,
I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:
My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch.
So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies

Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries
Upon some breast more lily-feminine.
(III, ll. 570–77)
The “reversal” or sudden overturning of ecstasy into its opposite is typical of

situations where the “negative” anima is involved. As Neumann observes,
sensuous ecstasy, or the ecstasy derived from drugs, alcohol, and other
stimulants, is initially positive, since these substances set the unconscious in
motion and may lead to transformation. Their effect easily becomes
reversed, however, if the ego is overcome and “lost” in the intensity of
ecstasy; if the will becomes totally extinguished, the originally positive
experience leads to stupor, madness, impotence, or loss of self. The episode
of Circe—which so fascinated Cortázar, so sensitive to the contradictory
character of the Feminine—exemplifies the danger of loss of self implied in
the abandonment to orgiastic sexuality. Glaucus, unable to keep a hold on
himself, regresses to the position of the child regarding the mother, to the
stage of the suckling who depends on the mother for the satisfaction of his
needs. The stories in Bestiario were written roughly at the same time as the
book on Keats; there appears to be a connection, then, between Cortázar’s
comments about Keats’s Circe and the conception of the story he wrote
under the same title. Cortázar’s early story “Circe” (Bestiario) already displays
this author’s fascination with the figure of the mythical enchantress. There is
a basic difference, however, between Cortázar’s treatment of the sorceress
and Keats’s; Cortázar’s Circe already displays the overlapping of the
characteristics of the A– and M– sides of the archetype, as previously
established. Basically, the negative anima is not a deadly figure. She is not
“terrible” in the same sense as the Magna Mater; even when she seeks to
destroy the male’s consciousness, a positive reversal is possible, for she is
always subject to defeat. As Neumann observes, “when Circe, the
enchantress who turns men into beasts, meets the superior figure of
Odysseus, she does not kill herself like the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus has
solved, but invites him to share her bed” (GM, p. 35). Keats’s Circe turns
Glaucus into “an animal,” but does not kill him; Cortázar’s Circe, on the
other hand, is deadly, displaying characteristics of the Terrible Mother, as
well as the negative anima.
In Delia Mañara, the mysterious girl who kills her suitors, we find a re-
creation of the myth of Circe the Magician, the Lady of the Animals who
absorbs the will of men, especially younger men (Delia is 22, Mario 19), and
forces them into submission. Cortázar had praised Keats for his ability to
re-create the essence of myths; his story accomplishes precisely this. Whether
in ancient Greece or twentieth-century Buenos Aires, the situation is one and
the same: a young boy, Mario, is enthralled by a mysterious woman who
symbolically castrates him. The description of Delia—lithe and snakelike—is
meant, from the very beginning, to corroborate the identification with the
mythical sorceress implied in the title: Delia “era fina y rubia, demasiado lenta
en sus movimientos” (B, p. 92); “A veces la escuchaba reirse para adentro, un
poco malvadamente y sin darle esperanzas” (B, p. 93). Later in the story we
are told that “Todos los animales se mostraban siempre sometidos a Delia, no
se sabía si era cariño o dominación” (B, p. 94). Moreover, the reaction of
Mario is in strict accordance to the myth: he breaks all ties with family and
friends and becomes completely absorbed by Delia. The means she employs
to ensnare and trap her victims—magical liquors and potions she stuffs into
candies and feeds to her suitors—are also in harmony with the dynamics of
the archetype. Medicines as well as poisons are agents of transformation and
manifest that process in themselves (the sequence from plant to juice, juice to
elixir, etc.).26 But there is a more “terrible” aspect in Delia that is not usually
characteristic of the archetypal Circe. Circe provides her victims with the
positive ecstasy of sensuality before she turns them into animals. Not so Delia,
who is totally destructive and absorbing. Her own last name, Mañara, is
phonetically associated with “maraña” (web) and “araña” (spider), aside from
being identical with that of Don Miguel de Mañara, Valle-Inclán’s diabolical
Marqués de Bradomín, whose female counterpart she appears to be. The
deaths of the two suitors are also in agreement with the dynamics of the
archetype; the first dies of a heart attack, an accident associated with the
Terrible Mother’s function of “fixating” and “paralyzing,” and the second
becomes bereaved and drowns himself, exemplifying her power to “drown”
consciousness and “absorb” the personality.
Mario, however, escapes from Circe’s clutches by seeing and
understanding the symbolic action she performs as a prelude to her destruction
of him. He sees the family cat dying in a corner of the kitchen, its eyes
perforated with wooden splinters.27 Then he presses the chocolate Delia
hands him and discovers that the attractive chocolate exterior hides a filling
made of cockroaches. She pierces the cat’s eyes in the same way that she
intends to destroy Mario’s vision, that is, his consciousness. The eye, the site
of consciousness, is one of the most important weapons of the hero in his
battle against the Magna Mater, whose realm is that of darkness and “blind”
instinct. On the other hand, the chocolate is symbolic of Delia herself; the
repulsive, parasitic insect in her hides under an attractive exterior. Mario is
able to escape from Delia’s clutches by understanding or “seeing” her true
nature. She is returned, at the end of the story, to the character of the
“defeatable” negative anima.
From the above discussion, it becomes evident that there is no actual
resemblance between Keats’s and Cortázar’s Circe, aside from the name itself
and the ambiguous feelings towards women the authors displayed through
them. The influence of Keats in this instance, then, must be traced to the
mere conception of the feminine figure in mythological terms, but not to the
actual representation. A similar situation is presented in “El ídolo de las
Cícladas” and “Las ménades,” both inspired by the sacrifices in honor of the
ancient Mother Goddesses. I do not know whether Cortázar’s interest in
sacrifices originated in connection with his study of Keats or if it anteceded
it; his own statement in IJK suggests that there was a simultaneous interest
in both and that he somehow made a connection between the two, with or
without grounds. In his commentary on the ode “On a Grecian Urn” (a
reworking of his 1946 article “La urna griega en la poesía de Keats”),
Cortázar exhibits—perhaps more blatantly than in any other section of his
book—a tendency to attribute to Keats his own reactions to certain themes.
He interprets the scene portrayed on the Grecian urn as a scene of sacrifice,
with maenads dancing around the victim; he states that Keats’s susceptibility
to themes connected with matriarchal rites had made him conceive of such a
scene. What this comment actually reveals is Cortázar’s propensity to
perceive the Feminine under the guise of Terrible Mother. The author’s
interest in ritual at the time when he wrote the book on Keats is responsible
for the conception of “El ídolo de las Cícladas” and “Las ménades.”
In “El ídolo de las Cícladas,” Cortázar’s choice of the Cycladic islands
for the setting of the story is not accidental; Asia Minor is the site where the
worship of a Terrible Goddess first arose. Neumann observes that these pre-
Mycenean idols—dating back to 3000 B.C.—show a tendency towards
abstraction that is not present in other primordial fertility goddesses and
indicate “a bond between the numinous-imaginative and the realm of the
spirits and the dead ...” (GM, p. 113). While the Great Mother in her aspect
of fertility goddess tends to be characterized by a naturalistic, “sensuous”
form, “her aspect as ruler over the spirits and the dead favors forms stressing
the unnatural unreal, and ‘spiritual’” (GM, p. 108). The sensuous
manifestations of the goddess, predominant in Keats’s works, denote an
extroverted attitude, while her abstract manifestations, present in Poe’s and
Cortázar’s, denote these writers’ introverted attitudes and their tendency to
identify woman with death.
Somoza, introverted and obsessive, sublimates his desire for Thérèse
(his friend’s wife and, as such, “taboo”) by translating it into the desire to
enter the world of the goddess Haghesa, whose statuette he has unearthed.
But this goddess is the ruler of the dead; her rituals demand that he become
her high priest, the one who will carry out the ritual sacrifices in her honor.
Somoza, in his obsession, succumbs to the onrush of “ancestral memories,”
and gradually abandons his modern identity as he passes into Haghesa’s own
time. The ancient religions of Asia Minor were never fully suppressed; in the
ensuing syncretism, primitive rituals were preserved. Even though
Byzantium, the City of the Goddess, became Constantinople, the City of the
Virgin, Byzantine priests preserved a terrible, more ancient ritual: the priest’s
castration in, honor of the goddess.28 Somoza’s unconscious “possession” by
the spirit of the goddess has, thus, an even darker connotation. Finally,
Somoza is transported to a “sacred time” and, having totally surrendered his
twentieth-century self, prepares to carry out Morand’s sacrifice. The latter,
however, kills Somoza in self-defense, accomplishing thus the ritual to
Haghesa. “Possessed,” in his turn, through his active, though
unpremeditated participation in the ritual, he assumes the role of sacrificial
priest and lies in ambush, awaiting the arrival of his next victim: Thérèse.
“Las ménades” recreates, in a contemporary atmosphere, the ritual
killing and dismemberment of the god in the primitive matriarchal rites. As
Neumann states; “Death and dismemberment or castration are the fate of
the phallus bearing, youthful god ... both are associated with bloody orgies
in the cult of the Great Mother.”29 In this story, the “seasonal King” is the
director of the orchestra, the “maenads” his public, who gather in the
concert hall in the midst of an atmosphere of increasing heat and excitement.
The tension builds up in a masterful crescendo that succeeds in involving the
reader in the “ritual.” At a certain point, a woman in red advances towards
the stage, as if in a trance, marking the beginning of the orgy. At the end of
the story, a frenzied public destroys the theater and overwhelms the
conductor and the members of the orchestra. Finally, the woman in red
emerges licking her lips. The motif of the enraged maenads recurs—briefly
but effective—in Cortázar’s last novel, Libro de Manuel. In it, Oscar—a
younger mirror-image of the protagonist, Andrés Fava—suffers from a
recurring, obsessive vision: that of the “moonstruck” girls who escape the
confinement of a hospital and form what appears to be a society of enraged
maenads. Although the apparent intention of this episode is to condemn
society’s “confining” aspect, likening it to the hospital, the vision seems to
have a deeper meaning. Indeed, the whole episode has that indefinable
character that marks the situations derived from the author’s “archetypal”
nightmares and obsessions. When described at first, the episode appears as a
frightening vision: the girls escape from the hospital, gather under the moon,
run half-naked and half-maddened. Oscar experiences a vague feeling of

fright as he remembers his nightmare, which curiously recurs whenever he
meets Gladis, with whom he is carrying on a superficial affair. If the dream
simply denounces society’s confining aspect, why should Oscar, one of the
revolutionaries, be disturbed by the girls’ flight from that confinement?
Evidently, the moonstruck, nearly hysterical girls have more than a merely
social symbolism. Their portrayal likens them to the legendary maenads,
driven to frenzy and in pursuit of a sacrificial victim. Oscar, unconsciously
afraid of Gladis, seems to fear he might be the object of the maenads’ pursuit.
A more concrete evidence of Keats’s influence is to be found in
connection with “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Lamia. The genesis of “La
Belle Dame” is enveloped with an aura of mystery that must have presented a
special attraction for Cortázar. Keats seems to have conceived the poem in a
hypnotic mood, half asleep. The poem was written at an important point in
Keats’s life; his brother Tom had died shortly before, and he had recently met
Fanny Brawne, who was destined to play a crucial role in Keats’s life. Several
sources for the poem have been pointed out; Gittings sees Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy—which Keats read extensively at this time—behind the portrayal of
the solitary, melancholy dreamer in the poem.30 Coleridge’s “Christabel”—
conceived in a similar mood—presents an analogous mysterious atmosphere
where legend blends with nightmare. Moreover, the story of Tom Keats’s own
infatuation with the fictitious “Amena” of the love letters seems to have been in
the back of Keats’s mind. Keats—who had received the packet of “Amena’s”
letters shortly before—was convinced that this painful episode had contributed
to accelerate his brother’s death. But behind all these influences, there remains
an unexplained element that can only be related to the archetypal roots of the
story. As Robert Gittings adequately observes, none of these influences can
account for “the intensity and underlying depth of a poem which brought
Keats’s darkest and most fundamental experiences to the surface.”31
“La Belle Dame” presents that significant blend of characteristics from
the A– and M– characters of the archetype in the previously discussed
Schema II. The image we encounter at the beginning of the poem is that of
the forsaken, lonely youth already smitten with a deadly “disease”:
I see a lilly on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
(ll. 9–12)
The cause of the disease is linked to the mysterious lady the knight has met in
the meads. Her description is hallowed with the supernatural aura distinctive
of all manifestations of the archetype of the Magna Mater. The lady is
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
(ll. 14–16)
She completely absorbs his senses (“And nothing else [the knight] saw all day
long,” l. 22), and keeps him in subjection by means of magical foods and
drinks (ll. 25–26). By closing her eyes with “kisses four,” the knight is not
merely displaying a common manifestation of love, but he is performing a
symbolic action whereby he “shuts her eyes” as well as his own to the reality
beyond the “elfin grot.” Likewise, the line “she lulled me asleep” (l. 33)
possesses the connotation of a spiritual, as well as a physical, slumber and
foreshadows the sleep of death that haunts the knight as we encounter him
at the beginning of the poem. In the dream, the knight sees
... pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
(ll. 37–40)
The vision of the Belle Dame’s victims, appearing to him “with horrid
warning” (l. 42), makes the knight realize the horror of his condition: he is
asleep, blind, and under the subjection of a sorceress who will drain the life
away from his body. At that very moment both lady and grot disappear, and
the knight finds himself “palely loitering,” forsaken and alone, as the poem
returns to the setting of the opening stanzas.
As I previously observed, the Belle Dame possesses a deadly character
that, transcending the qualities of the negative anima, could identify her with
the archetypal Terrible Mother, whose function it is to extinguish
consciousness and take back to herself, through death, that which had
attempted to break away from her domination. In this poem, Cortázar saw
an externalization of his own feelings towards women. We can hear echoes
of this poem in several of his later creations. A noticeable parallel is to be
found between “La Belle Dame” and Cortázar’s story “Cuello de gatito
negro,” published in Octaedro.
Cortázar’s story blends in itself characteristics from both Keats’s “La

Belle Dame” and the episode of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Lucho, whose name is reminiscent of Lycius, the hero in
Lamia, finds the weeping Dina, apparently by chance, in one of his journeys
in the Paris metro. The solitary mead of “La Belle Dame,” the forest of
Lamia, and the grove of Ovid’s story have their modern counterpart in a
tunnel of the Paris metro; though less poetic, the metro retains the
characteristic aspect of “isolation” of the other settings, since it is
“underground” and dark. Moreover, the train is usually associated, in
Cortázar’s works (let us remember the tramways in the nightmares of 62),
with the laws of chance ruling every decisive or numinous encounter. Juan,
fascinated by Dina, and particularly by Dina’s hands, follows her to her
apartment—the modern counterpart of the “elfin grot.” There, they taste the
pleasures of sensuality. But soon afterwards, Dina shows her “terrible”
aspect: her hands, acquiring a life of their own, pull at his penis and attempt
to scratch his eyes out. At the end of the story, he stands alone in the hallway,
cold, naked, pale, and confused, like the youth in Keats’s poem. Cortázar’s
story emphasizes, much more than Keats’s poem, the “terrible” aspect of the
enchantress. Keats’s poem merely hints at the death the knight is to suffer by
presenting the Belle Dame’s victims in the knight’s dream; but she is never
portrayed explicitly in her “terrible” manifestation. Cortázar’s story, on the
other hand, presents the total reversal of the shy, weeping Dina into the
fierce, bloodthirsty Black Artemis. Dina’s name is very similar to the name
Diana; Diana’s “dark” manifestation appears in Ovid’s story, where the
goddess, avenging herself for Actaeon’s entrance into her sacred grove and
his looking at her naked body, turns him into an animal and has him torn to
pieces by his own mastiffs. The Terrible Diana was represented as a Black
Goddess; Dina, a native of Martinique, is dark-skinned. Moreover, as in
Ovid’s story, Lucho looks at Dina without “seeing” her, just as Actaeon had
looked at Diana’s body without recognizing her divine nature. Lucho’s
“blindness” is symbolically alluded to in the reference to the lamp Dina
unsuccessfully attempts to light, being impeded by Lucho’s repeated amatory
demands. Finally, Lucho breaks the lamp as she reaches for it. In the ensuing
darkness, Dina turns into an aggressive maenad, attempting to blind and
castrate Lucho.
The presence of Lamia can be detected behind Cortázar’s best-known
novels, Rayuela and 62. The ambiguousness implied in the character of the
Belle Dame, who represents both Love and Death, is more explicit in the
character of the lamia. It has been rightly observed that the symbol of the
lamia is especially attractive to Keats, since it permits him to embody the
mingled attraction and repulsion characteristic of his treatment of woman as

a love object.32 Indeed, Lamia represents both the ideal goddess and the
dream lover that Lycius, a dreamer, had longed for. But in Lamia Keats
employs an ironic tone that was absent from “La Belle Dame.” If in the latter
Keats had presented the knight’s doom objectively, without attempting to
blame it on the weaknesses in the knight’s character, in Lamia he seems to
adopt a critical position regarding his protagonist’s attitude and, indeed,
regarding his former poetic self. Lamia belongs to a period in Keats’s
development when he was trying to develop an “Apollonian” outlook to
counteract his basically “Dionysiac” nature. In The Fall of Hyperion: A
Dream—which also belongs to this period—he had established a
differentiation between the poet (the one who accepts his link to a specific
human group and tries to alleviate their sufferings through his art) and the
dreamer (the selfish visionary who rejects the world for the sake of his ideal
visions). By presenting Lycius as a “dreamer” and making him die at the end
of the poem, he seems to be trying to “exorcize” Lycius’ attitude in himself.33
Keats is very much in control of this aspect of the poem’s symbolism, even if
his conception of the lamia undergoes a radical metamorphosis in the course
of the poem; every element in it contributes to prepare the reader for the
final outcome.
In the initial section of the poem, Lamia is presented as the beautiful,
cruel seductress who ensnares the unwary dreamer by means of her magical
crafts; yet, there is also a mockery, on Keats’s part, of the naiveté with which
Lycius succumbs to her traps. Lycius had gone to the temple of Cenchreae
to offer a sacrifice to Jove and meets Lamia on his way back from it;
apparently, he seems to have asked Jove for a happy marriage, for we read
that “Jove heard his vows and better’d his desire” (I, l. 229). Lycius, a scholar,
is so concerned with his ideal visions that he even misses the concretion of
his own desires when he passes her on the road. He had been wearied with
his companions’ talk and walked alone, abandoning himself to his fantasies
without any interruption from the outside world:
Over the solitary hills he fared,

Thoughtless at first, but ere eve’s star appeared
His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades,
Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near—
Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
So neighbour’d to him and yet so unseen
She stood: he pass’d, shut up in mysteries,

His mind wrapp’d like his mantle ...
(I,ll. 233–42)
Even though Lycius is a scholar, his fantasy prevails over his reason; Lycius’
reason “fades” as he is lost in nocturnal fantasies or “Platonic shades.” Keats
emphasizes Lycius’ “blindness” when confronting the objectification of the
ideal vision he longed for: Lamia stands “so neighbour’d to him, and yet so
unseen”; his mind, “wrapp’d like his mantle,” is so totally turned inwards that
he fails to notice the presence of that “nymph” for whom he apparently
longed. However, when he finally notices Lamia, he does not doubt for a
second that she is a goddess sent in answer to his desires. He accepts her as
such without further questioning, looking at her, “not with cold wonder
fearingly / But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice” (I, ll. 247–48). The mention of
Orpheus has ironic overtones, for Orpheus loses his beloved when he “looks”
at her, just as Lycius will lose Lamia towards the end of the poem. Keats’s
ironic treatment of Lycius is sustained throughout the first part of the poem;
Lycius soon forgets the goddess for the sake of the woman:
... gentle Lamia judg’d, and judg’d aright

That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
More pleasantly by playing woman’s part.
(I, ll. 334–37)
Absorbed in his passion for the being whom he sees as the concretion of his
ideals, he appears as a ludicrous, gullible figure: “Lycius to all made eloquent
reply / Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh” (I, l. 340–41). He is not even
aware that Lamia has shortened the way to Corinth from three leagues to a
few paces; her trick is “not at all surmised / By blinded Lycius, so in her
comprized” (I, ll. 346–47).
Even though Keats portrays Lamia as a snake travesti, an evil creature
responsible for his hero’s destruction, she is not presented as a totally
repulsive character. Although her cruelty is evinced by the calm
premeditation with which she makes Lycius swoon by threatening him with
the withdrawal of her affections (I, ll. 286–95), her love for Lycius, later in
the poem, makes her surrender her supernatural powers and please Lycius by
her charms as woman only. Unlike the Belle Dame, who rends her lovers and
then forsakes them, Lamia submits to Lycius and remains beside him. The
tragic outcome of the poem is indirectly blamed on Lycius.
Like the ecstasy Circe provided, the pleasure Lamia offers Lycius is
one-sided; it is a happiness that excludes every thought of reality. Lamia had
the ability “to unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain” (I, l. 192). She, a
supernatural being, is capable of enjoying an undisturbed kind of happiness
isolated from worldly cares; he, a human, must feel “the strife of opposites.”
Lycius soon tires of Lamia’s unworldly bliss and longs to return to the world,
for
Love in a palace is perhaps at last

More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast:—
(II, ll. 3–4)
As Lycius listens to the sounds of trumpets outside the palace, he is reminded

of “the noisy world almost forsworn” (II, l. 33) and attempts to convince
Lamia to leave the palace and announce their love to the rest of the world.
As Lamia, grown weak and frightened at the thought of losing Lycius, pleads
with him, trying to change his mind, his behavior towards her takes a sadistic
turn. The initial relationship is now reversed:
... she nothing said, but pale and meek,

Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain
Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain
Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung,
To change his purpose. He thereat was stung,
Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim
Her wild and timid nature to his aim:
Besides, for all his love, in self despite,
Against his better self, he took delight
Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new.
His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous as ’twas possible
In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell.
(II, ll. 65–77)
Cortázar’s comments on the above lines are very revealing; he observes that
Lycius’ attitude towards Lamia, in Part II of the poem, constitutes “un
comportamiento de la más alta importancia” (IJK, p. 277). He terms this
behavior “sadismo poético,” stating that it constitutes a method whose aim it
is to attain the ontological possession of its object (IJK, p. 277). According to
Cortázar, the poet possesses reality by means of analogies, through
metaphors that link unfamiliar objects with the familiar ones they resemble.
Only contraries, those objects that possess no analogy to one another, escape
the poet’s tendency to embrace them in one central metaphor and must be
apprehended separately. According to Cortázar, Keats felt anguished and
even angered at his inability to conciliate opposites in his heart and in his
mind, and he cites the “Epistle to Reynolds” as an exemplification of those
feelings, adding: “Que el día no sea también la noche lo aterra y lo
encoleriza; que cada cosa aprehendida presuponga su contrario remoto e
inalcanzable lo humilla” (IJK, p. 277). Keats’s answer to this schism, he
continues, is expressed in a gesture that embraces opposites in a higher form
of oneness. If there is no real analogy between two objects or feelings, the
poet invents it; thus, Keats conceives of the expression “pleasant pain” as he
solves the mystery of polarization by his acceptance of opposites (IJK, p. 277).
Most of Keats’s critics would agree with Cortázar’s interpretation of the
expression “pleasant pain” and with his appreciation of Keats’s sensitivity to
polarizations.34 His use of the term “method of poetic sadism,” however, is
questionable. Cortázar implies that Keats deliberately introduced the
element of sadism in the poem in order to embrace, in a broader concept, the
contradictory emotions love arouses. However, the very conception of a
“method for an ontological possession of reality” (Cortázar’s terminology) is
alien to Keats’s nature. The use of a “method” implies the preconception of
a system of abstractions that is then applied to a concrete situation. It
presupposes a certain distance and controlled coldness on the subject’s part
regarding the object of his attention. Yet abstract thinking, in the ordinary
sense, was alien to Keats; as Murry observes, “the movement of his thought
was richly imaged, and amazingly concrete—‘sensations rather than
thoughts.’”35 I do not believe Keats’s attitude in Lamia evinces the cool,
controlled distance the use of a preconceived method would betray. The
poem’s ambiguousness regarding the lamia and Lycius undermines the
theory that Keats was working according to a “method of poetic sadism.”
The concept of “poetic sadism,” in its assumption of a preconceived
method, actually applies to Poe’s stories better than to Lamia. In any case,
Cortázar’s reading of Lamia gives us an important clue for the interpretation
of certain episodes in Rayuela, where a “method of poetic sadism” seems to
be, indeed, at work.
Lamia ends with the death of Lycius as the lamia fades away under the
gaze of the philosopher Apollonius. Keats had meant, apparently, to exorcize
his former fascination with “ideal beauty” of an unreal kind and condemn his
former pursuit of the idyllic bower. Yet he is unable to make his hero return
to the claims of “reality”; Lycius dies once the lamia disappears. One might
say that she appears as the archetypal Terrible Mother, who ensnares her
victims to such a degree that they cannot survive the withdrawal of her
affection.
The first part of Rayuela presents a number of parallels with both “La
Belle Dame” and Lamia. According to Professor Barrenechea—who
possesses the working notebooks for Rayuela—one of the first chapters
originally conceived in this novel was the one that later became Chapter 123
in Part III. In it Oliveira returns to a scene of his childhood; there, he sees
his sister, the garden, the house of his childhood days. Upon awakening, he
is invaded by the feeling that the dream had a far greater “reality” than
anything else he had later experienced; the reality of the room in Paris and
la Maga’s company appeared to be, indeed, the dream. From the beginning,
then, Cortázar sees the character of la Maga as “unreal,” illusory, the figment
of imagination, or of a dream—like the lamia or the Belle Dame. Moreover,
Oliveira, like Lycius and the knight, is more of a dreamer than a poet, and as
such, one who “venoms all his days” and “vexes the world,” rather than one
who “pours a balm” on it. Like Lycius, Horacio is seen, at the beginning of
the novel (if we choose the “hopscotch” way of reading and begin with
Chapter 73) lost in his mental speculations. Like the knight (if we choose the
“normal” way of reading and begin with Chapter 1), he wanders about,
“palely loitering,” searching for the ideal woman, the enchantress who has
captivated his senses and then abandoned him. Just as Lycius’s search for
“ideal forms” finds a concrete expression in his obsession with the
supernatural Lamia, so Oliveira’s metaphysical longings find a concrete
expression in his desire to enter la Maga’s world. The Belle Dame is
presented as “a faery’s child”; the transformation of the lamia into the woman
and the duality of her nature are presented at the very beginning of Keats’s
poems. La Maga is presented as a concrete woman with a good share of all-
too-human stupidity; yet, the author clothes her with a supernatural aura
that is many times stressed throughout the novel.
From the beginning, la Maga is presented as an elusive, mysterious
female who, as “anima,” entices the hero to adventure. Her description is
unmistakably “unreal”: we read about “su delgada cintura” and “su fina cara
de transhicida piel” (R, p. 15). Moreover, her very name is deliberately
symbolic: la Maga’s name is Lucia, that is, “she who has the light”; Oliveira
gives her the epithet that identifies her both with Circe and with the
symbolic figure in the second mystery of the Tarot. “La Maga”—or the
Archpriestess—is Isis, goddess of the night: “She is seated, holding a half-
opened book in her right hand and two keys in her left, one of which is
golden (signifying the sun, the work, or reason) and the other silver (the
moon or imagination).... She is leaning against the sphinx of the great cosmic
questions, and the floor, being composed of alternate white and black tiles,
denotes that everything in existence is subject to the laws of chance and of
opposites.”36 Isis, as Archpriestess and Moon Goddess, has been traditionally
associated with the esoteric rites of initiation, from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass
to Godfrey Higgins’ Anacalypsis. In Jungian theory, Isis, a representative of
the Magna Mater, is identical with Ishtar of Babylonia, Astarte of Phoenicia,
Kali-Durga and Anna-Purna of India, Demeter in Greece, and Themis in
Asia Minor. But, most importantly, Isis is the figure that best exemplifies the
triple aspect of the Magna Mater as inspiration, Good-Bad Mother, and
Terrible Mother.
La Maga is also alluded to with another of the Magna Mater’s names,
that of the Great Whore of Babylonia: “nos fuimos a tomar una cops de
pelure d’oignon a un café de Sèvres-Babylone (hablando de metáforas, yo
delicada porcelana recién desembarcada, HANDLE WITH CARE, y ella
Babilonia, raíz de tiempo, cosa anterior, primeval being, terror y delicia de los
comienzos, romanticismo de Atalá pero con un tigre auténtico esperando
detrás del árbol)” (R, p. 486). The presence of the baby Rocamadour, named
after the French Virgin of Rocamadour, further implies an identification of
la Maga with the archetypal Virgin Mother, another aspect of the Magna
Mater. As Dr. Esther Harding remarks, the word “Virgin,” that gives name
to one of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, did not have, for the
ancients, the value it has today; it alluded to a psychological, rather than to a
physical, condition. A physical virgin was called a “Virgo intacta,” while the
word “Virgo” itself was specifically used to designate a woman who
“possessed herself” and did not cling to any particular man or demand that
his relationship to her be permanent. Such a woman could be a “Virgo”
whether or not she was a mother and whether her behavior was exemplary or
licentious.37
In any case, la Maga—in spite of the numerous rapes she is subjected
to—retains an oddly ascetic aura about her. The love scenes between her and
Oliveira are actually rape scenes; it is in the scenes with Pola that we find
more balanced erotic encounters. Pola, though far more “concrete” than la
Maga, is also identified with one of the symbolic attributes of the Magna
Mater: the City. As Pola-Paris she appears as the Earth, or the provider of
sensuous pleasure, while la Maga-Isis appears primarily as the subject of
inspiration. La Maga, as agent of transformation, performs the role of
“anima”38 through the first eight chapters in the novel. Yet even though la
Maga first appears as anima, Oliveira does not succumb totally to her
attraction. In fact, he appears like a forewarned Lycius, a Lycius who has read
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Lamia. While Keats’s heroes lose
themselves in the intensity of their passions, Oliveira remains coolly
detached and suspicious. On the other hand, in spite of the initial bliss he
seems to experience with la Maga, he can never abandon himself, completely
to the full intensity of passion (“éramos como dos músicos,” etc.), apparently
from fear of being completely absorbed and lost in the world of la Maga.
Like Lycius, Horacio feels he must go on to something else; unlike Lamia, la
Maga offers no resistance to his desire to live his own life and engage in
concerns other than herself. In fact, Oliveira is seldom presented in la Maga’s
company, except in the erotic scenes. Most often he is with the members of
the Club, with or without la Maga, or with his other mistress, Pola, with
whom he has an affair with the knowledge and apparent consent of la Maga.
As Oliveira feels the call of the outside world, from which he fears la Maga
will separate him, he resorts to a sadistic behavior against her, just as Lycius
had regarding Lamia. Yet their perverseness is, essentially, of a different
nature. In Keats’s poem, perverseness appears as an amplification of the
concept of love that includes suffering as well as joy; it explores a new aspect
of Lycius’ relationship to Lamia (Lycius takes delight in her sorrows, “soft
and new”). Oliveira’s cruelty towards la Maga, on the other hand, seems to
respond, indeed, to what Cortázar termed a “method of poetic sadism” in his
discussion of Lamia. Oliveira’s cruelty is cold, even premeditated and
objective. Its chief object seems to be Oliveira’s self-defense, and the
preservation of his identity in the face of the mounting threat posed by la
Maga. As in Poe’s stories (“Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,”
“The Oval Portrait,” “The Black Cat”), the hero paradoxically expresses his
love through the destruction of its object, thus freeing himself from the
manic states and the anxiety neuroses provoked by the object of his love. Just
as Egaeus’ love for Berenice increases as the heroine sickens and is on the
verge of death, and just as Roderick Usher’s love for his sister Madeline finds
its extreme expression in the entombment of his live sister in a crypt while
she is under the effects of a cataleptic seizure, Oliveira’s love increases with
la Maga’s sorrows, and his highest expression of love is manifested in his
desertion of la Maga after the death of her child. If we attribute what
Cortázar calls a “method of poetic sadism” to Cortázar’s own works, the
reason for Oliveira’s behavior becomes clear. According to this declaration,
the author wishes to burst through the usual demarcations and definitions of
“love” and “hatred” by presenting a situation that encompasses both. Such
had been the effect attained by Keats in Lamia. But in Rayuela the author’s
overt intention seems too noticeable, and moreover, we seem to detect a
more subtle and unconscious force below the surface. That “hidden force”
seems to be the hero’s desire to protect himself from the devastating effect of
passion: the dissolution of the self. The dread of the “devouring” female is,
as we have seen, an important theme in Cortázar’s works from the very
beginning, and it had played a central role in his two preceding novels, El
examen and Los premios. Rayuela is the work where it is first openly confronted
and portrayed; the author has brought himself to a point where he attempts
to dissect the relationship between his hero and heroine, yet fears to carry
the “operation” to its utmost conclusions.
If in Lamia and “La Belle Dame” the sorceress abandons the hero, here
it is Oliveira who first leaves la Maga on the night of the baby Rocamadour’s
death; when she later leaves the apartment, it is because he has indirectly
ordered her to do so. Yet, as soon as she leaves, Oliveira literally falls apart,
expressing his longing for her. If the knight in “La Belle Dame” has the mark
of death on his brow and cheeks after the sorceress deserts him and Lycius
collapses dead on the point of Lamia’s disappearance, Oliveira becomes
progressively weakened throughout the second part of the novel, but the
final outcome is the same as in Keats’s poems. Even though Oliveira
originally intended to desert la Maga in order to preserve his freedom and
pursue his literary ambitions, after she leaves he betrays that very freedom by
setting up housekeeping with the foolish Gekrepten and nearly abandons all
literary concerns, absorbed by the haunting memory of la Maga. Once his
defense system is thoroughly broken (after the episode in the morgue, where
he “accepts” la Maga in Talita’s person), he faces three possible destinies:
madness, suicide, or symbolic castration through his subjection to the
motherly Gekrepten. Various critics and the author himself have claimed
that the novel has an “open ending” and that Oliveira’s future has endless
possibilities. I believe, however, that we must limit ourselves to what is
expressed in the text itself. And the text offers only these three possibilities,
all of which imply a dissolution of the self, an overturning of the mind that
is the archetypal outcome of an encounter with the Terrible Mother, as has
been exemplified in our analysis of both of Keats’s poems.
Even though the “terrible” side of la Maga is merely hinted at in the
episode involving her spell on Pola, her nature is known through the effect
she provokes on Horacio; the novel, thus, presents an ideal case of negative
anima projection, since the heroine is not objectively presented as a wicked
sorceress but is mostly known to us through the effects she has wrought on
Oliveira. There is, however, another indirect allusion to la Maga’s “terrible”
aspect in the second part of the novel: the references to “el perro.” The
references to “the dog” first appear towards the end of the novel, soon before
Oliveira’s encounter with the ghost of la Maga in the asylum’s morgue. As the
asylum is transferred to a new owner—the former director of the circus—the

patients are asked to sign the deed signifying their consent in order to
legalize the transaction. The patients, however, demand the death of a dog as
a necessary condition before they grant approval. No further explanations
are given; “the dog” remains a cryptic allusion that gains an ominous aura as
it is reiterated. Dogs are a symbol of the Terrible Mother and are associated
with the “tearing to pieces” symbolic of madness and dissolution of the self
through the fragmentation of the personality. Diana’s dogs tear Actaeon to
pieces in revenge for his having looked at her without seeing her. Dogs are
also the companions of Hecate, identified with Artemis in Greek syncretism
and, in fact, Artemis’ “dark” aspect. “El perro” can be interpreted, then, as
an objectification of Oliveira’s dread of la Maga’s return, and of the
fragmentation of his consciousness through the shock occasioned by that
return. This is, actually, what happens at the end of the novel; and the
references to “the dog” act, then, as a premonition. The symbol of the dog
reappears in Cortázar’s next novel, 62: Modelo para armar, where the
archetype of the Terrible Mother is further elaborated.
The character of Hélène holds a greater direct affinity with the lamia
and the Belle Dame. Firstly, both heroines are associated with the mythical
figure of the vampire and with Hecate, the “dark” Moon Goddess, ruler of
the underworld, witchcraft, madness, and death. That Lamia and Hélène
both represent the “spook” Moon Goddess Hecate—traditionally associated
with witches, phantoms, and vampire. (cf. Schema 11 above)—can be
confirmed by recalling Hecate’s traditional attributes: “As an incubus or
vampire she [Hecate] appears in the form of Empusa, or as a man-eating
lamia, or again in that more beautiful guise, the ‘Bride of Corinth.’” 39 Lamia
is, concretely, the “Bride of Corinth,” whose story, derived from Philostratus’
Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Keats found in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy;
Hélène, who lives in the rue de la Clef, possesses “the key,” one of Hecate’s
traditional attributes, together with the torch and the dog.40 Both are, thus,
identified as vampiresses, as man-eating lamiae.
Cortázar confirms the identification of Hélène with the “terrible” side
of the Moon Goddess further in the novel. Juan, who had called Hélène “a
basilisk” (a variation of the vampire), also identifies her with Diana. On the
night of their encounter, Juan tells Hélène: “Siempre me tuviste rencor,
siempre te vengaste de alguna manera. ¿Quieres saber cómo me llamó un día
mi paredro? Acteón” (62, p. 235). Later, she tells him:
Vaya a saber si Diana no se entregó a Acteón, pero lo que cuenta

es que después le echó los perros y probablemente gozó viendo como
lo destrozaban. No soy Diana pero siento que en alguna parte de mí

hay perros que esperan, y no hubiera querido que te hicieran
pedazos. (62, p. 238; my italics)
If the relationship between “el perro” and the Terrible Mother aspect in la
Maga had been merely suggested in Rayuela, it becomes explicit—as the
preceding quotation demonstrates—in the case of Hélène. Like la Maga in
the second part of Rayuela, Hélène seems to be motivated by a vague desire
for revenge.
Like Lycius, Juan is manipulated by forces he can neither understand
nor control. He tries to find sensuous oblivion through his relationship with
Tell and attempts to “blur his vision” through constant drinking (we never
see Juan without a drink in his hands—Campari, whiskey, slivovitz, Médoc,
Sylvaner ...). Juan is in love with a symbol: the petrified and petrifying beauty
of the Medusa, Empusa Hélène, the evasive anesthetist of the rue de la Clef.
Juan’s monologues stress Hélène’s unreal nature from the very beginning; he
says: “¿Estabas en la zona o te soñé? ... Pero tú, Hélène, ¿habrás sido una vez
más un nombre que levanto contra la nada, el simulacro que me invento con
palabras ...?” (62, p. 21). Later, we realize that, unlike Lycius, Juan does not
want Hélène “to throw the goddess off”; in fact, he loves her as goddess,
precisely because of her evasiveness and coldness: “Hélène Arp, Hélène
Brancusi, ... fría astuta indiferente crueldad cortés de infanta entre
suplicantes y enanos ... (La sombra de Hélène es más densa que las otras y
más fría; quien posa el pie en sus sargazos siente subir el veneno que lo hará
vivir para siempre en el único delirio necesario) ...” (62, pp. 76–77). Even
though he suspects Hélène’s true nature, Juan does not want to face it; at the
end of the novel we read: “... te quería demasiado para aceptar esa
alucinación en la que ni siquiera estabas presente ... llegué al borde y preferí
no saber, consentí en no saber aunque hubiera podido ...” (62, p. 262).
Like Lycius, Juan becomes obsessed with his vampiress, almost
disregarding the rest of the world. Both heroes, however, really succumb to
the destructiveness of their own passions, rather than to an innate perfidy on
the part of the beloved. Just as Lamia, the “cruel lady” of the opening scenes,
becomes tame and submissive as the poem progresses, and she seems to have
become truly human through her love for Lycius, so Hélène displays at least
a desire to become “human” on the night of her encounter with Juan: she
obsessively wipes her face as if trying to remove a mask (62, p. 237), and she
asks Juan to change her, if he can (62, p. 238). Neither Keats nor Cortázar
succeeds in presenting the heroine as a truly repulsive creature (in spite of
the explicit identification of the heroine with the snake and the vampire,
respectively) because each author seems to place a great part of the blame on
the hero himself; he does not love the woman but the dream, and by rejecting
the real for the sake of the ideal vision, he succumbs under the weight of the
reality he was unwilling to face, once the object of his fantasy disappears.
Lycius asks the gods for a dream woman; once his wish is granted, he wants
to impose his dream on the diurnal world and is destroyed by his folly. Juan,
likewise, want; to love his own Hélène, and thus provokes her wrath when he
unwittingly refuses to see her “unmasked” face (62, p. 262).
As is always the case when the hero “turns away” from an archetype
arising from his disconcerted psyche, the refusal of the archetype’s summons
turns the adventure into a negative one. Rather than being saved, the hero
becomes doomed; all he can do is await the process of his disintegration. The
hero refuses to give up his present dreams and ideals, for he sees the future
not as a process of growth, but as an indefinite prolongation of his present
state; hence, he becomes imprisoned in his infantile ego, unable to make the
passage from his inner world to the world outside. His former “dream
vision” becomes a monster that will constantly haunt him; his very house, a
house of death.
NOTES
1. IJK, pp. 266–70.

2. Walter Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1965), p. 91.
3. Evert, p. 91.
4. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 427–33.
5. Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Compass-Viking, 1967),
pp. 312–13; Robert Gittings, John Keats (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1968), pp.
358–61.
6. Allen Tate, “A Reading of Keats,” The American Scholar, 15 (Winter–Spring
1945–46), 62.
7. Rollins, I, 341.
8. Rollins, I, 392.
9. In Keats and Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), John Middleton
Murry had stated that “Fanny Brawne killed Keats,” although he later recanted his idea in
The Mystery of Keats (see Bibliography). Both works were included in Cortázar’s
bibliography for IJK; but he seems to have stuck to Murry’s earlier belief.
10. Rollins, I, 391–92, 394–96; “As a Man in the world I love the rich talk of a
Charmian; as an eternal being I love the thought of you [Georgiana Keats]. I should like
her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me...” (p. 396).
11. Rollins, II, 223–24. The letter of 19 October 1819 expresses a similar feeling: “I
must impose chains upon myself—I shall be able to do nothing—I shold [sic] like to cast
the die for love or death—I have no Patience with anything else—if you ever intend to be
cruel to me as you say in jest now but perhaps may sometimes be in earnest be so now—
and I will—my mind is in a tremble, I cannot tell what I am writing” (p. 224).
12. Rollins, II, 133.
13. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream (New York: Harper & Row,
1967), pp. 214–15.
14. Letter received from Julio Cortázar, 19 July 1974.
15. Hernández, “Camaleonismo y vampirismo.”
16. Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, trans. Andrea Dykes
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons for the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology,
1970), pp. 40,43–44.
17. See, for instance, Cortázar’s own account of the critics’ reaction to IJK (VDOM, p.
209). As for Keats, the negative reception of Endymion has become legendary.
18. For a discussion of Keats’s annotations on the margins of the Anatomy, see
Gittings, John Keats, pp. 323–24, 345, and Ward, pp. 312–13.
19. Rollins, I, 395.
20. Rollins, I, 395.
21. In Joanna Richardson, Fanny Brawne (London: Thames & Hudson, 1952), pp. 20,
172, and Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), pp.
3–33, 59–60, 230–35 (this is the sole reference to this Gittings work).
22. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp.
167–68; Ward, pp. 121–22; Gittings, John Keats, pp. 139–40; Murry, Keats (New York:
Minerva Press, 1968), p. 123. These critics speculate about such a possibility.
23. Rollins, I, 403–04.
24. None of Keats’s later critics has been so totally negative when interpreting the
Fanny Brawne affair. See, for instance, Murry, Keats, pp. 19–81; Ward, pp. 292–324;
Gittings, John Keats, pp. 327–30.
25. Rollins, II, 126.
26. “Medicines as well as poisons are numinous contents that have been acquired and
communicated in mysterious wise. The communicators and administrators of this aspect
of the Feminine—originally almost always women—are sacral figures, i.e., priestesses—”
(GM, p. 60).
27. Freudian psychology generally establishes a connection between the eyes and the
male genitalia. Thus, Oedipus’ self-blinding is seen as punitive castration. In Ancient
Greece, the interpreters of the oracle of Themis were blinded and had been castrated in
honor of the goddess; in this case, blindness appears as a symbolic surrendering of the male
realm, that of “visionary reason,” in favor of the feminine realm, that of “blind intuition.”
Also, see note 28 below.
28. “For a boy to be really successful, it might be wise to castrate him; for Byzantium
was the eunuch’s paradise. Even the noblest parents were not above mutilating their sons
to help their advancement.... A large proportion of the Patriarchs of Constantinople were
eunuchs; and eunuchs were particularly encouraged in the Civil Service, where the
castrated bearer of a title took precedence of his unmutilated compeer and where many
high ranks were reserved for eunuchs alone”—Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilization
(New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 162–63.
29. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R.F.C. Hull,
Bollingen Series XLII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971; first ed. 1949), p. 58.
30. Gittings, John Keats, p. 303.
31. Gittings, John Keats, p. 303.

32. “The symbol inherently contains the repulsive element, but keeps it at a distance,
so that he [Keats] does not have to face it in terms of a common experience, his own....”
(Tate, p. 62).
33. Cf. Murry, Keats, p. 237; Gittings, John Keats, pp. 338–41.
34. Gittings, John Keats, p. 301: “Keats was living out the diversities of love which had
formed part of his satisfaction with his treatment of Lamia, a love which included every
possible element”; Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971): “Love, possession and sadistic desire for domination intermingle here, under
the significant banner of Keats’s old ideal of ‘luxury’”; Murry, Keats, p. 237: “‘Light and
shade,’ ‘pro and con,’ are in Keats’s experience the very law and principle of life—and
death.”
35. Murry, Keats, p. 231.
36. J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1962), pp. 127–28.
37. M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 2nd ed. (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons for the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, 1971; first
ed. 1935), pp. 103–04.
38. Cortázar has observed as follows:
El capítulo del “anima” es muy hermoso, y creo que tienes toda la razón al
ver así a la Maga. Eres la primera en asimilarla a esta concepción de Jung, y
creo que tu interpretación echa por tierra muchas otras que andan por ahí.
Ahí sí entro de lleno en tu campo, sin el menor esfuerzo; porque yo mismo
siento, retrospectivamente, las fuerzas que me impulsaron y me compulsaron
cuando escribí ese libro; no tenían nombres ni parámetros psicoanalíticos,
pero yo las sentía, desde el tablón inicial (y bien que lo citas) hasta el final del
libro. Sólo en algunos momentos de 62 he vivido tan sometido a esas
potencias que tiran y empujan desde abajo, si abajo quiere decir alguna cosa.
Y a propósito de 62, me deslumbró que vieras en Hélène un complemento de
la Maga; eso me aclara muchas cosas, mi fascinación personal por Hélène,
vagamente basada en una mujer que sólo vi dos o tres veces y a quien hubiera
querido conocer íntimamente: lesbiana (no tengo pruebas), misteriosa,
esquiva, cruel, bella, distante, y a la vez irradiando una atracción
permamente: de ahí nació Hélène, y es cierto que es la otra mitad, por decirlo
así, de la Maga. (Letter received from Julio Cortázar, written at Saignon, 30
June 1973.)
39. C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed. Vol. V of The
Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970), p. 370.
40. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, p. 369.
G O R D A N A Y O VA N O V I C H
An Interpretation of Rayuela
Based on the Character Web
A lthough on one level the characters in Rayuela are autonomous, on a

different level they imply a unified, single fictional world. The great art of
Julio Cortázar’s novel is his creation of this unified world out of a fragmented
text; he has invented characters who, while retaining their identity, form part
of the author’s and the reader’s single consciousness.
The difficult interpretation of the whole of Rayuela requires great
participation by readers. The meaning resides in the articulation of what is
between the signs; always, of course, starting from the sign. Jean-Paul Sartre
writes: ‘The literary object, though realized through language, is never given
in language ... Nothing is accomplished if the reader does not put himself
from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this
silence.’1 According to Kathleen Genover, Rayuela should be interpreted ‘del
mismo modo que las alegorías medievales’2 / ‘in the same way as the
medieval allegories.’ Genover’s statement is true only because the story and
the discourse in Rayuela are not equivalent. However, the analogy between
the meaning and the text is not a simple one, since in Rayuela there is no pre-
existing reference to serve as the basis of allegory—no reference comparable,
for example, to the Bible’s place in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
A study of the names of the characters in Rayuela shows that even
though there are examples of allegory, the novel as a whole is not allegorical.
From Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic. © 2003 Gordana Yovanovich.
101
102 Gordana Yovanovich
The name ‘La Maga’ may relate to imagination, especially because the
character is a dreamer. ‘Horacio’ certainly brings to mind the name of
Horace, the Latin poet, and ‘Traveler’ associates the character with a person
on the move (ironically, because Traveler never travels). Names such as these
certainly suggest correlated order but, despite their symbolic qualities, they
do not, taken together, form a single system. In other words, the novel as a
whole does not bring in another correlated order in the same way that
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, consistently alludes to the
Russian revolution.
Many names in Cortázar’s novel do not have an allegorical
dimension—for example, Rocamadour, Ronald, Babs, and Gregorovius.
Readers are therefore not encouraged to interpret the novel on the basis of
a pre-existing reference related to the novel through characters; the names of
characters in Rayuela are not a link between its sense and its reference. The
names of La Maga and Horacio encourage readers to look for secondary
meaning, while names such as Rocamadour and Gregorovius remind us that
the secondary meaning is not to be found in the outside world.
The organizing principle in Rayuela is a metaphor rather than allegory.
Mario Valdés, using an example from García Lorca’s poetry, explains how
metaphor involves the reader in an interpretation:
The range of expression through metaphor is only limited by the

reader’s ability at imaginative association and transference of
characteristic. Consider the following line: ‘El mar baila por la
playa / un poema de balcones’ ... The meaning of the line is so
much more than the subject matter. It is evident that the
reference is to the sea breaking on the beach, but the
metaphorical element is the essential expansion which takes place
due to the juxtaposition of the extraneous objects and activities of
‘poema,’ ‘balcones,’ and ‘bailar.’ Consequently the metaphoric
meaning includes the transference of characteristics in the mind
of the reader; thus, we have an expanded and expanding
consciousness where the sea is merely the starting point.3
A metaphoric mode of expression implies new relationships among normally

extraneous objects. These new connections are usually found more easily in
a poem than in a novel, simply because a poem is shorter. In Rayuela the
problem is simplified because readers are not expected to juxtapose all of the
words in the text; the characters and their worlds function in the same way
that individual words do in poetry. Oliveira explains the relationship between
characters and words: characters are both human beings and symbols of
different semantic fields or fictional worlds. A reader’s realization, as Iser
would say, of the characters’ relationship, as an explanation of the
relationship of words in poetry, reveals the meaning of the novel.
Cortázar’s own ideas, as expressed in the writings of his character
Morelli, are important clues in the interpretation of the novel; they are a
model for Rayuela. Morelli’s book is made up of different notes combined
according to the rules of chance; he does not believe that any logical
organization is representative of life. This does not mean that there is no
unity in his text. In chapter 109 one of the members of the club who has read
Morelli’s work says:
Leyendo el libro [de Morelli] se tenía por momentos la impresión

de que Morelli había esperado que la acumulación de fragmentos
cristalizara bruscamente en una realidad total. (647)
Reading the book, one had the impression for a while that
Morelli had hoped that the accumulation of fragments would
quickly crystallize into a total reality. (469)
After many readings, the reader gets the same impression about Rayuela.
Cortázar’s novel is rich in unconnected details, but it simultaneously seeks
the unified ‘cosmovision’ sought by the surrealists. It wishes to synthesize all
elements of life. Evelyn Picón Garfield shows that Cortázar does share the
basic idea of surrealism defined by André Breton, whom Picón Garfield
quotes in her book:
Todo induce a creer que en el espíritu humano existe un cierto

punto desde el que la vida y la muerte, lo real y lo imaginario, el
pasado y el futuro, lo comunicable y lo incomunicable, lo alto y
lo bajo, dejan de ser vistos como contradicciones.4
Everything leads us to believe that in the human spirit there is a

point where life and death, the real and the imaginable and the
incommunicable, the high and the low, stop being seen as
contradictions.
Single elements form a unity, as in a mosaic where a single picture is formed

by the fragments; but the fragments also stand as individual pieces, with a
noticeable space between them.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel is of great assistance

in understanding Cortázar’s complicated novel. Bakhtin explains how writing
can achieve the simultaneity of coexisting forces. This is nothing new, as
Bakhtin points out, because it was achieved by Cervantes, Shakespeare, and
Rabelais, but ‘its germs ripened in the novels of Dostoyevky.’5 Bakhtin
explains the basic nature of Dostoyevsky’s novel and, by inference, of
Cortázar’s Rayuela:
The essence of polyphony is precisely in the fact that the voices

remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a
higher order than a homonymy. These independent voices are
the voices of the characters in the novel. Their independence and
freedom are a part of the author’s plan which, as it were,
predestines them to be free (relatively speaking of course) and
introduces them, as free men into the strict and calculated plan of
the whole.6
Since the independence of the voices is the most apparent characteristic of

Dostoyevky’s novel (and Cortázar’s), the ‘calculated plan of the whole’ is to
be found in the second level of narration. Even then it is very difficult to
grasp the totality because the relationship between the parts and the whole
in Rayuela is much more complex than it is in medieval allegory.
In the very first chapter (73) of the suggested reading, Cortázar warns
his readers that sense and reference in his novel are not divorced and that the
novel must be understood in the same way a metaphor is understood: even
though its tenor and its vehicle are different, they combine in a single unit,
the metaphor. Cortázar illustrates this through a commentary on a particular
interpretation by Morelli. In one of his books Morelli talks about a
Neapolitan who spent years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a
screw on the ground. The fellow dropped dead of a stroke and as soon as the
neighbours arrived the screw disappeared. One of them has it now. Morelli
suggests that perhaps the neighbour takes it out secretly, puts it away again,
and goes off to the factory, feeling something that he does not understand,
‘una oscura reprobación’ (545) / ‘an obscure reproval’ (384). Morelli’s
interpretation is that the screw must have been something else, ‘un dios o
algo así’ (545) / ‘a god or something like that’ (384). The narrator, who is
probably Oliveira, comments: ‘Solución demasiado fácil’ (545) / ‘Too easy a
solution’ (384).
Morelli’s interpretation, to which Oliveira objects, has a long history in
literature. Critics have frequently interpreted literary works by relating them
to what Hegel called ‘the spirit of the age,’ or to existing historical

conditions, putting their emphasis on what was already familiar to them. In
doing this they undermine the work itself, or a smaller sign within a work.
Oliveira wishes to look at the screw as a screw first, and only then to perceive
it as a symbol of something else.
The interpretation of the novel, ‘the plan of the whole,’ stands above
the text but is not divorced form it. Etienne, who reads Morelli’s text with
Oliveira, tells him: ‘Race rato que mucha gente sospecha que la vida y los
seres vivientes son dos cosas aparte’ (314) / ‘It’s been some time now since
people have suspected that life and living things are two completely different
things’ (164). They are different and one at the same time. Oliveira explains
this paradox in his understanding of La Maga, who is simultaneously a
person and a poetic image. He says:
Así la Maga dejaría de ser un objeto perdido para volverse la

imagen de una posible reunión—pero no ya con ella sino más acá
o más allá de ella; por ella pero no ella. (451)
In that way La Maga would cease being a lost object and become
the image of a possible reunion—no longer with her but on this
side of her or on the other side of her; by her, but not her. (292)
The meaning of the text is not something that stands above the text; rather,
it is created through—‘por’—the text. It is to be found in the reader’s
response, which has been stimulated by the text. Etienne explains:
... la verdadera realidad que también llamamos Yonder ... esa

verdadera realidad, repito, no es algo por venir, una meta, el
último peldaño, el final de una evolución. No, es algo que ya está
aquí, en nosotros. Sula siente, basta tener el valor de estirar la
mano en la oscuridad. (618)
... the true reality that we also call Yonder ... that true reality, I
repeat, is not something that is going to happen, a goal, the last
step, the end of an evolution. No, it’s something that’s already
here, in us. You can feel it, all you need is the courage to stick
your hand into the darkness. (445–6)
In Rayuela, it is important to remember, what is said about life is

relevant for literature, and vice versa. Cortázar points out many times in
Rayuela his dislike for literature that is only ‘literatura,’ an empty rhetoric
with little bearing on life itself. Consequently, the place of the reader
becomes similar to that of a character. If Etienne looks for the ‘Yonder’ in
himself, readers must also look for an interpretation in the text and through
the text as the text becomes a part of them.
COMMUNICATION THROUGH FORM
Alfred J. MacAdam points out that there is not yet an interpretation of

Rayuela as a whole in which the reader distances himself or herself after
having analysed each individual part of the novel. ‘The sad reality of most of
Cortázar’s criticism is its pious repetition of what the author or his surrogate
[Morelli] says about literature.’7 What is most important is to see the novel
as a whole. One of the outstanding characteristics of Cortázar’s novel is that
there is no extraneous material; everything functions in relation to
everything else, and Cortázar often gives explicit clues as to how readers
should interpret the novel. He tells us that Gregorovius and Traveler are
Oliveira’s doubles. Furthermore, he tells us that La Maga and Pola
complement each other in their relationship to Oliveira. Readers soon
realize that not only these but all of the characters function together; they
form a picture of a complete human being, and reveal the relationship
between an individual and the human collective. The form of the novel
complements the content. Cortázar creates the character of Oliveira not as
something independent, but as a commentary on what other characters are
or are not. Without the others Oliveira is nothing; without him they are
incomplete. Their interrelationship can best be seen in the board scene.
The board scene, in the middle of the novel, is the seed from which the
novel Rayuela grew. Like James Joyce, who wrote Ulysses from a short story,
Cortázar built his novel from the nucleus of a single scene. He has said that
‘Rayuela, for example, began in the middle. The first chapter I wrote was
about Talita aloft on the boards. I hadn’t the least idea of what I’d write
before or after that section.’8 In this scene Oliveira wants Traveler, in an
apartment opposite his, to send over some nails and mate leaves to him.
Oliveira does not need the nails for any specific purpose; he wants them
because he cannot tolerate the crooked ones he already has. The
conventional, normal, way to get the package is to go downstairs, cross the
street, and climb up to Traveler’s room at the same level in the other
apartment building. But this route is too long; furthermore, it is meaningless
because it has been repeated too often. Consequently, Oliveira and Traveler,
his double, invent a new, logical, and entertaining way to do the job: they
each put a board out of their windows so the two boards meet in the middle.
The men then hold the boards and Talita, with nails and mate in her pocket,
crosses over by crawling on her stomach. The act is adventurous and bold,
but not foolish, because Oliveira and Traveler do everything possible to
secure Talita’s passage. They even give her a hat so that she will not get
sunstroke. The activity scandalizes the women who watch them from below,
even though there is no reason for complaint: their three young neighbours
are having fun at nobody’s expense. In fact, they provide entertainment for
the women, who function as their audience.
At the end of the episode Oliveira tells Traveler, ‘Somos el mismo, uno
de cada lado’ / ‘We are the same, one from each side.’ They are, in fact, one
unity. Holding the boards on each side, they are in physical contact and
create a meaningful unit called ‘the bridge.’ On a higher level, they are also
one because they merge in their love for Talita, who lies on the boards. In
chapter 43 Oliveira explicitly tells Talita ‘Sos nuestra ninfa Egeria, nuestro
puente mediúmnico. Ahora que lo pienso, cuando vos estás presente Manú y
yo caemos en una especie de trance’ (423) / ‘You’re Egeria, our nymph, our
bridge, our medium. Now that I think of it, when you’re present Manú and
I fall into some sort of trance’ (265). Cortázar then takes his readers one step
further. Talita, the link between the two opposites, becomes a catalyst. She is
important not only in herself, but also as an agent that speeds up a chemical
reaction between the two men. Talita realizes that they look beyond her, and
says, ‘Estos dos han tenido otro puente entre ellos ... Si me cayera a la calle
ni se darían cuenta’ (404) / ‘Those two have got another bridge working
between them ... If I were to fall into the street they wouldn’t even notice it’
(247). She knows that she is and is not a bond, because Oliveira and Traveler
begin with her but transcend her. ‘Hablen de lo que hablen,’ she says, ‘en el
fondo es siempre de mí, pero tampoco es eso, aunque es casi eso’ (405) / ‘no
matter what they talk about, it’s always about me in the end, but that’s not
what I really mean, still it’s almost what I mean’ (248). She inspires love; love
is not only in her, but also in the subject who loves. Oliveira and Traveler
meet in her but also above her. In Libro de Manuel the narrator says, ‘Un
puente es un hombre cruzando el puente, che’9 / ‘A bridge is a man crossing
a bridge, by God.’
The important point here is that relationships (as well as the text of the
novel) encompass a hierarchy of meaning, and in the final phase form a
complete synthesis. People are complicated beings who in their depths
possess undiscovered and unrealized layers of personality. Oliveira shows this
in his conversation with La Maga. When La Maga tells him that they are two
very different people, that he is a ‘Mondrian’ and she is a ‘Vieira da Silva,’
Oliveira asks her, ‘¿Y no se te ha ocurrido sospechar que detrás de ese

Mondrian puede empezar una realidad de Vieira da Silva?’ (212) / ‘And didn’t
it occur to you that behind this Mondrian there might lurk a Vieira da Silva
reality?’ (76). The answer is in the affirmative. Each person is able to be in
contact with the other because people are a sum of possibilities. Oliveira sees
in everything the potential for a different way of life, and he longs for this
completeness:
Si hubiera sido posible pensar una extrapolación de todo eso,

entender el Club, entender ‘Cold Wagon Blues’, entender el
amor de la Maga, entender cada piolincito saliendo de las cosas y
llegando hasta sus dedos, cada títere o a cada titiritero, como una
epifanía; entenderlos, no como símbolos de otra realidad quizá
inalcanzable, pero sí como potenciadores (qué lenguaje, qué
impudor), como exatamente líneas de fuga para una carrera a la
que hubiera que lanzarse en ese momento mismo.
(206, emphasis added)
If he could have conceived of an extrapolation of all this,

understanding the club, understanding the Cold Wagon Blues,
understanding La Maga’s love, understanding everything every
thread that would become unravelled from the cuff of things and
reach down to his fingers, every puppet and every puppeteer, like
an epiphany; understanding them, not as symbols of some other
unattainable reality perhaps, but agents of potency (such
language, such lack of decorum), just like lines of flight along the
track that he ought to follow at this very moment. (72)
Each character offers a possibility of escape. Oliveira accepts some of their

characteristics and tendencies and subtly criticizes others. The way in which
Cortázar delineates his protagonist’s search is similar to the way in which
Cervantes illustrates the development of Don Quixote; Cortázar does not
describe the development directly but leads the hero through different
contexts. In Rayuela these contexts are the worlds of different characters.
Each of them represents a different quality of life. Oliveira’s contact with
them modifies and enriches his character.
Cortázar uses irony as a predominant technique to create the character
of Horacio Oliveira. This ironic mode of expression in Cortázar’s novel, like
the metaphoric mode of expression, also requires great participation by
readers. ‘The reconstructions of irony,’ Wayne Booth points out, ‘are seldom
if ever reducible either to grammar or semantics or linguistics.’10 Readers

begin from the language, but search for the meaning beyond language—in
the relationship of contexts. According to Booth, in an ironic text the
deception of readers is a precondition:
The essential structure of irony is not designed to ‘deceive some

readers and allow others to see the secret message’ but to deceive
all readers for a time and then require all readers to recognize and
cope with their deception.11
In Rayuela secondary characters claim moral superiority and explicitly

scorn Oliveira for his immoral deeds. In the course of the novel the readers,
who originally share the views of the secondary characters because their
views are the dominant ethics of society, realize that they are being deceived
by the author and above all by society. In the section entitled ‘Del lado de
acá’ / ‘From This Side’ the character who is presented in this manner is Ossip
Gregorovius, who helps most to build the character of Oliveira. In Rayuela
Gregorovius has the role of a humanist. When Babs accuses Oliveira of
heinous crimes, Oliveira does not answer her but secretly looks at
Gregorovius, knowing that Gregorovius is a symbol of such views, a person
who often uses such moral arguments as ammunition against Oliveira.
Readers side with Babs and Gregorovius because Oliveira leaves La Maga at
the moment of her son’s death. Desertion at such a time is a horrible deed; a
woman in this situation should be helped, not abandoned. Oliveira, who does
not deny that he should be with La Maga, only points out that if he went to
her, he would do so for himself and not for her.
Oliveira se dijo que no sería tan difícil llegarse hasta la cama,

agacharse para decirle unas palabras al oído a la Maga. ‘Pero eso
yo lo haría por mi’, pensó. ‘Ella está más allá de cualquier cosa.
Soy yo el que después dormiría mejor, aunque no sea más que una
manera de decir. Yo, yo, yo. Yo dormiría mejor después de besarla
y consolarla y repetir todo lo que ya le han dicho éstos.’ (320)
Oliveira told himself that it would not be so difficult to go over

to the bed, squat down beside it and say a few words in La Maga’s
ear. ‘But I would be doing it for myself,’ he thought. ‘She’s
beyond anything. I’m the one who would sleep better afterward,
even if it’s just an expression. Me, me, me. I would sleep better
after I kissed her and consoled her and repeated everything these
people here have already said.’ (170–1)
The critic Graciela de Sola has stated that Gregorovius is a European

Oliveira.12 Oliveira himself realizes that he and Gregorovius are very similar:
‘Vos sos como yo’ (324) / ‘You’re like me’ (174). They are alike because they
are both highly educated, intelligent men. Gregorovius is often reading or
carrying books, and from various discussions in the club it becomes obvious
that he reads the works of Pascal, Wittgenstein, and many other thinkers
who are also known to Oliveira. Like Oliveira, Gregorovius is not sure where
he comes from or where he is going. They both live on borrowed money and
search for some meaning in their existence. There are important differences
between them, however. Here Cortázar creates a hierarchy, which readers
dramatize and use to draw important conclusions. Brita Brodin agrees with
Graciela de Sola that Gregorovius is the ‘Oliveira europeo’ who is left behind
when Oliveira begins to search actively for La Maga.13 This may be true, but
it has to be explained. Oliveira never rejects his knowledge and erudition.
What he rejects is Gregorovius’s hypocrisy.
As we have seen in the first chapter, Cortázar shows Gregorovius, the
moralist, to be La Maga’s psychological rapist. Oliveira makes Gregorovius
admit that his charity towards La Maga during Rocamadour’s funeral is not
as great as it appears. When he asks Gregorovius, ‘¿Y estuviste aquí todo el
tiempo? CARITAS’ / ‘And you were here all the time? CARITAS’ he admits that
he stayed in La Maga’s apartment because he hoped to keep it now for
himself: ‘No era por eso, tenia miedó de que alguno de la casa aprovechara
para meterse en el cuarto y hacerse fuerte’ (322) / ‘That wasn’t why. I was
afraid somebody from the landlady might use that time to get in here and
cause trouble’ (172). More important, however, Oliveira insinuates that
Gregorovius stayed with La Maga for sexual pleasure. A careful reader links
the two important scenes because Oliveira comments on both in a similar
fashion. When La Maga tells Oliveira about the lovers who had taken
advantage of her, the conversation runs in the following way:
—Sí—dijo la Maga, mirándolo—. Primero el negro. Después

Ledesma.
—Después Ledesma, claro.
—Y los tres del callejón, la noche de carnaval.
—Por delante—dijo Oliveira, cebando el mate.
—Y monsieur Vincent, el hermano del hotelero.
—Por detrás.
—Y un soldado que lloraba en un parque.

—Por delante.
—Y vos.
—Por detrás. Pero eso de ponerme a mí en la lista estando yo
presente es como una confirmación de mis lúgubres
premoniciones. (218–19)
‘Yes,’ La Maga said, looking at him. ‘First the Negro. Then

Ledesma.’
‘Then Ledesma, of course.’
‘And the three up the alley, on carnival night.’
‘Por delante,’ said Oliveira, sipping his mate ...
‘And Monsieur Vincent, the hotel keeper’s brother.’
‘Por detrás.’
‘And a soldier who was weeping in a park.’
‘Por delante.’
‘And you.’
‘Por detrás. But the idea of putting me on the list in my
presence just bears out my gloomiest premonitions ...’ (82–3)
When Gregorovius describes Rocamadour’s funeral, Oliveira comments

supportively. He repeats the words ‘por delante’ / ‘from the front’ and ‘por
detrás’ / ‘from the back,’ making the two scenes similar. Gregorovius begins:
—Sí, él [Ronald] y Perico y el relojero. Yo acompañaba a Lucía.

—Por delante.
—Y Babs cerraba la marcha con Etienne.
—Por detrás. (327)
‘Yes, he and Perico and the watchmaker. I went with Lucía.’

‘Por delante.’
‘And Babs brought up the rear with Etienne.’
‘Por detrás.’ (177)
Gregorovius looks for an advantage in everything, which inspires Oliveira’s

description of him as ‘una especie de lameculos metafisico’ (324) / ‘a kind of
metaphysical ass-kisser’ (174). He does not criticize Gregorovius’s education
but attacks his tendency to moralize and to indulge in immoral behaviour.
Oliveira’s position is further crystallized when he is juxtaposed with
Etienne. Through an interaction of contexts Cortázar develops the character
further. Unlike Gregorovius, Etienne wishes to break away from European

social norms. Oliveira takes him to visit Morelli, with whom the two young
intellectuals share ideas about art. They all wish to break away from empty
rhetoric and to communicate through form:
[La Maga] admiraba terriblemente a Oliveira y Etienne, capaces

de discutir tres horas sin parar. En torno a Etienne y Oliveira
había como un círculo de tiza, ella quería entrar en el círculo,
comprender por qué el principio de indeterminación era tan
importante en la literatura, por qué Morelli, del que tanto
hablaban, al que tanto admiraban, pretendía hacer de su libro una
bola de cristal donde el micro y el macrocosmos se unieran en una
visión aniquilante. (150)
[La Maga] was terribly in awe of Oliveira and Etienne, who could
keep an argument going for three hours without a stop. There
was something like a circle of chalk around Etienne and Oliveira
and she wanted to get inside, to understand why the principle of
indetermination was so important in literature, why Morelli, of
whom they spoke so much, whom they admired so much, wanted
his book to be a crystal ball in which the micro- and the
macrocosm would come together in an annihilating vision. (25)
For Etienne, as for Morelli and Oliveira, art is the giver of meaning. Etienne
says, ‘Pinto, ergo soy’ echoing Descartes’s ‘I think; therefore I am.’ Etienne
searches for complete liberation, and in his way is very similar to Oliveira.
None the less, art does not have a deeper meaning for Etienne because he is
concerned only with form and his own pleasure. When Wong shows pictures
of torture victims Oliveira comments, ‘Por más que me pese nunca seré un
indiferente como Etienne ... Lo peor era que había mirado fríamente las fotos
de Wong, tan sólo porque el torturado no era su padre, aparte de que ya hacía
cuarenta años de la operación pekinesa’ (188, emphasis added) / ‘No matter
how it hurts me, I shall never be indifferent like Etienne ... The worst was
that he had looked at Wong’s picture with coldness because the one they
were torturing had not been his father, not thinking about the forty years
that had passed since it all took place in Peking’ (57). Etienne is obviously
not as interested as Morelli and Oliveira in universal justice for humankind.
Oliveira repeats again that Etienne is an egoist, and compares him to La
Maga:
La Maga jamás ha sido capaz de entender las cuestiones morales

(como Etienne, pero de una manera menos egoísta; simplemente
porque sólo cree en la responsabilidad en presente, en el
momento mismo en que hay que ser bueno, o noble; en el fondo,
por razones tan hedónicas y egoístas como las de Etienne).
[La Maga] has never been able to understand moral questions

(just like Etienne, but less selfishly; just because the only
responsibility she believes in is of the present, the very moment
when one must be good or noble; underneath it all, for reasons
just as hedonistic and selfish as those of Etienne’s). (527–8)
Oliveira rejects the moral concerns of Gregorovius and censures

Etienne for his amoral attitude to life. This does not mean that he is
contradicting himself, if we keep in mind that Rayuela is structured on the
principle of metaphor. In both instances Oliveira criticizes self-interest and
pure egoism, and he rejects moral, ethical norms not for the sake of amorality
but in the hope of creating a new moral order.
In their attempt to revolutionize the world, Etienne, Oliveira, and
Morelli emphasize the importance of form. None the less, formal
experimentation for its own sake is not the goal of Rayuela. Through the
example of Berthe Trépat, Cortázar shows what he wants by explaining what
he does not want. Like Morelli, who wishes to revolutionize literature,
Berthe Trépat attempts to revolutionize music. She is introduced as an avant-
garde composer whose ‘Síntesis Délibes-Saint Saéns’ represents one of the
most profound innovations in contemporary music, something Trépat calls
‘Sincretismo fatídico.’ Oliveira is interested in her arrangement, but quickly
becomes disappointed because ‘el sincretismo fatídico no había tardado en
revelar su secreto’ (250) / ‘the prophetic syncretism was not long in revealing
its secret’ (107). She took four chords from well-known works and alternated
them. Cortázar ridicules the lack of a true synthesis on a different level
through her grotesque presentation and the behaviour of her audience, who
gradually leave. Readers, necessarily comparing her to Morelli, deduce that
a revolution is fruitful only if it creates a new order in which there is a true
and complete union of parts. This point becomes even more clearly
established in a juxtaposition of the members of the Club de la Serpiente and
‘el viejo de arriba,’ the old man who lives above La Maga’s apartment.
The members of the club and the old man are social outcasts. (Babs
points out that their neighbours suspect them of smoking marijuana even
when they are only making goulash.) Despite this similarity, the members of
the Club de la Serpiente, to which Oliveira belongs, are very different from
the old man. ‘El viejo de arriba’ is driven by hate; the nailed shoe and other
strange objects on his door reflect decadence and madness. He complains
whether or not he has a valid reason. In other words, he is different from his
society not for any valid reason but because he is a difficult, obstinate
individual. The members of the club, in contrast, reject social norms in favour
of a higher order; the atmosphere at the club is warm and friendly. During
one of their ‘discadas’ or record-playing parties, inspired by the freedom of
jazz, the members create chaos: at one point La Maga weeps, Babs is very
drunk, Etienne, Wong, and Ronald argue over what record to play, Guy
remembers his ex-girlfriend, and Oliveira, who observes all of them, thinks:
Y todo eso de golpe crecía y era una música atroz, era más que el
silencio afelpado de las cosas en orden de sus parientes
intachables, en mitad de la confusión donde el pasado era incapaz
de encontrar un botón de camisa y el presente se afeitaba con
pedazos de vidrio a falta de una navaja enterrada en alguna
maceta, en mitad de un tiempo que se abría como una veleta a
cualquier viento, un hombre respiraba hasta no poder más, se
sentía vivir hasta el delirio en el acto mismo de contemplar la
confusión que lo rodeaba y preguntarse si algo de eso tenía
sentido. Todo desorden se justificaba si tendía a salir de sí mismo,
por la locura se podía acaso llegar a una razón que no fuera esa
razón cuya falencia es la locura. (210)
And suddenly from all this there came some horrid music, it was
beyond the felted order of homes where untouchable kin put
things in order, in the midst of the confusion where the past was
incapable of finding a button on a shirt and the present shaved
itself with pieces of a broken bottle because it could not find a razor
stuck away somewhere in some flowerpot, in the midst of a time
which opened up like a weather vane to whatever wind was
blowing, a man breathed until he could no longer do so, he felt that
he had lived until he reached the delirium of the very act of taking
in the confusion which surrounded him and he asked himself if any
of this had meaning. All disorder had meaning if it seemed to come
out of itself, perhaps through madness one could arrive at that
reason which is not the reason whose weakness is madness. (75)
While the old man stays at the level of ‘locura,’ or insanity, the club attempts
to transcend madness and create a new order. This new order is beyond
common experience, and Cortázar describes it only elliptically by
juxtaposing two social outcasts and then insinuating their differences.
Each member of the Club de la Serpiente contributes something to the
creation of the new order. Oliveira observes and appropriates these different
facets, in the end creating his own new order and new union with the other, ‘el
otro,’ thanks to lessons learned in the club. This is also true for readers. From
experience readers know that when different characters represent different
qualities the author has a specific purpose in creating each of them. Readers also
know that the only way to understand something completely is to try to knit all
of its parts together. They observe each character and then form a synthesis.
Wong, for example, representing the ceremonial aspect of life, studies oriental
ways of torture, and often carries photos of torture victims, which he shows in
the club. This in itself is a negative quality. Despite the obvious cruelty that can
be seen in his pictures, there is also a certain mysticism in the way the tortures
are performed. The mystery softens the horror, making death seem less bleak
and tragic. Cortázar also softens the criminal aspect by making Wong an
attractive character. Brita Brodin lists all the adverbs, adjectives, and nouns that
describe Wong: sonriendo / smiling, sonrisa / smile, reverencia / reverence,
ceremonioso / ceremonious, and ceremoniosamente / ceremoniously.14 Wong’s
nature, together with the ceremony with which the victims are tortured,
changes the picture of death for the members of the club and for readers. La
Maga, a sensitive person for whom ‘morir era la peor ofensa, la estupidez más
completa’ (193) / ‘to die would have been the worst offense, the most complete
stupidity’ (61), thinks of Wong fondly. When he brings coffee she thinks: ‘Ah,
olor maravilloso del café, Wong querido, Wong Wong Wong’ (197) / ‘ah, a
wonderful smell of coffee, dear Wong, Wong Wong Wong’ (65). In addition to
being a warm person, Wong always looks for a humorous aspect of life. He
adorns bare, meaningless reality with unusual objects. Oliveira says to Ronald:
Acércate aquí. Vas a estar mejor que en esa silla, tiene una especie
de pico en el medio que se clava en el culo. Wong la incluiría en
su colección pekinesa, estoy seguro. (302)
Come on over here ... You’ll be more comfortable than in that

chair, it has a kind of point in the middle of it that pricks your ass.
Wong would include it in his Peking collection if he knew about
it, I’m sure. (153)
Wong needs to be imaginative and creative in both the practical and the
theoretical sense. Speaking about the fact that Etienne and Wong have seen
Oliveira with Pola, Gregorovius tells La Maga: ‘Wong se aprovechó más
tarde para edificar una complicada teoria sobre las saturaciones sexuales’
(282) / ‘Wong used all this later on to work out a complicated theory on
sexual saturation’ (135). Wong’s approach to life is important for the
development of Rayuela. When Guy Monod, a minor character, attempts to
commit suicide, Oliveira calls him stupid. In other words, death is
completely ruled out as a possibility in Oliveira’s search. Since death is none
the less present literally and symbolically, Cortázar shows Wong’s approach
to life—ceremony—as a possible way to escape both boredom and death.
This becomes particularly obvious in comparison with the lives of Traveler
and Talita. For the two Argentinians, games and ceremony are a way of
conquering the absurd and the important factors in relationships.
Babs and Ronald’s relationship, strengthened by a naîve enjoyment of
music, is important for the rendering of the character of Oliveira and in the
development of the novel as a whole. Oliveira, with his predominantly
intellectual approach to life, is incapable of identifying completely with
music or anything else.
Por más que le gustara el jazz Oliviera nunca entraría en el juego

como Ronald, para él sería bueno o malo, hot o cool, blanco o
negro, antiguo o moderno, Chicago o New Orleans, nunca el
jazz, nunca eso que ahora eran Satchmo, Ronald y Babs, ‘Baby
don’t you play me cheap because I look so meek’, y después la
llamada de la trompeta, el falo amarillo rompiendo el aire y
gozando con avances y retrocesos y hacia el final tres notas
ascendentes, hipnóticamente de oro puro, una perfecta pausa
donde todo el swing del mundo palpitaba en un instante
intolerable, y entonces la eyaculación de un sobreagudo
resbalando y cayendo como un cohete en la noche sexual, la mano
de Ronald acariciando el cuello de Babs y la crepitación de la púa
mientras el disco seguía girando y el silencio que había en toda
música verdadera se desarrimaba lentamente de las paredes, salía
de debajo del diván, se despegaba como labios o capullos. (182)
As much as he liked jazz, Oliveira could never get into the spirit
of it like Ronald, whether it was good or bad, hot or cool, white
or black, old or modern, Chicago or New Orleans, never jazz,
never what was now Satchmo, Ronald, and Babs, ‘So what’s the
use if you’re gonna cut off my juice,’ and then the trumpet’s
flaming up, the yellow phallus breaking the air and having fun,
coming forward and drawing back and towards the end three
ascending notes, pure hypnotic gold, a perfect pause where all the
swing of the world was beating in an intolerable instant, and then
the supersharp ejaculation slipping and falling like a rocket in the
sexual night, Ronald’s hand caressing Babs’s neck and the
scratching of the needle while the record kept on turning and the
silence there was in all true music slowly unstuck itself from the
walls, slithered out from underneath the couch, and opened up
like lips or like cocoons. (512)
This passage suggests that there is an absolute equality between music and
love-making. Cortázar, like Oliveira and Morelli, searches for a similar but
even more complex union in life. At that moment Oliveira cannot surrender
himself to the music and allow it to awaken feelings that might integrate
different experiences. Ronald and Babs are capable of this, but unfortunately
lack the ability to comprehend the experience and therefore cannot change a
naîve identification into a meaningful progress in life. Oliveira, who envies
Ronald’s ability to become music, shows Ronald’s limitations at the same
time. When Ronald says, ‘Estoy de acuerdo en que mucho de lo que me
rodea es absurdo, pero probablemente damos ese nombre a lo que no
comprendemos todavía. Ya se sabrá alguna vez’ / ‘I agree that a lot of what is
around me is absurd, but we probably call it that because that’s what we call
anything we don’t understand yet. Someday we’ll know,’ Oliveira comments,
‘Optimismo encantador’ (314) / ‘Charming optimism’ (164). Ronald
identifies with music but does not search for the meaning of life in music as
Johnny Carter, for example, does in the short story ‘El perseguidor.’ Oliveira,
however, wants to see jazz as an absolute freedom that he both feels and
understands. Cortázar has said that
Johnny y Oliveira son dos individuos que cuestionan, que ponen

en crisis, que niegan lo que la gran mayoría acepta por una
especie de fatalidad histórica y social. Entran en el juego, viven su
vida, nacen, viven y mueren.15
Johnny and Oliveira are two individuals who question, create a crisis,
deny what a great majority accepts as a type of historical and social
fate. They enter the game, live their life, are born, live and die.
Ronald and Babs die in music, but they are not able to be reborn; this
is something Oliveira attempts to do not just in music but in all spheres of
life. A precondition for this rebirth is the experiencing of different aspects of
life. This is why Oliveira must be put in contact with all members of the club
before he can make the final leap in his relationship with Traveler and Talita.
Like La Maga in the poetic world, and like Ronald and Babs in the world of
music, Oliveira must identify with the objects observed or listened to as if he
were making love to them. Like Wong, he must, through imagination and
ceremony, overcome death and the uglier aspects of life. And like Etienne, he
must look for the meaning of life not in the outside world but in his art and
games. In this attempt he must avoid the hypocrisy of Gregorovius and
Perico Romero by focusing on the other and not on himself.
There is one more character in the first part of the novel, Pola, who,
though not a member of the club, contributes significantly to the rendering
of Oliveira’s character and to the development of the theme. At the
beginning of the novel Oliveira is described as a man who perceives the
world intellectually; his relationship with Pola develops this idea. La Maga
believes that Oliveira left her for Pola because Pola knows how to think.
While Oliveira does wish that La Maga knew how to think, he does not give
priority to reason and the ability to think logically. The narrator, who adopts
Oliveira’s point of view says:
Fracasar con Pola era la repetición de innúmeros fracasos, un

juego que se pierde al final pero que ha sido bello jugar, mientras
que de la Maga empezaba a salirse resentido, con una conciencia
de sarro y un pucho oliendo a madrugada en un rincón de la boca.
(588)
Failure with Pola was the repetition of innumerable failures, a

game that ultimately is lost but was beautiful to play, while with
La Maga he had begun to come out resentful, with a taste of
tartar and a butt that smelled of dawn in the corner of the mouth.
(422)
What attracts Oliveira to Pola is her schizophrenia. During the daytime she
lives in a perfectly ordered apartment and she depends on the objects around
her to confirm her existence. Oliveira tells her ironically,
Enumerá, enumerá. Eso ayuda. Sujetate a los nombres, así no te

caés. Ahí está la mesa de luz, la cortina no se ha movido de la
ventana, Claudette sigue en el mismo número, DAN-ton 34 no sé

cuántos, y tu mamá te escribe desde Aix-en-Provence. Todo va
bien. (527–8)
Name them, name them. That helps. Give them names, then you
won’t fall. There’s the night-table, the curtain hasn’t run away
from the window, Claudette is still at the same address, DAN-ton
34 I can’t remember the rest, and your mother still writes to you
from Aix-en-Provence. Everything’s fine. (366–7)
Simultaneously, in her sexual behaviour Pola leads Oliveira into the realm of
the forbidden, and experiences life without any control. What she cannot do,
however, is unite her daytime activities with her nighttime activities. Oliveira
attempts to show her that they are closely related and that the order and
disorder mutually presuppose each other. While they walk through the
streets of Paris, Oliveira points out to Pola that the classical paintings on the
sidewalk have to be erased at night in order to be repainted in the morning;
creation and destruction, her perfection and her pornography; are two sides
of the same coin. Pola, who fears that her daily security is not as stable as it
was before she met Oliveira, tells him, ‘Me das miedo, monstruo americano’
(528) / ‘You make me afraid, you South American monster’ (367). The same
night Oliveira kisses her breast and becomes aware of himself only through
the kiss. The two reach a union through the realization that life is based on
paradox. Unlike Pola, La Maga can never reach this conclusion; she can feel
it, but she cannot understand it. Pola is capable of understanding
metaphysical questions in the same way Oliveira understands them. Because
of this the two women complement each other, and Oliveira loves them both
at the same time. Oliveira’s relationship to Pola is important not because she
teaches him anything new, but because it shows that reason is also a form of
union between people. Oliveira becomes the kiss itself after their intellectual
conversation about the paintings on the sidewalk.
In the section entitled ‘Del lado de acá’ / ‘From This Side,’ Oliveira
acquires one more important characteristic: in his contact with Traveler he is
forced to participate actively in life. In the very first chapter of ‘Del lado de
acá’ Traveler is described in the following way: ‘A falta de lo otro, Traveler
es un hombre de acción’ (377) / ‘Since he doesn’t have this otherness,
Traveler is a man of action’ (223). In keeping with his usual practice,
Cortázar first provides us with the basic characteristic of his hero and later
elaborates on it through the hero’s juxtaposition with other characters.
Traveler is a man of action because he often changes jobs, throws water in his
boss’s face as a sign of protest, makes Talita explain to him how to use
medication, how exactly to put it in his rectum, and so on. However, his
action acquires serious meaning only when he comes in contact with
Oliveira—not because he changes his activities, but because he changes his
attitude towards what he does.
Before Oliveira’s arrival Traveler had reacted against the stupidities of
the established order, but he did not foresee that a new order could be
created. He complains that he is unable to travel, in a metaphysical rather
than a literal sense, and sees this as his personal failure:
Una cosa había que reconocer y era que, a diferencia de casi todos
sus amigos, Traveler no le echaba la culpa a la vida o a la suerte
por no haber podido viajar a gusto. Simplemente se bebía una
ginebra de un trago, y se trataba a sí mismo de cretinacho. (374)
One thing had to be recognized and it was that unlike almost all
her other friends, Traveler didn’t blame life or fate for the fact
that he had been unable to travel everywhere he had wanted to.
He would just take a stiff drink of gin and call himself a boob.
(219)
He knows that it is up to him to change his life, but he fails to act because he
does not believe he can accomplish anything. Oliveira, however, strongly
believes that there is a way to travel to different lands, and that this will
replace the boredom of everyday habits. Oliveira asks Traveler, ‘¿No sos capaz
de intuir un solo segundo que esto puede no ser as?’ (505, emphasis added) /
‘Aren’t you capable of sensing even for a single second that this. might not be
like that?’ (344). Traveler knows that life has its own course and is willing to
accept it without struggle, while Oliveira struggles to incorporate himself into
the current. Oliveira has the will to go beyond everyday reality but fails to act.
Traveler acts, but lacks the ease with which Oliveira makes his action
meaningful. For this reason the two men are ‘doppelganger, uno de cada lado’
(504) / ‘doppelganger, one from each side’ (344).
In their relationship Traveler always creates the situation in which
Oliveira is forced to act. He waits for Oliveira at the harbour and thereby
renews their relationship. He introduces Talita to Oliveira. In the board
scene Traveler suggests that they build the bridge, and he volunteers Talita
to take the nails and mate leaves over to Oliveira, despite the actual and
implied dangers. Furthermore, despite his knowledge that a relationship is
beginning to develop between Talita and Oliveira, Traveler finds Oliveira a
job in the circus where he and Talita work. At this point Traveler initiates all
the actions that force Oliveira to participate actively in life.
The relationship between Traveler and Oliveira is significant not only
because it influences Oliveira to act but also because it sums up all the aspects
of life discussed until now, and, more important, because of its intensity. Like
Oliveira, Etienne, and Morelli, Traveler does not wish to follow the existing
order. His chief entertainment is to ridicule the old women in his
neighbourhood—the representatives of social order. Like Wong, Traveler
plays games with Talita in an attempt to conquer the boredom and absurdity
of everyday reality. Like Pola, Traveler comes to understand Oliveira’s
metaphysical preoccupations; at the end of the novel the two achieve
absolute understanding. Unlike the characters in Paris, they succeed not only
in understanding each other but also in feeling their understanding, a quality
embodied in La Maga.
The relationship between Traveler and Oliveira begins from the liberation
of the social order and moves upwards. When Traveler finds Oliveira a job
despite the fact that Oliveira is a threat to his marriage, Oliveira is unhappy.
A Oliveira no-se-le-escapaba que Traveler había tenido que hacer

un-esfuerzo-heroico para convencer al Dire, y que lo había
convencido más por casulidad que por otra cosa. (420)
Oliveira had-not-failed-to-notice that Traveler had had to make

a-heroic-effort to convince the Boss, and that he had convinced
him more by chance than for any other reason. (262)
The ironic adjective ‘heroico’ / ‘heroic’ reminds the reader of Morelli’s and
Oliveira’s goal to search for the new man without being a hero. They search
for the man who completely ignores the social norms and acts according to
his inner drives. Traveler has not yet reached this stage.
Traveler’s actions begin to be meaningful when he becomes jealous of
Oliveira, when, despite sleepless nights, he chooses to continue in the union
because he feels that there is a higher order that makes sense:
Había noches en que todo el mundo estaba como esperando algo.

Se sentían muy bien juntos, pero eran como una cabeza de
tormenta ... Al final se iban a la cama con un malhumor latente, y
soñaban toda la noche con cosas divertidas y agradables, lo que
más bien era un contrasentido. (387)
There were nights when everybody seemed to be expecting

something. They felt very good together, but it was like the eye
of a hurricane ... Finally they would go to bed with latent ill-
humour, and spend the whole night dreaming about happy and
funny things, which was probably a contradiction of terms. (231)
What inspires Traveler to continue acting is a sense of being alive, which

expresses itself through jealousy, fear, compassion, and similar feelings.
Movement is a necessity. Traveler explains to Talita that it is not Oliveira
who disturbs their relationship, but something more profound.:
No es por Horacio, amor, no es solamente por Horacio aunque

él haya llegado como una especie de mensajero. A lo mejor si no
hubiese llegado me habría ocurrido otra cosa parecida. Habría
leído algún libro desencadenador, o me habría enamorado de otra
mujer. (429)
It isn’t because of Horacio, love, it isn’t only because of Horacio,

even though he may have come like some sort of messenger. If he
hadn’t come, something else like it would have happened to me.
I would have read some disillusioning book, or I would have
fallen in love with some other woman. (271)
Oliveira knows from the very beginning not only that this is one of the
rules of life, but also that a man himself can and should create a situation in
which he will have the opportunity to experience such feelings. Like Wong,
he therefore creates a situation that makes him experience feelings; because
of Talita, he is afraid of Traveler; ‘el pobré infeliz tenía miedo de que él
[Traveler] lo matara, era para reírse’ (703, emphasis added) / ‘so the poor
devil was afraid he [Traveler] would kill him, it was laughable’ (522). In
reality Oliveira knows that Traveler does not plan to kill him. He creates a
situation in which the attack and the defence are a pretence to escape the
deadly atmosphere of everyday life. He explains to Traveler, ‘A veces siento
que entre dos que se rompen la cara a trompadas hay mucho más
entendimiento que entre los que están ahí mirando desde afuera’ (437) /
‘Sometimes I feel that there’s more understanding between two people
punching each other in the face than among those who are there looking on
from outside’ (279). Oliviera intuits violence in Traveler’s words to Talita:
‘Apurate. Talita. Rajale el paquete por la cara y que nos deje de joder de una
buena vez’ (405) / ‘Hurry up, Talita. Throw the package in his face so he’ll
stop screwing around with us once and for all’ (249), and chooses to play the
game until the end. On the night of the pretended murder Talita says of
Oliveira, ‘Está tan conento de tener miedo esta noche, yo sé que está contento
en el fondo’ (703, emphasis added) / ‘He’s so happy to be afraid tonight, I
know he’s happy’ (522). Both Oliveira and Traveler live this game intensely.
Oliveira tells him, ‘Por lo parte no me vas a negar que nunca estuivste tan
despierto como ahora. Y cuando digo despierto me entendés iverdad?’ (505)
/ ‘For your part you can’t deny that you were never as awake as right now.
And when I say awake you understand, right?’ (344). Traveler is awake not
because he is afraid for himself but because he has identified with Oliveira in
the game, and he fears for Oliveira’s life. This action, together with the
characters’ intelligence, willingness to play, and genuine concern for each
other, leads to an intensive feeling of life. Traveler inspires Oliveira to act: at
the level of everyday reality, on the level of the dirty sidewalk, as Cortázar
expresses it, playing rayuela / hopscotch together, Oliveira and Traveler
attain what is symbolized by the word ‘cielo’ / ‘heaven.’
Cortázar’s goal in Rayuela is to awaken the characters and the readers.
The fragmentation of the text has this precise purpose. It is a goal that
Cortázar shares with many writers of the twentieth century. The absurdists,
such as Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, exhibit not only the aimlessness and
impotence of their heroes, but also their inability to feel that they are alive at
all. Others, such as Miguel de Unamuno and Cortázar, use the absurdity of
life as a point of departure, and suggest possible ways to avoid the fate of
Kafka’s hero Joseph K. For Unamuno, to doubt means to live. For Cortázar,
the driving forces of life are the conscious, rejection of the established order,
the invention and creation of games, and the identification with the other. In
their game, in which they are completely involved, Traveler and Oliveira
experience life intensely.
Another character, Gekrepten, is the opposite of Talita and has no
influence on the development of the character of Oliveira. The rest of the
secondary characters in ‘Del lado de acá’ / ‘From This Side’ have the same
function as the old man who lives above La Maga’s apartment; the patients
in the mental hospital point out what Oliveira is not—that he is not crazy—
and the hospital officials and the neighbours represent the social norm. Some
critics (for example, Robert Brody) believe that Oliveira’s search ends in
madness:
Oliveira becomes completely insane at the end of the novel when,

convinced of Traveler’s desire to kill him, he sets up an elaborate
protective maze of string and ball bearings and threatens suicide.
Oliveira’s quest ends in failure, since he finds neither la Maga nor

his ‘centro,’ ‘kibbutz del deseo,’ ‘absoluto,’ ‘reino milenario,’ all
of which may be placed in the final Heaven Section of the
hopscotch design.16
Cortázar attempted to prevent the reader from drawing a similar conclusion;

to show that Oliveira’s actions are not ordinary madness, Cortázar puts his
protagonist in a hospital with the true lunatics, with whom Oliveira his little
in common. In contrast to them, and in contrast to the officials, Oliveira’s
situation becomes a reality of a higher order. Talita indicates this in her
response to Cuca, who treats Oliveira as if he were a child or one of her
patients. She offers to make some coffee hoping that Oliveira will come
down.
—Con medialunas fresquitas. ¿Vamos a preparar el café, Talita?

—No sea idiota—dijo Talita, y en el silencio extraordinario
que siguió a su admonición, el encuentro de las miradas de
Traveler y Oliveira fue como si dos pájaros chocaran en pleno
vuelo y cayeran enredados en la casilla nueve. (508)
‘With nice hot croissants. Shall we go make some coffee,

Talita?’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ Talita said, and in the extraordinary silence
that followed her admonition, the meeting of the looks of
Traveler and Oliveira was as if two birds had collided in flight and
all mixed up together had fallen into square nine. (348)
Clearly, the novel does not end on a negative note. There is an ‘encuentro’—
‘a meeting’ between Oliviera, Traveler, and Talita that lies beyond the
possible manipulation of reason. When the mental patients are asked to sign
the hospital over to the new owners, they are bribed in the same way Cuca
attempts to bribe Oliveira. While the patients do not have the intelligence to
resist the deception, Talita, Traveler, and Oliveira certainly do. Oliveira’s
lucidity is seen in his conversation with Traveler a moment before Cuca’s
offer, in which he tells Traveler that he saw La Maga:
—No es la Maga—dijo Travele.—Sabés perfectamente que no

es la Maga.
—No es la Maga—dijo Oliveira—Sé perfectamente que no es
la Maga. Y vos sos el abanderado, el heraldo de la redición, de la
vuelta a casa y al orden. Me empezás a dar pena, viejo.

(503)
‘It’s not La Maga,’ Traveler said. ‘You know perfectly well it’s
not La Maga.’
‘It’s not La Maga,’ Oliveira said. ‘I know perfectly well it’s not
La Maga. And you’re the standard-bearer, the herald of
surrender, of the return to home and order. You’re beginning to
make me feel sorry, old man.’ (343)
Oliveira is beyond both the simple reasoning of the officials of the hospital
and Traveler’s reasoning. He is conscious of reality, but transcends it by
living like the patients yet differently from them.
In Rayuela Cortázar says very little about Oliveira directly. However,
Oliveira is the protagonist of the novel; his character exhibits depth and a
wide vision of the world. Cortázar creates and develops him through his
relationship with other characters. Readers who fill in the gaps do not
passively follow Oliveira in his search, but search with him, enriching their
own personalities. Cortázar leads readers through multiple interruptions to
make them think about what they read. Through the use of juxtaposition and
irony Cortázar implies a new order that the reader can reconstruct. From the
formal aspect of the novel readers conclude that everything is related to
everything else. The richer the contact between Oliveira and people and the
world around him, the richer Oliveira’s personality becomes. This has
important implications. Georgy Lukács quotes Marx as saying that ‘the real
spiritual wealth of the individual depends completely on the wealth of his
real relationships.’17 In Rayuela Oliveira forms no long, meaningful
relationships. However, his personality, in contact with other characters,
achieves a high level of evolution—liberates itself of its egoism—and, at least
for a moment, engages in a complete communication with Traveler and
Talita.
The social implications of Oliveira’s search are a new step within
socialist thinking; Cortázar does not concentrate on the dialectics caused by
the progress of history. He believes in the idea of an individual’s enrichment,
which leads automatically to the formation of the human collective. In this
respect Cortázar’s novel offers an important contribution to the study of the
individual and the social order. The form of the novel tells us that an
individual, Oliveira, is himself plus all the people he comes in contact with.
In humanity’s evolution towards a truly integrated collective, the main
obstacle is the egoism that is the product of existing social norms. Oliveira
liberates himself from his social ‘yo,’ not alone but in union with others.
Readers who actively accompany Oliveira through Rayuela, which constantly
demands keen participation and interpretation, learn much about their own
abilities to reconstruct social involvement.
THE BRIDGE THEME
A la mano tendida debía responder otra mano desde el afuera,

desde lo otro. (140)
The outstretched hand had to find response in another hand

stretched out from the beyond, from the other part. (99)
In addition to its formal aspects, which juxtapose and unite characters, Rayuela
contains two important themes that further explain the union between an
individual and others—the bridge theme and the pity theme. For Cortázar a
bridge is not an artificial link, but an image that illustrates a complete union
between people. In Cortázar’s short story ‘Lejana’ (‘The Distances’) the
bridge is a symbol of the search for a complete being. Alina Reyes thinks, ‘Más
fácil salir a buscar ese puente, salir en busca mía y encontrarme’18 / ‘Easier to
go out and look for that bridge, to go out on my own search and find myself.’
On the bridge in Budapest Alina embraces her double, a beggar, liberating
herself from social values. Jaime Alazraki says, ‘[In the criticism of Cortázar’s
works] it is necessary to follow a course opposite to the one adopted until
now—not so much to explain the text through the double, but to explain the
double through the text in which it has been inserted as an answer to
questions and problems posed by the text.’19 In the board scene Talita
changes from a woman standing on two boards to the uniter of Traveler and
Oliveira. Through her we understand the type of relationship that binds the
three of them together. Cortázar introduces the idea of a bridge in three
important instances in Rayuela. Oliveira meets La Maga on the bridge; he
spends the night with the clocharde under the bridge; and Talita is the bridge
between him and Traveler. In these three instances Oliveira searches for
union with the other, and La Maga seems to be the most distant from him.
None the less, Oliveira meets with her through the other two women; she is
a friend of the clocharde, and Talita reminds Oliveira of La Maga. What is the
real relationship between these women and Oliveira? It seems that La Maga
is too high to reach, that the clocharde is too difficult a companion, and that
Oliveira finally reaches the heaven of hopscotch only with and through Talita.
Brita Brodin, along with other critics, points out that La Maga is the poetic
ingenuity. Oliveira loses her so that she may be reborn in the image of Talita. Using
Cortázar’s essay ‘Para una poética’ (‘Towards a Poetics’) as a reference point, Saúl
Sosnowski explains the relationship between poetic intuition and the poet:
Según Cortázar, la intuición del hombre es la manifestación de

ese estrato ‘más real’ que trata de poseer. Se establece así una
dialéctica poemáctica entre el poeta y esa realidad trans-racional
que llamamos ‘supra-realidad.’ El poeta busca ser, ‘quiere poseer
la realidad al nivel ontológico, al nivel del ser’ y esta supra-
realidad trata de manifestarse por medio de la sensibilidad del ser
del poeta ... La intuición inicial lleva al poeta a sentir un mundo
que no es el hombre pero del cual participa. Es esa supra-realidad
que lo usa como MEDIUM, ‘ser’ es el principio unificado de todo.20
According to Cortázar, a man’s intuition is the manifestation of

the ‘more real’ layer which he attempts to possess. In this way a
poematic dialectic is established between the poet and this
transrational reality which we call ‘super-reality.’ The poet wishes
to be, ‘wants to possess the reality on the ontological level, on the
level of being’ and this super-reality attempts to manifest itself
through the sensitivity of being of the poet ... The initial intuition
leads the poet to feel a world which is beyond man but in which
he participates. It is this super-reality that uses him as a MEDIUM;
‘being’ is the unifying principle of everything.
If Oliveira is the poet, and La Maga the other reality he attempts to possess,
we see that she is not equal to poetry, but only to the ‘initial intuition’ that is
the first step in Oliveira’s development. The poet is not only a ‘medium,’ as
Sosnowski believes, because he is not completely passive; he chooses what to
accept from the outside world (inspiration). Oliveira wants to possess some
of La Maga’s characteristics and reject others. He respects her ability to move
through life spontaneously, as the current carries her:
La Maga no sabía demasiado bien por qué había venido a París, y

Oliveira se fue dando cuenta de que con una ligera confusión en
materia de pasajes, agencias de turismo y visados, lo mismo
hubiera podido recalar a Singapur que en Ciudad de Cabo; lo
único importante era haber salido de Montevideo, ponerse frente
a frente con eso que ella llamaba modestamente la vida. (146)
La Maga didn’t really know why she had come to Paris, and
Oliveira was able to deduce that with just a little mixup in tickets,
tourist agents, and visas she might just as well have disembarked
in Singapore or Capetown. The main thing was that she has left
Montevideo to confront what she modestly called ‘life’. (22)
Because of this quality La Maga is an important influence on Oliveira. Soon

after meeting her he tells her, ‘Parto del principio de que la reflexión debe
proceder a la acción, babalina’ (144) / ‘I believe in the principle that thought
must precede action, silly’ (20). After spending time with her and then losing
her he approaches life in a different fashion. He thinks, ‘Te sentí previa a
cualquier organización mental’ (532, emphasis added) / ‘I sensed you ahead of
any mental organization’ (371). This is La Maga’s most important effect on
Oliveira. Nothing else about her is strong. Because she is not a rational
being, she allows weeping soldiers and other destructive people to take sexual
advantage of her. She inspires life, but she is not able to protect it. She allows
her son to die because she cannot overcome her intuitive dislike of ‘esa cara
de hormiga’ (273) / ‘that ant-faced doctor’ (128). Oliveira also points out that
she is a poor companion in everyday situations: ‘Lo horrorizaba la torpeza de
la Maga para fajar y desfajar a Rocamadour [y] sus cantos insoportables para
distraerlo’ (230) / ‘He was horrified by La Maga’s laziness in diapering and
undiapering Rocamadour, the way she would sing at him to distract him’
(77). Oliveira has to ask her to wash her hands after she changes
Rocamadour’s diapers, and she annoys him when she spoils his mate because
she does not know how to move the bombilla.
So it becomes clear why Oliveira meets La Maga on the bridge. She is
above everyday life, and the two characters need a link between them. To
follow Sosnowski’s metaphor, without the poet’s firm ‘ser’ / ‘a sense of being’
to filter her through reason, she is easily destroyed. Figuratively, Oliveira has
to bring her down and incorporate her into everyday reality. In Cortázar’s
understanding, as in the writings of many other Latin American writers such
as Borges and García Márquez, the fantastic, or the intuitive form, is not a
break with historical reality. As Jaime Alazraki explains, the form is a
realization of what appears to be unreal within our casual contexts.21
Unlike La Maga, who is above life, the clocharde is a symbol of survival.
She provides Oliveira with three basic things: heat, food, and sex. More
important, she shows Oliveira how to defy death and conquer nothingness.
When Oliveira spends the night with her he has nothing: he has just broken off
his relationship with La Maga and the members of the club, Pola is dying of
cancer, and he has no apartment, no profession, nothing to eat. Because of the
cold, he is forced to sit close to the stinking Emmanuèle and to drink from the
bottle covered with her lipstick and saliva. In short, he has none of the resources
Westerners have invented as an escape from nothingness. In loneliness and filth,
in his primitive state for the first time, he becomes conscious of himself. There
is only one option left for him, his own conscious beginning: ‘Deseducación de
los sentidos, abrir a fondo la boca y las narices y aceptar el peor de los olores, la
mugre humana’ (361) / ‘Untrain the senses, openyour mouth and nose wide and
take in the worst of smells, human funkiness’ (209). This acceptance of the
battle is equivalent to the retreat of Sisyphus; it is a moment of lucidity in which
a character willingly accepts fate, which thus stops being fate. In the police car,
a symbol of the social order; Emmanuèle consciously throws herself on the
floor and chooses to ignore the world around her. In her singing, Oliveira
intuits the happiness of being human.
Y por los mocos y el semen y el olor de Emmanuèle y la bosta del

Oscuro se entraría al camino que llevaba al Kibbutz del deseo, no
ya subir al Cielo (subir, palabra hipócrita, cielo, flatus vocis), sino
caminar con pasos de hombre por una tierra de hombres hacia el
kibbutz allá lejos pero en el mismo plano, como el Cielo estaba
en el mismo plano que la Tierra en la acera roñosa de los juegos,
y un día quizá se entraría en el mundo donde decir Cielo no sería
un repasador manchado de grasa, y un día alguien vería la
verdadera figura del mundo, patterns pretty as can be, y tal vez,
empujando la piedra, acabaría por entrar en el kibbutz. (369)
And through the snot and semen and stink of Emmanuèle and the
shit of the Obscure one you would come onto the road leading to
the kibbutz of desire, no longer rising up to Heaven (rise up, a
hypocrite word, Heaven, flatus vocis), but walk along with the
pace of a man through a land of men towards the kibbutz far off
there but on the same level, just as Heaven was on the same level
as Earth on the dirty sidewalk where you played the game, and
one day perhaps you would enter that world where speaking of
Heaven did not mean a greasy kitchen rag, and one day someone
would see the true outline of the world, patterns pretty as can be,
and, perhaps, pushing the stone along, you would end up
entering the kibbutz. (216)
Emmanuèle is the awareness of self, while La Maga is selfless inspiration, a

fantastic reality. Together these two women produce a complete picture of
life which is wholly expressed through the character of Talita. Talita

possesses La Maga’s intuition and mystery, and like Emmanuèle struggles for
the survival of self through consciousness. If La Maga represents poetic
inspiration, Talita, being more earthy, is an incarnation of poetry and of true
human life. Like La Maga, she inspires the world beyond reality. Traveler
tells her that Oliveira does not want her but something beyond her,
something through her (‘no ella, pero por ella’). Traveler says to Talita, ‘El
no to busca en absoluto ... Es otra cosa. ¡Es malditamente otra cosa, carajo’
(430) / ‘He’s not after you in the least ... It’s something else ... It’s something
fucking else, God damn it’ (271). Talita is aware of this; when Oliveira kissed
her in the morgue she realized he was in an exalted state:
Nunca lo había visto sonreír así, desventuradamente y a la vez con

toda la cara abierta y de frente, sin la ironía habitual, aceptando
alguna cosa que debía llegarle desde el centro de la vida. (481)
She had never seen him smile like that, faintheartedly and at the
same time with his whole face open and frontward, without the
usual irony, accepting something that must have come to him
from the centre of life. (321)
Talita is capable of taking Traveler as well as Oliveira on a journey beyond

everyday reality. She tells her neighbour about Traveler:
Por supuesto yo soy el mejor de sus [Traveler’s] viajes. Pero es tan

tonto que no se da cuenta. Yo, señora, lo he llevado en alas de la
fantasía hasta el borde mismo del horizonte. (374)
Of course, I have been his best trip ... but he’s so silly that he
doesn’t realize it. I, my dear, have carried him off on the wings of
fantasy to the very edge of the horizon. (219)
Like La Maga, Talita has a childlike, imaginative attitude towards life; while
La Maga invents ‘glíglico,’ Talita plays games with Oliveira and Traveler.
There is an important difference between the two women, however. La
Maga is inventive but not especially intelligent; she keeps her game at a very
simple level, and Oliveira complains: ‘Me aburre mucho el glíglico. Además
vos no tenés imaginación, siempre decís las mismas cosas. La gunfia, vaya
novedad’ (221) / ‘I’m getting sick of Gliglish. Besides, you haven’t got any
imagination, you always say the same things. Gumphy, that’s some fine
invention’ (85). Talita, in contrast, is an equal partner to Oliveira in

‘sementerio’ and ‘preguntas balanza.’
Unlike La Maga, Talita is a woman who knows how to think; like
Emmanuèle, she struggles to maintain her identity. Her games are not only
entertainment but also a search for meaning in life. Since Talita and Traveler
know that life is absurd, they attempt to conquer the absurd through humour.
A Talita le hacía poca gracia la idea del manicomio, y Traveler lo

sabía. Los dos le buscaban el lado humorístico, prometiéndose
espectáculos dignos de Samuel Beckett. (426)
Talita didn’t find the idea of the mental hospital very funny, and
Traveler knew it. The two of them tried to find the humorous
side, promising themselves spectacles worthy of Samuel Beckett.
(268)
For the same reason, Traveler hides in the bathroom with a cloth over his
mouth ‘para escuchar como Talita hacía hablar a las señoras’ (374) / ‘listening
while Talita got the ladies to talk’ (220). Together with Oliveira they stretch
the boards from one window to the other, giving some life to the dead hours
of a summer afternoon. That scene is from the theatre of the absurd; to
paraphrase Oliveira, they understand that only by living absurdly is it
possible to break out of infinite absurdity.
Talita attempts to conquer absurdity and despair through games and
through small domestic activities. With her cooking Talita answers some of
Traveler’s needs and makes him relatively happy.
Cuando Traveler está triste y piensa que nunca ha viajado (Talita

sabe que eso no le importa, que sus preocupaciones son más
profundas), hay que acompañarlo sin hablar mucho, cebarle el
mate, cuidar de que no le falte tabaco, cumplir el oficio de mujer
cerca del hombre pero sin taparle la sombra. (376)
When Traveler gets sad and thinks about the fact that he has
never travelled (and Talita knows it’s not that that bothers him,
that his worries are much deeper), she has to go along with him
and not say very much, prepare his mate, make sure that he never
runs out of tobacco, do her duty as a wife alongside her husband
but never casting a shadow on him. (222)
La Maga never possessed these skills. In fact, she often annoyed Oliveira with
her clumsiness. She embarrassed the members of the club in a restaurant
because she did not know how to use a fork, and she particularly disgusted
Etienne with her ignorance. Talita, though, is always a congenial companion.
To show how Talita’s small gestures are a form of special
communication, Cortázar juxtaposes Gekrepten with Talita. Gekrepten
cooks as well as Talita, and as a ‘faithful Penelope’ makes an effort to please
Oliveira. She fails, however, and becomes a grotesque figure because her
actions are mechanical. Her stories about visiting a doctor are humorous
mainly because they are out of context. Gekrepten does not listen to
Oliveira, Traveler, and Talita. Even if Oliveira needed her, she would not be
able to perceive it, because she acts only according to a sense of wifely duty.
In her search for meaning Talita is also fighting to maintain her
identity—a quality absent in the character of La Maga. When Oliveira tells
Talita that she looks like La Maga, Talita says, ‘Pero no to fabriques una de
tus teorías de posesión, yo no soy zombie de nadie’ (477) / ‘But don’t you go
making up one of your theories about my being possessed, I’m nobody’s
zombie’ (317). She also tells Traveler, ‘Ustedes [Traveler y Oliveira] están
jugando conmigo, es como un partido de tenis, me golpean de los dos lados,
no hay derecho Manú, no hay derecho’ (429) / ‘You two were playing with
me, like a tennis ball, you hit me from both sides, it’s not right, Manú, it’s not
right’ (270. La Maga does not fight for justice or for herself, though almost
everyone wrongs her.
While La Maga becomes the object she observes or experiences, Talita
retains her individuality in her awareness of being the observing object that
is becoming the object itself. In a taped monologue, Talita, for example,
realizes that she is beginning to fall in love with Oliveira. She struggles:
Soy yo, soy él. Somos, pero soy yo, primeramente soy yo,
defenderé ser yo hasta que no pueda más. Atalía, soy yo. Ego. Yo.
Diplomada, argentina, una uña encarnada, bonita de a ratos,
grandes ojos oscuros, yo. Atalía Donosi, yo. Yo. Yo-yo. (442)
I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend being

I until I am unable to fight any longer. I am I ... Atalía Donosi, I.
Yo. Yo-yo. (283)
Talita does not mind that she is he, and that they are one, but she wishes first
to be herself. Her ‘yo’ is different from the ‘yo’ of Oliveira’s uncles in Buenos
Aires, which Oliveira ridicules earlier in the novel. Since Talita is not a selfish
person, her ‘yo’ is not a result of social conditioning. Instead, it is a struggle

for identity, against nothingness, Her ‘yo’ is a centre giving unity to
everything around her and in her. She is the ‘I’ of a poet, or, as Sosnowski
says, ‘“ser” es el principio unificador de todo’22 / ‘“being” is the unifying
principle of everything.’
Talita’s struggle is existential in nature: her main question is, Who am
I? Her struggle is not purely intellectual, however. Victor Brombert
reproduces a typical monologue of the existentialist hero: ‘I am, I exist, I
think therefore I am; I am because I think; why do I think? I no longer want
to think; I am because I think that I do not want to be; I think that I ...
because pou ah!’23 While existentialist heroes attempt to find themselves in
their thinking, Talita is satisfied with an almost childlike proof of her
existence. Her questioning is complicated, yet it does not reach pure
abstraction; she attempts to find an answer in ordinary things. The insecurity
of her existence does not put her in a mood that is as serious as the one
created by the existentialist hero. She gives her struggle a humorous tone
through the repetition of the pronoun ‘yo,’ which in the end becomes ‘yo-
yo,’ a toy. Cortázar often inserts English phrases in Rayuela, and the pun is
obviously intentional.
Rather than concentrating on intellectual certainty, Talita shows
openness towards life. Even though she objects to being La Maga, in an
important moment she admits that on a different level she may be someone
else. She does not object when Oliveira tells her:
—Y vos—dijo Oliveira, apuntándo con el dedo—tenés

cómplices.
—¿Cómplices?
—Sí, cómplices. Yo el primero, y alguien que no está aquí
[la Maga]. (424)
‘And you two,’ Oliveira said, pointing his finger at her, ‘have
accomplices.’
‘Accomplices?’
‘Yes, accomplices. First me, and then someone who’s not here
[La Maga].’ (266)
Even when she tells Oliveira that she is not ‘el zombie de nadie’ / ‘anybody’s
zombie,’ she admits that she thought herself to be La Maga when playing
hopscotch. ‘Tenés razón. ¿Por qué me habré puesto? A mí en realidad no me
gusto nunca la rayuela’ (477) / ‘You’re right. Why did I? I never really did
care for hopscotch’ (317). Talita feels that she belongs to a world larger than
herself, but at the same time she is conscious of her identity.
The struggle expressed in the words ‘soy yo, soy él’ is also Oliveira’s
struggle. At the beginning of the novel he was unable to become the other, and
he envied La Maga’s ability to grasp—to take in—the world around her. Later
in the novel he is able to become the other because Talita and Traveler make it
easier for him to possess them. When Oliveira left La Maga he said, ‘Desde la
mano tendida debia responder otra mano desde el afuera, desde lo otro’ (240) /
‘the outstretched hand had to find response in another hand stretched out from
the beyond, from the other part’ (99). Talita, being similar to him and
consequently (unlike La Maga) able to understand him, offers him a hand from
the outside. In becoming Talita and simultaneously remaining himself, Oliveira
sets his life in motion in the way Cortázar describes it in Ultimo Round:
Hay que aprender a despertar dentro del sueño, imponer la

voluntad a esa realidad onírica de la que hasta ahora sólo se es
pasivamente autor, actor y espectador. Quien llegue a despertar a
la libertad dentro de su sueño habrá franqueado la puerta y
accedido a un plano que será por fin un NOVUM ORGANUM.24
One must learn to wake up within the dream, to impose one’s will
on the oneiric reality of which, until now, one is only a passive
author, actor, and spectator. The one who succeeds in waking up
to freedom in his dream will open the door and accede to a level
which finally will be a NOVUM ORGANUM.
In his relationship with La Maga, Oliveira learns to enter the world of

dreams. With the clocharde he learns both to wake up and to be conscious of
himself dreaming. His relationship with Talita gives expression to both these
states in an experience equivalent to poetry. Another Argentinian writer,
Ernesto Sábato, explains the distinction between dreams and poetry:
El arte y el sueño tienen un principio común, a mi juicio. Pero en

el arte hay salida y en el sueño no. El arte se sumerge, en un
primer momento, en el mundo de su inconsciencia, que es el de
la noche, y en eso se parece al sueño. Pero luego vuelve hacia
fuera, es el momento de la ex-presión, despresión hacia fuera. Es
entonces cuando el hombre se libera. En el sueño todo queda
adentro.25
In my opinion, art and a dream have a common beginning.

However, in art there is a way out and in a dream there is not.
The art submerges itself, at the first moment, in the world of the
unconscious, which belongs to night, and in this it is similar to a
dream. But then it comes back out, it is the moment of
expression, depression outward. It is then that the person is
liberated. In a dream everything remains inside.
The three women Oliveira meets on, under, and in the bridge explain
Oliveira’s gradual liberation from the social ‘yo’ to the creation of a poetic ‘I.’
The relationship between the ‘I’ and the external world, the other, is also a
key to Cortázar’s second theme, that of pity. The relationship—‘soy yo, soy
él’—reveals that Talita’s struggle is also Oliveira’s.
THE THEME OF PITY
Thou art the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but such a
poor, bare, forked animal.
—Shakespeare, King Lear
Through Rayuela’s constant juxtaposition and question-raising, readers come

to discover the importance of a word that recurs like a leitmotiv throughout
the novel. The word ‘lástima’ / ‘pity’ is repeated in Oliveira’s relationship
with Berthe Trépat, with La Maga, with Traveler, and with Talita. In the first
two instances Oliveira rejects the feeling of pity because it does not arise out
of a genuine and equal relationship. In the last two he accepts it because it is
a product of authentic togetherness. Readers draw their own conclusions and
probably wonder why the same feeling is accepted in one situation and
rejected in another.
The ability to feel pity is, for Oliveira and Cortázar, a sign of life; a
meaningful, intense life is possible only in a relationship with the other. The
theme of pity, the theme of the bridge, and the development of the
protagonist in relation to other characters in the novel combine to generate
an important philosophy of life. Cortázar was often criticized for taking an
irresponsible attitude towards his society at a time when his country, as well
as the whole of Latin America, was in a state of economic and political crisis.
Many critics did not realize that Cortázar had his own profound view of this
struggle. In fact, he advocates revolution in his novel—a revolution not only
artistic but also subtly political.
Political preoccupation in no way imposes a limitation of the

artist’s creative value and function; rather, his literary or artistic
creation develops within a context that includes the historical
situation and its political options, which, in a subtle or direct
manner, will be reflected in the most vital aspect of his work.26
Cortázar does not write ‘proletarian literature,’ as he calls the literature of

socialist realism, which deals with social problems in the form of propaganda.
He believes that a revolution can be successful only if it starts from the very
essence of individual people and moves out towards a larger context. In this
he differs from most socialist writers. Brecht, for example, says in his
Organon that ‘we must not start with the individual but work towards him.’27
Cortázar’s goal in Rayuela is ‘establecer una verdadera comunicación del
hombre consigo mismo, con los demás y con el mundo que lo rodea’28 / ‘to
establish a true communication of man with himself, with others and with
the world that surrounds him’. In his novel Cortázar defines man not as an
individual but as someone with a relationship to the world and to people
around him. In this approach Cortázar produces a double effect: he exhibits
the hypocrisy of the old society and shows how a new, more honest and
natural society creates itself. Once liberated from the egoism and hypocrisy
taught in the existing world, people can rediscover natural links with their
fellow human beings. Culture, which provides no answers to these new
people, functions only as a game.
Cortázar introduces the theme of pity in Rayuela through Oliveira’s
relationship with Berthe Trépat. After he tells La Maga that he does not wish
to stay in the same apartment with her because her son Rocamadour disturbs
him, Oliveira, having nothing better to do, goes to a concert given by Berthe
Trépat. All the spectators leave because the concert is as grotesque as the
woman giving it; but Oliveira stays because ‘le hizo gracia esa especie de
solidaridad’ (249, emphasis added) / ‘he was amused by this bit of solidarity’
(107). From the psychological point of view it is possible that Oliveira,
feeling guilty because he cannot tolerate the presence of an innocent baby,
attempts to assuage his guilty conscience with this act. His staying until the
end of the concert is perhaps analogous to the act of giving alms in expiation
for some horrible deed. If this is the case, it is only one of the reasons for the
scene that follows the concert. There is a still more important message: if it
is imbued with self-interest, pity can lead to a more serious and more
embarrassing situation. Oliveira waits for the pianist after the concert and
offers to see her home. When they arrive at her house Valentín, the pianist’s
boyfriend, will not let her in. Oliveira then offers to pay for a hotel room
with his last franc and to accompany her to a bar, or to go and talk to
Valentín.
At this point readers are caught in a trap. Oliveira’s offers seem serious,
and Berthe Trépat’s stories about Valentín make her definitely Valentín’s
victim. Readers begin to feel that Oliveira is a nice fellow who is fulfilling his
duty as a good citizen by helping a poor woman. But Cortázar’s use of irony
dramatically alters these assumptions. Cortázar ridicules not the basic need
to help the other, but the reason the help is given. Oliveira does not help
Berthe Trépat just because he truly understands or likes her. He has ulterior
motives:
Es demasiado idiota, pero hubiera sido tan bueno, subir a beber

una copa con ella y con Valentín, sacarse los zapatos al lado del
fuego. En realidad por lo único que yo estaba contento era por
eso, por la idea de sacarme los zapatos y que se me secaran las
medias ... Era para reírse. (269)
It’s all been too nutty, but it would have been nice to have gone
upstairs and had a drink with her and with Valentín, taken off my
shoes next to the fire. Actually, that’s all I ever wanted to do, the
idea of taking off my shoes and drying my socks ... It was enough
to make you laugh. (124)
Oliveira exhibits selfishness in the act of giving, but the pianist also uses
him for her own purposes. When he offers to pay for her hotel room she
slaps him across the face, not because she believes that he wants to sleep with
her but because she needs to regain her self-esteem on the pretext of
asserting her moral and sexual purity. She hits him, and speaks very loudly
when she hears her neighbours coming downstairs. In both instances the
subject is only conscious of his or her own need; the object, the other, is
completely foreign.
Oliveira’s behaviour with Berthe Trépat is not an isolated example.
Oliveira says that he, like Gregorovius, feels pity for La Maga. Looking at
Gregorovius, who is stroking La Maga’s head after she has told him her rape
story, Oliveira thinks:
Y le tenemos lástima, entonces hay que llevarla a casa, un. poco

bebidos todos, acostarla despacio, acariciándola, soltándole la
ropa, despacito, despacito, cada botón, cada cierre relámpago, y
ella no quiere, quiere, no quiere, se endereza, se tapa la cara, llora,
nos abraza como para proponernos algo sublime, ayuda a bajarse

el slip ... Te voy a tener que romper la cara, Ossip Gregorovius,
pobre amigo mío. (177–8, emphasis added)
We feel sorry for her and we have to take her home, all of us a
little tight, and put her to bed, petting her gently as we take off
her clothes, slowly, button by button, every zipper, and she does
want to, wants to, doesn’t want to, straightens up, covers her face,
cries, hugs us as if suggesting something sublime, wiggles out of
her slip ... I’m going to have to bust you in the face, Ossip
Gregorovius my poor friend. (47–8)
La Maga is in one world while they are in another. The pity they feel is obviously
not the way to a complete communication, even if she does respond to them slightly.
When Rocamadour dies and La Maga is in a similar situation, Oliveira
avoids this hypocrisy. Even though it appears cruel to the members of the
club, who judge him by the old existing criterion, Oliveira chooses not to stay
with La Maga for the following reasons:
Oliveira se dijo que no sería tan difícil llegarse hasta la cama,

agacharse para decirle unas palabras al oído a la Maga. ‘Pero eso
yo lo haría por mí’, pensó. ‘Ella está más allá de cualquier cosa.
Soy yo el que después dormiría mejor, aunque no sea más que una
manera de decir. Yo, yo, yo. Yo dormiría mejor después de besarla
y consolarla y repetir todo lo que ya le han dicho éstos.’ (320)
Oliveira told himself that it would not be so difficult to go over

to the bed, squat down beside it and say a few words in La Maga’s
ear. ‘But I would be doing it for myself,’ he thought. ‘She’s
beyond anything. I’m the one who would sleep better afterward,
even if it’s just an expression. Me, me, me. I would sleep better
after I kissed her and consoled her and repeated everything these
people have already said.’ (170–1)
In this case Oliveira rejects self-interest as well as hierarchy among people.

In another example, at a time when La Maga feels pity for Oliveira, she has
no self-interest. None the less, she feels superior to Oliveira—a feeling that
is also unacceptable because it shows a lack of understanding. The following
conversation takes place between La Maga and Oliveira:
—Te tengo tanta lástima, Horacio.

—Ah, eso no. Despacito, ahí.
—Te tengo lástima—insistió la Maga—. Ahora me doy cuenta.
La noche que nos econtramos ... Si te dijera que todo eso lo hice
por lástima.
—Vamos—dijo Oliveira, mirándola sobresaltado.
—Esa noche vos corrías peligro. Se veía, era como una siren a
lo lejos ... no se puede explicar. (225–6, emphasis added)
‘I feel so sorry for you, Horacio.’

‘Oh no; hold it right there.’
‘... I feel sorry for you.’ La Maga repeated. ‘I can see now. That
night we met ... If I were to tell you that I did it all out of pity.’
‘Come off it,’ Oliveira said, looking at her with surprise.
‘You were in danger that night. It was obvious, like a siren in
the distance ... I can’t explain it.’ (89)
If Oliveira is in any danger, he tells her, his danger is of a metaphysical

nature. But since she does not understand metaphysics, she does not
understand him. Her feeling of pity, therefore, is not based on
understanding, and her love-making with him, a form of charity, does not
solve any of his problems.
Understanding is an important factor for Oliveira. He says about his
experience with two of his ex-girlfriends:
En dos ocasiones había estado a punto de sentir lástima y dejarles

la ilusión de que lo comprendían, pero algo le decía que su lástima
no era auténtica, más bien un recurso barato de su egoísmo y su
pureza y sus costumbres. (484, emphasis added)
On two occasions he had been at the point of feeling pity and

letting them keep the illusion that they understood him, but
something told him that his pity was not genuine, it was more a
cheap trick of his selfishness and his laziness and his habits.
(419–20)
What Oliveira searches for is an authentic pity, a true sign of life.
Y con tanta ciencia una inútil ansia de tener lástima de algo, de

que llueva aquí dentro, de que por fin empiece a llover, a oler a
tierra, a cosas vivas, sí, por fin a cosas vivas.

And with so much knowledge a useless anxiety to pity something,

to have it rain here inside, so that at long last it will start to rain
and smell of earth and living things, yes, living things at long last.
(96)
The feeling of pity that Oliveira longs for here is very similar to La
Maga’s experience of the world: the ability to rejoice at the smallest detail, to
be happy because she finds a piece of red cloth on the street. While he stayed
with her Oliveira was no more able to join La Maga in this enjoyment than
she was able to join him in his metaphysical quest. By the end of the novel,
however, Oliveira is able to experience life fully in his friendship with
Traveler and Talita.
When thinking about his relationship with Traveler and Talita,
Oliveira remembers the incident with Berthe Trépat: There is a superficial
similarity to that grotesque scene, but the new situation develops very
differently. Oliveira compares Traveler’s kindness in finding him a job in the
circus with his own seemingly kind treatment of Berthe Trépat: ‘En ese caso
apiadarse hubiera sido tan idiota como la otra vez: lluvia, lluvia. ¿Seguiría
tocando el piano Berthe Trépat?’ (451, emphasis added) / ‘In that case it
would have been just as idiotic as the other time: rain, rain. I wonder if
Berthe Trépat still plays the piano?’ (292). Oliveira accepts the job because in
this situation Traveler does not demonstrate either his superiority or self-
interest. He accepts him as an equal rival and invites him to fight. Similarly,
when Talita asks Oliveira to leave the morgue he accepts her hand even
though he again recalls Berthe Trépat:
Estaba viendo con tanta claridad un boulevard bajo la lluvia, pero

en vez de ir llevando a alguien del brazo, hablándole con lástima,
era a él que lo llevaban, compasivamente le habían dado el brazo y
le hablaban para que estuviera contento, le tenían tanta lástima
que era positivamente una delicia ... Esa mujer jugadora de
rayuela le tenía lástima, era tan claro que quemaba.
He could see with great clarity a boulevard in the rain, but instead
of leading somebody along by the arm, talking to her with pity,
he was being led, they had given him a compassionate arm and
they were talking to him so that he would be happy, they had so

much concern for him that it was absolutely delightful ... That
woman who played hopscotch had pity on him, it was so obvious
that it burned. (320)
At this point readers have to ask, Why is pity ridiculed in one instance and
accepted with enthusiasm in another? The answer lies in the relationship of
equality between Oliveira and Traveler and Talita. Traveler and Talita pity
Oliveira because they understand him and feel that his situation is also theirs.
Traveler feels that there is a mystical bond that ties them together. He tells
Talita:
Increíble, parecería que cuando él [Oliveira] se junta con nosotros

hay paredes que se caen, montones de cosas que se van al quinto
demonio, y de golpe el cielo se pone fabulosamente hermoso, las
estrellas se meten en esa panera uno podría perlarlas y
comérselas. (430)
It’s incredible, when he’s with us it’s as if walls collapsed, piles of

things all going to hell, and suddenly the sky becomes
fantastically beautiful, the stars come out on that baking dish, you
can skin them and eat them. (272)
Oliveira feels the same way. He tells Traveler and Talita:
Me da por pensar que nuestra relación es casi química, un hecho

fuera de nosotros mismos. Una especie de dibujo que se va
haciendo. (439)
It makes me think that our relationship is almost chemical,

something outside of ourselves. A sort of sketch that is being
done. (281)
Their relationship has an element of mysticism and mystery, something

similar to the quality that La Maga represented. It also has the sense of
ceremony embodied in the character of Wong. Oliveira, Traveler, and Talita
spend most of their time playing games in an attempt to overcome the
boredom of their job and their neighbourhood. Like Etienne and Morelli,
they break away from the traditional way of living to create a new order.
Traveler forces Oliveira to stay with them, even though he is jealous and
knows that there is an attraction between Oliveira and Talita. In this rivalry
a certain fear is awakened in both men, giving them the sense that they are
living fully. Like Babs and Ronald, the Argentinian threesome is able to
experience a childlike identification with the world around them. When
Oliveira threatens to commit suicide, Traveler reacts emotionally: ‘Traveler
lo miraba, y Oliveira vio que se te llenaban los ojos de lágrimas. Le hizo un
gesto como si le acariciara el pelo desde lejos’ (507) / ‘Traveler looked at him,
and Oliveira saw that his eyes were filling with tears. He made a gesture as if
to stroke his hair from a distance’ (346). Talita also loses herself in her
feelings for Oliveira. Oliveira comments at the end of the novel: ‘Se sacrificó
por mi—dijo Oliveira—. La otra no se lo va a perdonar ni en el lecho de
muerte’ (509) / ‘“She sacrificed herself for me,” Oliveira said. “The other one
is never going to forgive her, not even on her deathbed”’ (348). The reason
La Maga will not forgive Talita is that Oliveira’s relationship with Talita (and
Traveler) is much stronger because it is more complete. It has most of the
qualities of life that Oliveira defines in his relationship with the members of
the Club de la Serpiente. At the same time, Talita has similar characteristics
to both La Maga and the clocharde. The combination of these qualities
spontaneously creates an intense and complete unity among Oliveira and his
two Argentinian friends.
To show the seriousness and the difficulty of the struggle to achieve
this union, Cortázar’s novel does not end like a fairy tale—‘and they lived
happily ever after’—but puts Oliveira in an absurd situation in which he is
fed by his ridiculous girlfriend Gekrepten. Many critics have therefore
concluded that Rayuela ends in madness, and that Cortázar is a nihilist. For
those who have closely followed the account of Oliveira and his rewarding
union with Traveler and Talita, this last scene is similar to Oliveira’s descent
to the filthy world of the clocharde. It gives Oliveira strength to get up and
continue the larch for La Maga, who has become the lighthouse towards
which he moves.
As a mimetic novel, Rayuela has to end on a negative note. Any quick
change for the better either in Oliveira or in his outside world would be
artificial. In spite of this, the novel as a whole is positive. Readers are shown
the possibility of human evolution (even though it points backwards towards
the original self) and a route to a more natural human collective. Steven
Boldy observes:
Oliveira rejects the whole world of history and politics, ‘not

because of Eden, not so much because of Eden itself, but just to
leave behind the jet plane, the face of Nikita or Dwight or
Charles or Francisco.’ Thus he condemns oppressive Russian

communism, American imperialism, French nationalism, Spanish
fascism, not for any other political position, but for what they
have in common, their negation of man. It is the whole system of
thought in the West that he attacks: ‘since the Eleatics to the
present day, dialectical thought has had plenty of time to yield its
fruits. We are eating it, it’s delicious, it is boiling with
radioactivity.’ Thus until man’s whole way of thinking is changed,
any political action will simply be a perpetuation of the same state
of affairs.29
Cortázar’s contribution to humanity and social development in Rayuela

becomes especially obvious in the context of the works of those Russian and
East European writers who disagree with the political reality in their
countries and are fighting for a better model of socialism. These writers
believe that the main failure of the social revolution in Eastern European
countries lies in its preference for the collective to the exclusion of the
individual. In Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak does not object to revolution as
such, but to the preference for ideas and people as a general concept over
human life and the individual. His hero Zhivago (‘Zhivago’ in Russian means
‘alive’) is destroyed by fanatics and opportunists who fight for revolutionary
ideas rather than for human life. In Rayuela human life is of supreme
importance. Cortázar, like Pasternak, believes the individual must not be
sacrificed for the collective. In Doctor Zhivago Tonya’s father, an honest pre-
revolutionary aristocrat, returns to his house and finds that it is no longer a
home for him and his family. When he is told that his house was taken for
the people, he asks, ‘Are we not people?’ In Cortázar’s revolution, there is no
need for such a question; a person is as important as people. People are an
amalgamation of honest, intelligent, educated, and imaginative men and
women.
Dobrica Chosich, a contemporary Yugoslavian writer who fought for
the socialist revolution beside Tito, asks a question similar to Pasternak’s. In
Chosich’s novel The Sinner his heroine Milena leaves her bourgeois home to
fight for the revolution alongside her husband. She suffers imprisonment
with him without a trace of fear or disappointment. Her husband, however,
leaves her in order to belong totally to the Komiterna and communism.
Milena’s question to his friend Peter is the key question in the novel: ‘What
kind of a communist are you, Bogdan, if you are unable to love a woman?’30
Unlike Chosich’s heroes, Talita, Traveler, and Oliveira form a collective
firmly based on human emotion and understanding. They are Cortázar’s
models for the reader in the struggle for the new human being and for future,
true revolutions.
Cortázar is a socialist writer whose work is extremely important to the
development of socialism. A supporter of the Cuban revolution, he wrote to
Fernández Retamar:
Jamás escribiré expresamente para nadie ... Y sin embargo hoy sé

que escribo para, que hay una intencionalidad que apunta a esa
esperanza de un lector en el que reside ya la semilla del hombre
nuevo.31
I will not write explicitly for anyone ... Nonetheless, today I know
that I write for, that there is an intention which aims at the hope
of a reader in whom resides a seed of the new man.
Cortázar writes with a certain intention in mind: completeness of being and

the human collective. The form of the novel gives evidence of this thematic
aspect. Cortázar’s characters are simultaneously autonomous characters and
part of a single author’s plan, a plan which considers the nature of a person and
the union with the other. The dialectics of the novel arise from the tension
between awareness of one’s self and a belonging to something else. Talita’s
struggle—‘soy yo, soy él’—is a nucleus of the struggle in the novel as a whole.
In Rayuela Cortázar searches for a complete liberation and complete
involvement. Honesty leads his characters, particularly La Maga, away from
social lies and allows the characters to possess the world around them.
Imagination and games, represented by Wong, Traveler, and Talita,
complement Ronald’s and Babs’s complete identification, and lead to a
rebirth. Games in Rayuela have the same function as rituals in primitive
times. Octavio Paz explains:
The fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods

painfully accumulated during the rest of the year [as certain
French sociologists had claimed]; it is also a revolt, a sudden
immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta
society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules
its gods, its principles, and its laws; it denies its own self ... The
group emerges purified and strengthened from this plunge into
chaos. It has immersed itself in its own origins, in the womb from
which it came.32
Cortázar’s anti-novel Rayuela is for the reader exactly this: a fiesta leading to
a rebirth.
Rayuela is also a polyphonic novel that rebels against any logical
simplification; it emphasizes the individuality of its elements while searching
at the same time for their synthesis. The clue to the synthesis, and to the
understanding of the novel, is to be found in the relationship of characters,
in the character web. Cortázar constructs his novel on the principles of
metaphor and irony—two similar modes of expression, according to Wayne
Booth:
In reading any metaphor or simile, as in reading irony, the reader

must reconstruct unspoken meanings through inferences about
surface statements that for some reason cannot be accepted at
face value; in the terminology made fashionable by I.A. Richards,
there is a tenor (a principal subject) conveyed by a vehicle (the
secondary subject). It is not surprising, then, that many casual
definitions of irony would fit metaphor just as well, and that the
two have sometimes been lumped together in criticism.33
While irony deceives readers and makes them reconsider their original
understanding of the text and issues, metaphor requires a complete synthesis
of different semantic fields (worlds) and a formation of a new, all-
encompassing field (world). In Rayuela different characters are carriers of
different semantic fields, or different philosophical ideas. The osmosis of the
secondary characters by the protagonist produces the character of Horacio
Oliveira, the constant point of reference in the interpretation of the novel. In
Rayuela the main question is, What is a human being? The ‘yo’ of Cortázar’s
principal character differs from the ‘yo’ of the Romantic hero because in
Oliveira‘s case the subjective ’I’ is inseparable from the outside world.
The relationship between the ‘I’ of Cortázar’s hero and his
‘circumstances’ must first be examined from the existentialist point of view;
only then can we deduce the social, political, and other implications.
Cortázar’s man is conscious that he is himself and the world around him.
This is well illustrated in Talita’s taped monologue which begins, ‘Soy yo, soy
él.’ In the novel as a whole Oliveira struggles against the egoism, or emphasis
on individuality, that is encouraged by Western thought. With the help of La
Maga, who lacks the awareness of self but is able to become the object
observed, he succeeds in bridging his concerns for self-awareness and La
Maga’s intuitive grasp of the world around her. Oliveira’s struggle is
equivalent to the poetic experience of the world in which the poet
synthesizes his I, his consciousness, with the poetic inspiration, an emotional

and illogical aspect of life.
Cortázar’s development of the theme of pity makes evident his
intention with respect to the further implications of this question. Pity in
Rayuela is synonymous with understanding. Pity is not pity as we normally
conceive it but, as with César Vallejo, a sense of solidarity that requires
liberation from social prejudices, and egoism, and an openness towards life
(the other). It also requires an imaginative, active participation, as in a game,
and an awareness that the absurd can be conquered only by a decision of the
sort made by Sisyphus not to avoid his destiny but to participate willingly in
an absurd situation. In other words, a feeling of pity arises out of our decision
to search for meaning in union with the world and the people around us.
Oliveira’s happiness at the end of the novel is like that expressed by the
Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre:
Hermoso es, hermosamente humilde y confiante

vivificador y profundo,
sentirse bajo el sol, entre los demás.34
It’s beautiful, beautifully humble and trusting,

exhilarating and profound,
to feel yourself under the sun with others.
The union with the other in Rayuela is not an artificial union but arises from
humanity’s essential need to surpass its own limited sphere. By writing the
novel Cortázar shows us a struggle for a true socialism.
The artistic and educational strength of Cortázar’s Rayuela lies in its
ability to engage readers and make them arrive at their own conclusions. The
possibility of multiple interpretations arises from Cortázar’s metaphor, which
suggests new relationships. He writes economically about the essential
problems, leaving the rest of the explication up to the readers. The
characters in the novel are important stimuli because readers easily relate to
other human beings. The identification with the character, an important
aspect of literature, is only the first step in the interpretation of the novel.
Rayuela requires a perceptive, imaginative, and informed reader. The
relationship between the characters in the novel and between the characters
and readers has two main functions: to stimulate the readers’ identification
and to guide them in the interpretation. Given Rayuela’s fragmentary nature,
readers must understand its characters in order to interpret its meaning. The
characters are not superimposed on the text; the text is the stuff of which
they are made. Cortázar has earned a special place in the development of the
modern novel because he creates multidimensional characters while carrying
out intellectual and stylistic experimentation.
NOTES
1. Sartre, What Is Literature? 38

2. Genover, Uno novelística existencial, 57
3. Valdés, Shadows in the Cave, 102
4. Picón Garfield, ¿Es julio Cortázar un surrealista? 70
5. Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 28
6. Ibid., 17
7. MacAdam, Modern Latin American Narrative, 54
8. Picón Garfield, ‘Interview with Julio Cortázar,’ 9
9. Libro de Manuel, 27; A Manual for Manuel, 23
10. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 43
11. Ibid., 106
12. Sola, El hombre nuevo, 122
13. Brodin, Criaturas ficticias, 33
14. Ibid., 45
15. Picón Garfield, Cortázar por Cortázar, 20
16. Brody, Julio Cortázar, 20
17. Lukács, European Realism, 143
18. Cortázar, ‘Lejana,’ in Bestiario, 44
19. Alazraki, ‘“Lejana” Revisited,’ 73
20. Sosnowski, Julio Cortázar, 12
21. Alazraki, En busca del unicornio, 75
22. Sosnowski, Julio Cortázar, 12
23. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, 181
24. Cortázar, Ultimo Round, 50, planta baja
25. Sábato, ‘Borges-Sábato,’ 23
26. Cortázar, ‘Politics and the Intellectual,’ 42
27. Quoted in Dickson, Towards Utopia, 46
28. Genover, Una novelística existencial, 72
29. Boldy, Novels of Cortázar, 44
30. Chosich, Greshnik, 442. The translation is mine.
31. Cortázar, ‘Carta a Retamar,’ 86
32. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 51
33. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 22
34. Aleixandre, ‘En la plaza,’ in Historia del corazón, 209
DORIS SOMMER
Grammar Trouble:
Cortázar’s Critique of Competence
F rom the opening lines in “The Pursuer” (1959), Julio Cortázar’s narrator
seems uneasy.1 Bruno is a jazz critic, respected among Parisian publishers
and academics, but surprisingly out of phase from the very beginning of his
story.2 By contrast, the disarmingly lucid character here is a drug-dependent
saxophonist who stands in for Charlie Parker. Any jazz buff would recognize
him from the biographical dates and details that follow, and maybe even from
the title and our first glimpse of a self-destructive and arrogant “Johnny
Carter,” but Cortázar makes sure we get the reference from his dedication to
Parker in memoriam. The narrating critic, as I said, shows signs of
awkwardness even before Johnny greets him sardonically—“Faithful old
buddy Bruno, regular as bad breath” [161].3 Not that Bruno justifies Johnny’s
distasteful reception, as if faithfulness were any reason for embarrassment.
On the contrary, Bruno assumes no responsibility for Johnny’s bad mood.
Why should he, when the loyal friend had rushed to the musician’s cheap
hotel room to rescue him—once again—from the childish irresponsibility
that only artists get away with? This time Johnny had forgotten his
saxophone under the seat of a subway car and Bruno offered to replace it.
The rescuer’s condescending concern obviously grates on the black musician,
who seems helpless, sweating, and shivering after some forbidden drug-
induced high. Patronized and misprized, Johnny surely knows the self-
From Diacritics vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1995). © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
149
150 Doris Sommer
serving motives for solicitude, and he probably dismisses Bruno’s genuine

concern for the man wasting his talent and his life, just as Charlie Parker was
said to dismiss his own friends and fans.4 Bruno’s objection to heroin means,
for Johnny, a determination to cancel the trips that take him away from work.
Johnny’s work is, after all, the necessary condition for Bruno’s success. “I’m
thinking of the music being lost, the dozens of sides Johnny would be able to
cut, leaving that presence, that astonishing step forward where he had it over
any other musician” [167].5 The poor “savage monkey” of a musician is not
only the object of Bruno’s own, casually racist dismissals [see 258, 263, 288,
291, 299; English 164, 174, 179,199]; he is also the subject of the critic’s
authoritative biography. Johnny plays the alto sax as “only a god can play”
[251; 163], and he continues to be the capital for Bruno’s critical purchase.
But Johnny is precarious capital, because—as Bruno frets toward the end—
he might publicly contradict the interpreter, or simply leave him behind in
the wake of musical and personal mischief.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE
Bruno has good reason to fret, while his professional identity and public
worth wither from exposure to questions of competence. For Bruno to admit
that the biographer doesn’t really know his subject, that the critic can’t quite
keep time to the music, is to admit defeat in criticism and to de-authorize
himself. Critics are supposed to know better, and Bruno can stand in for so
many professional readers in Cortázar’s narrative commentary, as well as in
the following abbreviated discussion about critical deafness to textual refusals
of cooperation.6 We are far more likely to treat a text as a command
performance; it happens thanks to our attention. Ever since interpretation
freed itself from its origins in pious exegesis, which could remain open to
wonder and awe, critics have tended to take the responsibility, and the credit,
for understanding art better than the artist. “Don’t ask a writer to interpret
his own work” is the common caution, as if writers, or musicians, were
inspired but not very smart people. Even in the improvisational styles of
today’s critical riffs, where striking the right note is far less interesting than
playing on variations, and where “correct” interpretation fragments and
multiplies into a range of competing takes, critics continue to assume that
they know the score.
Years of privileged literary training understandably add up to a kind of
entitlement to know a text, possibly with the possessive and reproductive
intimacy of Adam who knew Eve. As teachers and students we have until now
welcomed resistance as a coy, teasing invitation to test and hone our mastery.
We may pick up a book because we find it attractive—or because of mimetic

desire through (for) a model reader, the real object of our murderous desire
to displace her. We always assume, in our enlightened secular habits, that the
books are happy to have our attention, like so many wallflowers lined up to
be selected for a quick turn or an intimate tête-à-tête. If the book seems easy,
if it allows possession without a struggle and cancels the promise of self-
flattery for an expert reading, our hands may go limp at the covers. Easy
come, easy go. The more difficult the book the better. Difficulty is a
challenge, an opportunity to struggle and to win, to overcome resistance, to
uncover the codes, to get on top of it, to put one’s finger on the mechanisms
that produce pleasure and pain, and then to call it ours. We take up an
unyielding book to conquer it and to feel grand, enriched by the
appropriation and confident that our cunning is equal to the textual tease
that had, after all, planned its own submission as the ultimate climax of
reading. Books want to be understood, don’t they, even when they are coy
and evasive? Evasiveness and ambiguity are, as we know, familiar interpretive
flags that readers erect on the books they leave behind. Feeling grand and
guiltless, we proceed to the next conquest.
“I am only interested in what does not belong to me. Law of Man. Law
of the Cannibal” [35] is the gluttonous way Oswald de Andrade inflected this
desire to conquer difference. Appropriation of the other is what our New
World cultures feed on, according to the Brazilian modernist, as long as the
other offers the spice of struggle. Cannibals reject the bland meat easily
consumed, in this digestion of Montaigne’s essay.7 Europe, apparently, was
also constituted by ingesting its others. And Andrade’s point is, after all, that
cannibalism is what makes us all human, or at least participants in an
extended occidental culture nourished on novelty. His manifesto is
intentionally provocative; it makes outrageous theater of more contrite
admissions of plunder.
But how much less provocative is Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text?
It pushes the engagements of reader-response theory to their eroticized
limits, to a knowing note of triumph over the text. He takes for granted that
texts exist to give him pleasure, that in fact he is their reason for being: “The
text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me” [27]. The reader as object of
desire, the solicited partner for an intimate entanglement, Barthes performs
tirelessly in his extended essay to reciprocate. The result is a book composed
of flirtatiously neurotic [6] intermittence, deliciously anticipated but
unpredictably timed interventions at gaps in the body of conventional
criticism. This boldly self-celebratory role for the reader sounds almost
scandalous against the drone of academic theories; and it rubs dangerously
152 Doris Sommer
against the sensitive skin of sexually correct comportment in today’s

American academy. But I wonder how fundamentally different it is from
other strains of reader-response theory that also flatter readers by locating
them as objects of textual desire and elevating them from the perverse role
of voyeur to the category of partner, collaborator, co-author.
In critics as different from one another as Georges Poulet is from
Wolfgang Iser, the focus is on the agency of readers. Whether agency is
understood as interiorizing (not to say cannibalizing) instead of talking back
to a text (in Poulet’s version), or as putting the text into dialogic motion (as
in Iser’s classic and familiar studies),8 readers are necessary and equal
partners in the shared pleasures of aesthetic production. Poulet’s claims
selflessly to “accede” to a text can prove the outlying example of an inclusive
culture of criticism.9 He protests against modest passivity only after
initiating his own surrender to helplessly dependent objects that crave his
attention:
Books are objects. On a table, on shelves, in store windows, they

wait for someone to come and deliver them from their
materiality, from their immobility. When I see them on display, I
look at them as I would at animals for sale, kept in little cages, and
so obviously hoping for a buyer. For—there is no doubting it—
animals do know that their fate depends on a human
intervention.... Isn’t the same true of books? ... They wait. Are
they aware that an act of man might suddenly transform their
existence? They appear to be lit up with that hope. Read me, they
seem to say. I find it hard to resist their appeal. [56]
Once Poulet, the reader-prince, commands a performance and succumbs to

his own sensitivity to the text’s charming eagerness for a kiss, the rest of his
essay follows the flirtatious rhythm of reciprocal possession. The analogy
between bookshops and pet stores is a provocatively flimsy cover-up for love
for sale.10 The first move is to purchase a partner and to feel chosen by the
book; the next is to appreciate its “offering, opening itself.... It asks nothing
better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the
extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers
between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you” [57]. As the
entanglement proceeds, Poulet manages some distance; he takes a breath of
reflection on such breathless activity. (“On the other hand—and without
contradiction—reading implies something resembling the apperception I
have of myself.... Whatever sort of alienation I may endure, reading does not
interrupt my activity as subject” [60]. But the repeatable rhythm of contact

and consummation concludes by celebrating abandon to the writer who
“reveals himself to us in us” [61]. Perhaps celebration is in order because
abandon, far from diminishing the reader as ventriloquist and vehicle,
returns him to princely primacy. “The work lives its own life within me; in a
certain sense, it thinks itself, and it even gives itself a meaning within me”
[62], a universal meaning that finally does not belong to a particular work. It
is a haunting “transcendence” that is perceptible when criticism can
“annihilate, or at least momentarily forget, the objective elements of the
work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of a subjectivity without
objectivity” [72].
If Poulet’s finally immodest and mutually penetrating dance with the
death of authorship can suggest one kind of border in reader-response
criticism, the frontier between unabashedly self-centered unscientific
ludicism and the philosophically cautious grounding in the reality of reading
as an activity, a different border is the site of equally serious trouble. It is the
promising but underdeveloped place where reader response meets political
imperatives, the critical place marked in Cortázar’s story by a racial
difference that complicates the question of competence. The trouble
brewing there is, to a great degree, Bruno’s nervousness about the self-
authorizing assumptions common to professional readers. He remains
unconvinced of his own competence and is therefore unrecognizable as a
critic. Since when have educated readers recognized themselves as the
possible targets of a text, as incompetent voyeurs? Perhaps it is time that we
learn to do so.
One notable case of missing the aggressive point is Ross Chambers’s
Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Beginning with
an admirably ethical inspiration, the study is plainly a program for politically
productive reading; “Changing the World” is the first heading of the
introductory chapter. Chambers is therefore at pains to open a space beyond
the action/reaction dynamic that reads resistance in a Foucauldian spiral of
power and dissent which reinforce one another. He pries the dead-end dyad
of opposition open to real resistance; the fulcrum, the third term, is the
reader as a neatly dialectical solution to unproductive tensions. “The
communicational relationship between text and myself, as reader, is of a
different kind, and positions me in such a way that I coincide fully neither
with ‘Paddy’ [narrator] nor with ‘Stephen’ [narratee] but find myself in a
triangulated relationship in which the third position (mine) is, with respect
to the textual relationships, both that of tiers exclu—the excluded third
party—and that of tertius gaudens, the third who enjoys or profits” [24]. The
154 Doris Sommer
reader, as the indirect object of discourse, the redeemable viewer of discord,

is available for the kind of sentimental re-education that could amount to the
social condition for political changes of heart.
To do justice to Chambers’s important move here is to acknowledge the
stages of reader response that lead to the narrative’s “influencing the desires
and views of readers” [12]. The first is an identification between powerful
narratee and privileged reader. The reader “slips into the slot furnished—
often as a vacancy—in the text as that of the narratee, and becomes the object
of the narrator’s seduction” [32]. But because Chambers assumes that the
reader is excluded from the oppositional act directed at the narratee (or that
he should exclude himself thanks to the distance vouchsafed as voyeur), a
triangulated reading becomes possible in which the opposition is given the
visibility [33] that amounts to the reader’s collaborative operation with the
text. “For my role as reader of a text is not so much to receive a story
(identifying with the narratee position) as to collaborate with the text in the
production of meaning, a task that redistributes—perhaps equalizes—the
power relationship, and certainly dissolves the simplistic distinctions of self
and other, sender and receiver that are inherent in the concepts of narrator
and narratee” [26].
The danger may be evident in this bloodless Aufhebung of narratee
stand-in into the oppositional narrator’s ally. By excluding ourselves from the
struggle we get away unscathed, possibly with our retrograde desire still in
place. Despite the best intentions of Chambers to describe desire in
politically altered states, thanks to sensitive and self-critical readings, our
self-appointed role as co-author/collaborator remains, for example,
unchallenged. And the possibility of sustained hostility toward the reader
vanishes in the dialectical magic of helping hands. It is not that Chambers
ignores that initial tension, but that he decides too quickly perhaps that it is
a dead end, that readers are capable of self-criticism without enduring
redundant reminders of complicity.
We have almost lost the trail of a truly humbling exercise that Stanley
Fish might have taught us in Surprised by Sin. This early (and outlying) book
focuses on the reader’s role in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but certainly not to
illustrate any possible co-authorship or complicity, no eroticized pas de deux
or transcendental erasure of the text. Instead, Milton is shown to set his
reader up at every point, to cajole him into thinking he has understood
something of God’s divine pattern only to dash the reader’s presumptuous
satisfactions. The true Christian should know that God is unknowable, and
the text plays on our stubbornly earthly expectations of enlightenment in
order to counter them abruptly, aggressively, repeatedly.
This is the track we might tread again when we learn to listen to the
nervousness in Bruno’s narrative. Like Fish’s Milton, Cortázar may also be
playing on the expectations of enlightened modern readers for whom the
amount of energy expended should predict the level of mastery gained. But
labor theories of readerly value will miss the specific use value of Bruno’s
frustrating efforts. Milton’s poem refuses workerly improvements because
they are arrogant examples of the work’s main point: the mortal reader’s
incorrigible incompetence. Without making transcendent claims for Johnny’s
music, and arguing more modestly that his particularly positioned life defies
easy universalizing and transcendent appropriations that would allow readers
to assume some ultimate knowledge of him, he too discounts the unsolicited
labor of Bruno, the self-defined collaborator. Like Milton, Johnny insists
repeatedly that we miss the point by striving for it so confidently.
Some lives, and books, resist the competent reader, intentionally. Cool
before the Whitmanian heat that would melt down differences, as if
difference obstructed democratic vistas, unyielding texts erect signposts of
impassable terrain. They raise questions of access or welcome to produce a
kind of readerly “incompetence” that more reading will not overcome. I am
not referring to the ultimate or universal impossibility to exhaust always
ambiguous literature through interpretation. Ambiguity, unlike the
resistance that interests me here, has been for some time a consecrated and
self-flattering theme for professional readers. It blunts interpretive efforts,
and thereby invites more labor, so that ambiguity allows us to offset
frustrated mastery with a liberating license to continue endlessly.11
The point is rather that certain textual strategies announce limited
access to interpretation, whether or not information is really withheld. In fact,
Bruno has lots of information; he understands Johnny and his music far better
than the musician wants to acknowledge. But Johnny’s refusal to acknowledge
Bruno is the sticking point. Resistance does not necessarily signal a genuine
epistemological impasse; it is enough that the impasse is claimed in this
ethico-aesthetic strategy to position the reader within limits.12 The question,
finally, is not what “insiders” can know as opposed to “outsiders”; it is how
those positions are being constructed as incommensurate or conflictive. And
Cortázar’s particular constructions, as he pursues and performs textual
refusals of interpretation, are worth tracing in some detail.
PURSUING A PERFECT PRESENT
Bruno, as I said, has good reason to fret. Rather, he has two good reasons.
One is his self-doubt, of course; the other is knowing himself to be a target
156 Doris Sommer
of Johnny’s hostility. The new jazzmen of the 1940s and early ‘50s were
notorious for psychologically harassing those who couldn’t keep up, meaning
other musicians as well as a public still avid for the musical Uncle Toms who
played the sensual sounds of “hot” music.13 Louis Armstrong was probably
the most visible target, and his characteristic courtesy to other jazzmen
cracked with the boppers: “they want to carve everyone else because they’re
full of malice, and all they want to do is show you up,” he complained. “So
you get all them weird chords which don’t mean nothing ... and you got no
melody to remember and no beat to dance to” [2]. Sometimes literally
turning its back on the audience, “cool” jazz refused to pander. Instead of
tortured and passionate, repeatable songs, cool “bebop” delivered an oblique
sense of melody, a deliberate exploration of unsuspected harmonies and
rhythms. Bruno fancies himself a “hipster” on the inside of innovation, but
he can feel the chill of being left out (“And furthermore, cool doesn’t mean, even
by accident ever, what you’ve written,” Johnny would accuse him [208; 300]. So
Bruno worries about a possible professional shaming.
Honestamente, ¿qué me importa su vida? Lo único que me

inquieta es que se deje llevar por esa conducta que no soy capaz
de seguir (digamos que no quiero seguir) y acabe desmintiendo
las conclusiones de mi libro. Que deje caer por ahí que mis
afirmaciones son falsas, que su música es otra cosa. [303–04]
[To be honest, what does his life matter to me? The only thing
that bothers me is that if he continues to let himself go on living
as he has been, a style I’m not capable of following (let’s say I
don’t want to follow it), he’ll end up by making lies out of the
conclusions I’ve reached in my book. He might let it drop
somewhere that my statements are wrong, that his music’s
something else.] [211]
That “something else” haunts Bruno, when he’s in Johnny’s company.

Brooding about getting it all wrong (Johnny, his music, his biography),
Bruno knows the pain of writing it anyway. He also knows, and tells us early
on, that his pathetic insufficiency is its own paradoxical license to narrate.
Because he admits his own shortcomings, Bruno can become strangely
trustworthy as a critic of what continues to elude him. (Were it not for this
paradox, how could any reader dare to comment on this story by Cortázar,
on his pursuits and accomplishments?)
Soy un crítico de jazz lo bastantesensible comopara

comprendermis limitaciones, y me doy cuenta de que lo que estoy
pensando está por debajo del plano donde el pobre Johnny trata
de avanzar con sus frases truncadas, sus suspiros, sus súbitas rabias
y sus llantos. A él le importa un bledo que yo lo crea genial, y
nunca se ha envanecido de que su música está mucho más allá de
la que tocan sus compañeros. Pienso melancólicamente que él
está al principio de su saxo mientras yo vivo obligado a
conformarme con el final. El es la boca y yo la oreja, por no decir
que él es la boca y yo ... [256]
[I’m sensitive enough a jazz critic when it comes to understanding

my limitations, and I realize that what I’m thinking is on a lower
level than where poor Johnny is trying to move forward with his
decapitated sentences, his sighs, his impatient angers and his
tears. He gives a damn where I think everything ought to go easy,
and he’s never come on smug that his music is much farther out
than his contemporaries are playing. It drags me to think that he’s
at the beginning of his sax-work, and I’m going along and have to
stick it out to the end. He’s the mouth and I’m the ear, so as not
to say he’s the mouth and I’m the ...] [167]
Self-awareness, though, does not mean that Bruno is resigned to the

aesthetic and intellectual asymmetry. The limitations that he confesses,
together with Johnny’s relentlessly searching talk, evidently make the critic
anxious. The very next thing Johnny says, in fact, sounds like a reproach:
“Bruno, maybe someday you’ll be able to write.... Not for me, understand,
what the hell does it matter to me” [167].14 Bruno feels diminished in
Johnny’s presence, both because he has trouble following the musicians’
verbal improvisations and because he may be serving as Johnny’s instrument
to be played on and with. “[A]fter the wonder of it’s gone you get an
irritation, and for me at least it feels as though Johnny’s been pulling my leg”
[173].15 In either case, Bruno can’t wait to leave the hotel room, so that
Johnny’s troubling text can safely unravel into commonplaces. “I smile the
best I can, understanding fuzzily that he’s right, but what he suspects and the
hunch I have about what he suspects is going to be deleted as soon as I’m in
the street and’ve gotten back into my everyday life” [173].16
The layered relationship that Cortázar manages to portray in this
initial scene would be admirable enough: Bruno’s vexed reverence for the
“childish” genius who makes the mature critic feel stupid; Johnny’s reluctant
158 Doris Sommer
respect for the interpreter who gets more right than is safe to say, and who
listens well enough to keep Johnny talking. (In fact experimental jazz was
indebted to European, even academic, influences.)17 But the story is
admirable beyond the probing dialogue and reflection, just beyond, in the
subtly disquieting performance of the narrative passages that frame the
encounter. From the first lines, as I said, while the narrator still casts himself
as blameless and forebearing, before acknowledging any uneasiness at the
level of story, his plight is felt in the grammar.
To be precise, Bruno’s nervousness comes out in his obsessive recourse
to the present perfect tense. The very term “present perfect” is oxymoronic,
unstable, dislocating, with one foot in the past and the other in the present.
Its function is logically pivotal, providing a point of departure from one
component tense to the other. But Bruno’s compound tense doesn’t resolve
itself into either the past or the present; instead it stays deadlocked and
dizzying in its own repeated contradiction. Fourteen present perfect verbs
cluster on the first full page of text. “Dédée me ha llamado ... yo he ido ... Me
ha bastado ... he encontrado ... ha dicho ... he sacado ... no he querido ... he
preguntado ... se ha levantado y ha apagado ... nos hemos reconocido ... ha
sacado ... he sentido ... ha dicho ... Me ha alegrado.”
Dissonant, almost shrill from repetition, the present perfect tense
becomes a structural feature of Bruno’s writing. It is as if the writing refused
to fit into time, the conventional grammatical time that opposes past to
present in neat, mutually exclusive categories. The present perfect
scrambles categories. It straddles between excess and inadequacy, too much
time and too little. Does a present perfect action spill over from past to
present, an exorbitance and difference carried in a single composite tense?
Or does the action fit nowhere, already exiled from the past and not quite
surviving into the present? The specific problem for Bruno is that Johnny is
unstable, exorbitant as the subject of a definitive biography. He is still alive
and willful, too present and palpable to be the manageable material of an
informative story. Alive, he is not really perfect, a term that I take here in
the grammatical sense of finished, past. Only at the end of Bruno’s long
struggle in the disturbingly present perfect of Johnny’s life, after 63 closely
written pages, does the biographer finally put a full stop to his work in
simple, perfect grammar. Johnny dies, Bruno reports with some relief and
no less bad faith, “as he really is, a poor sonofabitch with barely mediocre
intelligence ...” [218].18 And the story achieves the finality of a simple past
tense that can be superseded by the repose and plenitude of a perfectly
simple present.
Todo esto coincidió con la aparición de la segunda edición de mi

libro, pero por suerte tuve tiempo de incorporar una nota
necrológica redactada a toda máquina, y una fotografía del
entierro donde se veía a muchos jazzmen famosos. En esa forma
la biografía quedó, por decirlo así, completa. Quizá no está bien
que yo diga esto, pero como es natural me sitúo en un plano
meramente estético. Ya hablan de una nueva traducción, creo que
al sueco o al noruego. Mi mujer está encantada con la noticia.
[313]
[All this happened at the same time that the second edition of my
book was published, but luckily I had time to incorporate an
obituary note edited under full steam and inserted, along with a
newsphoto of the funeral in which many famous jazzmen were
identifiable. In that format the biography remained, so to speak,
intact and finished. Perhaps it’s not right that I say this, but
naturally I was speaking from a merely aesthetic point of view.
They’re already talking of a new translation, into Swedish or
Norwegian, I think. My wife is delighted at the news.] [220]
Presumably the verbs were always simple in the biography, even in the first
edition, but now there are comforting grounds for simplicity. Real death,
mercifully for Bruno, has stabilized the virtual loss that biography effects into
loss, pure and simple. The very genre that presumes to preserve a life defaces
it, as Paul de Man argues so poignantly, because biography petrifies living
movement into a monument, spirit into letter. Here the hardening takes the
form of fixing an unstable present perfect tense into a solidly perfect past.
Until that final page, though, Johnny’s vitality has been outstripping Bruno’s
best biographical efforts to control it. The biographer would reduce the
complexity of his subject’s relationships to an orderly report of information.
The violence of that project should be clear. It collapses the obliging and
ensnaring discourse of sociability into the unencumbered, antiseptic language
of knowledge, to use Emmanuel Levinas’s terms.19 In the place of a social
subject who makes claims on his interlocutors, Bruno prefers the unfettered
objective hero, a cluster of data available for bloodless exchanges among
music mavens.
But Bruno can’t seem to package the narrative interlude we are reading
now, the story that comes between the official editions of Johnny’s life.
Bruno’s writing in “The Pursuer” doesn’t cooperate with marketing
demands. As if to call attention to his performance in an anxious present
160 Doris Sommer
perfect tense, the narrative voice pauses after a first page. The writing is, in
fact, so apparently clumsy that Paul Blackburn’s overly graceful English
translation refuses to respect the redundant awkwardness. The English
version presumes to correct Cortázar’s purposefully unpleasant Spanish with
the predictable elegance of variety that good taste dictates. For example, the
first two Spanish verbs (“Dédée me ha llamado ... yo he ido”), which set the
dissonant tone and timing for Bruno’s nervous style, are fixed in the
translation into easily chronologized past perfect conjugations: “Dédée had
called me ... and I’d gone.” Johnny, we know, reviles conventional “good
taste”; and perhaps surprisingly, respectable Bruno seems incapable of
practicing it.
The attention-getting pause after that first narrative page is a short
dialogue about timing, the very feature that has presented a problem. Bruno
begins with a conventional comment about how long the friends had not
seen one another. That triggers Johnny’s objection to Bruno’s penchant for
putting everything into orderly, linear time. The irony, of course, is that the
page we have just seen, but that Johnny has not, can hardly keep things
straight. And Bruno’s messy compound tense continues to narrate in the
frame of the dialogue. “‘We haven’t seen one another for a while,’ I [have]
said to Johnny. ‘It’s been a month at least.’ ‘You got nothin’ to do but tell
time,’ he [has] answered in a bad mood. ‘The first, the two the three, the
twenty one. You, you put a number on everything’” [162, my insertions and
emphasis].20
Johnny’s objection is to counting, to marking time in foreseeable
sequences. Were his emphasis on time understood differently, it would point
to his own obsession as well. “Johnny ... kept on referring to time, a subject
which is a preoccupation of his ever since I’ve known him. I’ve seen very few
men as occupied as he is with everything having to do with time” [164].21
Among those rare obsessives is the narrator Bruno himself. Johnny noted as
much, but too impatiently, perhaps because he is not reading the text before
us. In it Bruno’s discordant performance in the present perfect is
unmistakably doubled. While it seems to comment coolly on the confusing
temporality of the jazz musician, the narrator’s timing is in fact contaminated
by Johnny’s own experiments with music. This slippage between musical
timing and verbal tenses works in both directions; this is particularly plain
when Johnny’s drive to get beyond convention finds textual representation in
oxymoronic verbs. Consider the way he forces the present progressive or the
simple past to perform in the future. “I am playing this tomorrow,” Bruno
remembers him complaining during a rehearsal years earlier. “I already
played this tomorrow, it’s horrible, Miles, I already played this tomorrow”
[164].22 And Bruno himself will play an extended variation, when he takes a
break from the present perfect and narrates the recent past (or the present?)
in a consistent future tense [201–04; 293–95].
By making his agonists share a preoccupation with time, Cortázar is
evidently deconstructing the difference between Bruno’s intellectual work
and Johnny’s artistic genius. Bruno should logically be talking about artistic
challenges; instead he performs them. And Johnny should be pursuing his
speculations through performances, musical rather than verbal; yet he talks
far more than he plays. Like Charlie Parker’s critics—who acknowledge his
superior intelligence and technical appreciation for his own work—Bruno is
careful to let Johnny talk, always quoting rather than reporting his textual
riffs.23 This slippery difference between art and critique has at times, of
course, been taken to be a more stable opposition. It was, for instance,
fundamental to a fascist aesthetics that distinguished radically between two
types of writers: the pedantic Schriftsteller and the inspired Dichter. The
opposition is unhinged by Cortázar’s own variegated virtuosity, combining
inspiration and intellection as a continual challenge to his own critics.
Readers usually develop along with Cortázar’s experimental writing, but
more slowly.
His accomplishment in “The Pursuer,” it would seem, both depends on
and overrides a naîve reading that would simply oppose Bruno to Johnny. To
appreciate the deconstructive turn is also to acknowledge its polarized
pretext as a simple reading that would make the title refer only to Johnny. He
“was no victim, not persecuted as everyone thought, as I’d even insisted upon
in my biography of him.... Johnny pursues and is not pursued” [196].24 Only
this disingenuous interpretation could mistake Johnny as the sole medium of
the story’s almost mad metaphysical desire to beat down the doors of
arbitrary limits. Only willful simplicity could demote Bruno to the prosaic
condensation of everything Johnny resists. It would draw a stark contrast
between the castrating conventionality of Bruno’s language and the
liberating trespasses of Johnny’s music.
A conclusion, logically, would be that Cortázar is celebrating the
superiority of extralinguistic and nonintellectual communication. This is not
the only story where nonliterary arts seem to compensate Cortázar for the
limitations of his medium. (See “Apocalypse in Solentiname,” in which
viewing his own slides of naîve Nicaraguan paintings shocks the narrator into
finally seeing Somoza’s official terror; “Return Trip Tango,” where the
recursive rhythm of urban music provides the logic of human disencounters;
and “Graffiti,” where an academic painter wakes up to political repression
162 Doris Sommer
through an amorous dialogue of public drawings.) The examples come

readily to mind, and Cortázar’s borrowings from the visual and performing
arts are already the topic of important studies [see, for example, Zamora;
Luli]. But the borrowings should not obscure the obvious fact that Cortázar’s
own pursuit is rendered in the apparently disdained medium of literature. In
other words, a simple reading that would diminish the value of Bruno’s
probing literary styles in order to exalt the spontaneity of experimental music
misses the charm of this story: “The Pursuer” manages to accomplish those
winning experiments through writing. Even Johnny’s putative superiority is,
after all, an effect of his own evasive words and of Bruno’s tortuous, tense-
troubled responses. Bruno’s haunted memory “insists and insists on Johnny’s
words, his stories” [178; 265].
This irony—about outperforming writing through writing—might
make a nice point in a deconstructive reading, a generalizable or abstract
point that could follow from the personalized ironies about Bruno’s unstable
difference from Johnny. And if we cared to circle back in order to insist on
the virtual collapse of differences between the cautious Schriftsteller and the
daring Dichter, we could develop the point about Johnny’s capacity for
intellectual speculation being more than equal to Bruno’s. Johnny does more
than merely quote lines from Dylan Thomas; he glosses them. “O make me
a mask,” the line that frames the story from Cortázar’s epigraph to the coda
on Johnny’s words [220; 313], is an opportunity for the jazzman to
extrapolate on the general arbitrariness of signs. His own life, for example,
could not possibly be contained in Bruno’s biography; it’s not even in the
records [212; 304]. And his face, for an even more intimate example, could
not possibly be an adequate representation of Johnny himself. Instead it’s a
mask that makes recognition both possible and impossible; it is someone else,
to be caught by surprise as he stares from the glass, menacing to pass for and
replace the person looking in.25 Tirelessly driven, Johnny develops the
mystery by wondering about words as such, the way they stick to things and
overcome them with the connecting slime that passes for meaning.26
Imagínate que te estás viendo a ti mismo, eso tan sólo basta para
quedarse frío durante media hora. Realmente ese tipo no soy yo
... lo agarré de sorpresa, de refilón y supe que no era yo.... No son
las palabras, son lo que está en las palabras, esa especie de cola de
pegar, esa baba. Y la baba viene y te tapa, y te convence de que el
del espejo eres tú. [282]
[Imagine that you’re looking at yourself; that alone is enough to

freeze you up for half an hour. In reality, this guy’s not me.... I
took it by surprise, obliquely, and I knew it wasn’t me.... No, not
words, but what’s in the words, a kind of glue, that slime. And the
slime comes and covers you and convinces you that that’s you in
the mirror.] [192]
His speculations range in apparent disorder, disorder itself being one theme
in his obsession with “elastic” time. Even more than an obsession, more than
simply a problem to harass him the way it does Bruno, the variability of time
for Johnny is an invitation to study and to speculate. “I [have] read some
things about all that, Bruno. It’s weird, and really awfully complicated ... [sic].
I think the music helps, you know. Not to understand, because the truth is I
don’t understand anything” [165].27 His own reflections sound distinctly
Bergsonian, about the variable durée of experience. Sometimes, Johnny
muses, a suitcase, like a song, will hold more and sometimes less. Other times
it is packed so full that the contents seem limitless. “The best is when you
realize you can put a whole store full of suits and shoes in there, in that
suitcase, hundreds and hundreds of suits, like I get into the music when I’m
blowing sometimes. Music, and what I’m thinking about when I ride the
metro” [168].28 With this breathless transition, the speculation about
elasticity continues with the subway as a vehicle for musical compression: the
minute-long ride from one stop to another is so crammed with lovingly
detailed reveries that the trip seems impossibly concise [175–76; 260–61].
“Bruno, if I could only live all the time like in those moments, or like when
I’m playing and the time changes then too ...” [173].29 Timing was always
Charlie Parker’s musical frontier, too. “Charlie Parker’s idea of rhythm
involves breaking time up. It might be said that it is based on half beats. No
other soloist attaches so much importance to short notes (eighth notes in
quick tempos, sixteenths in slow),” writes André Hodeir early enough for
Cortázar to have read it. Hodeir’s Hommes et problèmes du jazz was published
in the same place and year as Bruno’s biography (Paris, 1954) and became a
standard work for other jazz historians. At about the same time, jazz pianist
Jay McShann was saying that Parker “played everything offbeat. He had it in
his head long before he could put it together” [qtd. in Reisner; qtd. in Collier
353]. And none of his contemporaries ever caught up to him in pursuit of
polyrhythms, the very pulse of the new music.30 As the period’s giant of jazz
(along with Gillespie), Parker pioneered a variety of styles that would
develop into the opposing “hot” and “cool” trends that lesser musicians
would choose between.31 They appropriated pieces of Parker, mostly his
experiments with melody and harmony. But no one overtook his talent for
164 Doris Sommer
timing, not even his most admiring students, like the pianist Hampton
Hawes. “It was Bird’s conception that ... made me realize how important
meter and time is in jazz.... I began experimenting, taking liberties with time,
or letting a couple of beats go by to make the beat stand out, not just play on
top of it all the time.”32
To develop a reading of deconstructed oppositions would be to include
a counterpoint to our artist’s critical acuity. And Bruno the critic has in fact
been showing himself to be an unconventional artist. We have already heard
him play with the dissonant “chord tensions” (one of Charlie Parker’s
performative signatures) of an unstable tense. Now we might add that Bruno
is also given to the kind of cramming, overpacking, and overloading so
characteristic of bebop and of Johnny’s particular speculations about music
and time. And just to make sure that we get the connection, Bruno
thematizes his own performance as he comments on another hanger-on
whose language is also “contaminated” [217; 310] by jazz: “When the
marquesa started yakking you wondered if Dizzy’s style hadn’t glued up her
diction, it was such an interminable series of variations in the most
unexpected registers ...” [178].33 Bruno stretches and pads his own story,
especially through the long middle section, where linear writing breaks down
under the weight of worry. Telling asides erupt through spaces that are
visually represented as barely constraining parentheses. In those unpredicted
spaces, extradiegetic writing plays with and against Bruno’s simpler themes.
Crouching inside the breaches and ready to outshout the line of continuity
(like Johnny crouches, “lying in ambush” [211; 303]) are pieces of
dangerously supplemental information, Bruno’s reflexive musings, and his
wonder at what he admits to misinterpreting. He squeezes words into his
paragraphs like bebop squeezes notes into a melody. It squeezes so hard that
the new music verges on exploding the familiar line; melody is not entirely
overwhelmed, but it is continually commented on, challenged, critically
caressed.34 And Bruno sees his own project ready to burst from the pressure
of overwriting “(I swear I don’t know how to write all this)” [210],35 he
confesses in one parenthetical riff.
Readers who notice this visual aid to Cortázar’s trespassing from music
to manuscript may be surprised—as I was—to know that it may well be
borrowed from a jazz critic writing about Parker, perhaps the very critic who
inspired Bruno. André Hodeir writes that Parker played “in parentheses.
“That is, he suggested as much music as he actually played; “his phrase
frequently includes notes that are not played but merely suggested.... Thus,
anyone who writes down a Parker chorus is obliged to include, in parentheses
[my emphasis], notes that have hardly been played at all” [Jazz 108]. Hodeir’s
own page then visibly breaks up in parenthetical asides, as if consciously

imitating the master. Whether or not Cortázar was imitating, too, whether
he took a cue for improvisation from jazz criticism, he certainly played
stunning variations. Usually they are doubled solos (between Bruno’s
nonstop narrative and his preoccupied parentheses), but at least one inspired
adaptation sets competitive voices in counterpoint. Regular print and italics
alternate and crescendo in a debate about Bruno’s book, between an ever-
more-anxious biographer and his progressively angrier hero:
—Faltan cosas, Bruno—dice Johnny— ...

—Las que te habrás olvidado de decirme—contesté—bastante
picado. Este mono salvaje es capaz de ... (habrá que hablar con
Delaunay, sería lamentable que una declaración imprudente
malograra un sano esfuerzo crítico que... Por ejemplo, el vestido rojo
de Lan—está diciendo Johnny—. Y en todo caso aprovechar las
novedades de esta noche para incorporarlas a una nueva edición;
no estaría mal. Tenía como un olor a perro—está diciendo Johnny—
y es lo único que vale en ese disco. Sí, escuchar atentamente y
proceder con rapidez, porque en manos de otras gentes estos
posibles desmentidos podrían tener consecuencias lamentables. Y
la urna del medio, la más grande, llena de un polvo casi azul—está
diciendo Johnny—y tan parecida a una polvera que tenía mi
hermana. Mientras no pase de las alucinaciones, lo peor sería que
desmintiera las ideas de fondo, el sistema estético que tantos
elogios.... Y además el cool no es ni por casualidad lo que has escrito—
está diciendo Johnny. Atención.) [300]
[“There’re things missing, Bruno,” Johnny says ...

“The things that you’ve forgotten to tell me,” I answer,
reasonably annoyed. This uncivilized monkey is capable of ... (I
would have to speak with Delaunay, it would be regrettable if an
imprudent statement about a sane, forceful criticism that ... For
example Lan’s red dress, Johnny is saying. And in any case take
advantage of the enlightening details from this evening to put
into anew edition; that wouldn’t be bad. It stank like an old
washrag, Johnny’s saying, and that’s the only value on the record. Yes,
listen closely and proceed rapidly, because in other people’s hands
any possible contradiction might have terrible consequences. And
the urn in the middle, full of dust that’s almost blue, Johnny is saying,
and very close to the color of a compact my sister had once. As long as
166 Doris Sommer
he wasn’t going into hallucinations, the worst that could happen

would be that he might contradict the basic ideas, the aesthetic
system so many people have praised.... And furthermore, cool
doesn’t mean, even by accident ever, what you’ve written, Johnny is
saying. Attention.)] [208]
One result of all this overwriting is a very long short story. The tale seems
compact—a conversation in Johnny’s hotel room, a get-together at the
marquesa’s place, a drink and more talk just before Johnny dies—but the
narrative is tellingly stretched beyond the capacity of more conventional
stories. Cortázar almost always writes them within twenty pages. More than
doubling that length by adding variations, speculations, reveries, and
repetitions is the kind of experimental performance that brings Bruno close
to bebop.
The analogy between modern music and modern writing is
redundantly clear. Even so, Cortázar takes few risks with his readers’
interpretive skill. He informs us, outright, that Johnny’s jazz is part of a
general postwar culture exploding with artistic experiments. “This is not the
place to be a jazz critic, and anyone who’s interested can read my book on
Johnny and the new post-war style, but I can say that forty-eight—let’s say
until fifty—was like an explosion in music ...” [176].36 The image of
exploding standard forms, the following reference to an ever greater and
more avid public, and the timing in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s are
unmistakable allusions to the Latin American literary “Boom” that Cortázar
helped to detonate. So is the geographical displacement that makes
American jazz flourish in Paris, the same haven that attracted the most
influential new Spanish American novelists: Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas
Llosa, and Cortázar himself, among others. As a late and supremely self-
ironizing wave of modernist experiments, Boom writing distinguished itself
from the kind of expository prose that Bruno’s biography stands for. The
genre of biography in Cortázar’s Argentina had in fact been extolled by the
great nation-builder Domingo F. Sarmiento. For him and for generations of
practical and productive disciples, biography was the most effective guide to
personal and political development.37 And Bruno’s book about the bebop
artist who “turned the page” [177; 266] on music history might well have fit
the mold of celebrating exemplary men in a mimetic effort to become one.
Cortázar is presumably offering a critique of this self-improving genre
by replacing biography with a story that tracks the troubled afterthoughts
about the very possibility of writing a life. But he may be even more self-
promoting than simply preferring his own type of experimental prose to the
biographical developmentalism that stays beyond the scene of writing like

some guilty pretext for the drama. Cortázar may also be objecting to some of
his own interpreters who have tried to tidy up his really unpredictable
production into a story of development.38 Both they and Bruno the
biographer tend to lose focus on the mystery pursued, on the
nonchronological play that, ironically, can make artistic history. Conceivably,
the story is meant to leave Cortázar’s critics in the dust raised by his own
superior flair for speculative interpretation and by his endless pursuit of
forms that describe desire without controlling it.
Without denying the possibility of Cortázar’s self-promotion or self-
defense, and far from discarding the deconstructive reading that I’ve been
describing, I want to argue a different point here. It sidesteps immediate self-
interest and gets beyond the kind of deconstruction that heaps glaring
ironies onto inconsistent oppositions in order to level the feeble differences
between Bruno’s project and Johnny’s performance. The story, I would
boldly point out, is not merely about the ultimate naiveté of binary
oppositions. It is also—and most powerfully—about a refusal to overcome
difference. The agonists resist the leveling effect and remain in murderous
tension with one another. Johnny refuses to be contained in Bruno’s smug
prose. And Bruno strains to be free of Johnny, of the self-doubts and the
complexity he inflicts. I am saying, in other words, that the “naive”
interpretation that a familiar version of deconstruction would override
survives the sophisticated assault, in a more responsible deconstructive
practice. This survival is most palpable, as I will repeat, in the diegetic
passages and at the level of grammar. Whereas a standard deconstructive
reading (more de Manian than Derridean) would focus on Bruno’s bebop
style, on the futility of keeping oppositional categories clear, the “agonistic”
emphasis I prefer to give this story keeps an eye on the energy invested in
safeguarding the oppositions. The differences between the agonists are
evidently not essential, not organic. But their very fragility, their almost
arbitrary constructedness, makes the characters whose identity depends on
them nervous enough to insist on distinctions.
The fact that Bruno and Johnny overlap as personae and performances
is no happy liberation from the tensions of difference; instead it is a threat to
the difference that gives each character his specificity, his life. “([M]aybe I’m
a little afraid of Johnny, this angel who’s like my brother, this brother who’s
like my angel)” [174; 263]. To override that respectful distance between self
and other, a distance that provides the ground for dynamic social
relationships, is to risk reducing sociability to solipsism. Closing up distances
and coming perilously close to the other threatens to overtake one in a
168 Doris Sommer
gesture of an ontological appropriation that Levinas calls “totality.”39 Both

Bruno and Johnny threaten one another in this way. Each implicates the
other in the deadlock of ethical engagement.
Bruno cannot help but perfect his living subject into an inanimate
object of discourse. That is the cost of writing a life. Mikhail Bakhtin almost
benignly called the process “consummation,” in an early philosophical essay
titled “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” It is an especially suggestive
piece for reading Bruno’s relationship to Johnny.40 Consummation, for
Bakhtin, describes the process whereby an author contextualizes and
completes his hero from a necessarily exterior vantage point: for example,
from Bruno’s perspective on Johnny. Critics, Bruno protests after feeling
especially stupid, are more necessary than they sometimes think, “because
the creators ... are incapable of extrapolating the dialectical consequences of
their work, of postulating the fundamentals and the transcendency of what
they’re writing down or improvising” [208–09].41 To hear this almost funny,
hollow, and impersonal academic jargon, after Johnny has just complained
about being left out of Bruno’s biography, is to get Johnny’s point. Bruno has
had to fictionalize his friend, to flatten and substitute him, in order to
celebrate him. We are already remarking the culpability of completing a
character. And Bakhtin is explicit, at points, about the violence inherent in
the process, although the thrust of his sometimes rambling essay is to define
a properly ethical engagement between authors who respect their heroes’
qualified autonomy, even as the writers help to confer it. The violent surplus
of establishing pleasing contours for a hero, whose interior sense of himself
cannot appreciate his own outline, is that to confer coherence on a character
is, necessarily, to finish him.
Artistic vision presents us with the whole hero, measured in full

and added up in every detail; there must be no secrets for us in
the hero with respect to meaning; our faith and hope must be
silent. From the very outset, we must experience all of him, deal
with the whole of him: in respect to meaning, he must be dead for
us, formally dead.
In this sense, we could say that death is the form of the
aesthetic consummation of an individual. [131]
Cortázar’s fans may remember his own repeated explorations of the

murderous price authors pay for congealing incoherent lives into perfected
fictions. In fact much, if not most, of Cortázar’s writing is driven ahead of the
danger posed by fixing and finishing. He will resist perfection,

characteristically, by deforming his grammar, with “shifty” pronouns as well
as oxymoronic verbs.42 Perhaps the most dramatic example of the danger is,
predictably, a story that succumbs to it. “We Love Glenda So Much” (1981)
is practically a parable about deadly perfectibility. That story ends once
Glenda’s fans conspire to kill her in order to polish the movie-star image that
stabilizes their devotion. The very last lines draw an unmistakable parallel
with another necessary sacrifice to cultish heroism: “We loved Glenda so
much that we would offer her one last inviolable perfection. On the
untouchable heights to which we had raised her in exaltation, we would save
her from the fall, her faithful could go on adoring her without any decrease;
one does not come down from a cross alive” [16].43 Sacrifice and deification
also menace Bakhtin’s essay to describe the dynamic between hero and
author. But his efforts run directly into the paradoxical possibility that the
hero can be redeemed by the author’s finishing work. Love runs the risk of
fixing and killing the beloved, but it also promises to raise him or her to
another, more perfect plane.
It is only love (as an active approach to another human being)

that unites an inner life (a subiectum’s own object-directedness in
living his life) as experienced from outside with the value of the
body as experienced from outside and, in so doing, constitutes a
unitary and unique human being as an aesthetic phenomenon.
[82–83]
[T]he enrichment in this case is formal, transfigurative in

character—it transposes the recipient of the gift to a new plane of
existence. And what is transposed to a new plane, moreover, is not
the material, not an object, but a subiectum—the hero. It is only
in relation to the hero that aesthetic obligation (the aesthetic
‘ought’) as well as aesthetic love and the gift bestowed by such
love are possible. [90]
Some pages earlier, Bakhtin had spelled out the fundamentally

Christian and paradoxical nature of this consummating and redemptive love.
In that passage, Bakhtin might have capitalized the word author because he
casts himself as one possible creation. The mystery of redeeming a life
through death can be read here as one result of Christ’s synthetic embrace of
traditions, a synthesis that allows for slippages from one plane to another.
170 Doris Sommer
In Christ we find a synthesis of unique depth, the synthesis of

ethical solipsism (man’s infinite severity toward himself ...) with
ethical-aesthetic kindness toward the other. For the first time,
there appeared an infinitely deepened I-for-myself... one of
boundless kindness toward the other.... [Thanks to Christ,] God
is no longer defined essentially as the voice of my conscience....
God is now the heavenly father who is over me and can be
merciful to me and justify me where I, from within myself, cannot
be merciful to myself and cannot justify myself ... What I must be
for the other, God is for me. What the other surmounts and
repudiates within himself as an unworthy given, I accept in him
and that with loving mercy as the other’s cherished flesh. [56]
To become “the other’s cherished flesh”—it is a phrase passionate enough to

send chills through readers of “Glenda,” where passion achieves its sacrificial
meaning and the heroine’s fans (short for fanatics) become living shrines to
her memory. By the time he writes this story, Cortázar is himself a venerated
superstar, or a venerable monument as vulnerable to his carping critics as
Glenda was to her fans. “As always, why don’t you live in your country, why
was Blow-Up so different from your story, don’t you think writers should be
committed? And ... chez Saint Peter there’ll be no difference, don’t you think
that down below you used to write too hermetically for regular people to
understand?” [“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 119].44 “Glenda,” therefore,
may be a cautionary tale about loving the beloved to death. But such a
reading would diminish the meaning of love, shrink it into simple,
cannibalistic appropriation. Glenda’s fanatics could not possibly have loved
her, Cortázar is probably saying, not in the generous and tolerant sense that
Bakhtin gives the word. No one among the “faithful” could have justified
Glenda in her imperfections, forgiven her for that which she could not
forgive herself. Therefore, no one could have consummated the character
with the pleasing coherence achieved only outside one’s own intolerant
“ethical (or aesthetic) solipsism.”
Bakhtin’s idea of redemptive love is obviously inimical to the ritual
cannibalism of Glenda’s celebrants. In the least case, their cannibalism
digests away the tension between interiority and exteriority that makes
writing possible. The expression of their love means the end of Glenda, as a
character and as a narrative. Even an autobiographer, Bakhtin observes,
needs to define a tension between author and hero in order to write himself
[151]. And beyond the aesthetic need to keep them apart, there is an ethical
imperative for the author to maintain, or regain, a respectful distance from
his hero: the distance allows the hero’s fullness to come into focus [26].
“What’s hard is to circle about him and not lose your distance,” Bruno
reminds himself, “like a good satellite, like a good critic” [197].45 But despite
Bakhtin’s own cautions about overtaking or being overtaken by the other,
despite repeated warnings against the undifferentiating empathy that offers
cheap rushes of feeling and shirks the labor required for consummation [64,
81, 88], his essay seems so steeped in the paradox of redemption through
death that even his supremely reflexive and careful kind of loving nudges the
argument toward the foot of a cross. An author’s loving justification hardly
allows for struggle; instead it would seem to stop the hero, to perform for
him by substituting his development for an external and more pleasingly
coherent perspective.
Maybe there is no help for approaching the cross. Writing, even or
especially writing with love, tends to flesh out characters, to finish them off
and then to finish narrating. Therefore, to read from the ending, at the point
of closure, is almost inevitably to read the violence loosed on life when it is
stabilized as a story. But more specific and interesting observations are to be
made before the inevitable endings, during the engagement between author
and hero, sometimes, that is, between characters cast in those roles. The
particular process of consummation, rather than its mere fact, gives a
narrative its specificity. And Bakhtin himself would later sharpen his critical
focus on the almost open-ended dynamic he called dialogism, so
characteristic of modernity, rather than on the consummate promise of
salvation as the end of writing. Consider how different are Glenda’s fans
from Johnny’s biographer. Their refusal to engage her is a brutal narrative
short-cut, a dime-store deification, while Bruno’s vulnerability to Johnny
keeps the hero, their conversations, and therefore the narrative alive for
many, many pages. The temptation to crucify Johnny is there for Bruno, too,
but it is openly and self-critically there. So, besides being an unavoidable
trap, temptation is also a goad for more writing: “Basically we’re a bunch of
egotists,” Bruno admits in this rehearsal of Glenda’s demise, “under the
pretext of watching out for Johnny what we’re doing is protecting our idea
of him, ... to reflect the brilliance from the statue we’ve erected among us all
and defend it till the last gasp” [182].46 Later on, Bruno will even imagine
the others looking at him looking at Johnny, as if Bruno were “climbing up
on the altar to tug Christ down from his cross” [204].47 The first to reproach
him was Johnny himself, and to the extent that they struggle against one
another, author and hero survive the violence. The story flows between
them, through the fissures of Bruno’s fictional but still functional authority.
Compared to Glenda’s fans and to privileged narrators who stay in business
172 Doris Sommer
by being willfully stupid (like the one who keeps missing the connections in
Cecilia Valdés and like Bartleby’s boss in Melville’s story), Bruno seems almost
defenseless.
Yet he menaces Johnny by the very fact of taking his life down, of
getting it right. And Johnny reciprocates by dismissing Bruno’s capacity to
understand him. Why, he practically demands of Bruno, don’t you leave
biographical logic alone and do as I do, pursue the inarticulable energy
behind art, even in the uncooperative medium of writing. “Bruno, maybe
someday you’ll be able to write ...” [167]. Each makes unsatisfiable demands
on the other; yet each resists those demands and remains himself. It is the
resistance that safeguards their vexed but dynamic sociability. The agonists
depend on one another in their differences, and they know it. Bruno needs
the unfettered genius as the featured subject of an academic career and the
goad to his own probing performance, while Johnny needs Bruno’s sensible
attentions in order to survive. He also needs the critic’s trained ear to elicit
more music and more talk. “You ought to have been happy I put on that act
with you,” Johnny tells him a few days after the scene in the hotel room. “I
don’t do that with anybody, believe me. It just shows how much I appreciate
you. We have to go someplace soon where we can talk ...” [181].48
But Johnny usually prefers not to admit his entrapment; and refusal
suggests the bad faith of a man who declines any real engagement with
another. “I understand nothing” [165; 254], he protests to the critic who is
supposed to understand. Johnny objects that any text would betray him, that
any meaning assigned to him would be a falsification. “Right away you
translate it into your filthy language ...” [213; 305]. The filth, the slime that
makes language work also makes Bruno’s book “like a mirror” [207; 300], as
falsifying and substitutive as a mirror. Bruno apparently gets it wrong even
when he modestly writes that Johnny’s real biography is in the records. The
point is that the biography cannot be written, or made right, because
Johnny’s life is driven by inarticulable desire. “And if I myself didn’t know
how to blow it like it should be, blow what I really am ... you dig, they can’t
ask you for miracles, Bruno” [212].49 But Bruno tries to content himself with
less than miracles, as he translates Johnny’s objection to being left out of his
own biography with a literary-critical commonplace: “Basically, the only
thing he said was that no one can know anything about anyone, big deal.
That’s the basic assumption of any biography, then it takes off, what the hell”
[213].50
Of course his dismissal of the problem doesn’t make it go away. Right
before Johnny dies, and just as the biography was going into its second
edition, Bruno indulges in self-critical plans for rewriting. “To be honest
within the limits permitted by the profession, I wondered whether it would

not be necessary to show the personality of my subject in another light” [217;
310]. But he controls himself. Another light might promote a “literary
infection,” Bruno’s colleagues worry, and weaken the points about Johnny’s
music, “at least as all of us understood it” [218; 310]. Whether the infection
is of literature (Bruno’s biography) or by literature (Johnny’s poetic version of
finally ineffable experience) seems purposefully ambiguous. In any case,
Bruno closes the prophylactic cover of his book against any possible disease.
It is a characteristically self-preserving move.
For all of his repeated admissions of intellectual and spiritual
inferiority, Bruno usually braces himself against Johnny. To be in Johnny’s
company is to lose composure, to become a misfit in time. The parallels with
Johnny’s experiments (present perfects, future for the past, and the
parenthetical riffs) are problems for Bruno the character, as opposed to
opportunities for Cortázar the writer. Bruno’s problem would perhaps not be
so profound if his ressentiment were not so obviously driven by jealousy along
with self-defensiveness. Less guilty of provocative bad faith than Johnny’s
conversation, Bruno’s private writing seems brutally self-reflective. “I envy
Johnny, that Johnny on the other side, even though nobody knows exactly
what that is, the other side.... I envy Johnny and at the same time I get sore
as hell watching him destroy himself, misusing his gifts ...” [180].51 And the
solution for problem-solving Bruno is to finish Johnny, to make him perfect
and stable in a finite past. “[M]aybe basically I want Johnny to wind up all at
once like a nova that explodes into a thousand pieces and turns astronomers
into idiots for a whole week, and then one can go off to sleep and tomorrow
is another day” [180].52 Thirty pages later the murderous wish for release
recurs: “Sure, there are moments when I wish he were already dead” [210].
Then Bruno undercuts the wish by worrying if release is even possible.
Sí, hay momentos en que quisiera que ya estuviese muerto....

Pero cómo resignarse a que Johnny se muera llevándose lo que no
quiere decirme esta noche, que desde la muerte siga cazando, siga
salido (yo ya no sé cómo escribir todo esto) aunque me valga la
paz, la cátedra, esa autoridad que dan las tesis incontrovertidas y
los entierros bien capitaneados. [302]
[[H]ow can we resign ourselves to the fact that Johnny would die
carrying with him what he doesn’t want to tell me tonight, that
from death he’d continue hunting, would continue flipping out (I
swear I don’t know how to write all this) though his death would
174 Doris Sommer
mean peace to me, prestige, the status incontrovertibly bestowed

upon one by unbeatable theses and efficiently arranged funerals.]
[210]
But relief and repose finally do come. The last sentences, over Johnny’s
consummately finite body, rescue Bruno from the mire of deconstructive
contaminations and tangled tenses. Whatever subtle complications may
haunt the biographer after his hero’s death, the writing shows symptoms of
release. Bruno has straightened out his verbs; he has disaggregated past from
present, disengaged himself from the present perfection that Johnny
pursued. Finally, Bruno frees himself from Johnny, after “sticking it out to
the end” [167; 256]. He releases his grip on the unmanageable genius who
has dragged him through relentlessly self-reflexive writing. Now tension
abates. The energizing if tortuous present perfect tense slackens and breaks
down into either a haltingly simple past or a comfortingly stable present. And
the supplementary parenthetical riffs evacuate the text, now hellbent on
setting itself straight.
Only now, in the deadly timing of his verbs and in the cause-and-effect
continuity of the necrological notes, does Bruno show some bad faith. He
shows it clearly in the mildly embarrassed reflection that follows his relief at
Johnny’s death. More than relieved, Bruno actually seems happy about the
lucky timing of Johnny’s funeral, because it produced pictures for the
improved biography. The book “remained, so to speak, intact and finished.
Perhaps it’s not right that I say this,” Bruno interjects almost contritely, “but
naturally I was speaking from a merely aesthetic point of view” [220; 313].
Merely aesthetic is what Johnny’s life becomes for Bruno, once the hero gets
the finishing touches that fix him in a satisfying story. Therefore, the
embarrassed aside is hardly exculpating. Instead, it belies an unhappy
conscience. Although Bruno manages to play a kind of happy note in the last
paragraph, he knows that the note is drowning out much richer music. He
holds that easy note long enough to stop everything else, as if to say that
counterpuntal melodies no longer matter, as if dissonance were now merely
cacophony, a problem to be solved. Again, it is Bruno’s grammar that plays so
convincingly. Whatever information we may or may not get about Bruno’s
will to survive, that will is felt through his newly orthodox verbal conjugations.
Willfully simple, Bruno evokes here the purposefully deaf narrators of Cecilia
Valdés and “Bartleby,” self-serving narrators who defend their privilege by
defending against understanding. All Bruno wants to know, as he gets on with
his life, is what fits into the disaggregated, perfectly simple past and present
tenses that end Johnny’s story. The hero died, and the book is finished.
NOTES
I am indebted to conversations with Adam Zachary Newton, about Bakhtin and about
Bruno, as this essay developed.
1. To facilitate reading this essay, I quote Cortázar in the notes and the English
version—sometimes adjusted to capture Cortázar’s style—in the text. Where two page
numbers are cited, the first refers to the translation and the second to the Spanish.
2. Could Bruno be “the brilliant André Hodeir” [qtd. by Marshall W. Stearns in his
discussion of Charlie Parker]? It seems plausible, given the respect Hodeir’s book
commanded, the year of publication (a year before Parker’s death), and his characterization
of Parker as “the most perfect example” of the jazzman: “L’oeuvre de ce genial
improvisateur est l’expression la plus parfaite du jazz moderne” [128]. Stearns concurs:
“The giant of giants was saxophonist Charlie Parker” [227].
But a retrospective view questions Parker’s stature over Gillespie. “Today Parker is given
the lion’s share of the credit for inventing the harmonic changes bop brought to jazz, but
on the evidence of the records it seems clear enough that Gillespie was making the same
discoveries on his own, possibly in advance of Parker” [Collier 350].
3. “El compañero Bruno es fiel como el mal alient” [149].
4. For one of many examples, see Collier: “Parker ... was already (1944) exhibiting
the personality problems from which he suffered. He missed jobs; slept through others....
[W]here Charlie Parker wasted his talent on the pursuit of the moment, Gillespie managed
his career with intelligence and skill “[my emphasis]. Collier begins the chapter “Charlie
Parker: An Erratic Bird in Flight” [362–76] by calling him a “sociopath ... who managed
in a relatively short time to destroy his career, every relationship important to him, and
finally himself” [363], largely through drugs and the arrogance that needed every desire
fulfilled immediately.
5. “Pienso en la música que se está perdiendo, en las docenas de grabaciones donde
Johnny podría seguir dejando esa presencia, ese adelanto asombroso que tiene sobre
cualquier otro músico” [255].
6. For a more developed discussion see, for example, my “Resistant Texts and
Incompetent Readers,” Poetics Today, Spring 1995; and “Taking a Life: Hot Pursuit and
Cold Rewards in a Mexican Testimonial Novel,” Signs, forthcoming. These will be part of
a book on literary strategies that refuse intimacy with readers.
7. I thank Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda for pointing this out.
8. See, as a representative piece, “The Reading Process.” For a study of the
operations readers perform and the “spurs” that texts provide for interaction with the
reader, see The Act of Reading. In The Implied Reader Iser offers readings of representative
novels based on their requirement of active readerly participation. Among his many essays,
one that is most promising for the readings I attempt here is “Narrative Strategies As
Means of Communication.” It focuses on the particular shape of readings as imposed by
the author’s regulation of the process.
9. In the “Discussion “[Macksey and Donato 73–88] that follows Poulet’s paper, he
responds that, unlike reading, conversation “becomes instead, quite the contrary, a sort of
battle, a radical opposition, an insistence of differentiation. The act of reading, as I conceive it,
is ... above all an acceding, even an adherence, provisionally at least, and without reserve” [73].
10. That unreflective, universalizing love can produce perverse confusions between
pets and partners is provocatively argued in Marc Shell’s “The Family Pet.”
176 Doris Sommer
11. According to Gérard Genette, Roman Jakobson is associated with the lapidary, and
by now generally accepted, statements about ambiguity being inherent in poetry and in
literature more generally [10]. Specifically, for example, reader-response criticism begins
from assuming the negotiable ambiguity of a text. For a transatlantic view, see Lisa Block
de Behar, Una retórica del silencio.
12. Among other critics concerned with related issues, see Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of
Criticism. In general, this is an almost shrill rejection of contemporary criticism, from New
Criticism to poststructuralism, on the grounds that it assumes that decisions in reading
literature are necessarily oppressive, totalitarian, and unethical. From a narrow reading of
Kant, and then of Nietzsche, new critics insist on the autonomy of art and then of
language, free from considerations of intentionality. Society and art are necessarily
opposing terms, for them, the undecidability of art giving the realm of freedom that
society tries to limit by law.
13. Public interest in bop didn’t last long—the musicians themselves seemed to go out
of their way to discourage it—and the threat in bop soon became more psychological than
economic. But the young and formerly admiring bop musician did not hesitate to tell the
old-timer: “If you don’t dig these new sounds, man, you’re real square.” In fact, he made
a point of doing so—in a variety of ways—and many older musicians felt this hostility
keenly. The revolt in bop was frequently revolting.... The switch from “hot” to “cool” as
the epithet of highest praise goes deeper ... he refused to play the stereotype role of Negro
entertainer, which he rightly associated with Uncle Tomism. He then proceeded to play
the most revolutionary jazz with an appearance of utter boredom, rejecting his audience
entirely. [221]
In his review of the militant journalism that accompanied the “bebop” revolution,
Martin Williams points out that the battle was pitched between those who claimed that
bop had blasted everything else out of the field and those who claimed it was a passing
aberration. See his introductory note to Ross Russell’s 1948–49 articles in The Record
Changer [Williams 1851].
14. “Bruno, si un día lo pudieras escribir.... No por mí, entiendes, a mí qué me
importa” [256].
15. “[D]espués de la maravilla nace la irritación, y a mí por lo menos mepasa que siento
como si Johnny me hubiera estado tomando el pelo” [262].
16. “Sonrío lo mejor que puedo, comprendiendo vagamente que tiene razón, pero que
lo que él sospecha y lo que yo presiento de su sospecha se va a borrar como siempre apenas
esté en la calle y me meta en mi vida de todos los días” [262].
17.The ideas of Parker and Gillespie were not so very novel from an academic
viewpoint, and would have come into jazz anyway. By the 1940s conservatory-trained
musicians were beginning to enter jazz, and they were bringing with them similar ideas
worked out by master composers in the previous century. Indeed, it may not be
coincidental that Hawkins’s “Body and Soul,” virtually an exercise in chromatic chord
movement, had become, late in 1939, one of the biggest jazz hits of the period. But Parker
and Gillespie set about building a whole music around this concept, and, perhaps more
important, they had the courage to insist that they were right. [Collier 351]
Parker, like Johnny, was reluctant to admit debts of gratitude and respect, even to
mentor musicians [Collier 365]. See also Stearns [218, 224].
18. “como lo que era en el fondo: un pobre diablo de inteligencia apenas mediocre ...”
[311].
19. “Knowledge has always been interpreted as assimilation. Even the most surprising
discoveries end by being absorbed, comprehended, with all that there is of ‘prehending’ in
‘comprehending.’ The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in
communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still and always
a solitude.... Sociality will be a way of escaping being otherwise than through knowledge”
[Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 60–61].
20. “‘Hace rato que nonos veíamos—te he dicho a Johnny—. Un mes por lo menos.’
‘Tú no haces más que contar el tiempo—me ha contestado de mal humor. El primero, el
dos, el tres, el veintiuno. A todo le pones un número, tú’ [250, my emphasis].
21. “Johnny ... seguía haciendo alusiones al tiempo, un tema que le preocupa desde que lo
conozco. He visto pocos hombres tan preocupados por todo lo que se refiere al tiempo” [252].
22. “Esto lo estoy tocando mañana.... Esto ya lo toqué mañana, es horrible, Miles, esto
ya lo toqué mañana” [253].
23.
I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used
all the time ... and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I
could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it.
Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and as I did, I found that
by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them
with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing.
I came alive. (qtd. in Shapiro and Hentof 340)
24. “no es victima, no perseguido, sino perseguido” [287].

25. The suggestion of Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage is so strong here, it makes one
wonder if Cortázar had read the piece or heard it referred to in a later seminar. In that
essay, Lacan develops the idea of mirror images as fictional representations likely to cause
paranoia in the onlooker who suspects that the coherent image knows more about him
than he does himself.
The scene also evokes Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” although
Cortázar almost certainly did not know this piece:
The mirror can do no more than provide the material for self-
objectification, and even that not in its pure form. Indeed, our position
before a mirror is always somewhat spurious, for since we lack any approach
to ourselves from outside, in this case, as in the other, we project ourselves
into a peculiarly indeterminate possible other, with whose help we then try
to find an axiological position in relation to ourselves.... I am not alone
when I look at myself in the mirror: I am possessed by someone else’s soul.
More than that. At times, this other soul may gain body to the point where
it attains a certain self-sufficiency. Vexation and a certain resentment, with
which our dissatisfaction about our own exterior may combine, give body to
this other–the possible author of our own exterior. Distrust of him, hatred,
a desire to annihilate him become possible. [32–33]
26. That slime or “drool” is the same stuff that obsesses the photographer in “Blow-
Up” (“Las babas del diablo”).
178 Doris Sommer
27. “He leído algunas cosas sobre todo eso, Bruno. Es muy raro, y en realidad tan
difícil ... [sic]. Yo creo que la música ayuda, sabes. No a entender, porque en realidad no
entiendo nada” [254].
28. “Lo mejor es cuando te das cuenta de que puedes meter una tienda entera en la
valija, cientos y cientos de trajes, como yo meto la música en el tiempo cuando estoy
tocando a veces. La música y lo que pienso cuando viajo en el métro” [257].
29. “Bruno, si yo pudiera solamente vivir como en esos momentos, o como cuando
estoy tocando y también el tiempo cambia ...” [262].
30. “Perhaps the most controversial aspect of bebop jazz is its rhythmic organization.
Bebop rhythmics, or better polyrhythmics, are so revolutionary that they have been largely
misunderstood and, since no jazz can exist without a solid beat, the new style has been
suspect among many uninformed listeners” [Russell 189].
Miles Davis has this telling memory of Parker revolutionizing the rhythm section: “Like
we’d be playing the blues, and Bird would start on the 11th bar, and as the rhythm sections
stayed where they were and Bird played where he was, it sounded as if the rhythm section
was on one and three instead of two and four. Every time that would happen, Max used to
scream at Duke not to follow Bird but to stay where he was. Then eventually, it came
around as Bird had planned and we were together again.” Davis adds that Parker’s “turning
the rhythm section around” so frustrated him that for a while he would quit the group
every night [qtd. in Metronome (June 1955) 25; qtd. in Stearns 231–32].
31. Hodeir writes that Parker was the real leader of the bebop movement. Like
Armstrong around 1930, Parker got jazz out of a rut [Jazz 101].
Later the standard attribution was to Parker and Gillespie. Their contributions and the
differences of personal style between them are put succinctly by Leonard Feather, whose
early Inside Bebop became required reading for other jazz historians. In The Pleasures of Jazz
he writes, “the emergence of bebop, a new and enduring genre, was primarily the creation
of Charlie Parker—whose pleasures during his appearances took several forms: odd quotes
during an improvised solo, caustic comments to an apathetic or uncomprehending
audience—and of Dizzy Gillespie, whose fame as a comedian has often enhanced the
undimmed grandeur of his musical contribution” [21].
Keeping Gillespie in view tempers more romantic and self-destructive assumptions about
great music, such as the one Robert George Reisner repeats in “I Remember Bird” [Bird
11–27]: “Bird was neurotic, but the great strides in the arts are not made by happy, well-
adjusted people. Art is a form of sublimation and is created by neurotics and compulsion-
ridden people, not by the happy, nine-to-five, family man” [19]. This brings to mind some
of Spike Lee’s reasons for making Mo’ Better Blues, his memorial to musical family men,
including his own father.
32. From the liner notes to “Hampton Hawes Trio,” Contemporary Records LP C3505,
quoted by Lester Koenig (26 August 1955) [Stearns 228]. Hodeir had already made the point:
“It is clear that he [Parker] created a school.... But, as we shall see, the new generation has not
completely assimilated his acquisitions, particularly in the field of rhythm” [Jazz 104].
33. “Cuando la marquesa echa a hablar uno repregunta si el estilo de Dizzy no se le ha
pegado al idioma, pues es una serie interminable de variaciones en los registros más
inesperados ...” [268].
34. André Hodeir describes Charlie Parker as a musical magician, “making appear and
then disappear scraps of a melody that should have been rendered in full, hiding them up
his sleeve” [“The Genius of Art Tatum” 175].
35. “([Y]o ya no sé cómo escribir todo esto)” [302].

36. “Este no es el momento de hacer crítica de jazz, y los interesados pueden leer mi
libro sobre Johnny y el nuevo estilo de la posguerra, pero bien puedo decir que el cuarenta
y ocho—digamos hasta el cincuenta—fue como una explosión de la música ...” [266].
37. “Biography is the most original kind of book that South America can produce in
our times, and the best material we can offer history” [Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
Recuerdos de provincia (1850), in the appendix on biography].
38. I find Jaime Alazraki unconvincing, for example, when he applauds Cortázar’s
fiction for maturing from an obsessive focus on plot to being “more concentrated on
characters, more vital and less dependent on plot” [94]; but his partiality to character
development is consistent with his appreciation for Cortázar’s mastery as a writer of
faction. Cortázar, of course, kept mastery at enough distance to incite innovation. He
always feared writing too easily or too well. Even if Alazraki is not wrong about the initial
shift of focus, it is only one shift, and Cortázar is a moving target for his readers.
39. His Totality and Infinity is an extended critique of the tradition of Western
philosophy, a fundamentally ontological tradition that moves out in appropriative
concentric circles from the subject. In its stead, Levinas appeals for an ethics based in the
other, the locutor who preexists the subject and constructs him as a necessary listener.
Only an appreciation for the radical and inassimilable alterity, and primordialness of the
other can ground ethical relations.
40. I thank Adam Zachary Newton for the general turn of this argument to the
question of ethical engagement, and specifically for pointing out the relevance of Bakhtin
for Cortázar. He develops his own reading in chapter 2 of his masterful Narrative Ethics:
Readers and Fiction in Each Other’s Hands, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Newton’s focus is on the duration of the enabling engagement between author and hero.
41. “Que los críticos son mucho más necesarios de lo que yo mismo estoy dispuesto a
reconocer ... porque los creadores, desde el inventor de la música hasta Johnny ..., son
incapaces de extraer las consecuencias dialécticas de su obra, postular los fundamentos y la
transcendencia de lo que están escribiendo o improvisando” [300–01].
42. See my “A Nowhere for Us.” My focus is on his experiments with the very
components of literary and common language, that is, on the arbitrarily produced
linguistic signs he shows to be constructed, changeable, flexible, and as unstable as the
world they allegedly represent.
43. “Queríamos tanto a Glenda que le ofreceríamos una última perfección inviolable.
En la altura intangible donde la habíamos exaltado, la perservaríamos de la caída, sus fieles
podrían seguir adorándola sin mengua; no se baja vivo de una cruz” [28].
44. “lo de siempre, por qué no vivís en tu patria, qué pasó que Blow-Up era tan distinto
de tu cuento, te parece que el escritor tiene que estar comprometido? A esta altura de las
cosas ya sé que la Ultima entrevista me la harán en las puertas del infierno y seguro que
serán las mismas preguntas, y si por caso es chez San Pedro la cosa no va a cambiar, a usted
no le parece que allá abajo escribía demasiado hermético para el pueblo?” [95].
45. “Lo difícil es girar en torno a él sin perder la distancia, como un buen satélite, un
buen crítico” [288].
46. “En el fondo somos una banda de egoístas, so pretexto de cuidar a Johnny lo que
hacemos es salvar nuestra idea de él ... sacarle brillo ala estatua que hemos erigido entre
todos y defenderla cueste lo que cueste” [272].
47. “que se trepara aun altar y tironeara de Cristo para sacarlo de la cruz” [296].
180 Doris Sommer
48. “Deberías sentirte contento de que me haya portado así contigo; no lo hago con
nadie, créeme. Es una muestra de cómo te aprecio. Tenemos que ir juntos a algún sitio para
hablar ...” [271].
49. “Y si yo mismo no he sabido tocar domo debía, tocarlo que soy de veras ... ya ves
que no se te pueden pedir milagros, Bruno” [304].
50. “En el fondo lo único que ha dicho es que nadie sabe nada de nadie, y no es una
novedad. Toda biografía da eso por supuesto y sigue adelante, qué diablos” [304–05].
51. “envidio a Johnny, a ese Johnny del otro lado, sin que nadie sera qué es
exactamente ese otro lado.... Envidio a Johnny y al mismo tiempo me da rabia que se esté
destruyendo por el mal empleo de sus dones ...” [269–70].
52. “y quizá en el fondo quisiera que Johnny acabara de una vez, como una estrella que
se rompe en mil pedazos y deja idiotas a los astrónomos durante una semana, y después
uno se va a dormir y mañana es otro día” [270].
WORKS CITED
Alazraki, Jaime. “From Bestiary to Glenda: Pushing the Short Story to Its Utmost Limits.”
Review of Contemporary Fiction 3.3 (1983): 94–99.
Andrade, Oswald de. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Trans. Leslie Bary. Latin American Literary
Review 19.38 (1991): 35–47. Trans. of “Manifesto antropofago.” 1928.
Armstrong, Louis. “Bop Will Kill Business unless It Kills Itself First.” Down Beat 7 Apr.
1948: 2.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early
Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov.
Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Behar, Lisa Block de. Una retórica del silencio: Funciones del lector y procedimientos de la lectura
literaria. México: Siglo XXI, 1984.
Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1991.
Collier, James Lincoln. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1978.
Cortázar, Julio. “Apocalypse at Solentiname.” A Change of Light and Other Stories. Trans.
Gregory Rabassa. New York: Knopf,1980. 119–27. Trans. of “Apocalipsis en
Solentiname.” Alguién que anda por ahí. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1977.
———. “Graffiti.” We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales 33–38.
———. “Blow-Up.” Blow-Up and Other Stories 100–15. Trans. of “Las babas del diablo.”
Las armas secretas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1959.
———. Blow-Up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: Collier, 1967.
———. “The Pursuer.” Blow–Up and Other Stories 161–220. Trans. of “El perseguidor.”
Las armas secretas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1959. 149–313.
———. “Return Trip Tango.” We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales 60–77.
———. “We Love Glenda So Much.” We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales 8–16.
———. We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York:
Knopf, 1983. Trans. of Queremos tanto a Glenda. México: Nueva Imagen, 1980.
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography As Defacement.” MLN 94 (1979): 919–30.

Feather, Leonard. Inside Bebop. New York: Robbins, 1949.
———. The Pleasures of Jazz. New York: Horizon, 1976.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. New York: St. Martin’s,
1967.
Genette, Gérard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia
UP, 1982.
Hodeir, André. “The Genius of Art Tatum.” Williams 173–80.
———. Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence. Trans. David Noakes. New York: Grove, 1956.
Trans. of Hommes et problèmes du jazz. Paris: Portulan, 1954.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1978.
———. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to
Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
———. “Narrative Strategies As Means of Communication.” Interpretation of Narrative.
Ed. Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller. Toronto: Intl. Colloquium on
Interpretation of Narrative, U of Toronto, 1978. 100–17.
———. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Tompkins 50–69.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Lee, Spike, dir. Mo’ Better Blues. Universal, 1990.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A.
Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.
———. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
Macksey, Richard A., and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Language
of Criticism and the Science of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.
Poulet, Georges. “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority.” The Structuralist
Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man. Macksey and Donato
56–72. Rpt. in Tompkins 41–49.
Reisner, Robert George. Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker. New York: Da Capo, 1973.
Russell, Ross. “Bebop.” Williams 186–214.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Recuerdos de provincia. 1850. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1944.
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Shell, Marc. “The Family Pet, or the Human and the Animal.” Children of the Earth:
Literature, Politics, and Nationhood. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 148–75.
Siebers, Tobin. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Sommer, Doris. “A Nowhere for Us: The Promising Pronouns of Cortázar’s ‘Utopian’
Stories.” Dispositio 11 (1986). Rpt. in Discurso literario 4.1 (1986–87): 231–63.
Stearns, Marshall W. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1956.
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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
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the Recent Fiction of Julio Cortázar.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 3.3 (1983):
51–64.
I S A B E L A LV A R E Z B O R L A N D
Cortázar: On Critics and Interpretation
En algún lugar debe haber un basural donde están amontonadas las

explicaciones. Una sola cosa inquieta en este justo panorama: lo que
pueda ocurrir el día en que alguien consiga explicar también el basural.
—Julio Cortázar, Un tal Lucas 66.
C ortázar’s writing overtly challenges and invites the reader to participate

in the act of creation, engaging him/her to consider the creative act from
multiple perspectives. He has explicitly dealt with his poetics in “Apuntes
para una poética” (1945), and with a theory of the short story in Ultimo Round
(1969). Starting with Rayuela (1963), a great portion of his fiction has been
self-consciously dedicated to exploring the aesthetics of the creative act.
Given his interest in the subject, a question is raised by the fact that while his
essays and fiction on the creative process defend and praise the craft and role
of the artist, his portrait of literary critics as characters or as subjects of his
essays has displayed an intense suspicion regarding the critic’s role vis-à-vis
the work of art.
The present study concerns specific stories and essays by Cortázar in
which the literary critic functions as the main character. Central to our goal
would be to explore how, in these fictions, Cortázar establishes a dialogue
with the reader through which he addresses the subject of interpretation. In
From INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispanica, nos. 43–44 (Primavera-Otoño 1996). © 1996 by
INTI.
183
184 Isabel Alvarez Borland
order to identify a subtext common to the stories as well as the essays, two
questions must be directed to these narratives: 1) What is the role of the
protagonist/critic in providing the reader with a particular perspective of the
critical act? 2) How does the critical language employed by these
protagonists/critics differ from the familiar language of fiction, and what are
the implications of these differences? By answering these questions through
a careful study of the narratives’ fictional processes, we will be concerned
with identifying not only the critic as a literary character, but also with
exploring Cortázar’s awareness of the dynamics of literary interpretation1.
“El perseguidor” has received considerable attention from scholars as
Cortázar’s testament on the subject of jazz2. Narrated in the first person of a
critic named Bruno, the story takes place in the world of music, offering us
an account of a talented jazzman’s last years, his drug and alcohol
dependency, his self-destructive impulses and, finally, the beauty and power
of his music. The story is an autobiographical account of Bruno, a critic who
is writing a biography on jazzman Johnny Carter. Bruno’s view of himself and
his profession dominate the story since it is through this critic’s perspective
that all other events are presented to the reader. As the story opens, the
reader is presented with a sordid scene at Johnny’s apartment: Johnny lies in
bed, sick from his drug habit and desolate because he has lost his saxophone.
Bruno, the artist’s “friend,” is there to promise another saxophone and
perhaps additional money. The roles are clearly delineated in this first scene:
Johnny will be the exploited genius of jazz while Bruno will be the provider
as well as the parasite, the “selfless” critic who follows Johnny around in
order to exploit his talents. The story is chronologically told, its language
straightforward, its motives and themes rather transparent. However, soon
the reader realizes the deceptive character of this narrative, for in this story
the narrator and the reader reach different conclusions about the portrait of
Johnny Carter as drawn by his critic/pursuer, Bruno. The gap caused by the
narratorial unreliability of Bruno’s first person, allows the reader to detect
inconsistencies in Bruno’s portrait of the artist.
There are several aspects in the telling of “El perseguidor” that allow
the critical reader to look at this account as the story of the dynamics of
exchange between critic and artist, between pursuer and creator. Moreover,
“El perseguidor” dramatizes the critical act from multiple perspectives: the
critic’s view and exercise of his profession; the critic’s portrait of the artist;
and finally, the artist’s view of the critic.
Bruno, our narrator, lacks imagination both in his critical study of
Johnny (the pretext for telling his story) and in his account to us as readers.
Early in the story Bruno states: “Soy un crítico de jazz to bastante sensible
como para comprender mis limitaciones” (92). For Bruno, a critic is no

better than a mercenary: “ese hombre que solo puede vivir de prestado de las
novedades y las decisiones ajenas” (130). In fact, Bruno feels that his
profession denies him any possible transcendence and this realization fills
him with bitterness.
It is precisely this negative self-image (“me siento como un hueco a su
lado” [120]) that translates into an account of Johnny which is tainted and
colored by Bruno’s intense feelings of inferiority. The critic wants to
convince the reader of Johnny’s unworthiness, of his decadent lifestyle, and
of the lack of correspondence between his genius and his personal merits.
Moreover, Bruno goes to great lengths to let the reader know that the genius
of this artist was totally undeserved:
un pobre diablo de inteligencia apenas mediocre, dotado como

tanto músico, tanto ajedrecista y tanto poeta del don de crear
cosas estupendas sin tener la menor conciencia (a lo sumo orgullo
de boxeador que se sabe fuerte) de las dimensiones de su obra
(148).
Bruno feels envy of Johnny Carter’s creative genius. He situates himself and
his profession as unworthy when compared to the artist’s endeavors: “el
Johnny está al principio de su saxo mientras yo vivo obligado a conformarme
con el final” (92).
Based on the plot’s events, we could assert that “El perseguidor” is
simply Cortázar’s bitter indictment against the figure of the critic, and
against criticism as an empty, meaningless, pursuit. However, if we look
further, the negative example of Bruno foregrounds key issues related to the
exercise of a satisfactory critical practice: the critic’s right to become the
artist’s author; the critic’s responsibility to his readers’ and the problematics
between the critic and his subject of study.
What in fact is Bruno’s critical approach to Johnny’s art? It is significant
that we are never quite sure of what is actually written in Bruno’s book. If on
one instance, Bruno writes: “me he impuesto mostrar las lineas esenciales
poniendo el acento en lo que verdaderamente cuenta, el arte incomparable
de Johnny” (124), later on he contradicts himself: “Se muy bien que el libro
no dice la verdad sobre Johnny (tampoco miente) sino que se limita a la
música de Johnny” (140). The critical reader is forced to examine gaps rather
than presences, omissions rather than assertions. The story’s subject,
Johnny’s portrait, is as elusive to the reader as is Bruno’s analysis of its merits.
At times Bruno dialogues with the reader and clearly admits that he has
no intention of letting him “read” his critical text: “Este no es el momento

de hacer crítica de jazz, y los interesados pueden leer mi libro sobre Johnny
y el nuevo estilo” (102). Moreover, when Bruno feels that he is letting on too
much information regarding his critical text, he restrains himself from such
activity: “Pero de todo esto he hablado en mi libro” (111). Bruno’s reluctance
to let the reader appreciate his critical acumen is significant and could be
indicative of Cortázar’s own suspicious view of the language of literary
interpretation.
The absence or unavailability of the critic’s text leads us to explore the
presence of a surrogate reader3 who comments on the critical text
unavailable to us. The final judgment on Bruno’s book comes from the artist
Johnny, and this has a terrifying effect on Bruno for the latter fears public
embarrassment. Johnny, as a reader of Bruno’s text, clearly sees the critic’s
desire for facile and opportunistic criticism. As expected, Johnny accuses
Bruno of creating a false portrait of him: “Bruno el jazz no es solamente
música, yo no soy solamente Johnny Carter” (142). Johnny becomes the first
reader of Bruno’s critical interpretation and underscores the critic’s dishonest
approach and lack of scruples (143). In addition, the jazzman’s judgment on
Bruno’s work has additional significance for it introduces in the story the
possibility of an alternative approach to the creative work:
Faltan cosas, Bruno—dice Johnny—. Tu estás mucho más

enterado que yo, pero me parece que faltan cosas ... El
compañero Bruno anota en su libreta todo lo que uno dice, salvo
las cosas importantes. Nunca creí que pudieras equivocarte tanto.
(143)
Johnny’s reproaches to Bruno suggest a holistic approximation to the work

of art, one that considers the artist’s human concerns as well as his craft:
“Pero Bruno.... de lo que to has olvidado es de mí.... De mí, Bruno, de mí”
(141). The events in this story question the critic’s right to become the artist’s
author; but more importantly, these events underline the basic differences
between the language of criticism and the language of art.
The questions posed by “El perseguidor” could perhaps be clarified in
the context of a second story on the subject of critics and their practice: “Los
pasos en las huellas” published in 1974 as part of the collection Octaedro4.
This story presents manipulation and selection of critical evidence as
dangerous temptations for the critic in the practice of his profession. Fraga,
an unknown critic, decides to write a study on Romero, a well-known poet
who had enjoyed an unexplained reputation in his country both before and
after his death. It is Fraga’s intention to uncover the obscure reasons for the
poet’s impact and popularity: “padecía de la falta de una crítica sistemática y
hasta de una iconografía satisfactoria” (25).
In “Los pasos”, Fraga’s research is traced chronologically: the initial
stage of gathering data, and the “inventive” stage in which Fraga manipulates
his facts in order to produce a version that would guarantee success: “ganar
simultaneamente el respeto del mundo académico y el entusiasmo del
hombre de la calle” (29). Fraga’s critical approach to Romero is biographical,
a task which makes him a chronicler/detective of Romero’s life. After some
months of research, Fraga succeeds in his venture: his new interpretation
radically changes the canon on the popular author and becomes “el tema del
momento.”
However, things do not go as Fraga had expected. Once accepted by his
peers and by the public at large, Fraga finds himself unable to continue his
farce. Overcome by “un desasosiego inexplicable” he is unable to enjoy his
newly found success. He recognizes and admits to the reader that his version
had not explored the subject sufficiently; that he had stopped researching
when he found suitable evidence; and finally, that he had neglected evidence
which would have considerably altered his now “commercial” interpretation
on Romero: “Oh sí, lo sabía, vaya a saber como pero lo sabía y escribí el libro
sabiéndolo y quizá también los lectores lo saben, y todo es una inmensa
mentira en la que estamos metidos hasta el último” (40).
A second visit to his original source, Raquel Marquez, confirms what
Fraga already knew: he had neglected to include significant evidence that
would have changed the reception of his best seller. Plagued by remorse and
conscious of the disastrous results such relations would have for his
reputation as a critic, Fraga decides to reveal his hoax to the public. There is
an ironic twist at the end of the story when Fraga realizes the commercial
value of his ‘second’ interpretation of Romero. Driven by his ambition and
desire to preserve his image, our critic is again ready to misuse his latest and
more honest interpretation: “... la cancelación del premio, la negativa de la
cancillería a confirmar su propuesta, podían convertirse en noticias que lo
lanzarían al mundo internacional de las grandes tiradas y las traducciones”
(46). The critic’s repentance only serves to sink him deeper into the lie he
was trying to correct.
The reader’s reception of the events in this story is the result of the
distorted accounts of three individuals. First, we witness Romero’s own
manipulation of his poems in order to create an image for himself. Next, we
have the selection of the letters given to Fraga by Raquel Marquez revealing
her own desire to withhold events which would produce a new version of
Romero. Finally, we have Fraga’s knowing acceptance of Raquel Marquez’

practical evidence because it suits his own commercial version. Thus Fraga’s
interpretation of the artist changes with each new telling, and with each
reason for telling it.
Against a biography’s mirroring capability, its implicit promise of
faithful representation, Cortázar clearly senses its potential for distortion and
inescapable otherness, its autonomy as object. Thus the subtle interactions of
the object’s biography and the subject portrayed (in both Johnny Carter’s and
Romero’s lives) contribute and speak for the problematics of identity of the
specific critic and of critics in general. In both these stories, the critics seem
to be hampered by their own subjectivity, and also by their own desire to
make their object of study be like them. In the case of the critic Fraga, this
manipulation of evidence is closely associated with an imposition of his own
life into the life of the subject he is creating. This is done very effectively as
the omniscient narrator draws intentional parallels between the critic and the
artist’s life: “Las afinidades entre Romero y yo, nuestra común preferencia
por ciertos valores estéticos y poéticos, eso que vuelve fatal la elección del
tema por parte de biógrafo, no me hará incurrir más de una vez en una
autobiografía disimulada?” (28).
Both Fraga and Bruno manipulate evidence in order to produce a
sellable, commercial interpretation of their artists. In “El perseguidor,” the
artist is alive and becomes a critical reader of Bruno’s text, while in “Los
pasos” Fraga has total and unchecked freedom to forge whatever image of
Romero is most suitable to him. The presence of Johnny Carter as a
surrogate reader in “El perseguidor”, ensures our negative reaction to the
critic’s unfair behavior. On the other hand, in “Los pasos,” Fraga’s self-
censorship reveals remorse for his dishonest critical practice. In both stories
the question of authorship of a critical treatise is a serious one for it involves
the risk of dishonesty and deviousness.
While “El perseguidor” and “Los pasos en las huellas” have given us a
fictional depiction of failed critics, Cortázar’s short essays have sometimes
approached the subject ironically once again depicting critics in a negative
light. Two fitting examples are his essays: “Noticias de los Funes” (1969) and
“Texturologías” (1979).
In “Noticias de los Funes” Cortázar communicates the same
derogatory attitude towards the labor of the critic that we had witnessed in
his fictions:
... un tal Julian Garavito de la revista Europe viene y escribe pero

entonces usted y el hilo secreto que va uniendo sus cuentos.... La
crítica es como Periquita y hace lo que puede, pero eso de que

ahora se dedique a la costura conmigo prueba lo que va de
cualquier realidad a cualquier interpretación. (120)
This essay is of interest because our author attempts to answer a critic’s

interpretation of his own work. In Garavito’s5 particular case, Cortázar is
surprised because this critic manages to find unity in what Cortázar viewed
as a totally haphazard collection of short stories (120). Curiously, Cortázar is
not totally censorious of this critics. The essay concludes by thanking
Garavito for having “illuminated” Cortázar’s creative work: “sin ironía
alguna le doy las gracias a Julian Garavito, tejedor al lado de la luz” (121).
“Texturologías,” on the other hand, effectively demeans the labor of
the critic by dramatizing the futility of a critical language. The essay
reproduces fictitious quotes from six critical interpretations of a poet named
Lobizón. Each critic appears as a critic of the previous critic, each successive
essay outdoing the next in its pedantry and obscurity, forgetting its main
concern which should have been the artist’s work. The critic’s quotes, which
make up the main body of the essay, are followed by Cortázar’s own ironic
closing sentence: ¿Qué agregar a esta deslumbrante absolutización de lo
contingente?”. In “Texturologías,” we find a telling instance of the misuse of
the language of interpretation.
Cortázar’s own biography tells us that he himself started as a critic and
as a teacher of literature6. As a student he labored over the work of Keats and
Poe, translated their work, and wrote critical treatises on them. In fact some
of Cortázar’s writings on these two authors have been identified by critics as
essential in the understanding of Cortázar’s poetics and his view on what
constitutes artistic creativity. “Para llegar a Lezama Lima,” Cortázar’s essay
on Lezama’s Paradiso, provides an excellent opportunity to examine
Cortázar’s own approach to the creative work of others.
The essay begins by discussing biographical facts about Lezama such as
his lack of familiarity with foreign languages, and his relatively unknown
status in Europe. As the essay progresses, it becomes obvious to the reader
that Cortázar’s method of analysis consists of quoting extensively from the
original. Few opinions are formulated by Cortázar on Paradiso and when they
do appear, they tend to be subjective and emulatory of Lezama’s own style
(72). Cortázar seems contaminated with Lezama’s style and uses nouns and
terms which would be recognized as lezamianos. Here Cortázar reaches the
same union with his text that he had prescribed as essential for creators in
“Apuntes para una poética”. Cortázar urges the reader to come into direct
contact with Paradiso, for only by establishing a communion with the artistic
text it will be possible for any reader to grasp Lezama’s poetic imagery and
the power of his prose. Fittingly, Cortázar concludes this essay with a humble
assessment of his, critical practice as he labels his own criticism as “un pobre
resumen de un libro que no los tolera.” As a critic, Cortázar feels awed by the
power of Lezama’s artistry. The critic, displaced by the artist, is forced to
summarize rather than to interpret.
Cortázar’s non-fictional writings on the subject of the artist seem to
suggest that critics and creators should adhere to the same professional
criteria. In his classic essay on creativity, “Apuntes para una poética,”
Cortázar discusses the qualities needed to create literature: faith, intuition,
and a belief by the artist that he will be possessed by the art he is creating.
The critic, like the artist, must be able to join in and communicate intuitively
with the text: “Yo creo que un gran crítico y un gran creador están
absolutamente en el mismo nivel” (Apuntes, 130). Cortázar’s insistence on
the communion between the artist and his object, is of great relevance to our
consideration of the author’s stance on critics since it allows us to understand
Cortázar’s suspicion and lack of trust in the language of criticism.
In a key essay on Cortázar’s poetics, Sara Castro Klaren describes the
significant influence of phenomenology—specifically Merleau Ponty’s
writings—on Julio Cortázar’s stance of the subject of artistic creation. Castro
Klaren specifies two main postulates as defining Cortázar’s poetics. The first
is the poet’s “porous” or open condition to the world’s experiences. The
second addresses the relationship between the artist and the object of his
creation, “the poet thirsting for being, manages to fuse his anxious being to
the ontological qualities of the contemplated object” (141).
By juxtaposing the critic’s and the artist’s use of language in the fictional
pieces we have studied, Cortázar explores the limits of critical language to
portray the truth. If a good critic should be at the same level as the artist,
then it follows that a critic should be able to achieve the same fusion with his
subject (the artist) as the artist achieves with his (the work of art). Yet, is this
a realistic goal for any critic? For Cortázar, a basic difference between the
language of the artist and the language of the critic lies in their respective
premises. The artist’s truth does not depend on the facts, it has a freedom
which is not available to the literary critic. Cortázar’s fictional pieces on
critics and his own essays on the creative act seem to support this view.
In an interview with Evelyn Picón Garfield, published five years before
his death, Cortázar spoke briefly about the language of fiction versus the
language of criticism:
La crítica a veces se llama una especie de creación de segundo

grado, de segunda etapa, es decir que el cuentista escribe
partiendo de una especie de nada y el crítico crea partiendo de
una cosa que ya está hecha.... A mí me gustaría ser una especie de
síntesis de las dos cosas aunque fuera un día: solo un día de mi
vida me gustaría ser a la vez un creador y un crítico. (19)
The passage is significant because it underlines once again Cortázar’s

dualistic feelings towards the critical act. It also explains what to Cortázar is
the critic’s dilemma “a veces hay una especie de corte con la vida, con los
impulsos vitales” (16). In the words of Bruno, a critic’s labor consists of
“sancionar comparativamente,” that is, to sanction comparatively always
hoping to arrive at a definitive reading of the work of art. Bruno, Fraga,
Garavito, and Lobizon dramatize the problematics of interpretation by
creating critical fictions which have as their futile objective rational and
definitive interpretations.
NOTES
1. Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice as well as Stein Haugom Olsen’s The Structure
of Literary Understanding are pertinent and influential to my own reading of Cortázar’s
views on literary interpretation.
2. Critics have shown considerable interest in “El perseguidor” and I have included
in my bibliography articles on this story which have appeared in the last ten years.
Pertinent to my own reading are the following pieces which look at the aesthetics of this
story: Roberto González-Echevarría , “Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing”; Lanin
Gyurko, “Quest and Betrayal in Cortázar’s El perseguidor”; Noe Jitrik, “Crítica satélite y
trabajo crítico en El perseguidor”; Amalia Lazarte-Dishman, “Otro enfoque a “El
perseguidor”; Maria Lima, “El perseguidor” una segunda lectura”; Antonio Skármeta,
“Trampas al perseguidor”; and Saul Sosnowski, “Pursuers.” None of the above articles
have traced the figure of the fictional critic to Cortázar’s other texts on critics.
3. Although Iser’s work on reader response is seminal for the kind of reading I’m
doing here, more specific studies on embedded readers and writers within fictional texts
have influenced my investigation. See specific studies by: S. Daniels, Prince, and, Shor.
4. In contrast to the great number of articles written on “El perseguidor”, Cortázar’s
“Los pasos en las huellas” has received little attention. One exception is Lanin Gyurko’s
“Artist and Critic as Self and Double” (1982). Gyurko’s perspective differs from mine
considerably.
5. As it turns out, this critic was not ‘invented’ by Cortázar. See: Julián Garavito’s
“Julio Cortázar: Gites.”
6. See Jaime Alazraki’s excellent overview of Cortázar’s biography in his introduction
to Final Island.
WORKS CITED
Alazraki, Jaime and Ivar Ivask eds. Final Island. Oklahoma: WLT, 1971. (See essays by
Linda Aronne Amestoy; Jaime Alazraki; Sara Castro Klaren).
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London & New York: Methuen, 1980.
Carter, E-D. “La sombra del Perseguidor: El doble en Rayuela.” Explicación de Textos
Literarios 17 (1988–89): 64–110.
Cortázar, Julio. “El perseguidor.” Las armas secretas. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1982.
———. “Los pasos en las huellas.” Octaedro. Madrid: Alianza, 1971.
———. “Del cuento breve y sus alrededores;” “Noticias de los Funes.” Ultimo Round.
México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969.
———. “Situación de la novela.” Cuadernos Americanos 4 (1950): 223.
———. “Apuntes para una poética.” Torre 7 (1945): 121–138.
———. “Para llegar a Lezama Lima.” La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos. México: Siglo
Veintinuno, 1967.
———. “Texturologías.” Un tal Lucas. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1979.
———. Ultimo Round. México, Siglo Veintiuno, 1969.
Daniels, S. “Readers in Texts.” PMLA 96 (1981): 848–63.
Fiddian, Robin. “Religious Symbolism and the Ideological Critique in El perseguidor.”
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 2 (1985): 149–163.
Garavito, Julian. “Julio Cortázar: Gites.” Europe 473 (1968) 17–8.
González-Echevarría, Roberto. “Los Reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing.” Voice of the

Masters. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Gyurko, Lanin. “Quest and Betrayal in Cortázar’s El perseguidor.” Hispanófila 31 (1988):
59–78.
———. “Artist and Critic as Self and Double in Cortázar’s Los pasos en las huellas.” Hispania
65 (1982): 352–64.
Hernández, Ana. “Camaleonismo y vampirismo: La poética de Julio Cortázar.” Revista
Iberoamericana 45 (1979): 475–92.
Hudde, Hinrich. “El negro fausto del jazz.” In Lo lúdico y lo fantástico en la obra de Cortázar.
Madrid: Fundamentos, 1986, 37–47.
Jimenez, Antonio. “El sensualismo y la otra realidad.” Mester 19 (1990): 49–54.
Jitrik, Noe. “Critica satélite y trabajo crítico en “El perseguidor de Julio Cortázar.” Nueva
Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1975): 337–368.
Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” In The Reader in the Text. Ed.
Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
106–19.
Kadir, Djelal. “A Mythical Re-enactment: Cortázar’s El perseguidor.” Latin American
Literary Review 2 (1973): 63–73.
Lazarte-Dishman. Amalia. “Otro enfoque a El perseguidor.” Alba de América 8 (1990):
187–202.
Lima, Maria H. “El perseguidor: una segunda lectura.” Discurso Literario 6:1 (1988):
23–34.
Olsen, Stein Haugom. The Structure of Literary Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
Prince, Gerald. “Introduction a l’étude du narrataire.” Poetique 14 (1973): 178–196.
Shor, Naomi. “Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction.” In The Reader in the

Text. Ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980. 165–83.
Picón-Garfield, Evelyn. Cortázar por Cortázar. México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1981.
Skarmeta, Antonio. “Trampas al Perseguidor.” Mapocho 20 (1970): 33–44.
Soren-Triff, Eduardo. “Improvisación musical y discurso literario en Julio Cortázar.”
Revista Iberoamericana 57 (1991): 657–63.
Sosnowski, Saul. “Pursuers.” Books Abroad 3 (1976): 600–608.
Suleiman, Susan. The Reader in the Text. Princeton University Press, 1980.
I L A N S TAVA N S
Justice to Julio Cortázar
The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because
of their simplicity and familiarity.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
“A nybody who doesn’t read Julio Cortázar is doomed,” the Chilean poet
and diplomat Pablo Neruda once said and, at least on this particular issue, he
wasn’t off target. The Argentine (1914–1984), a colossus of Latin American
letters, is responsible for one of the continent’s two twentieth-century
masterpieces: Hopscotch, published in 1963 (the other one is Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). But he is also responsible for
catapulting the region into an intellectual coming of age: his artistic talent
and his political views amazed and infuriated many, and forced the
post–World War II Latin American intelligentsia to become part of the
banquet of Western Civilization.
To read Cortázar at the peak of his international reputation was to
submerge oneself in the art of improvisational, empirical narrative. He
perceived fiction as an indispensable tool in the understanding of history and
philosophy. An unconventional man of letters and a philosophical explorer
born in Brussels and exiled in Europe since 1951 but a fervent Argentine
from head to toe, Cortázar would trot the globe denouncing human rights
From Southwest Review vol. 81, no. 2 (Spring 1996). © 1996 by Southern Methodist University.
195
196 Ilan Stavans
violations and would spend hours in front of the typewriter professing to

own a unique method of writing short stories, essays and novels not unlike
those developed by the French surrealist André Breton and the American
beatnik Jack Kerouac: a story, he would claim, is born in a sparkle, a
thunderous strike of inspiration, and requires very little by way of processing.
A decisive impulse, the necessary concentration—and it’s ready. He perfected
the technique known as “automatic writing,” in which the writer, much like
Samuel Taylor Coleridge when drafting Kubla Khan after an opium-induced
dream, must learn to trust his guts: almost no rewritings and virtually no
additional editing are needed once the text appears on the page; as if
literature were only the product of a supernatural Spirit dictating its craft to
scribes everywhere on the globe. He wrote a handful of tales that are among
the best this century has delivered.
Novels, on the other hand, were for Cortázar the result of
accumulation and a cut-and-paste development. His plots were often
restricted to the bizarre and unexplained, even when a political message was
intermingled. Although his fantastic tales deal with themes typical of two
major influential writers on his work, Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis
Borges, such as the double, the labyrinth, transformations of humans into
beasts, he injected in them a dreamlike, surrealistic cadence. He described
Anton Chekhov’s style as directed toward explaining, in minute detail, a
man’s routine, while his own approach to literature, following the rhythm of
chance, was interested in exceptions to a rule—not the investigation of
senseless repetitions of an act but the sudden abolition of a habit.
Energetic, outspoken, incredibly prolific, Cortázar probably died of
AIDS (although his friends deny it) just as the epidemic was gaining world
attention. His unconventional style, his interest in drugs and in altered states
of consciousness, his love of jazz and his passion for experimentalism, make
him a contemporary of the Beat Generation and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who
in 1956 inaugurated a new trend in French novel writing subscribed to by
Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. And yet, since his death
his work has fallen out of fashion—a casualty of our changing ideological
mood. It is seldom read beyond limited college courses; his style and voice
are seen as the legacy of an era long gone and buried, one that took jazz out
of the nightclub and into the concert hall, and was obsessively involved in
experimenting with drugs to reach alternative levels of consciousness.
More than a decade after his death, a revaluation is urgently needed.
Cortázar is in need of justice because the conservative atmosphere of today
has had the effect of dulling his reputation. What new readers ought to get
is a full-length biographical investigation in which his creativity serves as the
backbone to understand the political and intellectual transformation Latin

America has undergone in the twentieth century. After all, he was present at
every turning point and involved with the most urgent issues, both in politics
and in culture: Peronismo, existentialism, surrealism, the Cuban Revolution,
the French nouveau roman, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, exile as a permanent
stigma for Latin American writers, detective fiction, guerrilla fighting, the
AIDS epidemic, and the literary boom that swept Latin America in the late
1960s. He befriended luminaries like Che Guevara, Eden Pastora, Fidel
Castro, Ernesto Cardenal, Georges Perec, Alaide Foppa, as well as Borges,
Carlos Fuentes, Italo Calvino, José Donoso, Gabriel García Márquez, and
Mario Vargas Llosa. His novel Hopscotch created a huge controversy and his
response helped shape the aesthetics of the Latin American novel just as the
world was awakening to its enchantments. His work left a deep mark on
writers worldwide, and in Latin America Cortázar is considered a god-like
figure, his birthplace and houses up until his exile turned into shrines and
museums.
An exact contemporary of the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, the
1990 winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature, with whom he would
occasionally collaborate and who would write a moving obituary at the time
of his death, Julio Florencio Cortázar was born in Brussels on 26 August
1914 into a middle-class milieu, just as the First World War was spreading
throughout the Old Continent. His family tree is full of itinerant travelers: a
child of Argentine parents, from his paternal side he was a descendant of
immigrants from the Basque Province in Spain; and his maternal lineage is
traceable to France and Germany. Not surprisingly, Europe, his birthplace,
would stimulate more than transient passion in him: it would play an
important role throughout his life, becoming Cortázar’s permanent address
from the moment he turned thirty-seven, when Peronismo pushed him out
of the southern hemisphere. As it happened, when he was born his father,
also called Julio Cortázar, was temporarily stationed in Europe, as a specialist
in economic affairs attached to the Argentine Embassy in Belgium. He would
stay in Brussels until 1918, when, after a short visit to Spain, the elder
Cortázar returned with his wife Maria Scott and the rest of the family to their
native Argentina.
They settled in Bánfield, the lower-middle-class suburb of urban
Buenos Aires where “The Poison” and some other future stories of their son
would take place. Located in the southern section of the city, not far from a
famous slaughterhouse immortalized in a classic tale by Esteban Echeverría
written in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Bánfield was known
198 Ilan Stavans
as an industrial and manufacturing district. It was heavily contaminated. No

matter where you looked, an abundance of factory chimneys populated the
landscape. It had dusty, unpaved streets and in the early twenties, when
Cortázar was still a child, horses still prevailed as one, although not the only,
means of transportation.
His parents’ difficult marriage and ultimate separation marked him
deeply. Cortázar’s father abandoned the family when his son was six.
Cortázar would not know a thing about his father until news of the elder
Cortázar’s death, in the Cordoba province of Argentina, arrived many years
later. Although emotionally devastated, even in his adult life he would never
talk about the split, as if its insurmountable pain needed to remain forever
private. Paternal figures populate his fiction, for instance in the allegorical
novel The Prizes, about a group of civilians awarded a boat cruise as a lottery
prize, who are suddenly left unattended at sea, without a captain to guide
their boat. The novel is obviously a parable on tyranny and anarchy, and the
character of the capricious leader recalls Cortázar’s own disappearing father.
He and his sister Ofelia, one year his junior and his only sibling, were
raised by his mother and by an aunt in a larger-than-usual house with a
backyard, one with numerous rooms and obscure, empty corners that
became the model of “House Taken Over.” Cortázar and his sister developed
a complicated fraternal relationship with incestuous undertones, one he also
often refused to discuss in interviews. Cortázar acknowledged having had a
recurrent dream of sleeping in the same bed with Ofelia. One should
remember that non-incestuous fraternal relationships also abound in his
oeuvre. Life in Bánfield was intriguing: Cortázar was curious and bookish,
always intellectually driven, with an unconventional point of view, which
often scared young friends and made him a loner, a sort-of-pariah and
pushing him to the fringes of society. The neighborhood was the playground
where he tasted the sweet innocence of childhood. In its landscape he
discovered insects (ants, spiders, flies, bees), a quintessential presence in his
short fiction, and where his first encounters with death and romantic
disillusionment took place. When, in 1937 a doctor recommended to
Cortázar’s mother that the child, an avid reader and frequent dreamer, stay
away from books since they could affect his health, he happily ignored the
prescription. He loved radio, commercial films, and Greek mythology. He
especially enjoyed reading about adventurous heroes traveling to a distant
geography. Not surprisingly, his favorite writer was Jules Verne, and he is
said to have read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a romance about
submarines with Captain Nemo as its villain, several times. He wanted to be
a sailor and navigate distant seas. “I will always be a child in many ways,” he
once wrote, “but one of those children who from the beginning carries
within an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in
turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del cammino, yields to the seldom peaceful
coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world.”
His genealogical tree resulted in a polyglot education. He spoke fluent
French during his boyhood and his library, then as in the years to come,
would mainly consist of foreign titles, especially francophone and Anglo-
Saxon. (Borges, both one of Cortázar’s friends and his nemesis, had a similar
upbringing: he was a descendant of British immigrants, who used English at
home, a language in which he is said to have first read Don Quixote; when
time came to find the Spanish original, he was sure he had mistaken it for a
poor translation). In order to help support the household, at 18 he received
a degree as a secondary school teacher and taught for a decade, from 1935 to
1945, in several Buenos Aires provinces, including Bolivar and Chivilcoy.
The job proved to be double-faceted: after his classroom hours, he would
spend most of his free time completely alone, a depressing fact that made
him feel miserable, specially because the intellectual atmosphere in those
provincial communities was nonexistent; on the other hand, he had an
enormous amount of time to read and pushed himself to embark on
ambitious bibliographical projects: for instance, in a few months he devoured
Sigmund Freud’s complete oeuvre and the work of the Spanish critic and
lexicographer Ramón Menéndez y Pelayo. It was during the Bolivar and
Chivilcoy period that Cortázar developed neurotic symptoms he would later
on use as inspiration in his short fiction. He suffered intense and
inappropriate phobias to things and situations, and a compulsive need to
pursue certain thoughts or actions in order to reduce anxiety. He evidenced
physical symptoms such as tenseness, fatigue, and excessive employment of
defense mechanisms. Frequently, these neurotic aspects are pushed to the
limit, becoming forms of psychosis, which involve a loss of the sense of
reality. In his work, Cortázar is careful enough never to discuss these mental
disturbances and ailments in Freudian terms; he shied away from
psychoanalysis (so did Borges), trusting that any hallucination, any form of
psychological sickness, ought to be understood, perhaps even overcome,
through the best treatment: literature. It would be indeed easy to reduce the
Argentine’s complex work to mere psychosomatic contrivances, but by doing
so, its artistic power would be altogether lost.
Add to it Cortázar’s overwhelming physical presence, which often frightened

his peers. From his late adolescence, he had a distinctive corporal appearance
in that he cut a considerable figure: he was very tall, around six feet six
200 Ilan Stavans
inches, an anomaly for a Latin American. José Lezama Lima, the Cuban
author of Paradiso, used to say the Argentine had received the gift of eternal
youth in exchange for never being able to stop growing taller. His summer
house in Saigon, France, had to be remodeled in order for him to fit in the
kitchen and bathrooms. Years later, in Paris, he met the Colombian journalist
and later Nobel Prize awardee Gabriel García Márquez, who admired
Cortázar’s early work. They met in October, 1956, at the Old Navy Cafe on
the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He was “like an apparition,” said the author
of Love in the Time of Cholera. Cortázar “was the tallest man you could
possibly imagine, wearing a voluminous black raincoat which was more like
the dark cloak of a widow. His face was the face of a perverse child: wide-set
eyes like those of a heifer, so oblique and filmy they might have seemed
diabolical had they not been submitted to the domination of the heart.”
His bizarre looks, nevertheless, seem not to have made him
uncomfortable. Never physically handicapped, his characters are always
prisoners of their mental machinations, not their bodies. As friends described
him, he was punctilious, affable, straightforward, whimsical, lanky and
freckled. And Maria Pilar Serrano, wife of José Donoso, the Chilean author
of Curfew, would describe him as very introspective and reserved. “He hides
behind a curtain of friendliness and courtesy,” Donoso argued. “People say
he doesn’t accept or offer intimacy. Friends that loved him and admired him
for various and valuable reasons, told me they would never go to him in times
of crisis. They would never speak to him about their problems, and neither
did Julio.” Critic Luis Harss portrays him as follows: “a true Argentine, [he]
is a many-sided man, culturally eclectic, elusive in person, mercurial in his
ways. There is something adamantly neat and precise about him.... There is
a child in his eyes. He looks much too young for his age. In fact, his generally
boyish air is almost unsettling. An eternal child prodigy keeps winking at us
from his work.”
Since its independence, Argentina had been a stage for political
instability and military coups—and twentieth-century Argentina is no
exception. In 1945 the country belatedly entered World War II on the Allies’
side after four years of pro-Allied neutrality. Juan Domingo Perón, an army
colonel who, with a group of military colleagues, seized power a year before,
won the elections in 1946 and established a popular dictatorship with the
support of the army, nationalists, and the Roman Catholic Church. He
remained in power until 1955 and developed a following among workers,
clergymen, landowners, and industrialists. He instituted a program of
revolutionary measures that were supposed to lead to economic self-
sufficiency. At the time, Cortázar taught courses in French literature—
mainly Mallarmé and Baudelaire, his two idols at the time—at the University
of Cuyo, Mendoza, and was active in a resistance against Perón. He was even
arrested and freed shortly. The incident made it clear a dismissal from his
academic job was imminent and, thus, Cortázar resigned his position and
returned to Buenos Aires. His opposition to Perón’s regime, and his overall
political participation, was passive at best. He considered himself an
esthete—an intellectual involved with ideas and unconcerned with the daily
struggle to overthrow a dictatorship, even one in his own country. He
advocated art for art’s sake, intellectual freedom and, much like the early
Rubén Darío, a crucial Nicaraguan figure in the Modernista movement that
swept Latin America from 1885 to 1915, identified himself for a while with
the Romantic idea of the poet living in an ivory tower—isolated, away from
the discomfort of mundane affairs.
Intellectually speaking, Borges already commanded a major influence
on Argentine cultural life when Cortázar was in his late twenties. He had
published A Universal History of Infamy in 1935, and in the next few years,
after a near-fatal accident, would produce outstanding short stories like
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” His precise, almost mathematical
style had a small but fanatical following in the city’s intellectual circles and
his reviews in Victoria Ocampo’s literary magazine, Sur, were eagerly awaited
every month. Cortázar, to be sure, admired Borges, but also found him dry,
pedantic. At the time he discovered another crucial literary figure to be
attracted to: Roberto Arlt, a Buenos Aires crime reporter and anarchist
whose remarkable sequence of urban nightmares—The Rabid Toy, Seven
Madmen, and The Flame-throwers, published in 1926, 1929, and 1931
respectively—was sold for only a few cents in cheap editions at newspaper
stands.
Borges and Arlt were artistic opposites: while the former was known as
a crafter of overly sophisticated fictions using—perhaps abusing—
bibliographical references and philosophical quotes, the latter was a careless
stylist in close touch with the metropolitan masses. Arlt’s characters are often
anarchists with eccentric ideas plotting to incite the status quo; unable to
control their instincts, they run amok and end up destroying themselves. At
the time Argentine intelligentsia was divided in two major groups,
irrevocable rivals in their esthetic approach: the Florida and Boedo groups,
named after the location of cafés where members of each group used to meet
to chat about literature and politics. Cortázar identified with the author of
“Approach to Almotasim” but was infatuated with Arlt’s adventurous plots
and his use of lunfardo, Argentina’s urban slang. Eventually, he would
oscillate between one pole and the other, becoming a secret disciple of
202 Ilan Stavans
Borges while also constantly paying tribute to his other major influence, Arlt,
by drafting stories where characters look for existential answers in their
convoluted, violent urban environment. Later he moved back to Buenos
Aires, to his mother, sister, and aunt, and began working as a manager of
Camara Argentina del Libro, a government-run printing association. More
or less simultaneously, he applied, was accepted, and registered, in the
Department of Arts and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires, but would
never finish a degree. At the age of 24, under the pseudonym Julio Denís, he
embarked on a young writer’s dream to self-publish his first booklet of
poems, Presence, a collection of Mallarméan sonnets about which he would
have little to say later on. While Peronismo was at its peak, Cortázar met
José Bianco, Victoria Ocampo, and other Argentina intellectuals, and happily
began writing reviews and short essays for Sur, the most prestigious journal
of ideas of the southern cone, to which numerous writers of international
fame contributed between 1931 and 1970, including Roger Caillois, Waldo
Frank, and Hermann de Keyserling. Many of Cortázar’s critical texts in the
journal, while collected in his three-volume Obra Crítica, are little known and
almost forgotten. They are important in that they trace his intellectual
journey, as well as his literary influences, perhaps better than anything he
would create afterwards. Aside from Sur, he also wrote at the time for other
magazines, such as Cabalgata and Realidad. Altogether, these texts on Graham
Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, on Cyril Connolly, André Gide, Eugene
O’Neill, Soren Kierkegaard, Aldous Huxley, and on Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film,
Los olvidados, are a compass that signals the direction in which Cortázar as
novelist and short story writer would take his talent.
The invitation to write for Sur in particular couldn’t have come at a better
moment. More than anything else, it meant somehow to be related to Borges
and his circle of acolytes, to enter the master’s circle of close collaborators.
But Cortázar’s style and concerns immediately distinguished him from the
Borgesian galaxy. In 1948, for instance, he contributed to the magazine an
obituary for Antonin Artaud, considered today the first text in which he
expressed his views on surrealism, a philosophical and artistic movement he
was infatuated with, which left a deep mark on him, and whose promoters,
André Breton, Tristan Tzara, et al., he admired. He had become acquainted
as well with Francisco Ayala, a Spanish émigré who at the time was editing
Realidad. “The vast Surrealist experiment,” he wrote in 1949 in Ayala’s
magazine, “seems to me the highest enterprise modern man has embarked
upon in an attempt to find an integrated humanism. At the same time, the
surrealist attitude (inclined to the liquidation of genres and species) colors
the verbal and plastic creation, incorporating to the movement an irrational

element.” Cortázar wrote for Ayala not only on Breton and Artaud but also
his first overly ambitious essay on the contemporary novel, and, a bit later,
he gave the Spaniard a review of Leopoldo Marechal’s Adam Buenosayres, a
voluminous Argentine novel considered a classic today but at the time
attacked as artistic trash because of its author’s loyalties to Peronismo.
Putting politics aside, Cortázar celebrated Marechal’s style and intelligence
and applauded his portrait of national urban life. The review created a small
scandal in Buenos Aires. He received death threats and was accused of
collaborating with the enemy. The Marechal affair offered Cortázar a type of
exposure he was anxious to get.
In 1949, Cortázar published, with his friend Daniel Devoto’s money, a
theatrical piece (or, as he called it, a dramatic poem): the highly polished The
Kings, based on the myth of the Minotaur. Earlier, throughout the 1940s, he
spent a considerable amount of his time reading pulp fiction. It was not an
unusual interest; his entire generation inherited from the adventures of
British armchair detectives the passion for literature as sleuthing. Indeed,
besides Mallarmé, Keats, Baudelaire, and other Romantics, among
Cortázar’s adolescent passions in the spirit of the time, was police and crime
fiction. It was common for a number of publishing houses in Buenos Aires to
invest in thrillers, and some even contracted luminaries like Borges and the
novelist Ricardo Piglia, author of Artificial Respiration, to direct special series
like El Séptimo Círculo. More than any other Latin American country,
including Mexico, Argentina embraced the tradition of detective, dime, and
hard-boiled novels wholeheartedly. Not only was the subgenre highly
commercial, it was also embraced by the sophisticated elite. Aside from
writing “Death and the Compass,” Borges, together with his longtime
collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, published his collection Six Problems for
Isidro Parodi, humorous tales of detection mocking urban jargon and social
manners. And one year later, the team brought out The Best Detective Stories,
an anthology that displayed the subgenre in its most coolly intellectual
forms. Cortázar read every highbrow and cheap thriller available and, in his
words, became “an expert in the detective story.” So together with a friend,
he prepared a comprehensive bibliography on every thriller available in
Spanish, to be published in the Revista de Bibliotecología, sponsored by the
University of Buenos Aires. They came up with the pseudonym Morton
Heinz, supposedly a distinguished British criminologist in charge of the
bibliography. Their research was tremendous: they began with Edgar Allan
Poe and continued with Willard Huntington Wright (a.k.a. S.S. Van Dine),
Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr.
204 Ilan Stavans
Cortázar studied translation and earned a diploma, which allowed him

to work for various Argentine publishing houses, including Argos and Iman.
He translated G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, André Gide’s
The Immoralist, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jean Giono’s The Birth of the
Odyssey, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Marguerite Yourcenar’s
Memoirs of Hadrian, among other titles. He also embarked on an ambitious
translation of the complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer
profoundly influential in his early career. A slow enterprise, the two-volume
project on the author of Eureka (1848) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845)
would not appear until 1956, under the aegis of the University of Puerto
Rico and Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset’s magazine, Revista de
Occidente. (Cortázar’s future wife, Aurora Bernárdez, would help him
accomplish the task and decades later would be the major force behind
Cortázar’s multivolume Complete Works.) As a young man in his twenties, he
had loved Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, but was now
enamoured of the British Romantic poet John Keats. Around 1946 he even
published a now-forgotten essay on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and less than
ten years later, would embark on a translation of Lord Houghton’s Life and
Letters of John Keats into Spanish.
Cortázar’s adult life materialized in France, first in Paris and then in the small
southern town of Saignon. 1951, indeed, proved to be crucial. His literary
apprenticeship was over. His views on fiction versus reality, on nationalism,
on the role of the intellectual in Latin America, were already formed by then
(he was thirty-six). Although he had begun writing novels, he understood the
short fiction genre as the most valuable tool to explore his own neurosis and
that of South America. He knew it was a most difficult genre to master: you
have to be brief and put the right word in the right place; your reader will
expect to finish the text in one sitting, which means the reader’s attention
span is short and precious. Cortázar soon realized that his challenge in short
fiction was to find the peculiar and bizarre in the routine—to intertwine
dreams and reality. To succeed, he would need to find ways to disappear as
the author, to be detached, to bring the surreal into daily life. As he put it, “I
know I have always been irritated by stories in which the characters have to
wait in the wings while the narrator exploits details or developments from
one situation to another.” He added: “For me the thing that signals a great
story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from
its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.”
Things happened very quickly. In opposition to the Peronist regime,
Cortázar rejected a chair at the University of Buenos Aires. Almost
simultaneously, he was awarded a scholarship from the French government

to study in Paris. Suddenly, exile became an alternative he was happy to
embrace. He thus moved to France, where he would live until his death more
than thirty years later, dividing his time between a small Paris studio in the
Latin Quarter and, later on, an apartment on Place du Général Beluret, and
his summer home in the Provençal town of Saignon, Vaucluse. While in
Europe, he first worked for four months as a translator from French and
English into Spanish for UNESCO but afterwards devoted himself fully to
literature and his passions, boxing and the jazz trumpet.
Choosing exile in France seemed the best option for an avid reader,
would-be writer and polyglot with a perfect command of Voltaire’s language.
Away from Argentina, he would be able to explore his country’s idiosyncracy
through fiction. Distance offers perspective, and perspective brings maturity.
He would have time to meditate and read voraciously, an activity he adored.
More than anything else, he would live at the center of culture, the apex of
civilization, a fact very important since the depressing epoch when he taught
secondary school in Bolivar and Chivilcoy. Deep at heart, Cortázar was tired
of an existence on the periphery. Besides, there’s an old saying among Latin
American writers: “To be acclaimed at home, one first needs to be recognized
abroad.” He had been born in the Old Continent, where he received a
cosmopolitan education during his first few years of life; he was now anxious
to return to his roots. Ironically, once in France, he began missing Argentina.
Exile, he understood, is a universal state, every human an island in an eternal
diaspora. One lives constantly divided, neither here nor there. His linguistic
dilemma soon acquired difficult implications. To be exposed to another
language on a daily basis, to live in another idiom, could eventually be
detrimental to his work. His grammar and syntax were very much a part of the
urban slang on the River Plate. Like Roberto Arlt, he was deeply involved in
recovering through literary tools the arrabal idiosyncracy where lunfardo was
spoken. Would he consider renouncing Spanish and writing in Rabelais’
tongue? Could a literary career in two languages—two universes—be possible?
Borges served as a useful paradigm. His verbal style was unlike
anything ever written in South America: a rigorous attack against
arbitrariness, against clumsiness—an attempt to turn a Romance language
into a meticulous artifact. If anything, Cortázar could inject the French
flavor into his native tongue. After 1951, when the setting of his oeuvre
expanded from Buenos Aires to Paris and to the globe at large—Martinque,
Cuba, Montevideo, Costa Rica, London, Solentiname, etc.—Argentina was
turned into memory. Neither here nor there, he would spend his life
investigating the painful destiny of exile.
206 Ilan Stavans
The month of his departure for Paris, Bestiary, his first volume of
stories, was published by the respected Buenos Aires house, Editorial
Sudamericana. Together with his next two collections, it would be translated
into English, although only in part, some seventeen years later, as Blow-Up
and Other Stories. Although, as with The Kings, the reception was rather poor,
this most impressive book would slowly become a favorite among young
readers and critics, a true original in the Latin American tradition of short
fiction. Then, between 1956 and 1958, he published two other collections.
Juan José Arreola (b. 1918), the Mexican master storyteller who authored
Confabulario and was promoting a new literary generation that included José
Emilio Pacheco and Salvador Elizondo, invited him to submit End of Game
to Los Presentes, for a series under his directorship. The volume was
published in 1956, and expanded with eighteen more stories in 1964 in a
Buenos Aires edition by Sudamericana. And a couple of years later, Secret
Weapons was published also by Sudamericana. The playful (in his own
Spanish wording, lo lúdico) provides a constant theme in all of this work, a
sense of play offering an elaborate set of rules controlling human behavior.
The approach, of course, extends to adulthood and often has serious
overtones. What the Argentine was suggesting was that behind our daily
routine, behind what we call reality, another universe, richer yet chaotic,
seductive yet fabulous, lies hidden, ready to be seized. His objective was to
invite the reader to unveil what at first sight looks like the quotidian: a trivial
laughing stock, a childish stratagem. in an interview in Revista de la
Universidad de México, Cortázar said: “In my case, the suspicion of another
dimension of things, more secret and less communicable, and the fecund
discovery of Alfred Jarry, for whom the true study of reality did not depend
on the knowledge of its laws, but in the exception to such laws, have been
some of the directing principles in my personal search for a literature at the
margin of every naîve realism.”
Humor was also his trademark. His literature attempts to be comic,
albeit not in a light-hearted way. His esthetic approach is to intertwine
parody and sarcasm, to generate a nervous smile on the reader’s face and,
simultaneously, to reflect on a certain mysterious aspect of daily life. His
short fiction investigates the exception to the laws of nature, in Alfred Jarry’s
approach, as if the reader, not the author, were in full charge. Which brings
me to the second element common in his stories published between 1951 and
1959, from Bestiary to Secret Weapons: the fantastic—lo fantástico. “Almost all
the short stories that I have written,” he once said, “belong to the genre
called ‘fantastic’ for lack of a better name, and they oppose the false realism
that consists in believing that all things can be described and explained
according to the philosophical and scientific optimism of the eighteenth

century; that is, as part of a world ruled more or less harmoniously by a
system of laws and principles, of cause and effect relationships or defined
psychologies, of well-mapped geographies.” The fantastic was in vogue in
Buenos Aires in the 1940s. Borges himself is a most distinguished
practitioner. From “The Circular Ruins” to “The Book of Sand,” he
intertwined reality and fiction in essays and tales. Around 1941, in
collaboration with his friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Sylvina Ocampo, he
edited a now-legendary Antología de literatura fantástica—translated into
English as The Book of Fantasy, with a prologue by Ursula Le Guin.
Curiously, Borges and Bioy Casares decided not to include Cortázar in their
volume. He would finally make it in the second, 1965 edition. Several other
Argentines had also been selected, including José Bianco, Santiago Dabove,
Macedonio Fernández, Leopoldo Lugones, Carlos Peralta, and Manuel
Peyrou.
In 1953 Cortázar married Aurora Bernárdez, another Argentine translator, a

very bright and educated woman with whom he visited Italy and Greece,
where he began developing his characters Cronopios and Famas. In a
memoir published in the Mexican magazine Vuelta, which was later used as
the preface to Cortázar’s Complete Stories, the Peruvian-born Spanish novelist
Mario Vargas Llosa recalls meeting the couple: “I met them ... [in 1958],” he
writes, “in the house of a common friend, in Paris, and since then, until the
last time I saw them together, in 1967, in Greece—where the three of us
were translators in an international conference on cotton—I never stopped
being astonished by the spectacle of listening to their dialogue ad tandem.
Everybody else looked like an uninvited guest. Everything they said was
intelligent, sophisticated, enjoyable, vital. I thought many times: ‘They can’t
be always like this. They must rehearse this type of conversations, at home,
in order to impress the listeners with unexpected anecdotes, brilliant quotes
and jokes that, at the correct moment, loosen up the atmosphere a little bit.’”
And Vargas Llosa adds: “It is hard to determine who had read more and
better and which of the two offered more acute comments on books and
writers. The fact that Julio wrote and Aurora only translated (in her case the
word only means something altogether different than its normal connotation)
was something I supposed to be provisional, Aurora’s transitory sacrifice so
that in the family there would only be one writer.”
After 1958, Cortázar, his reputation still limited to a circle of initiated
few, made a fundamental artistic shift: he abandoned the short fiction genre
and devoted himself to the novel. The Winners was his first one published. He
208 Ilan Stavans
thought he needed to explore new narrative horizons and “The Pursuer” was
proof of a desire to expand and be inclusive. After visits to the United States,
mainly Washington, D.C., and New York, he devoted himself to a
transitional work: Cronopios and Famas, playful pseudo-essays now almost
totally forgotten, half non-fiction, half fiction. After he finished the section
on Cronopios, at first mimeographed as a private edition and distributed to
friends, someone suggested he expand certain sections and, thus, the volume
was born. When published, the reaction, unlike the applause he got
welcoming End of the Game and Secret Weapons, was negative. While poets
loved it, critics attacked it for its lack of serious intentions, as if the novelist
had abandoned his style and themes for sheer frivolity. Lacking unity, the
volume, written between 1952 and 1959, in Italy, France, and Argentina, is,
in Cortázar’s own words, “really a game, a fascinating game, very amusing: ...
almost like a tennis match. There were no serious intentions.” Cortázar’s
fame became international when Hopscotch was published in 1963. Along side
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, many critics consider it one
of the premier Latin American literary works of the twentieth century.
Since it appeared, Hopscotch transformed an entire generation. Divided
into two parts, one taking place in France, the other in Buenos Aires, it’s a
pastiche in which news items, recipes, philosophical disquisitions, letters, and
other forms of writing cohabit. The author suggests at least two ways of
reading the volume, although more can be found. It was quickly imitated and
critics continue to praise it as a crucial highlight in what has come to be
known as “the encyclopedic novel,” a type of epistemological novel in which
alternative forms of knowledge find a place. It was immediately celebrated
and had a deep impact on writers like Salman Rushdie, Georges Perec,
Michel Butor, Robert Coover, Fernando del Paso, Carlos Fuentes, John
Barth, and Susan Sontag.
Cuba, the third cultural center in Cortázar’s odyssey, is essential to
understanding him. Indeed, his role under Fidel Castro’s regime is helpful in
understanding the way in which Castro attracted intellectuals only to
manipulate their work and actions. He was initially ecstatic about Havana’s
socialism, but as time went by, in the eyes of many he became a puppet of the
regime in Havana, and as a result of his liaison to Castro, his literary work
lost power and respectability. Indeed, in 1966 Cortázar visited Cuba for the
first time. Since early 1959, Fidel Castro had become a regional idol and
Spanish-speaking intellectuals, after Castro’s invitation to “see the island for
themselves,” considered their role crucial in reeducating the masses along
the road to socialism. Cortázar fell under the tyrant’s spell and became an
active supporter of the revolution. Although he had been involved in
Argentine politics in his adolescence, this no doubt was a reversal of

considerable importance. As stated, in his early creative period (1945–1966)
he had ignored social causes. When critics suggested ideological readings of
his work, he quickly rejected their interpretations. But this attitude changed
in the 1960s. According to Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy Memory of Fire,
Cortázar, at least politically speaking, “... went from the end toward the
beginning; from discouragement to enthusiasm, from indifference to
passion, from solitude to solidarity.” In a letter to his friend the Cuban
intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar, editor of the cultural magazine
Casa de las Américas, dated 10 May 1967, Cortázar wrote:
At times I wonder what my work would have been like if I had

remained in Argentina; I know that I would have continued
writing because I’m not good at anything else, but judging by
what I had done by the time I left my country, I am inclined to
believe that I would have continued along the crowded
thoroughfare of intellectual escapism I had traveled until then
and which is still the path of a great many Argentine intellectuals
of my generation and my taste. If I had to enumerate the causes
for which I am glad I left my country (and let it be very clear that
I am only speaking for myself as an individual and not as any sort
of model), I believe the main one would be the Cuban revolution.
For me to become convinced of this it’s enough to talk from time
to time with Argentine friends who pass through Paris evincing
the saddest ignorance of what is really happening in Cuba; all I
have to do is glance at the newspapers read by twenty million of
my compatriots: that’s enough to make me feel protected here
from the influence that is wielded by U.S. information in my
country and which an infinite number of Argentine writers and
artists of my generation do not escape, even though they
sincerely think they do; every day they are stirred by the
subliminal mill wheels of United Press and “democratic”
magazines that march to the tune of Time and Life.
In essays and lectures he began to support the idea that, while involved
in social and political issues, the writer needs to be left alone to write
literature. He recognized his intellectual responsibility toward the future of
humankind, and yet railed for artistic freedom and against the Communist
concept of Socialist Realism, an esthetic approach to art that had reduced to
silence many Soviet and Eastern European writers like Isaac Babel, the
210 Ilan Stavans
author of Odessa Stories and Red Chivalry, during and after the Second World
War. In 1969, Cortázar participated in a controversial debate with Vargas
Llosa and Oscar Collazos, in which the latter, in the Uruguayan magazine
Marcha, attacked the Latin American boom writers as derivative,
ideologically inconsequential, and sold to the establishment. Cortázar
responded ferociously in an essay entitled “Literature in Revolution &
Revolution in Literature,” in which his views of Socialist Realism and his
attitude toward a revolutionary art became even clearer as he denounced
those on the left who fail to reach a consciousness that “is much more
revolutionary than the revolutionaries tend to have.” In a debate
preposterous from today’s perspective, Cortázar kept on defending the
revolutionary nature of his books. And shortly after, when the Heberto
Padilla affair exploded in 1971, he joined a number of Latin American
writers who signed a letter of protest.
Nevertheless, unlike Octavio Paz and Vargas Llosa, when the affair
became acrimonious he refused to turn his back on the Cuban regime. His
stand put him in a difficult position: he was in favor of artistic freedom but
backed a government that jailed a poet for his writings and later forced the
prisoner to denounce himself openly as counterrevolutionary after what was
clearly a brain-washing and torture session. Cortázar’s deepest political
transformation took place in May 1968, when the student uprising hit Paris
while civil upheaval shook Mexico’s Tlatelolco Square and Prague’s Spring
erupted. Suddenly, he found himself participating on barricades, handing out
fliers denouncing the establishment, and talking about “the imagination of
power.”
When Cortázar died, Octavio Paz wrote a touching obituary in his
literary magazine Vuelta. “He was a cornerstone of contemporary Latin
American letters,” he wrote. “He was my age. Although he lives in Buenos
Aires and I in Mexico, I met him early on, in 1945; the two of us contributed
to Sur, and thanks to José Bianco, we soon began exchanging
correspondence and books. Years later we coincided in Paris and for a while
we saw each other frequently. Later on, I abandoned Europe, lived in the Far
East and returned to Mexico. My relationship with Julio was not interrupted.
In 1968 he and Aurora Bernárdez lived with me and [my wife] Marie José in
our house in New Delhi. It was around that time that Julio discovered
politics and he embraced with fervor and naîveté causes that also ignited me
in the past but that, at that point, I already had judged reproachable. I ceased
to see him, but not to love him. I think he also kept considering me a friend.
Through the barriers of paper and words, we made each other friendly
signs.”
During the 1970s, Cortázar explored in esthetic terms what I call the
art of literary promiscuity. After All Fires the Fire, he published two playful,
amorphous texts, called “collage books”: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds and
Last Round; and in between, 62, A Model Kit, a sequel to Hopscotch, published
in 1968 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, about vampires and city
landscapes, a theme he began treating in La otra orilla. Using traditional
genres wasn’t enough any more; he needed to surmount barriers, to write
prose poems, essayist stories, non-fiction novels—to intertwine separate
structures, imposing chaos. This non-conventional drive went even further.
In 1975 came another rare experiment: Fantomas contra los vampiros
multinacionales. Una utopía realizable, an out-of-print “socialist” comic-strip
that used a famous dime-novel character placed in an ideological war against
aggressive capitalist forces. Just before Cortázar put together his second
poetry collection, Pameos and Meopas; and published what, according to
Ferré, is his most important work: Observatory Prose, a volume of illustrated
essays. He also wrote another novel, A Manual for Manuel, his most
politically outspoken to date, and traveled to Argentina with short visits to
Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, lectured at the University of Oklahoma,
participated in the PEN-sponsored Translation Conference in New York
City, and wrote an important introduction to Felisberto Hernández’s Sunk
House and Other Stories and assessment of Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt.
Indeed, it was obvious at this point in his career that, aside from Borges,
Hernández, Arlt, and Horacio Quiroga had exercised a great influence on
Cortázar’s short stories. Over the decades, in Hernández, whom the
Argentine first read in his thirties, he had found inspiration for stories such
as “House Taken Over” and “End of Game,” which resemble “Inundated
House” and “Las hortensias.” (Curiously, Hernández and Cortázar lived in
Chivilcoy at the same time, in 1939, but apparently they never met). He got
from him the capacity to find “the most subtle relationship between things,
that eyeless dance of the most ancient elements; untouchable smoke and fire;
the high cupola of a cloud and the random message of a simple herb;
everything that is marvelous and obscure in the world.” Arlt he had read in
his twenties. He had admired his “styleless,” chaotic street language, “weak”
prose, the urgency and anarchy of his plots. He found him to be a great
writer who looked for knowledge through the avalanche of darkness and his
own artistic power in his infinite weakness. And in Quiroga he had found the
raw explorer of the South American jungle, both in the concrete and the
imaginary sense, the writer as muscle-man, à la Hemingway—the pathfinder,
the pioneer, the trailblazer who would go penetrate inhospitable habitats and
return to write a magical story about man’s struggle with nature. A decade
212 Ilan Stavans
before his death, Cortázar, through evocative essays and introductions,

established genealogical lines between himself and those he recognized as his
precursors, making sure his oeuvre would be appreciated in the correct
literary tradition.
His political commitment was at its peak in the late 1970s. He had
donated the money of the Prix Médicis to the United Chilean Front. His
liberalism was in sharp contrast with Borges, who was spending his mature
life articulating a right-wing, semi-fascist position in which the artist is
glorified sub specie aeternitatis. Between 1974 and 1983, Cortázar returned to
the short fiction genre to write four more collections. “Politics in a work of
literature,” wrote Stendhal, “is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert,
something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to
refuse one’s attention.” In the case of Cortázar, the pistol-shot is apparent in
a handful of tales, written as he reassessed his whole oeuvre in intellectual
terms.
By the early 1980s Cortázar had fashioned a new world of fiction. He

accepted President François Mitterand’s offer to become a French citizen in
1981. He did it while insisting he was not relinquishing his Argentine
citizenship but the event was interpreted as a betrayal by many in Latin
America. Since his departure to Europe thirty years before, Cortázar had
been attacked by Latin American nationalists as an escapee. In his final
collection of prose poems, Except Dusk, he included a number of texts written
in 1949–1950, concerning his eternal identity dilemma: to live in Paris or
return to Buenos Aires—exile or home. Feeling, as he did, an endless
searcher for the ultimate Paradise, he could not go back: he wasn’t an
Argentine anymore—he had given up his native citizenship—but he wasn’t a
European either because he had immigrated to the Old Continent. Like
many of his short fiction characters, he was now a hybrid, a sum of identities.
His life had been made of endless farewells and he no longer knew where he
belonged. His writing was manifesting this identity conflict in an explicit
way.
Mexico and Nicaragua are also crucial to an understanding of
Cortázar’s odyssey. The first one was a decisive cultural center in the 1960s
and 1970s, where innumerable South American exiles sought refuge. The
Argentine had a large circle of friends there and many of his books were first
published by progressive Mexican houses, including Siglo XXI and Nueva
Imagen. As for Nicaragua, his attachment to left-wing causes since the early
days of Castro’s regime made him sympathize, in the late 1970s and early
1980s, with Darnel Ortega’s Sandinistas. Some of his most memorable late-
period stories are set in Central America, including “Apocalypse in

Solentiname,” about reality versus fiction, freedom versus repression in a
small Indian town in Nicaragua in which Ernesto Cardenal had built a
Marxist community inspired by liberation theology. Also, like Carlos
Fuentes, he was honored with the Rubén Darío medal by the Sandinistas.
In 1983 he traveled to Cuba one last time and then to New York to
address the United Nations concerning the desaparecidos in South America.
He felt lonely and isolated, especially now that a strange sickness began
taking over his body. He lost appetite, became thinner, and was predisposed
to colds. After his divorce from Aurora Bernárdez some fifteen years earlier,
he had been involved with a number of women and men, engaging in
bisexual affairs. Among his companions was Ugné Karvelis, a blond, tall,
Latvian woman who worked for Gallimard and was director of the Spanish
section of that publishing house. Karvelis had a son with another man whom
Cortázar loved dearly, but he never had children with her or anyone else.
When they separated, he became involved with Carol Dunlop. Their
relationship was brief but intense—she died in 1983 and as Cortázar told
Luis Harss, his solitude was so deep he began to lose trust in his own writing.
His most romantic friends still claim he died of “aloneness”—soledad.
But it has been rumored for years that he actually died of AIDS. The
epidemic was still unknown then, its details elusive to scientists and the
masses, so he probably knew little about it. Interestingly, a number of
Cortázar tales deal with homosexuality, including “Blow-Up,” “The Ferry, or
Another trip to Venice,” and “At Your Service,” the last about Madame
Francinet, an old servant woman employed as a babysitter for dogs in a
wealthy home. After reading it, Evelyn Picón Garfield asked Cortázar about
homosexuality. He answered with a lengthy dissertation on the subject, a
history from Greek times to the present social ostracism. “The attitude
toward [it],” he added, “has to be a very broad and open one because the day
in which homosexuals don’t feel like corralled beasts, or like persecuted
animals or like beings that everyone makes fun of, they’ll assume a much
more normal way of life and fulfill themselves erotically and sexually without
harming anyone and by being happy as much as possible as homosexual
males and females.” And he finished by applauding the fashion in which, in
some capitalistic societies, they are more accepted. While discussing
Cortázar’s sickness and death, one should reflect on machismo,
homosexuality, and hypocrisy in the Hispanic world, an issue still shockingly
absent in cultural debate. In spite of his outspoken political views the
Argentine was reluctant to talk openly about his sexuality. And he certainly
isn’t alone: Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas, and Severo Sarduy, openly
214 Ilan Stavans
homosexual, also died from AIDS—although only Arenas wanted the world
to know the truth. Which means that, for as much as Latin American writers
are ready to become speakers of the oppressed, only one or two are
committed to assuming their gay identity in the open.
Cortázar died in Paris, on 12 February 1984, and left numerous
imitators and countless literary followers, including Argentines Luisa
Valenzuela and Ana María Shua. I remember the morning I read the headline
in Excélsior, Mexico’s leading newspaper: “Latin America looses its favorite
child: Julio Cortázar, dead at 69.” A continental treasure had been lost and
the sense of sadness was overwhelming. The obituary declared the cause of
his death to be leukemia and heart disease. He died in Saint Lazare hospital
and is buried in Montparnasse cemetery. That same year, four more books
were published: Nicaraguan Sketches; Nothing for Pehujó, a play in one act;
Except Dusk, a collection of prose poems, and a bit later the prestigious
Spanish publishing house Plaza y Janés brought out a collection of his
political writings. Shortly after The Exam, his first novel, written in 1950,
before he left for France and stored in a drawer, finally appeared in print.
The curiosity regarding his background and early literary steps had begun.
Like few others, he seems to embody the refreshing spirit of renewal
and innovation that prevailed in the Woodstock generation: art as liberator,
art as excuse to innovate and unstabilize, to establish a bridge between and
highbrow and pop culture. His name brings back memories of the Vietnam
War and Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, an idol of the drugs-for-all fever that
characterized the 1960s. But he was also an incredibly concentrated
storyteller, one with a distinct world view, his oeuvre a masterful cornerstone
in contemporary Latin American literature that led the Hispanic
intelligentsia to new heights. So justice to his talents: The post–World War
II novelistic and short-story genres written in Spanish, and the renewal of the
novel on an international scale, would simply be impossible without Julio
Cortázar.
M A R I O VA R G A S L L O S A
Translated by Dane Johnson
The Trumpet of Deyá
for Aurora Bernárdez
T hat Sunday in 1984, I had just set myself up in my study to write an

article when the telephone rang. I did something that even then I never did:
I picked up the receiver. “Julio Cortázar has died;” the voice of the journalist
commanded: “Dictate to me your comment.”
I thought of a verse from Vallejo—“Stupid as a Spaniard”—and,
babbling, I obeyed him. But that Sunday, instead of writing the article, I kept
leafing through and rereading some of Cortázar’s stories and pages from his
novels that my memory had preserved so vividly. It had been some time since
I had heard anything about him. I suspected neither his prolonged illness nor
his painful agony. But it made me happy to know that Aurora had been at his
side during those last months and that, thanks to her, he had a sober burial,
without the foreseeable clowning of the revolutionary ravens who had taken
such advantage of him in his last years.
I had met both of them some forty years ago at the house of a mutual
friend in Paris. Since then—until the last time I saw them together, in
Greece in 1967, where the three of us worked as translators at an
international conference on cotton—I had never stopped marveling at the
spectacle of seeing and hearing Aurora and Julio converse in tandem. The
rest of us seemed to be superfluous. Everything they said was intelligent,
From The Review of Contemporary Fiction vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1997). © 1997 The Review of
Contemporary Fiction.
215
216 Mario Vargas Llosa
learned, amusing, vital. Many times I thought, “They can’t always be like
this. They must rehearse those conversations at home in order to dazzle
interlocutors with unusual anecdotes, brilliant quotations, and those jokes
that, at the opportune moment, burst the intellectual climate.”
They tossed subjects from one to the other like two accomplished
jugglers. With them, one was never ever bored. I admired and envied that
couple’s perfect complicity, the secret intelligence that seemed to unite them.
I admired, equally, their sympathy, their engagement with literature (which
gave the impression of being exclusive and total), and their generosity toward
everyone, above all, to apprentices like me.
It was difficult to determine who had read more or better or which of
the two said more acute and unexpected things about books and authors.
That Julio wrote and Aurora only translated (in her case this only means
completely the opposite of what it seems) is something that I always
supposed was provisional, a passing sacrifice by Aurora so that, in the family,
there would be at that moment no more than one writer. Now that I see her
again, after so many years, I have bitten my tongue the two or three times I
was at the point of asking if she had written much, if she had finally decided
to publish. Except for her gray hair, she looks the same: small, petite, with
those big blue eyes full of intelligence and the old overwhelming vitality. She
climbs up and down the Mallorcan rocks of Deyá with an agility that always
leaves me behind with palpitations. She too, in her own way, displays that
Cortazarian virtue par excellence: to be a Dorian Gray.
That night at the end of 1958, I sat with a very tall and thin beardless
boy who had very short hair and big hands that moved as he spoke. He had
already published a small book of tales and was about to re-edit a second
compilation for a small series in Mexico directed by Juan José Arreola. I was
about to bring out a book of stories too, and we exchanged experiences and
projects like two youngsters “who set sail under literary arms.” Only upon
saying good night did I become aware—stunned—that this was the author of
Bestiario (Bestiary) and so many texts that I read in Borges and Victoria
Ocampo’s journal Sur, as well as the admirable translator of the complete
works of Poe that I had devoured in the two opulent volumes published by
the University of Puerto Rico. He seemed to me a contemporary when, in
reality, he was twenty-two years older than I.
During the sixties and, especially, the seven years that I lived in Paris,
he was one of my best friends and also something like my model and my
mentor. I gave him the manuscript of my first novel to read and awaited his
verdict with the expectancy of a catechumen. And when I received his
letter—generous, with approval and advice—I felt happy. I believe that for a
long time I was accustomed to writing presupposing his vigilance, his

encouraging or critical eyes over my shoulder. I admired his life, his rituals,
his caprices, and his customs as much as the ease and clarity of his prose and
that everyday, domestic, and cheerful appearance that he gave the fantastic
subjects in his stories and novels. Each time that he and Aurora called to
invite me for dinner—first at the small apartment bordering on the Rue de
Sèvres, and later at the little house spiraling from the Rue du Général
Bouret—it was fiesta and felicity. I was fascinated by his board of unusual
news clippings and improbable objects that were picked up or fabricated. I
was intrigued by “the room of toys”: the mysterious place that existed in their
house in which, according to legend, Julio would lock himself up to play the
trumpet and enjoy himself like a kid. He knew a secret and magical Paris that
did not show up in any guidebook and from which I left loaded with treasures
after each encounter with him: films to see, exhibitions to visit, nooks in
which to forage, poets to discover, and even a congress of witches at the
Mutualité that bored me exceedingly but that he evoked afterward,
marvelously, as a jocular apocalypse.
With this Julio Cortázar it was possible to be a friend but impossible to
become intimate. The distance that he knew how to impose, thanks to a
system of courtesies and rules to which one had to submit to conserve his
friendship, was one of his enchantments. It enveloped him with a certain aura
of mystery. It gave to his life a secret dimension that seemed to be the source
of that restless depth—irrational and violent—that transpires at times in his
texts, even the most ragamuffin and cheerful. He was an eminently private
man with an interior world constructed and preserved like a work of art to
which probably only Aurora had access, and for whom nothing, outside of
literature, seemed to matter or, maybe, exist.
This does not mean that he was bookish, erudite, and intellectual in the
manner of a Borges, for example, who with all justice wrote: “Many things I
have read and few have I lived.” In Julio literature seemed to dissolve itself
into daily experience and impregnate all of life, animating it and enriching it
with a particular brilliance without depriving it of sap, of instinct, of
spontaneity. Probably no other writer lent to play the literary dignity that
Cortázar did, nor made of play an instrument of artistic creation and
exploration so ductile and beneficial. But saying this in such a serious way
alters the truth because Julio did not play in order to make literature. For
him, to write was to play, to enjoy oneself, to organize life—words, ideas—
with the arbitrariness, the liberty, the imagination, and the irresponsibility of
children or the insane. But playing in this way, Cortázar’s work opened
unpublished doors. It arrived to show some unknown depths of the human
condition and to graze the transcendent, something that surely never had
been intended. It is no accident (or, if it is, it is in that sense of the accidental
that he described in 62: A Model Kit) that the most ambitious of his novels
would take as its title Hopscotch, a children’s game.
Like the novel, like theater, the game is a form of fiction: an artificial
order imposed on the world, a representation of something illusory that
replaces life. It distracts us from ourselves, serving us in forgetting the true
reality and living—while the substitution lasts—a life apart from strict rules
created by ourselves. Distraction, enjoyment, fabulation—the game is also a
magic resource for exorcising the atavistic fear of humans toward the secret
anarchy of the world, the enigma of our origin, condition, and destiny. Johan
Huizinga, in his celebrated book Homo Ludens, maintained that play is the
spine of civilization and that society evolved up to modernity ludically,
constructing its institutions, systems, practices, and creeds starting from
those elemental forms of ceremony and ritual that characterize the games of
children.
In the world of Cortázar the game recovers this lost virtuality of serious
activity that adults use to escape insecurity, to avoid panic before an
incomprehensible and absurd world full of dangers. It is true that his
characters enjoy themselves playing, but many times it has to do with
dangerous diversions that will leave them not only forgotten passengers of
their circumstances but also with some outrageous knowledge or alienation
or death.
In other cases the Cortazarian game is a refuge for sensibility and
imagination, the way in which delicate, ingenuous beings defend themselves
against social steamrollers or, as he wrote in the most mischievous of his
books, Cronopios and Famas, “to struggle against pragmatism and the horrible
tendency toward the attainment of useful ends.” His games are pleas against
the prefabricated, against ideas frozen by use and abuse, prejudices, and,
above all, against solemnity, the black beast for Cortázar when he criticized
the culture and idiosyncrasies of his country.
But I talk of “the” game and, in truth, I should use the plural. In the
books of Cortázar the author plays, the narrator plays, the characters play,
and the reader plays, obligated to do so by the devilish traps that lie in wait
around the corner of the least expected page. And there is no doubt that it is
enormously liberating and refreshing to find oneself suddenly, without
knowing how, parodying statues, rescuing words from the cemetery of
academic dictionaries to resuscitate them with puffs of humor, or jumping
between the heaven and hell of hopscotch—all due to Cortázar’s sleight of
hand.
The effect of Hopscotch was seismic in the Spanish-speaking world when

it appeared in 1963. It rocked to the foundations the convictions and
prejudices that writers and readers had about the means and ends of the art
of narration, and it extended the frontiers of the genre to unthinkable limits.
Thanks to Hopscotch, we learned that to read was a brilliant way of enjoying
oneself, that it was possible to explore the secrets of the world and of
language while having fun. And we learned that playing, one could probe
mysterious layers of life forbidden to rational knowledge, to logical
intelligence, abysses of experience over which no one can lean out without
grave risks like death or insanity. In Hopscotch reason and unreason, sleep and
vigil, objectivity and subjectivity, history and fantasy all lose their exclusive
condition. Their frontiers are eclipsed. They stop being antonyms in order
to become fused. In that way certain privileged beings, like la Maga and
Oliveira, and the celebrated “madmen” of his future books, could flow freely.
(Like many couples reading Hopscotch in the sixties, Patricia and I also began
to speak in “gliglish,” to invent a private lingo and to translate to its
snapping, esoteric terms our tender secrets.)
Together with the notion of play, that of freedom is indispensable when
one speaks of Hopscotch and all the fictions of Cortázar. Freedom to break the
established norms of writing and structuring narrative, to replace the
conventional order of the narrative by a buried order that has the semblance
of disorder, to revolutionize narrative point of view, narrative time, the
psychology of the characters, the spatial organization of the story, and its
logical sequence. The tremendous insecurity that, as the novel proceeds,
comes to take possession of Horacio Oliveira in confronting the World (and
confining him more and more in an imagined shelter), accompanies the
reader of Hopscotch as he enters this labyrinth and lets himself be led astray
by the Machiavellian narrator in the twists and turns and ramifications of
anecdote. Nothing there is reconcilable and sure: not the direction not the
meanings nor the symbols nor the ground that one treads on. What are they
telling me? Why don’t I just understand it? Are we dealing with something
so mysterious and complex that it is beyond our apprehension? Or is it a
monumental pulling of our leg? We are dealing with both. In Hopscotch and
in many Cortázar stories, the mockery, the joke, and the illusionism of the
salon are often present, like the little animal figures that certain virtuosos
conjure up with their hands or the coins that disappear between the fingers
and reappear in the ears or the nose. But often, too—like in those famous
absurd episodes of Hopscotch that star the pianist Bertha Trépat, in Paris, and
the one with the plank over the emptiness on which Talita balances, in
Buenos Aires—these episodes subtly transmute themselves into a descent to
the cellars of behavior, to Its remote irrational sources, to an immutable

essence—magic, barbarous, ceremonial—of the human experience that
underlies rational civilization and, under certain circumstances, rises up to
disturb it. (This is the theme of some of Cortázar’s best stories, like “The
Idol of the Cyclades” and “The Night Face Up,” in which we suddenly see a
remote and ferocious past of bloody gods that must be satiated with human
victims bursting into the womb of modern life and without a continuous
solution.)
Hopscotch stimulated formal audacities in the new Hispano-American
writers like few books before or after, but it would be unjust to call it an
experimental novel. This qualification emits an abstract and pretentious
odor. It suggests a world of test tubes, retorts, and blackboards with algebraic
calculations, something disembodied, dissociated from immediate life, from
desire and pleasure. Hopscotch overflows life from all its pores. It is an
explosion of freshness and movement, of youthful exaltation and irreverence,
a resonant loud laugh in front of those writers who, as Cortázar used to say,
put on their collar and necktie in order to write. He always wrote in shirt
sleeves, with the informality and happiness with which one sits at the table to
enjoy a home-cooked meal or listens to a favorite record in the intimacy of
one’s room. Hopscotch taught us that laughter was not the enemy of
seriousness nor of those illusory and ridiculous things that can nestle in
experimental zeal when it is taken too seriously. In the same way that the
Marquis de Sade exhausted beforehand all of the possible excesses of sexual
cruelty, Hopscotch constituted a fortunate apotheosis of the formal game to
the extent that any “experimental” novel would be born old and repetitive.
For this reason, Cortázar, like Borges, has bad uncountable imitators, but not
one disciple.
To un-write the novel, to destroy literature, to break the habits of the
“lady reader,” to un-adorn words, to write badly, etc.—all that on which
Morelli of Hopscotch insists so much—are metaphors of something very
simple: literature asphyxiates itself with an excess of convention and
seriousness. It is necessary to purge it of rhetoric and of commonplaces, to
endow it again with novelty, grace, insolence, freedom. Cortázar’s style has
all of this, above all when it distances itself from the pompous miracle-
working prosopopeia with which his alter ego Morelli pontificates about
literature, that is to say in his stories. Those, generally, are more diaphanous
and creative than his novels, although they do not display the showy rocketry
that surrounds those last ones like a halo.
Cortázar’s stories are no less ambitious or iconoclastic than his longer
texts. But what is original and groundbreaking in the latter is usually more
metabolized in the stories, rarely exhibiting in them the immodest

virtuousity of Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit, and A Manual for Manuel, where the
reader has at times the sensation of being subjected to certain tests of
intellectual efficiency. Those novels are revolutionary manifestos, but
Cortázar’s true revolution lies in his stories. It is more discreet but more
profound and permanent because it aroused the very nature of fiction, its
indissoluble heart that is the form–depth, means–ends, and art–technique
that fiction becomes in the hands of the most successful creators. In his
stories Cortázar did not experiment: he found, he discovered, he created
something permanent.
In the same way, just as the label experimental writer falls short, it
would be insufficient to call him a writer of the fantastic, although, without
a doubt, if we were to give labels, he would have preferred the latter. Julio
loved the literature of the fantastic and knew it like the back of his hand. He
wrote some marvelous stories of that sort in which extraordinary events
occur, like the impossible change of a man into a little aquatic beast in the
small masterpiece “Axolotl”; or the somersault, thanks to intensifying
enthusiasm, of a trivial concert into an immoderate massacre in which the
feverish public jumps onto the stage to devour the conductor and the
musicians in “Las Ménades” (The Maenads). But he also wrote illustrious
stories of more orthodox realism: like that marvel “Little Bull,” the story of
a boxer’s decadence, told by himself, that is, in truth, the story of his way of
speaking, a linguistic feast of grace, musicality, and humor, and the invention
of a style with the flavor of the neighborhood, of the idiosyncrasies and
mythology of the people; or like “The Pursuer,” which is narrated from a
subtle preterit perfect that dissolves into the present of the reader,
subliminally evoking in this way the gradual dissolution of Johnny, the
brilliant jazzman whose deluded search for the absolute by way of the
trumpet arrives to us by means of the “realist” reduction (rational and
pragmatic) carried out by a critic and Johnny’s biographer, the narrator
Bruno.
In reality Cortázar was a writer of realism and the fantastic at the same
time. The world that he invented is unmistakable precisely because of that
strange symbiosis that Roger Caillois considered necessary for the right to be
called the fantastic. In his prologue to the anthology of literature of the
fantastic that he prepared, Caillois maintained that the art of the truly
fantastic is not born out of the deliberation of its creator but escapes between
his intentions through the work of chance or of more mysterious forces. In
the same way, he goes on, the fantastic does not come out of a technique, nor
is it a literary image, but rather it is the imponderable—a reality that without
premeditation suddenly happens in a literary text. From a long and

impassioned conversation in a bistro in Montparnasse about Carriers’s thesis,
I remember Julio’s enthusiasm for it and his surprise when I assured him that
that theory seemed to me to fit what occurred in his fictions like a glove.
In the Cortazarian world banal reality begins insensibly to crack and to
give in to some hidden pressures that push it up to the prodigious without
participating fully in it, maintaining it as a sort of intermediary, tense, and
disconcerting territory in which the real and the fantastic overlap without
integrating. This is the world of “Blow-Up,” of “Cartas de mamá” (Letters
from Mama), of “Secret Weapons,” of “La puerta condenada” (The Blocked-
Off Door), and of so many other stories of ambiguous solution that can be
equally interpreted as realistic or fantastic since the extraordinary in them is,
perhaps, a fantasy of the characters or, perhaps, a miracle.
This is the famous ambiguity that characterizes certain classics of
fantastic literature, exemplified in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw: a
delicate story that the master of the uncertain managed to tell in such a way
that there would be no possibility of knowing if the fantastic that occurs in
the story—the appearance of ghosts—really occurs or is the hallucination of
a character. What differentiates Cortázar from a James, from a Poe, from a
Borges, or from a Kafka is not the ambiguity or the intellectualism—which
are propensities as frequent in him as in them—but that in Cortázar’s fictions
the most elaborate and learned stories never die and transfer themselves to
the abstract. They continue rooted in the daily reality, the concrete. They
have the vitality of a soccer match or a barbecue. The surrealists invented the
expression “the daily marvelous” for that poetic reality—mysterious,
loosened from contingency and scientific laws—that the poet can perceive
underneath appearances by way of dreaming or delirium. This marvelous
reality generates books like Aragon’s Paris Peasant or Breton’s Nadia. But I
believe that no other writer of our time fits this definition as well as Cortázar:
a seer who detected the unusual in the usual, the absurd in the logical, the
exception in the rule, and the prodigious in the banal. Nobody dignified so
literally the foreseeable, the conventional, the pedestrian of human life than
he, who, with the juggling of his pen, denoted a hidden tenderness or
exhibited an immoderate face, sublime and horrifying—to the extent that,
passed by his hands, instructions for winding a watch or ascending a staircase
could be, at the same time, anguished prose poems and laughter-inducing
pseudometaphysical texts.
Style is the explanation of that alchemy in Cortázar’s fictions that fuses
the most unreal fantasy with the merry life of the body and of the street, the
unconditionally free life of the imagination with the restricted life of the
body and of history. His is a style that marvelously feigns orality, the fluent
ease of common speech, spontaneous expression, with neither the makeup
nor the impudence of the common man. We are dealing with an illusion,
because, in reality, the common man expresses himself with complications,
repetitions, and confusions that wouldn’t work if translated to writing. The
language of Cortázar is also an exquisitely fabricated fiction, an artifice so
effective that it seems natural, like talk reproduced from life that flows to the
reader directly from the mouths and animated tongues of men and women
of flesh and blood. It is a language so transparent and even that it blends with
that which it names—the situations, the things, the being, the landscapes, the
thoughts—to show it better, like a discreet glow that illuminates from within
their authenticity and truth. Cortázar’s fictions owe their powerful
verisimilitude to this style. It is the breath of humanity that beats in all of
them, even in the most intricate. The functionality of his style is such that
the best texts of Cortázar seem spoken.
Nevertheless, this stylistic clarity often deceives us, making us believe
that the content of these stories is also diaphanous, a world without shadows.
We are dealing with more skilled sleight of hand because, in truth, that world
is charged with violence. Suffering, anguish, and fear relentlessly pursue its
inhabitants, those who often take refuge (like Horacio Oliveira) in madness
or something that appears much like it to escape what is unbearable in their
condition. Ever since Hopscotch, the mad have occupied a central place in
Cortázar’s work. But madness begins to appear in it in a deceptive way,
without the accustomed reverberations of threat or tragedy. It is more like a
cheerful, even tender, impudence, the manifestation of the essential
absurdity that nestles in the world behind its masks of rationality and good
sense. Cortázar’s madmen are most affectionate and almost always benign,
obsessive beings with disconcerting linguistic, literary, social, political, or
ethical projects to—like Ceferino Pérez—recorder and reclassify existence
according to delirious nomenclatures. Between the chinks of their
extravagances, they always leave a glimpse of something that redeems and
justifies: a dissatisfaction with the given, a confused search for another life,
more unforeseeable and poetic (at times nightmarish) than that in which we
are confined. Sometimes children, sometimes dreamers, sometimes jokers,
sometimes actors, Cortázar’s madmen radiate a defenselessness and a fortune
of moral integrity that, while awakening an inexplicable solidarity on our
part, also makes us feel accused.
Play, madness, poetry, humor—all become allied like alchemic
mixtures in those miscellanies (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Ultimo Round
[Last Round], and the testimony of that absurd final pilgrimage on a French
highway, Los autonautas de la cosmopista [Autonauts of the Cosmopike]) where

he overturned his inclinations, manias, obsessions, sympathies, and phobias
with a happy adolescent brashness. These three books are other poles of a
spiritual autobiography, and they seem to mark a continuity in his life and
work, in his manner of conceiving and practicing literature as a permanent
impudence, a jocular irreverence. But we are also dealing with a mirage
because, at the end of the sixties, Cortázar underwent one of those
transformations that, as he would say, “occur only in literature.” In this, too,
Julio was an unpredictable “cronopio.”
Cortázar’s change (the most extraordinary that I have seen in any being
and a mutation that it occurred to me often to compare with that of the
narrator of “Axolotl”) took place, according to the official version—which he
himself consecrated—in France of May 1968. He was seen in those
tumultuous days on the barricades of Paris, distributing pamphlets of his own
invention, mixing with the students who wanted to elevate “imagination to
power.” He was fifty-four years old; the sixteen that remained of his life
would be as a writer engaged with socialism: the defender of Cuba and
Nicaragua, the signer of manifestos, and the habitué of revolutionary
congresses right up to his death.
In his case, unlike so many of our colleagues who opted for a similar
militancy but due rather to snobbism or opportunism (a modus vivendi and
a manner of social climbing in the intellectual establishment that was, and in
a certain form continues to be, a monopoly of the left in the Spanish-
speaking world), the change was genuine. It was dictated more by ethics than
by ideology (to which he continued to be allergic) and by a total coherence.
His life was organized around it and it became public, almost promiscuous,
and a good part of his work was devoted to circumstance and current events.
This work even seemed written by another Person, very distinct from the
man who, previously, perceived politics with ironic disdain, as something
distant. (I remember the time I wanted him to meet Juan Goytisolo: “I
abstain,” he joked, “he’s too political for me.”) In this second stage of his life
(as in the first, although in a distinct manner) he gave more than he received.
Although I believe he was often mistaken—as when he said that all the
crimes of Stalinism were a mere “accident de parcours” of communism—
even in those equivocations there was such manifest innocence and
ingenuousness that it was difficult to lose respect for him. I never lost it, nor
the affection and friendship that, although at a distance, survived all our
political differences.
But Julio’s change was much more profound and encompassing than
that of political action. I am sure that it began a year before the events of ‘68,
when he separated from Aurora. In 1967, as I already said, the three of us

were in Greece working together as translators. We passed the mornings and
the afternoons seated at the same table in the conference hall of the Hilton
and the nights in the restaurants of Plaka, at the foot of the Acropolis, where
we went invariably to dine. Together we passed through museums, Orthodox
churches, temples, and, one weekend, we visited the tiny island of Hydra.
When I returned to London, I told Patricia, “The perfect couple exists.
Aurora and Julio have learned how to realize that miracle: a happy marriage.”
A few days later, I received a letter from Julio announcing his separation. I
don’t think I have ever felt so misled.
The next time I returned to see him, in London with his new partner,
he was another person. He had let his hair grow, and he had a reddish and
imposing beard like a biblical prophet. He made me take him to buy erotic
magazines, and he spoke of marijuana, women, and revolution as he had
spoken of jazz and ghosts before. There was always this warm sympathy in
him, that total lack of pretension or of the poses that almost inevitably
become unbearable in successful writers when they hit fifty. I should add that
he had returned more fresh and youthful, but it was hard to relate him to the
man I once knew. Every time that I saw him afterward—in Barcelona, in
Cuba, in London, or in Paris, in congresses or roundtables, in social or
conspiratorial meetings—I remained each time more perplexed than the
time before: Was it him? Was it Julio Cortázar? Of course it was him, but
this Julio was like the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly or the fakir of the
story who after dreaming with maharajas opened his eyes and was seated on
a throne surrounded by courtesans who paid him homage.
This other Julio Cortázar, it seems to me, was less personal and creative
as a writer than the earlier one. But I have the suspicion that, to compensate,
he had a more intense life and, because of this, was happier than the one
before in that, as he wrote, existence transformed itself for him into a book.
At least, every time I saw him, he seemed to me young, excitable, game.
If anybody knows, it would be Aurora, of course. I am not so
impertinent as to ask her about it. Nor do we speak much of Julio, in those
warm days of summer at Deyá. Yet he is always there, behind all the
conversations, taking the counterpoint with the dexterity of that time. The
cottage, half-hidden among the olive trees, the cypresses, the bougainvilleas,
the lemon trees, and the hortensias, exhibits the order and mental cleanliness
of Aurora, naturally. It is an immense pleasure to feel, on the small terrace
next to the ravine, the decadence of the day, the breeze of nightfall, and to
see the sliver of moon appear at the crest of the hill. From time to time, I
hear a discordant trumpet. There isn’t anybody around. The sound comes,
then, from this poster in the rear of the living room where a lanky and
beardless boy with a military haircut and a short-sleeve shirt—the Julio
Cortázar that I knew—plays his favorite game.
LUCILLE KERR
Betwixt Reading and Repetition

(apropos of Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit)
W hen asked about his views of 62: A Model Kit and its relation to other
of his texts, Cortázar once stated the following: “When I finished Hopscotch,
and above all when Hopscotch was published, readers reacted as they normally
do when they wait for the author to write something like a second part to the
text.... [but] that seems to me a completely unacceptable requirement. I have
a very good relationship with my readers, but not to the extent of following
their instructions” (Cortázar/Sosnowski 1985, 47). Despite his resistance to
being instructed, as it were, by his readers, and despite his desire, if not
design, to break with the project of the 1963 text and take his next novel in
a different direction, Cortázar went on to confess that when he actually
wrote 62 he found himself explicitly invoking Hopscotch by recalling one of its
most important figures’ proposals. He explained: “When I felt the desire to
write another novel I decided to do something that didn’t have anything to
do with Hopscotch. But, oddly, what is said at the beginning in its title, in 62,
is where I take off from a reflection of Morelli in one of his brief notes in
Hopscotch, to see if it is possible to write a novel that rejects psychological
behavior, the law of causality that determines the different interactions
between individuals “based on their feelings” (48).1
Cortázar’s reference to the well-known explanation of the novel’s title
in what has generally been read as an authorial preface to 62 might be viewed
From Julio Cortázar: New Readings. © 1998 Cambridge University Press.
227
228 Lucille Kerr
in a number of ways. If one takes his observations as a possible, even

necessary, frame for an overall consideration of 62, one is led not only around
that text but also among questions that pertain to how one might read his
work overall. Moreover, Cortázar’s comments about the 1968 novel and its
relation to Hopscotch recall the literary and theoretical questions engaged
both by his most famous work and by its successor. Though different stories
are told in each of these novels, between the two texts Cortázar addresses
pivotal notions about narrative fiction and interrogates conventional critical
figures (e.g., author, reader, character) in an idiosyncratic but not
insignificant manner.
Cortázar’s insistence on authorial prerogative in the face of his readers’
actual or potential demands is an odd but apt disclosure. As we recall,
Hopscotch would have initially involved its readers in a seemingly democratic,
if not entirely egalitarian, relation between this same author and his
audience.2 Cortázar’s return to the 1963 text’s proposals—or rather to the
proposals of its resident author-theorist, Morelli—is a telling gesture that
both repeats and repositions some of his provocative notions about narrative
literature. The author’s uncontrollable return to a previous text would, it
seems, prescribe the route that any reader of 62 might appear to have to take
in order to read the 1968 text properly.
The reading model implicitly proposed by the author, however, would
have the reader execute some unsettling maneuvers. The route required for
that reading would virtually repeat an authorial operation that is supposedly
at the origin of 62, a text whose originality, and unconventionality, the
requisite return to Hopscotch also disputes. Furthermore, such a reading
would run the risk of belying the redundant, if not tautological, operations
that the “required” reading of 62 could entail. However, the readings already
produced around this text suggest that it may be difficult, and for some
impossible, to resist returning to the previous novel. For many readers it has
also been difficult to resist repeating the author’s words—more specifically,
his critical terminology—that seem to resonate so forcefully around, and also
within, 62. Indeed, Cortázar’s novel recalls the uncontrollable repetitions
that inform both his authorial activity and the critical corpus generated by
this novel.3
The author’s word around this text (as represented by the quotations
above), as well as the authorial words that seem to initiate it (i.e., in the
prefatory statement) push one to interrogate the parameters for reading 62
and perhaps even Cortázar’s literary project as a whole. One of the questions
one might ask after reading, or rereading, 62 is whether it is possible to talk
about this text without in some way privileging the author’s word about it. By
Betwixt Reading and Repetition 229
opening with what the reader is urged to take as an authentic authorial

statement, and under the guise of guiding the reader to read independently
(like Hopscotch that precedes it), 62 would underscore the apparent difficulty
of reading on one’s own. It suggests that one must turn to the author’s word
not only for instructions about how to read but perhaps also for information
about what is being read.4 From the outset 62 poses a variety of questions
about reading, questions that seem to be anticipated if not answered in the
prefatory comments where the author appears to speak directly to the reader
about the novel. As we recall, the authorial statement raises expectations
about the possibility of breaking with conventional concepts and practices
(“Not a few readers will notice various transgressions of literary convention
here”; 3).5 These opening words, which have received much attention,
predict readers’ reactions to some of the text’s unsettling narrative strategies
(i.e., it is imagined that some readers “might possibly be startled”; 3). The
words guarantee “the reader’s option” to read and make meaning
independently of the arrangements found in the text prepared and presented
by the author (3–4). The statement also locates the text’s narrative and
theoretical origins in chapter 62 of Hopscotch, from which the novel openly
derives its title. (The text mentions “the intentions sketched out one day in
the final paragraphs of Chapter 62 of Hopscotch, which explains the title of
this book” and speculates that “perhaps those intentions will be fulfilled in
the course of it”; 3.)
That 62 is presented as both a literary experiment and a quasi-
theoretical proposition is not insignificant. As both experiment and
proposition, it asks questions about narrative categories, and about the
formal concepts that may well continue to frame (even if only indirectly) the
reading and writing of narrative fiction (i.e., concepts such as verisimilitude
and character, author, and reader). As experiment and proposition, it also
questions the relation between writing (also reading) and theorizing, and
draws connections between these operations. The interrogation staged in
this text’s narrative—in whatever may be called its story—is explained,
however, as the result of a formal inquiry that was begun both abstractly and
practically in Hopscotch, and in particular in its chapter 62.
The untitled paragraphs of the introductory statement send both a
warning and a welcome to the reader. There 62 is characterized as
unconventional and transgressive, in both its theory and its practice. The
virtual solution to the 1968 text’s difficulties, the preface proposes, can be
sought and found in the writing and reading of the 1963 novel, which 62
thereby identifies as a “key” for reading.6 As we recall, the theoretical
proposal contained in Morelli’s note in Hopscotch’s chapter 62 is plainly about
230 Lucille Kerr
the matter of character, a critical concept that has more recently caught the
attention of literary theorists and critics unaware of Cortázar’s literary
practice and proposals. (We recall that Morelli, himself an elusive character
in Hopscotch, posits the foundation for a future book in which psychological
causality would cease to govern characters’ actions; in such a book, most of
the principles of conventional verisimilitude would also be suspended
[Hopscotch, 361–3]. What may seem most revolutionary is that Morelli’s
literary theory is supposedly based on the research of a Swiss neurobiologist
who proposes that human behavior is caused by chemical changes in the
brain rather than by psychological motivation.)7
In reading 62 one may therefore be persuaded to consider among
others, the “question of character” independently, if not also in relation to the
“question of verisimilitude,” precisely because one seems to be instructed,
directly or indirectly, to do so. However, one’s attention may be drawn to such
topics not so much because the authorial preface suggests them, but rather
because the narrative also engages—indeed, problematizes—those concepts’
conventionality within its own literary activity. The difficulties of making
sense of 62’s narrative would prod one to consider what terms such as “story”
or “character” have been taken to mean, and how they might be adapted to
new narrative projects. Moreover, one’s attention may be drawn to such
concepts, and the overarching questions to which Cortázar seems to connect
them in 62, precisely because it is difficult to sort them out from within the
text. One may be compelled, as many have been, to talk not only about
character, for example, but also about why one can’t talk about the characters
of 62 in conventional ways, even though that is precisely the grid against
which one is constrained to measure them. “Character” is, for Cortázar’s text,
as much a controversial concept as it is a conventional category.8
Given 62’s apparent challenge to such conventional terms and
concepts, one might be tempted to rely on another vocabulary, one
apparently ready-made for reading Cortázar. Indeed, in trying to describe
the novel’s narrative—that is, in attempting to summarize its story in the
wake of the theoretical announcement made in its prefatory page—one
might feel compelled to engage the literary material of 62 with a vocabulary
that belongs as much, perhaps more, to Cortázar’s own lexicon than to that
of literary poetics more generally. Such privileged Cortazarian concepts and
vocabulary (especially figura) precede and yet, the authorial voice of the
preface implicitly claims, follow on the writing of 62. But the reading
difficulties announced in the prefatory passages appear not so much as
abstract critical matters to be analyzed but rather as practical narrative
obstacles to be surmounted.
Indeed, in reading 62, one must navigate, as it were, through pages in

which various figures appear and reappear in episodes and scenes whose
temporal and spatial parameters are not always clearly delineated, but which
nonetheless, and contrary to what the initial paragraphs suggest, come to
make some kind of sense.9 For example, generally one can say that the novel
concerns a group of individuals situated simultaneously in Paris, London,
and Vienna, and that it gives glimpses of the relationships and episodes in
which they also become involved individually and together. One can name
these figures and describe specific scenes or summarize individual events that
comprise the novel’s narrative material.
However, in speaking further about the text, a good many readers have
assumed that one must inevitably move between Cortázar’s texts and his
theories, for, the implicit argument goes, one cannot make sense of things
without framing the narrative elements with the authorial concepts those
elements seem to illustrate or explain.10 Furthermore, it may appear that one
needs to consider not only the relationship between chapter 62 of Hopscotch
and the whole text of 62: A Model Kit, but perhaps also the novel’s affiliation
with other of the author’s words around it, whether in personal interviews or
in texts that would explain the novel’s genesis (e.g., “The Broken Doll” and
“Glass with Rose”).11 That is, in going further, readers may feel compelled
to return to other texts, to read backward and forward around the novel
where “key” references appear to be explained and authoritative explanations
provided. Thus one may move to Hopscotch and Morelli’s statements, where,
in a sense, the novel has already been plotted out, where the question of
convention, explicitly called up in 62’s opening paragraphs, is thematized as
it is theorized in the voice of an authorial figure who attaches himself to
critical as well as literary considerations. And one may move to interviews
and essays where the author talks about, even seeks to explain, the aims and
origins of the novel and, additionally, the meaning of specific narrative
elements.
Indeed, 62’s prefatory remarks authorize a reading beyond its
immediate borders. They suggest that meaning is to be found elsewhere, in
a previous theory or critical conceptualization which, one might argue, is
merely put into practice in this novel. But such a subordination of narrative
text to theoretical or conceptual project, which such reading models
presuppose, may also be refuted by 62, whose sense inevitably seeps beyond
the borders of any such project. Although the novel appears to respect the
aims of a previously articulated, unconventional theory of narrative or
narrative character, it critiques blind adherence to prior projects. And even
when it seems to serve its primary aims, the unconventional nature of its
232 Lucille Kerr
accomplishments may well be a matter of dispute. I would argue that 62’s

narrative strategies and anecdotal material also recover conventions and
concepts which the previous theory and the present text explicitly challenge.
There are, moreover, a number of ways to situate the novel’s prefatory
paragraphs. If one takes the preface as an explanation of what the novel will
do, one can read the text as the elaboration of a literary project that becomes
self-evident in the doing of literature but that nonetheless must also be
theorized before the project begins. However, the preface is a retrospective
introduction, a statement explaining, after the fact, the aims of the text whose
unconventional and potentially controversial effects its readers cannot resist
noting and its author, it seems, cannot refrain from explaining. The theory
of the novel proposed prior to the narrative is a theory that also follows its
own practice; and that practice, in turn, stages what one is supposed to read
as its originating theory.
If, as suggested above, one takes the preface at its word, one might be
compelled to read 62 as an “application” of theory first proposed in
Hopscotch.12 But the 1963 novel can be read as a text that telescopes the
distance between theoretical proposal and literary practice, partly because
the one form of discourse is mapped onto the other, and partly because the
theory Hopscotch presents is apparently derived from the discourse assigned
to a character in the narrative (i.e., Morelli). Thus, if one finds in Hopscotch’s
text the supposed origins and aims of 62, one also finds that the 1963 novel’s
theoretical authority remains unstable. Just when one might think one may
visit the one text so as to return with some theoretical certainty to the other,
one finds that one’s itinerary has changed. For one is forced to wander
between texts, or from a theory that can also be read as a practice to a
practice that also functions as a theory, and back again. One may imagine
that one is traversing a somewhat foreign (even if vaguely familiar) territory,
only to discover that one hasn’t really gone all that far from home.
One may read 62 as mapping out a familiar and finally conventional
reading territory. One may read Cortázar’s novel as reaffirming rather, than
revoking conventional reading practices, the conventions of reading against
which, the authorial preface suggests, the novel appears to have been
fashioned. One may see this text recuperate perhaps more than resist familiar
reading patterns; one may read this novel as an effort to reclaim as much as
to reject the reader’s and author’s conventional activities.
Let us recall the novel’s structure and its narrative difficulties so as to
plot out the territory for that conventional turn. As is true of any text, there
are a number of ways to describe this novel and to summarize its narrative.
First, one might describe its textual composition. The novel’s text comprises
a series of narrative segments comparable to chapters in conventional novels,

though neither the prefatory segment, which consists of three paragraphs,
nor any of the sixty-nine narrative segments, each of different length, bears
a title or number to identify or distinguish it from contiguous segments.
Then, one might try to summarize its story as it is presented by the text. The
narrative material that follows the authorial statement focuses for the first
thirty pages or so (the frontier between spaces and scenes is equivocal) on a
personage named Juan, who dines on Christmas Eve in the Polidor
restaurant in Paris and whose mental associations and analyses on that
evening are elaborated in these pages.13
The rest of the narrative moves among three cities, as noted above (Paris,
London, and Vienna). It registers the interior monologues and dialogues of, as
well as the apparently objective reports about, the characters who form the close-
knit group of 62.14 The interrelations among the group’s members are such that
one can speak not only about various, and often overlapping, couples (Juan and
Hélène in Paris, Juan and Tell in Vienna, Marrast and Nicole in London, Celia
and Austin in London, Celia and Hélène in Paris, Fran Marta and the English
girl in Vienna) but also about the triangles of desire that bind these figures
together (Juan–Tell–Hélène, Hélène–Celia–Austin, Marrast–Nicole–Juan).15
Although it is possible to name the characters, describe in the barest of
terms who they are (e.g., their occupations or professions), and situate them
in one or another city or episode, it is not so easy to describe exactly what the
narrative comprises.16 62: A Model Kit presents a sequence of interconnected
scenes and episodes (one might even argue for describing them as self-
contained short narratives) rather than a sustained, coherent linear story.17
Besides the extended opening scene focusing on Juan in the Polidor, there
are other episodes one could describe: for example, that involving members
of a group tailed Neurotics Anonymous who are directed by Marrast to
examine a painting in the Courtauld Institute in London; or Juan and Tell’s
voyeuristic pursuit of Frau Marta’s seduction of a young English girl in a
hotel in Vienna; or Hélène’s seduction of Celia in Paris; or Calac and
Polanco’s comical shipwreck in the shallow waters of a French pond; or the
ceremonious unveiling of a statue sculpted by Marrast for the town of
Arcueil—and so on. Readings seem inexorably drawn to describing specific
scenes and episodes, and to the reiterating characters’ ruminations about
themselves and others. Readers seem inevitably pushed to summarize and
repeat the themes, myths, and motifs that seem to shape the narrative, or to
identify the literary and cultural models, the authors and texts, from which
62 may well derive much of its material (e.g., vampirism, “meaningful
coincidences,” Michel Butor, psychoanalytic discourse).18
234 Lucille Kerr
Despite the acknowledged difficulties presented by the text’s rejection

of the narrative conventions of realist “psychological” fiction, the “informed”
reader may well have the sense that everything does, in the end, make sense
in this novel, but perhaps in unexpected ways. The problem the text seems
to pose is how to represent any such sense, perhaps how to translate into
intelligible terms the peculiar logic, rather than isolated allusions, themes, or
scene, that appears to organize the novel’s narrative. In confronting the text’s
apparent impenetrability, critics have seen that task as a one of decipherment,
principally as the need to decode the novel’s historical, literary, or cultural
references. The goal has also been to disclose the associational logic, the
unconventional connections, that link these elements and allow them to
make sense.
However, in critics’ efforts to delineate the connections among
characters and episodes so as to make sense of the novel, 62 seems to have
occasioned principally elaborate reiterations of the text’s details. Cortázar’s
novel demonstrates, perhaps, how the desire to interpret critically always
runs the risk of collapsing, perhaps unintentionally, into an uncontrolled
repetition of and absorption into the text from which critical activity would
more properly differentiate and distance itself. In the case of 62, the
repetition of the text’s thematic motifs (e.g., the vampire myth), and the
circular appropriation of its terminology (e.g., the novel as kaleidoscope, the
characters as forming a figura) seem unavoidable in reading.19 The matter of
repetition, as informing but also as distinct from reading, is perhaps one of
the “key” questions raised as one rereads Cortázar’s text.
What seem to get repeated in readings of 62 are not only the thematic
or anecdotal details of the narrative or the explicit associations among them,
but also, if not principally, the authorial theories and terminology proposed
within and around the novel. That such repetitions are inevitable if not
required for a reading of 62 is an arguable point. Nonetheless, one might
wonder, as suggested above, how one can talk about this text without relating
it to Hopscotch, without framing one’s reading with reference to Morelli’s
theory that is so explicitly recalled in the authorial preface. Or, how one
ought to talk about a text that appears to provide metaphors (e.g.,
kaleidoscope) if not also critical concepts (e.g., figura)’ apparently so well
suited to its own explanation. Or, how, if at all, one can refuse the author’s
word about the textual relations, theories, terminology, and concepts that
seem to figure so weightily in this text and about which Cortázar has so often
agreed to elaborate further.
There are, however, different ways to frame such questions. Given the
persistence with which the novel’s own terms and notions have defined and
even subsumed the discourse generated around 62 in critical studies and

authorial interviews, one might wonder about the repeated return to such
terms, about the dependence on the author’s (literary and critical) word.
Moreover, one might also wonder whether there might not be something
significant in the fact of repetition itself, whether the pattern of tautological
reiteration might not unwittingly reveal a significant feature of this novel.
On the one hand this feature might demand and, on the other, decry the
persistent critical restatement of the text’s (or the author’s) own words.
Perhaps a return to the much commented upon opening pages of the
narrative—those dedicated to Juan at the Polidor restaurant that follow the
prefatory paragraphs—will help to suggest another way around Cortázar’s
writing and around writing about Cortázar. These pages, which have been
read as summarizing or already containing all the essential elements of the
narrative that follows, are both cryptic and clear. In the broadest terms, they
describe the mental rather than physical activity of Juan, who is both subject
and object of the narration, which focuses attention on the associative
processes that inform his actions and thoughts during his solitary Christmas
Eve dinner at the Polidor. Seated facing the dining room’s back mirror, he is
oddly positioned to see and hear things as they finally need to be seen and
heard, for his position allows him access from several positions at once. The
process by which he comes to understand how he hears and sees the dinner
scene around him seems to acquire significance not only for him, but also, as
many readings of the text claim, for the whole novel.20
The scene revolves around a sentence, spoken by another diner and
heard by Juan in the novel’s opening line (“I’d like a bloody castle”; 5). This
sentence, which is Juan’s automatic, simultaneous translation of “Je voudrais
un château [i.e., Chateaubriand] saignant” (5), is the visible—or, rather,
audible—result of a process of association of which the reader has no
knowledge in the novel’s first page but which the text, in the voice both of
Juan and of the unidentified narrator, soon explains in subsequent pages of
the episode. The pages that follow, and through which additional enigmas
and explanations are provided, are notable not only because they present
details whose textual resonances are anticipated in these initial pages. (One
might emphasize the accumulation for example, of, interrelated references to
places [e.g., Transylvania] and personages [the countess Báthory] associated
with historical and literary vampire stories. The vampire figure resonates
from around the bottle of Sylvaner Juan drinks and the “bloody castle” he
“hears” the other diner order, as well as from the mention of “the countess,”
Frau Marta, the basilisk; see note 18.)
It could be argued that the significance of this episode lies in the
236 Lucille Kerr
reading performed by these pages, and in the reading figures this portion of
the text proposes. The novel presents Juan as a character who acts and thinks,
and who both subsequently and simultaneously begins to interpret or
decipher his own actions and thoughts. As the acting, thinking personage, he
is a figure somewhat out of control, because initially he is unable to read
properly the text he produces through his actions and associations. He is a
figure of unconscious associations, or rather, a figure unconscious of the
associations he seems automatically to make among a variety of figures and
phrases. As the figure who interprets or translates, and thus reads, the scene
in which he is also situated, however, he is a figure of mastery, for he appears
finally to understand not only what but also how things mean in this scene.
Initially he may be presented (or is presented as presenting himself—the
episode is narrated in the first and third persons, with Juan as the object of
both internal and external focalization) as unsure of how to read or as
doubting in general that something like understanding can be reached (7).
But he eventually seems to read things (and be read) correctly, if not also
completely.
Juan’s doubts about comprehending what he has done and/or seen, and
his confrontation with the “useless desire to understand” (7), are
incorporated into the process of interpretation and decipherment as well.
The question repeated in this episode, and that would finally generate his
reading, is “Why did I go into the Polidor restaurant?” (5, 7, 15). (This
question is followed by other related interrogatives, for example, “Why did
I buy a book I probably wouldn’t read?” [5]; “... why did I buy the book and
open it at random and read ...?” [7]; “Why did I ask for a bottle of Sylvaner?”
[5].) Given the announced authorial project to refuse conventional causal
logic, the text appears to remain true to its “theory,” as it refuses to provide
definitive answers to these questions about Juan’s so-called motivation.
While it refuses one interrogative (“why?”) it nonetheless accepts others
(“how?” and “what?” and “where?” and “when?”), as a reading of
nonmotivational connections develops within Juan’s scene. Indeed, in the
voices of Juan and the external narrator, the text replies to virtually all the
important questions Juan (or the reader) might have about the relations
among the apparently unrelated elements of the scene. This reply—the final
interpretation—is constructed in the episode’s final pages (20–4, 26–7). The
virtual appearance of that “decoding” permits the scene’s closure and causes,
as it were, Juan to leave the Polidor restaurant, the privileged site of reading,
seeing, and hearing in and around 62 (see also note 20).
Juan performs as a reading figure whose curiosity, whose interest in
“the old human topic—deciphering” (8), leads him (like any good reader
perhaps) to attempt what appears to be an exemplary interrogation of and

interpretation for 62. His questions about the connections among his
physical actions and about the meanings of his mental associations, as well as
his (or the text’s) answers to those questions, figure one of the reading
projects that Cortázar’s reader might feel compelled to complete. Indeed,
around the figure of Juan the text also proposes precisely how to read 62;
furthermore, the text privileges a specific type of reading. Juan’s reading,
along with the text’s reading of Juan, in these crucial initial pages would
suggest that there are hidden meanings (if not “keys”) that can and must be
identified in order to make sense of things.
That reading suggests that only when one has uncovered such
meanings (i.e., allusions, references, associations) can one make sense of this
episode and also, some readers would argue, the whole novel.
Juan, a translator by profession, appears as a conspicuous figure of
interpretation at the beginning of the text. The professional deformation
that would compel him to ruminate reflexively about his interpretive activity
and to question the reliability of his reading does not, however, obscure the
way in which his overall reading is staged in the text or how it offers a reading
model that seems so well suited to 62 (see, e.g., 6). The resistance to reading
that the scene’s initially impenetrable surface presents to Juan (and to the
reader) seems finally to be neutralized by a privileged figure of translation
whose task it is to uncover hidden linguistic structures and recuperate
original meaning. Juan virtually deciphers what at first seems to present itself
as incomprehensible. As he does so, he constructs a route into the text, a way
to make sense of what otherwise would appear to have little if any meaning.
The reading performed both by and around Juan in this episode virtually
finds beneath the scene’s and the text’s surface the references to which one is
led to believe that one must have access if one is to read the novel properly.
Through Juan’s reading and the reading of Juan presented by these
pages, the novel figures a competent, if not ideal, reader for 62.21 But the
reading figure produced and privileged here calls up a model of reading one
can only call authorial. Indeed, the reading performed in this episode
succeeds in reading the text only insofar as it seems to repeat, if not
reproduce, authorial knowledge and restage authorial activity. For this
reading (which, as suggested above, seems to have determined how 62 has
often been read) seeks out and apparently succeeds in recovering authorial
meaning, the (un)intended meanings presumably required for making sense
of 62. The text’s reading of Juan, as well as Juan’s seeming success in reading,
suggests that much if not all that looks opaque can be rendered transparent
in Cortázar’s novel—that is, if one is willing to repeat the author’s steps in
238 Lucille Kerr
reading. Juan’s episode at the Polidor thus has as much heuristic as

hermeneutical value; it teaches how to read as much as it tells what might be,
or actually is, underneath what is being read.
What are the consequences of becoming a reader like Juan? What are
the consequences of following the reading models produced by this “master”
episode? And, what, perhaps, does Cortázar’s text reveal about itself through
this reading proposal? It may well be that the “keys” contained in Juan’s
reading are more varied than those this figure seems to offer in what is
arguably the novel’s “key” episode. As suggested above, the figures of reading
apparently privileged by Cortázar’s text finally appear more conventional
than they might at first seem, if not counter to what the authorial preface
(and all of Morelli’s theories in Hopscotch) would propose.
A reading such as Juan’s (and of course the narrator’s reading of how
Juan reads or interprets things) would propose that the recovery of meaning
(references, allusions) is not only possible but necessary in this text. Such an
attempt to recover meaning following Juan’s model is at the same time an
attempt to return to authorial aims and ideas rather than to produce an
independent reading. The reading proposed at the outset of 62 therefore
entails an authorial recuperation along with the recuperation of the
traditional notion of original (if not final) meaning. Such recovery would
necessarily entail repetition, and such repetition, in turn, would serve as
evidence of recovery. To read the way the reader seems to be instructed to
read at the beginning of 62 is in a sense to try to return (to) the author’s words,
words that initially appear to underwrite the reader’s recuperative repetition.
In order to read properly, the initial episode if not the whole novel seems to
propose, one must repeat the, text, one must reiterate and reauthorize the
author’s word as it emerges from beneath the novel as well as around it. To
read like Juan is, in a sense, to read like Cortázar, and that is the only reading,
the “master” episode suggests, which can get one through this text.
Is such a reading of 62 inevitable? What are the possibilities for reading
62 without privileging an authorial reading, without in some way repeating
the author’s terminology and interpretations? One way is to maintain that 62
aims to resist being read otherwise; that its project, put forth as a
transgression of canonical critical concepts and literary practices, finally rests
on the most conventional of grounds. Indeed, alongside the figure of the
unconventional, transgressive author, which is proposed in the novel’s
prefatory paragraphs and elaborated in authorial interviews, there surfaces a
figure of authorial control and containment. While that figure’s word is
associated with radical ideas about reading and authoring, his writing still
conserves conventional practices and principles.
One can read Cortázar’s refusal to comply with his readers’ desires,
cited at the outset of this discussion, also as a statement of authorial
resistance. That statement oddly but aptly compels Cortázar’s readers to
consider how conventional models of reading are not only figured by the
novel’s initial, exemplary episode but also are implicitly recuperated by the
reading apparently required of its own readers. It may well be that in 62
Cortázar has accorded readers what they feel most comfortable with: a text
that tells its readers how difficult it is to read but also (“secretly”) plots out a
reading strategy that would elicit from them the habits of reading they
already know how to repeat.22 Readers who aim to read otherwise, to read
against the grain of repetition and recuperation, would have to reject the
reading figured by 62 in order to read in the manner theoretically proposed,
either there or elsewhere, by Cortázar.
In the end, if there are any reading lessons to be learned from reading
62 and the ways in which it has been read, they may be lessons that
inevitably situate us between reading (or rereading) and repetition. As one
attempts to maneuver around the words of Cortázar and the contrary
models of reading his writing proposes, one is positioned between texts and
terms that Cortázar both reconsiders and recycles in 62. If, while reviewing
the readings of 62 and the reading instructions it offers, one considers how
this novel works against the “revolutionary” reading practices associated
with Cortázar’s writing, one might perhaps be able to resist the repetitions
inherent in the model of reading it privileges and take one’s reading into less
conventional territory. However, at the moment one engages the text and
moves into its terrain, one is also compelled to respond to, perhaps even by
reiterating (but in ways more complex, perhaps, than those who would
follow Juan’s example), the models of reading that 62 (un)wittingly exposes.
It may well be, then, that 62 figures its own reading as a negotiation between
alternate practices and principles, which together persist in shaping how
one may inevitably wind up reading this text, and possibly others, by
Cortázar.
NOTES
Some material in this essay was first offered at the Twentieth-Century Spanish and Spanish
American Literatures International Symposium held at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, 18–20 November 1993. My thanks for the opportunity to present some of this
work go to the Boulder faculty and especially to Luis González-del-Valle, who organized
and hosted the conference.
1. With the exception of quotations from Cortázar’s texts also published in English,
all translations in this essay are mine. See also Cortázar/González Bermejo, 89–90,
240 Lucille Kerr
Cortázar/Garfield, 36, and Prego, 93–6, for related authorial statements regarding
Hopscotch’s chapter 62 as the foundation for 62: A Model Kit.
2. See Kerr, Reclaiming the Author, 26–45, 178–82, for my previous discussion of the
complex figures of the author that circulate around Hopscotch and the contradictory roles
proposed for the reader in that text.
3. There is hardly a discussion of 62 that does not mention, if not cite directly, its
opening paragraphs as a key to interpreting the novel. Moreover, many readings
appropriate Cortázar’s critical terms in order to explain the concepts he himself has
elaborated in other texts and in personal interviews. Many essays return as well to the text
of Hopscotch, primarily to cite Morelli’s proposals in chapter 62 and often to equate the
character’s words with those of Cortázar. Such readings presume that the author’s word is
presented directly to the reader in the prefatory paragraphs of 62, where Cortázar seems
to suggest that if one returns to Morelli’s notions one will find a transparent explanation
of precisely what is attempted, if not accomplished, in the 1968 text. For a sample of such
discussions, see, among others, Alazraki 1978 and 1981, Boldy, 97–160, Curutchet,
107–27, Dellepiane, Francescato, and Sicard.
4. Despite questions raised below regarding the privilege 62 and its readers seem to
grant to an authorial reading (i.e., a reading that would aim to recuperate original
meanings), there is much helpful material in articles that aim to decipher obscure
references or narrative elements in 62. Among the most suggestive are Boldy, 97–160;
Hernández; Incledon; and Nouhaud.
5. These words initiate the statement, and are followed by “a few examples” of the
text’s transgressive nature, which turn out to consist of transgressions from the laws of
verisimilitude; therefore the mention below of this concept, along with that of character,
as possible foci for critical inquiry.
6. Many readers have focused on the identification and explanation of certain terms
and narrative elements and have made explicit reference to the word key in the process; see,
e.g., Alazraki 1981, Dellepiane, Gyurko, Hernández, and Incledon. Nouhaud, on the other
hand, playfully reminds the reader of the instability of “key” meanings while also
suggestively proposing the interpretive possibilities for reading some “keys” (220).
7. One might note in addition that this is an idea to which biomedical and,
pharmacological research, as well as psychiatric practice, has more recently given a good
deal more credibility than such ideas received in the 1960s, when they were summarily
presented in Hopscotch. For overviews of developments in modern theories of character and
characterization, at least until about 1985, see Martin, 116–22, and also Hochman.
8. Borinsky’s reading of how specific figures in the novel may “create the kind of
currency needed to undo the psychological integrity of the characters” (90) is the most
suggestive contribution on this topic, and Ortega’s brief ruminations about the space
occupied by the novel’s characters develop related points (273–7); Yovanovich has also
tried to focus directly on “character” in 62 (132–49). Though other readings do not
address the concept of character directly, implicitly all assume the difficulties of reading
characters in 62 and offer possible ways of answering questions about them. As I have
suggested elsewhere (Kerr, 21), one could argue that Cortázar’s text offers yet another
opportunity to explore how, in its questioning of fundamental literary concepts (in this
case, “character”), Spanish American literature has the potential to teach readers a good
deal more than the theoretical materials typically consulted about such concepts.
9. Francescato’s early reading of the text argues a related point, going so far as to
declare that, even if readers are unable finally to resolve all the “enigmas,” the novel
nonetheless can be comprehended quite well (368); Figueroa Amaral’s early discussion also
emphasizes the text’s “clarity” (377).
10. This argument is made implicitly by all the critical and authorial discussions of
concepts such as “figura,” “constellation,” and “coagulation,” through which, it is claimed,
one may not only understand what 62 is about but also connect the novel to Cortázar’s
previous works; see, for instance, Dellepiane, Gyurko, Sicard, Yurkievich. The analyses
that pay special attention to 62’s own peculiar idiom (the concepts “the city,” “my
paredros,” “the zone”) and that rely on the novel’s explicit definitions of these terms or on
Cortázar’s statements about his lexicon to explain the novel, include Alazraki 1978 and
1981; Boldy, 97–160; Curutchet, 107–27; Garfield, 115–31; Peavler, 107–10; see also
Cortázar/González Bermejo, 93–5; Cortázar/Prego 87–9, 94–6. Cf. Ortega’s refusal to
read the text in terms of such authorial conceptualizations (232–3).
11. These two short texts are companion pieces, published a year after 62. Whereas
“Glass with Rose” clarifies a notion mentioned in “The Broken Doll,” the latter
constitutes the author’s revelations about the varied sources of 62 and his explanations of
many “key” references. Critics have both repeated and pursued further these references
and have thereby fulfilled, as it were, the reading of 62 already begun by Cortázar. These
texts are also mentioned in Boldy, 98, 110, and Incledon, 283, and in Cortázar/González
Bermejo, 86–9, 91, 93, and Cortázar/Prego, 89.
12. Alazraki calls 62 the author’s “novelistic answer” to Oliveira’s search for alternatives
or to “Morelli’s program” (1978, 14; 1981, 162), and sees it as “the implementation” (15) or
“realization” of Morelli’s project (1981, 155); Francescato describes it as “the result of the
elaboration of the notes by the author Cortázar created in Hopscotch” (367); Yurkievich sees
the novel as a “sequel” to Hopscotch (precisely the notion Cortázar claimed to resist) or as the
“putting into practice of Morelli’s narrative proposals,” but he also qualifies those
descriptions when he claims that 62 is “effective as a novel” but “defective with respect to the
program that motivated it” (463); Sicard sees 62 as an “attempt” to produce the “novel of
figuras” whose “theoretical bases” are presented in chapter 62 (234).
13. Juan, an Argentine in Paris who works as an interpreter, has been identified as a
figure of Cortázar and as a central character, if not protagonist (given their shared
biographical details, author and character seem “naturally” identified with each other).
This transparent identification is not unlike the Morelli–Cortázar or Oliveira–Cortázar
(Hopscotch) and Persio–Cortázar (The Winners) identifications assumed for, and continued
from, Cortázar’s two previous novels; see, for instance, Dellepiane, 172, Peavler, 108,
Sicard, 233–4, 236–7. However, the most suggestive identification with the author’s figure
may well be of a different sort, as suggested below.
14. Cortázar’s predilection for groups or communities of characters whose
interrelations rather than individual actions form the basis of the narrative is discussed in
Cortázar/Sosnowski, 49. Cortázar’s term for the configurations constructed by such
interrelations is figura (intimately related to, if not imbricated in, the notions of
coagulation and constellation), a term proposed in The Winners, discussed and implicitly
developed in Hopscotch, and, apparently, more directly materialized in 62. Much attention
has been paid to this concept’s elaboration in 62, and to repeating what Cortázar has said
about it; see, among others, Alazraki 1978 and 1981; Boldy, 97–160; Curutchet, 109–27;
Dellepiane; and Sicard; also Cortázar/Garfield, 36; Cortázar/González Bermejo, 91–3;
and Cortázar/Prego, 687–9. See also note 10.
242 Lucille Kerr
15. For more detailed summary descriptions of these dyadic and triadic
configurations, see Alazraki, 1981, 159–60; Dellepiane, 165, 173; Garfield, 119–22;
Peavler, 108–9. Dellepiane also suggests a four-part division of the narrative related to the
locations of the different pairs: The first comprises the Polidor episode with Juan in Paris;
the second revolves around both the Marrast/Nicole and the Juan/Tell pairs in London
and Vienna; the third focuses mainly on Hélène and Celia in Paris as well as on the
previously mentioned pairs in the other cities; and the fourth moves principally to Paris
where the characters all converge (171). Paz’s comments on the novel’s spatial, temporal,
and erotic orders, as well as his play on the novel’s title in Spanish (62 as the transformation
of a “modelo para amar” into a “modelo para armar”), suggest still other ways to consider
these characters’ relations (Paz/Rios, 37–9)
16. Most of the characters are engaged in artistic, musical, literary, scientific, or
educational activities, and are therefore identified with the world of high culture (as, we
recall, are most of the principal characters in Cortázar’s other novels): Juan is an
interpreter, Hélène a physician, Marrast a sculptor, Tell an illustrator, Calac a writer, Celia
a university student, Austin a musician. See Jones’s observations on the “economic idyll”
enacted by the characters in their arguably “pastoral” gathering (29).
17. Dellepiane, 180, and González Lanuza, 75, argue that 62’s narrative techniques
demonstrate Cortázar’s superior abilities as a short-story writer rather than his
accomplishments as a novelist.
18. While Hernández reads 62 as a vampire novel, seeing “the central theme of
vampirism as a common basis” for the novel’s “complex system of cross-references and
allusions” (109), Alazraki argues that it would be a mistake to read the novel exclusively in
terms of that code (1981, 156). On the myriad associations with literary and legendary
vampire stories and figures, see, besides Hernández’s detailed discussion, Boldy, 113–19,
129–35; Curutchet, 108–9; Francescato, 368–9; and Garfield, 125–8. On the Jungian
notion of “meaningful coincidences” or “synchronicity” which has been suggested as an
explanatory model for the novel’s logic and the notion of figura, see Boldy, 116, Curutchet,
108, and Dellepiane, 163–4. On the pivotal references to Butor’s texts, see Alazraki 1981,
157, Boldy, 115, 141–3, Garfield, 124. On the reference to or reliance on the logic of
psychoanalysis and the figure of Freud, see Nouhaud’s and Borinsky’s readings. On other
possible literary, mythological, and cultural derivations and affiliations, see Figueroa
Amaral, Jones, Incledon, Boldy passim, and also Cortázar/Prego, 92–3, 96–7,
Cortázar/Garfield, 87–8, Cortázar/González Bermejo, 89, 95–6, and of course Cortázar’s
“The Broken Doll.”
19. The kaleidoscope image, which is taken directly from the novel’s vocabulary (e.g.,
48, 49), is privileged as the “key” critical metaphor by Alazraki, who argues that “the novel
is put together like a kaleidoscope” (1981, 158); he is not the first nor the only critic to
prefer this authorial term; see, e.g., Francescato, 368 and Garfield, 116. See also note 10.
20. For detailed discussion of this scene, see Boldy, 115–17 (he reacts it as a “model of
how the text itself produces the figural,” 117); Curutchet, 108–10 (he also reads the scene
as illustrating the concepts of figura and “significant coincidences,” 108); Hernández,
109–10 (in her reading, the scene mainly serves the theme of vampirism); Alazraki 1981,
157–8 (he views the scene as “defining an ideogram that the rest of the text deciphers or
attempts to decipher,” 157). For the present discussion, Nouhaud’s is the most suggestive
reading (214–18); she engages the figures of the reader and the author through notions
both derived and distant from the text (e.g., translation, mutilation, transportation) but
which are used to elaborate horizontally, as it were, on the text’s associative possibilities
rather than vertically on its definitive meanings,
21. That the reader is a very special, if not specialized, figure tied to high culture, a
figure with a specific kind of cultural experience and literary knowledge—an experience
and knowledge perhaps equal only to that of the novel’s author—has been noted by
Curutchet, 109, González Lanuza, 72–3, and Nouhaud, 218, 220.
22. If one were tempted to read the author’s figure as a figure of secrets and secret
maneuvers, one could look to Borinsky’s reading and to the perverse figure of M. Ochs for
other suggestive reading possibilities.
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Nouhaud, Dorita. “Hay que armar el modelo ‘comilfó.’” Coloquio Internacional: Lo lúdico y
lo fantástico en la obra de Cortázar, 2: 213–21. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1986.
Ortega, Julio. Figuración de la persona. Barcelona: EDHASA, 1971.
Paz, Octavio, and Julián Ríos. “Modelos para a(r)mar.” El Urogallo 3 [15] (1972): 33–40.
Peavler, Terry J. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne Publishers 1990.
Sicard, Alain. “Figura y novela en la obra de Julio Cortázar.” Hommage à Amédée Mas,
199–213. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Reprinted in Lastra,
225–40.
Yovanovich, Gordana. Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Yurkievich, Saúl. “62: modela para armar: Enigmas que desarman.” Cuadernos
Hispanoamericanos 122 [364–6] (1980): 463–73.
ANÍBAL GONZÁLEZ
“Press Clippings” and Cortázar’s Ethics of Writing
Call me no longer Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt
bitterly with me.
I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.
—Ruth, 1:20–21
Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the

wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good.
—Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal
There was something that made comment impossible in his narrative, or

perhaps in himself....
—Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer”
S ince the late nineteenth century, specifically after naturalism and

symbolism in Europe and modernismo in Spanish America, it has been
assumed that literature is written, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “beyond good and
evil.” In fact, this thesis was advanced mostly by literary critics who wished
to distance themselves from the fruitless moralizing of much nineteenth-
century criticism (which, in Hispanic letters, reached its nadir in the work of
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo) rather than by the fiction writers themselves,
whose texts continued to display ethical concerns about the act of writing
and the relationship between writer and society.1 Until recently, such
concerns were usually mediated by ideology: Ideologies, whether from the
From Julio Cortázar: New Readings. © 1998 Cambridge University Press.
245
246 Aníbal González
left or the right, tended to dictate the writers’ relation to their society and to
their work. We are now witnessing the emergence in Spanish American
literature of an “ethics of writing” as a more encompassing phenomenon,
one imbued, above all, with a critical, philosophical spirit. Instead of a
catalogue of moral injunctions about the writers’ responsibility to society (as
one finds in nineteenth-century literary criticism as well as in twentieth-
century Marxist criticism), the contemporary ethics of writing is an attempt
by the writers themselves to figure out the moral implications of their work.
Instead of commandments and principles, this ethics of writing formulates
questions—questions for which there are no simple, dogmatic answers, such
as: What does it mean to be a writer in countries where the vast majority of
the population is illiterate? Does fiction writing tend to be complicitous with
the sources of social and political oppression or is it, on the contrary, an
inherently subversive, antiauthoritarian activity? Can one truly write
“beyond good and evil” or does all fiction contain implicit moral judgments?
Like many of his counterparts in the Spanish American narrative
“boom,” Julio Cortázar attempts to answer some of these questions in his
work of the 1970s and early 1980s. Novels such as A Manual for Manuel
(1973), short stories like “Apocalypse at Solentiname” (1977) and “Press
Clippings” (1981), and poems such as “Policrítica a la hora de los chacales”
(1971), among others, evidence concerns with the nature of authority and
authorship, with the writer’s civic duties as an intellectual, and, in general, a
questioning of the role of the writer in the power relationships that are at
work in literary texts. I have dealt elsewhere at some length with this
phenomenon in works by other boom authors such as Carpentier (The Harp
and the Shadow, 1979), García Márquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981),
and Vargas Llosa (The War of the End of the World, 1981), and in younger
authors such as Elena Poniatowska (Massacre in Mexico, 1971).2 However,
unlike these writers’ more distanced and ironic stance, in Cortázar the search
for an ethics of writing is frequently presented as a gut-wrenching, intimate
experience, similar in scope and intensity to a religious conversion. A
conveniently brief but richly suggestive example is his late short story, “Press
Clippings,” collected in We Love Glenda So Much and Other Stories (1981).
Regarded by some of his critics as one of Cortázar’s most disturbing
stories in a realistic and political vein, “Press Clippings” has also been seen
as “the culmination of his overtly political writing, which began with
‘Reunión’ in Todos los fuegos el fuego” (Boldy, 126; see also Peavler, 93).3 There
are, as we shall see, significant parallels (as well as differences) between this
story and “Meeting” (“Reunión,” 1966). One salient difference is that “Press
Clippings” has a female protagonist and first-person narrator who is also an
author figure. This is something of a departure in Cortázar’s oeuvre and

clearly indicates his intention of bringing into this story issues of gender in
society and literature.
Briefly, “Press Clippings” is the first-person narrative of Noemí, an
Argentine woman and successful author living in Paris, who is asked by a
fellow countryman, a sculptor who has done a series of works on the subject
of violence, to write a text to accompany a collection of photographs of the
works. They meet in his apartment in a seedy neighborhood, and while
Noemí studies the sculptures she shows the artist a press clipping that is an
open letter written by an Argentine woman living in Mexico, denouncing
how the woman’s oldest daughter, along with the woman’s husband and other
close relatives, were kidnapped and murdered by the military junta. Noemí
and the sculptor discuss their anguish and feelings of impotence over the
facts contained in the clipping. Noemí agrees to write the text about the
sculptures, and goes out into the street to take a taxi. On her way to the taxi
stand, she comes upon a little girl crying alone in the street. “My papa is
doing things to my mama,” the girl tells Noemí, and reaching out, practically
pulls the writer into a labyrinthine courtyard and toward a shack where
Noemí comes upon a dreadful scene: The father has tied the mother to a
bedstead and is torturing her by burning her nude body systematically with
a lighted cigarette. Following an uncontrollable impulse, Noemí knocks the
man unconscious with a stool, unties the woman, and then helps to tie the
man to the bedstead. Without exchanging a word with the woman, Noemí,
an intellectual who abhors violence, helps her torture the man.
Noemí returns to her apartment in a daze, drinks several glasses of
vodka, and passes out. That afternoon, she writes down her experience,
which will be the text to accompany the sculptor’s works. She then phones
the sculptor and, without giving him a chance to interrupt, tells him her
story. Several days later, the sculptor sends Noemí a letter with a press
clipping from the tabloid France-Soir recounting the story of a crime that
happened in Marseille, presumably a few days before, in which a man had
been tied to a bed and tortured to death. The man’s mistress, the clipping
says, is a suspect in the crime, and the couple’s little girl has been reported
missing. The part of the clipping describing the exact details of the man’s
torture is missing, but the photographs show the shack where Noemí had
been. Noemí rushes back to the sculptor’s neighborhood, trying in vain to
locate the place where, in defiance of space and time, she had had her
experience. However, she does find the little girl, and is told by a concièrge
that the girl had been found lost in the street and that a social worker would
come to get her. Before leaving, Noemí asks the little girl what her last name
is, then in a café she writes down the ending to her text on the back of the
sculptor’s letter, and goes to slip it under his door, “so that the text
accompanying his sculptures would be complete” (“Press Clippings,” 96).
The complexities in this intense and gloomy story are evident from the
beginning, when, after the title, an author’s note diffidently advises us:
“Although I don’t think it’s really necessary to say so, the first clipping is real
and the second one imaginary” (81). The story is indeed constructed, in a
typically Cortazarian fashion, following a series of polar oppositions that are
later collapsed: reality/imagination, past/present, literature/journalism,
male/female, France/Argentina, Paris/Marseille, and so on. In terms of its
structure, binarism and a mise en abyme effect also prevail. “Press Clippings”
contains two sets of stories, one placed inside the other. The first set
comprises the story “Press Clippings,” in We Love Glenda So Much and Other
Stories, written by Julio Cortázar, and the text Noemí writes to accompany
the sculptor’s works, which is contained in “Press Clippings” and is
essentially coextensive with it. The second set includes the two press
clippings, each of which presides over one-half of the narrative: the
Argentine mother’s press clipping in the first half, and the clipping from
France-Soir in the second half. Cortázar’s choice of a female first-person
narrator also places the question of narrative authority within a mise en
abyme: Do we read the story as if it were written by Noemí? or by Cortázar
writing as Noemí? or by Cortázar writing as Cortázar writing as Noemí?4
As my analysis of the story will show, the principal rhetorical device
used by Cortázar to coordinate his use of binary elements and the mise en
abyme is the chiasmus. This figure, as Richard A. Lanham explains, names
“the ABBA pattern of mirror inversion” (Lanham, 33). A well-known
instance is a quote from Knute Rockne: “When the going gets tough, the
tough get going” (ibid.). Lanham observes that chiasmus “seems to set up a
natural dynamics that draws the parts [of the construction] closer together,
as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first,
condensing the assertion back toward the compression of Oxymoron and
Pun” (ibid.). Chiasmus may also be seen as a figure that tends to create
indifferentiation, as it “seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument, as
when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author with, ‘Your manuscript
is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the
part that is original is not good’” (ibid.).
Several notable similarities between this story and Cortázar’s earlier
experiment in politically committed fiction in “Meeting” should be pointed
out: Both stories take real-world, historically verifiable events and
documents as their point of departure (Che Guevara’s Pasajes de la guerra
revolucionaria [1963] and a 1978 press clipping from the Mexican daily El
País), and both make use of religious allusions and figural allegory to
structure their narrative.5 Also, like “Meeting,” this story can be regarded as
the account of an experience so extreme and life-changing as to constitute a
“conversion.” “Meeting” is the allegorical account of Cortázar’s political
conversion to Cuban-style Marxism through the first-person retelling of Che
Guevara’s first guerrilla experiences in Cuba in 1959. Written in the (rather
naive) hope of harmonizing revolutionary fervor with the elitist values
inherent in literary discourse, “Meeting” succeeds, as I have argued
elsewhere, not because it achieves such congruence, but because it artistically
distorts and censors the texts by Che Guevara on which it is based
(“Revolución y alegoría,” 104–5, 109). “Press Clippings,” which may be read
as a critical rewriting of “Meeting,” is the record of an equally radical,
though less hopeful, change in Cortázar’s outlook. Far more pessimistically
and skeptically than in his previous fiction, Cortázar comes face-to-face in
this story with the “heart of darkness” that lies at the core of literature.
Journalism is clearly an important element in this context, as it serves
to spark the narrative’s ethical interrogations. Although the first press
clipping does not, properly speaking, belong to any genre of journalism—it
is, as I have already indicated, an open letter, written in the style of an
affidavit or legal deposition—it is nevertheless disseminated through the
newspapers. The clipping’s use of legal discourse further heightens its
journalistic impact: It is an immediate, direct appeal for justice, and its
language therefore carries a powerful performative element. It is not merely
a piece of journalistic reporting, but an action carried out by a victim of
violence seeking redress. Not unexpectedly, when Noemí and the sculptor
read it, the clipping makes them painfully aware of the futility of their own
activities to stop the violence:
“You can see, all this is worth nothing,” the sculptor said,
sweeping his arm through the air. “Worth nothing, Noemí, I’ve
spent months making this shit, you write books, that woman
denounces atrocities, we attend congresses and round tables to
protest, we almost come to believe that things are changing, and
then all you need is two minutes of reading to understand the
truth again, to—” (85)
Noemí responds in a reasonable and worldly-wise fashion to the

sculptor’s passionate exclamations, reminding him that writing and making
art are what they do best, and that their relative weakness and marginality
“will never be any reason to be silent” (86). She regards the sculptor’s
expressions of anguish as a form of “autotorture,” and in fact is pleased that
the man’s works are “at the same time naive and subtle, in any case without
any sense of dread or sentimental exaggeration” (82). She is leery of any sort
of sensationalism or directness in representing the subject of torture and is
sophisticated enough to realize that she herself feels an “obscure pleasure”
when evoking images of torture (83).
The second half of the story, which begins when Noemí leaves the
sculptor’s apartment, is controlled—fittingly, as it turns out—by a hidden
journalistic subtext: the crime story in France-Soir, which Noemí unknowingly
and mysteriously reenacts. This section of the narrative is a descent into
darkness, literally and metaphorically: the darkness of the passageways that
lead from a street in Paris to a shack in Marseille and the darkness of Noemí’s
unconscious, which yearns to pay back the torturers in their own coin, in a
version of talionic justice like the Old Testament’s “an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth.” (There are other, more direct links with the Bible in the story, as
will be seen shortly.) For now, suffice it to note that this section’s discourse
combines, in a volatile mix, sensationalist journalism with psychoanalysis.
But, why journalism? Why not deal more directly with the question of
art and violence, or art and crime, as in De Quincey’s On Murder Considered
as One of the Fine Arts (1827) or, to mention a more recent example, Patrick
Süsskind’s Perfume (1985)? Journalistic discourse, as I have pointed out in a
recent study, appears in many works of contemporary Latin American
narrative as a marker for ethical inquiry, specifically for what I have called an
ethics of writing (González, Journalism, 109–11). In literary works up to the
nineteenth century, religious discourse was predominant whenever ethical
issues were raised; in twentieth-century Latin American narrative, however,
it is frequently the figure of the journalist who confronts moral questions and
agonizes over them, and in a language that is predominantly secular and
philosophical rather than religious. The reasons for this journalism–ethics
linkage in Latin American literature are complex,6 but in general they have
to do with that literature’s constant return to its own discursive roots and to
the historical importance of journalism as one of the founding discourses of
Latin American writing. In “Press Clippings,” furthermore, the artist
characters are confronted by journalism with a transcription of reality
unhampered by the norms of artistic and literary taste and decorum as
Noemí and the sculptor understand them. The first clipping’s performative
use of language, and the second’s sensationalistic rhetoric, are both able to
name what the sculptures and Noemí’s own text (as she foresees it at the
story’s beginning) repress or elide in the name of “good taste” or intellectual
sophistication. By dealing openly with violence and crime, the press clippings
expose literature’s hypocritical denial of its links with evil.
Although this story’s ethical inquiries are secular in nature, religious
discourse still fulfills an auxiliary function in the text. Cortázar has seen fit to
insert it obliquely by the allusion, in his choice of the protagonist’s name, to
the biblical story of Ruth. The allusion to the Book of Ruth in Noemí’s name
reinforces the theme of male–female relations in the story, but it also brings
into play a figural allegorical framework derived from biblical exegesis
similar to the one Cortázar uses in “Meeting.”
“Noemí” is the Spanish version of Naomi, who was Ruth’s mother-in-
law. Though not an unusual name in Spanish-speaking countries, where it is
used by Christians as well as Jews, it nevertheless also suggests a figural link
between the protagonist and the Argentine mother of the first clipping, who
is Jewish.7 The biblical Naomi, it should be recalled, was an Israelite woman
who had gone with her husband and two sons to live abroad in the country
of Moab. Her husband and sons die, and she is left alone with her Moabite
daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. When she decides to return to her native
land, she tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their families, reminding
them that they no longer have any obligation toward her, but Ruth is
determined to remain: “Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be
my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). The latter verse is a
reminder that the story of Ruth, as Bible commentators have remarked,
entails profound personal transformations:
In what amounts to a change of identity, from Moabite to

Israelite (for there was as yet no formal procedure or even the
theoretical possibility for religious conversion), Ruth adopts the
people and God of Naomi. Religion was bound up with ethnicity
in biblical times; each people had its land and its gods (cf. Mic.
4:5), so that to change religion meant to change nationality.
(Harper’s Bible Commentary, 263)
The mutual loyalty between Ruth and Naomi throughout the story is seen in
the rabbinical tradition as an example of chesed, “loyalty or faithfulness born
of a sense of caring and commitment” (Harper’s Bible Commentary, 262). The
story of Ruth also develops the theme of family continuity. The males in
Naomi’s family, who might be expected to perpetuate their family, disappear
at the beginning of the story, and it falls to the women, an elderly widow and
a non-Israelite, to achieve the continuity of the family through Ruth’s
marriage to Boaz (ibid.).
Noemí and the Argentine mother stand in a figural allegorical

relationship to the biblical Naomi. Like her, both Noemí and the Argentine
mother have no husband (in Noemí’s case, because she is unmarried), and
both seem to be women in their middle age or past it.8 Like Naomi at the
beginning of the Book of Ruth (1:20–1), Noemí clearly harbors a great
bitterness (in her case, about her country’s situation), and one may surmise
that the Argentine mother harbors similar feelings, as her experience of
losing her husband and daughters parallels that of the biblical Naomi.
Furthermore, like Naomi, both women display chesed—loyalty and
solidarity—although Noemí does so in an unexpectedly evil fashion, when
she helps the tortured woman to turn the tables on her torturer. In contrast,
the Argentine mother is closer to the instance of Naomi, because she
petitions international organizations like the United Nations, the OAS, and
Amnesty International for help in her plight; that is, she acts within a legal
framework, as Naomi does to help her daughter-in-law Ruth at a time when
Israel is under the rule of the judges (Ruth 1:1).
The figural allegory of Naomi, the Argentine mother, and Noemí
clearly breaks down during the scene of violence in which Noemí is an active
participant. This is the point when a chiasmatic reversal occurs in the
narrative, a mirrorlike inversion of both the story of Naomi and that of the
Argentine mother. This section may be read as Noemí’s dream or fantasy of
wish fulfillment in which, by assuming the male’s aggressive role, she ends up
displaying the same dark impulses as the male power-figures.9 The question
of gender comes shockingly to the fore in this section. Unlike the powerless
women in the Book of Ruth and in the first press clipping, who must appeal
to a higher—and masculine—authority for aid, Noemí takes violent action to
defend the tortured woman and, in a gesture that connotes not only
solidarity with the victim but a distrust of the male-dominated system of
justice, helps her to get even in the same brutal way as a male might do.
Despite its rather graphic realism, the atmosphere in this section of the
story is oneiric, suggesting a symbolic rather than a literal reading. Earlier,
the narrator had indicated a latent desire for wish fulfillment, when she
recalled a religious anecdote about the conversion of King Clovis:
I remembered something I’d read when I was a girl, in Augustin

Thierry, perhaps, a story about how a saint, God knows what his
name was, had converted Clovis and his nation to Christianity
and was describing the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus, and the
king rose up on his throne, shaking his spear and shouting: “Oh,
if only I could have been there with my Franks!”—the miracle of
an impossible wish, the same impotent rage of the sculptor, lost

in his reading. (87)
As well as prefiguring the story’s narrative strategy (the use of wish

fulfillment), the anecdote foregrounds the ambiguous use of the
representation of violence in religious and, by extension, narrative discourse.
King Clovis’s naive reaction to the story of Christ’s crucifixion uncovers the
violent subtext on which the narrative depends even as it symbolically
suppresses it: Hearing the story, Clovis did not see the cross as a. Christian
symbol of redemption but as an instrument of torture on which Jesus was
being unjustly punished.
Like Clovis, Noemí literalizes in the account of her experience
elements from a symbolic system—in her case, the Freudian “primal scene.”
The little girl’s complaint (“My papa is doing things to my mama”) rings with
a psychosexual double entendre, suggesting a link with Noemí’s unconscious,
but also with her literary work: Earlier, Noemí has told the sculptor, “I’ve
been writing a story where I talk, no less, about the psycho-log-i-cal
problems of a girl at the moment of puberty” (87). It should be stressed that,
in the end, this process of literalization and wish fulfillment does not uncover
Noemí’s unconscious so much as it does the hidden impulses behind the
production of a literary text, in this case, the text to accompany the sculptures
about violence. Cortázar’s focus in this story, I would argue, is resolutely
fixed on the gray no-man’s-land (so to speak) between literature and
psychoanalysis. Thus, the “primal scene” Noemí witnesses is not quite that
of the sexual act between the father and the mother, but yet another
symbolization. Although sexual implications are still present in this scene (in
the symbolic equation of sex with violence and death common to many
cultures), in this instance, like Jesus’ crucifixion, the torture of the woman by
the man clearly stands also for something else: writing. The connection with
writing is brought out through a series of conventional symbolic
equivalencies between the sexual act and the act of writing: The lighted
cigarette is the penis/pen, the woman’s body “burned from the stomach to
the neck” (“Press Clippings,” 91–2) is the page, the “purple or red splotches
that went up to the thigh and the sex to the breasts” (92) are a form of
somatic writings.10
As a whole, the tableau that Noemí interrupts suggests an equation
between sexuality, violence, and writing in a context of transgression—a view
that has much in common with that of the French writer Georges Bataille in
Literature and Evil (1957). In his work, Bataille, who sees literature as the
product of an unconscious human desire to exceed all boundaries (whether
legal, religious, or cultural), offers a Nietzschean “hypermorality” as a position

au dessus de la melée, as it were, from which to judge literature ethically (Bataille,
8). Provocatively, to be sure, Bataille writes as if the question of evil in
literature were already settled: “Literature is not innocent. It is guilty and
should admit itself so” (82). Cortázar, on the other hand, seeks to go beyond
Bataille’s rather detached “hypermorality” toward a more personal and critical
view of literature’s links with evil. Cortázar wishes to show instead that there is
no fixed, exterior place from which one can safely pass judgment: Just as the
distinctions between male and female, inside and outside, reader and writer,
torturer and victim, are blurred in the story, so the possibility of rendering an
objective moral judgment about events becomes more difficult, if not
impossible—even as the need to do so becomes more urgent.
In “Press Clippings,” Cortázar creates a referential mise en abyme in
which “literature” and “reality” (as both are symbolized in multiple ways in
the story) continually reflect and interpenetrate each other at various levels,
in a back-and-forth movement that ends in indifferentiation: We have already
remarked how Noemí’s story stands in a figural allegorical and chiasmatic
relation to both Naomi’s (in the Book of Ruth) and to that of the Argentine
mother; and how, by “gendering” (to use a fashionable verb) the narrator, by
making his narrator female, Cortázar encourages an abysmatic reading of his
authorial pronouncements in the story (how do we separate Noemí’s
utterances from those of Cortázar, or from Cortázar writing as Noemí, etc.?).
Even when Noemí supposedly comes face-to-face with the grimmest reality
in the second half of the story, literature creeps in. Noemí’s actions, as said
before, are obvious wish fulfillments; but their improbable, conventionally
fictional nature is further underscored by the narrator’s reference to books
and films. After she has struck the man with a stool, she finds a knife and cuts
the woman’s bonds: “What came afterward I could have seen in a movie or
read in a book, I was there as if not being there, but I was there with an agility
and an intent that in a very brief time—if it happened in time—led me to find
a knife on the table, cut the bonds that held the woman” (92).
In another wish-fulfilling reversal, Noemí and the woman then tie up
the still-unconscious man to the bed and proceed to torture him as he had
tortured the woman. The narrator refuses to offer the exact details of the
man’s torture, save by an indirect—and terrifying—reference to a story by
Jack London (“Lost Face,” 1910), suggesting that the man’s fate is different
from what he inflicted upon the woman (93).11 But is this really so? The
allusions to the Jack London story suggest a scene not of maenadic frenzy,
but of carefully deliberate dismemberment:
now that I have to remember it and have to write it, my cursed

state and my harsh memory bring me something else
indescribably lived but not seen, a passage from a story by Jack
London where a trapper in the north struggles to win a clean
death while beside him, turned into a bloody thing that still holds
a glimmer of consciousness, his comrade in adventures howls and
twists, tortured by women of the tribe who horribly prolong his
life in spasms and shrieks, killing him without killing him,
exquisitely refined in each new variant, never described but there,
like us there, never described and doing what we must, what we
had to do. (93)
The passage suggests that the man is subjected to a process of

indifferentiation—he is turned, like London’s character, “into a bloody
thing”—which appears to be the opposite of what the woman suffered: I have
already remarked that the cigarette burns on her body evoke a form of
somatic writing, and as such they are connected to differentiation. But it can
be argued that what we have here is another chiasmus, “an ABBA pattern of
mirror inversion,” and that in fact the fates of both the man and the woman
are equivalent.
The way in which Jack London’s story is alluded to becomes in itself a
clearer indication of what happened to the man. Unwilling to repeat in
writing the horror in which she participated, Noemí takes recourse to
literature in order to avoid describing, while strongly suggesting, what took
place. Not surprisingly, given the story’s pervasive use of the mise en abyme,
the passage from London alluded to here also performs the same act of
elision by allusion. In “Lost Face,” the narrator refers to the torture thus:
So that thing before him was Big Ivan—Big Ivan the giant, the man
without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of
the seas; who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so
low that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to
him. Well, well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan’s nerves
and trace them to the roots of his quivering soul. They were
certainly doing it. It was inconceivable that a man could suffer so
much and yet live. Big Ivan was paying for his low order of nerves.
Already he had lasted twice as long as any of the others. (5)
As Noemí says, in London’s tale the torture “by the women of the tribe” is
“never described but there” (“Press Clippings,” 93). Comparing this
reference to Jack London with one in “Meeting,” one sees that in the latter
story London is mentioned indirectly through an edited quote from Che
Guevara’s Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria that serves as the story’s epigraph:
“I remembered an old story by Jack London, where the protagonist, resting
against the trunk of a tree, prepares to end his life with dignity” (Todos los
fuegos el fuego, 67). As I show in my essay on this story, Cortázar reads this
quote as a convergence between life and fiction, as well as an allegory of
death and resurrection, although in fact there is no precise correspondence
between Che’s circumstances (a guerrilla skirmish in a Cuban forest) and
those of Jack London’s fictional hero: As Che himself indicates in a phrase
that Cortázar chose to cut, “the protagonist ... prepares to end his life with
dignity, knowing that he is doomed to die of the cold in the frozen zones of Alaska”
(quoted in González, “Revolución y alegoría,” 104–5; my italics).12 In “Press
Clippings,” on the other hand, the allusion to London opens up a vertiginous
mise en abyme of elisions, cuts, or “clippings”: A paraphrase, it is itself already
a “clipping,” a piece cut from London’s text; furthermore, in its content, the
passage avoids describing directly the way the trapper dies (another elision),
although it strongly suggests that this occurs through some variant of the
proverbial “death of a thousand cuts,” which is yet another grim metaphor
for writing.
Commenting astutely on Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) in his essay “Del yin
al yang (Sobre Sade, Bataille, Marmori, Cortázar y Elizondo),” the late
Severo Sarduy focuses on chapter 14 of the novel, the episode in which
Wong, a Chinese who is a marginal character in the novel, shows the
members of the Serpent’s Club a portfolio of photographs of the Leng T’che,
the “death of a thousand cuts,” which he is using for a book on Chinese art,
because “In China,” as Wong explains, “one has a different concept of art”
(Rayuela, 70). Sarduy remarks that Wong symbolizes in the novel an
alternative to the Western metaphysics of presence and to the yearning for
totality that predominates in Cortázar’s ideology in Hopscotch. Wong and his
photographs emblematize the discontinuous, fragmentary nature of literary
language, and its links with death and emptiness. However, Sarduy points
out, Cortázar’s text does not fully develop these implications, perhaps
because they are too unsettling to the search for wholeness thematized in the
novel (Escrito sobre un cuerpo, 24–7). Both the man and the woman in “Press
Clippings,” therefore, attempt to destroy each other through a mutilation
that is emblematic of writing. There is no symbolic death and resurrection
here, no possibility of allegorically “healing” the break between the text and
its meaning: A panorama of “cuts” or “clippings” extends as far as the eye can
see.
“Press Clippings” proposes a view of writing as a cutting or mutilation

very similar to Jacques Derrida’s notion of “textual grafting”:
One ought to explore systematically not only what appears to be

a simple etymological coincidence uniting the graft and the graph
(both from graphion: writing implement, stylus), but also the
analogy between the forms of textual grafting and so-called
vegetal grafting, or even, and more commonly today, animal
grafting. It would not be enough to compose an encyclopedic
catalogue of grafts ...; one must elaborate a systematic treatise on
the textual graft. Among other things, this would help us
understand the functioning of footnotes, for example, or
epigraphs, and in what way, to the one who knows how to read,
these are sometimes more important than the so-called principal
or capital text. (Dissemination, 202–3)
Could it be by chance that the scene of torture in the second press clipping,
in which Noemí uncannily (vicariously?) participates, tapes place in a shack
next to “a vegetable patch with low wire fences that marked off planted
sections, there was enough light to see the skimpy mastic trees, the poles that
supported climbing plants, rags to scare off the birds” (90) and with “a vague
entrance full of old furniture and garden tools” (91)? Cortázar’s use of
chiasmus not only negates the possibility of any allegorical interpretation
that would give his story a sense of wholeness and transcendent meaning, but
it also makes visible the story’s dependence on cuts or elisions at every level:
from that of writing (as a systematic spacing of signs as well as an operation
involving textual grafts), to the structural (the story’s binary divisions), to the
thematic (the sculptor’s works and the instances of torture and mutilation
described in the text). Noemí’s disjointed thoughts, while self-reflexively
harking back to the story’s overall theme of cutting or dividing, show that she
has witnessed a terrifying truth about herself, not only as a human being, but
as a writer: “How could I know how long it lasted, how could I understand
that I too, I too even though I thought I was on the right side, I too, how
could I accept that I too there on the other side from the cut-off hands and
the common graves, I too on the other side from the girls tortured and shot
that same Christmas night ...” (93).
The psychoanalytic element in the story helps explain the delayed
appearance of the second press clipping, the one from France-Soir, as an
instance of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action. As Jonathan Culler
summarizes it, this is “a paradoxical situation that Freud frequently
encounters in his case studies, in which the determining event in a neurosis

never occurs as such, is never present as an event, but is constructed
afterward by what can only be described as a textual mechanism of the
unconscious” (On Deconstruction, 163). Arguably, the event that precipitates
the deferred action is the encounter with the little girl, which causes Noemí
to construct a fantasy in which she acts out her neuroses; what is uncanny
about the fantasy is that it is built out of elements from another clipping, one
that Noemí had not previously mentioned (although she never denies having
seen it before). The story leaves open the possibility, however, that Noemí
might have learned about the events in Marseille from the little girl herself,
who was the (presumably runaway) daughter of the couple in France-Soir,
and that what we have read is Noemí’s conflation of the little girl’s account
with her own wish-fulfilling fantasy.
In the end, it matters little. Clearly, there are two opposite ways to read
this story: a “fantastic” one, which discounts the story’s political and
documentary elements (the first clipping) by subsuming everything into
fiction; and a “realist” or “symbolic” one, in which the whole second half of
the story (after Noemí leaves the sculptor’s home) would be Noemí’s fictional
response to the first clipping, a narrative-within-the-narrative, and thus
subject to a “symbolic” rather than a literal interpretation. This reading,
however, is based on assumptions that are not fully and unequivocally
supported by the text (that the story as a whole, or a large part of it, is a
fiction penned by Noemí and therefore attests only to her “state of mind”)
and essentially acts to suppress the “fantastic” reading. Both readings conflict
with each other and do violence to the text. I have been pursuing the latter,
more “symbolic” reading, mainly because it has allowed me to focus on the
story’s many self-reflexive aspects, including the question of the narrator’s
gender, but it clearly breaks down when I try to explain, in a non-”fantastic”
way, the chain of events of the story’s second half. The preliminary authorial
statement that one of the clippings is real and the other imaginary (81),
further muddies the waters by first strictly delimiting two domains—“reality”
and “imagination”—and then suggesting that, save for the first clipping,
which has been “grafted” into it, the story as a whole belongs to the
“imaginary” domain. Nevertheless, even this apparently authoritative
statement is subject to fictionalization, and more ruthless readers who want
to opt for the “fantastic” view might choose to do this, if they were willing
to consider the powerfully performative first clipping to be purely fictional
as well—an option that goes to the heart of the ethical issues raised by the
story, as will be seen shortly.
The ethical questions in “Press Clippings,” however, focus first not on
the reader but on the figure of the author. In a curiously perverse

(chiasmatic?) version of his old theory of the “lector cómplice” (Rayuela,
453–4), Cortázar posits in this story a theory of an “autor cómplice,” an
“author-accomplice,” not of the reader, but of the torturers, the criminals,
and any other entity that uses violence as a means to control others. The
writer’s craft is a sublimated version of the mechanisms of aggression used by
those in power and those who wish to have power. To write is to cut, to
wound, to hack away at something that is (or seems to be) alive: language,
words, texts. Even if texts are viewed as already “dead bodies” or “epitaphs,”
writing is still a macabre affair, a form of necromancy or necrophilia.
Considering that all of Cortázar’s novels after Hopscotch have
fragmented, collage-like structures in which “expendable chapters” (that are
often quotes taken from newspapers and magazines, as in Hopscotch) or
outright press clippings (as in A Manual for Manuel) play a significant role,
then “Press Clippings” clearly implies a broad and anguished reappraisal by
Cortázar of a large portion of his own oeuvre. And Cortázar, unlike Bataille,
seems to find no reassurance in a view of literature as a form of desire and
transgression. “Press Clippings” marks a point of crisis in Cortázar’s work, a
crisis that had been haunting that work at least since chapter 14 in Hopscotch,
where Wong displays the photographs of the Leng T’che. The source of
those photographs, as Severo Sarduy points out, is Bataille’s Les Larmes d’Eros
(1961; Escrito sobre un cuerpo, 16, 24–5); “Press Clippings” would thus be
merely the latest episode in a long-standing and tense “dialogue” between
Cortázar and Bataille’s texts. Sarduy also remarks on the narrative distance
with which Cortázar approaches this subject, and on the “perturbation”
(Sarduy’s italics) Wong’s presence brings into Hopscotch (Escrito sobre un
cuerpo, 25, 27). Cortázar continued to tiptoe around the subject of literature
and evil in texts such as “Suspect Relations” (in Around the Day in Eighty
Worlds, 1967), which can be considered a tepid gloss on De Quincey’s On
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and in such novels and stories as
Manual for Manuel and “Apocalypse at Solentiname,” which, in their search
for ideological solutions, are still merely rough drafts of “Press Clippings.”
Of course, Cortázar’s stories have often featured characters who confront evil
and perversity, or who are themselves monstrous;13 but in “Press Clippings”
the terms of the equation (literature, politics, violence) are fully present and
clearly laid out, the ethical questioning is deeper, and the sense of crisis is
unequivocal.
The discomfort this story generates in both author and readers is
directly traceable to the grafting of the first press clipping, that of the
Argentine mother. This powerful text unsettles the story and critical readings
of it, making them seem superfluous, if not downright immoral. Bringing

legal discourse into play, and evoking notions of justice and morality at their
most fundamental level, the first press clipping uses ethical discourse as a
shield and as a weapon to further its cause.
The clipping’s ultimate effect is to make the critical reader feel like an
accomplice to the crimes it denounces. It achieves this first through its
testimonial nature, which asserts the text’s absolute truthfulness and almost
literally rubricates it in blood. In general, testimonial narratives are
profoundly ethical, in that their stories are built around moral imperatives;
one of these is Thou shalt not lie. (From the reader’s standpoint, this particular
imperative translates as Thou shalt not doubt.) Despite their frequent claims
to objectivity, moralism is pervasive in testimonial narratives, since, like
melodrama (to which many of these texts recur), they always deal with
fundamental polar oppositions: truth versus falsehood, justice versus injustice,
society versus the individual (Brooks, 4). With the best intentions, these texts
often manipulate their readers’ emotions, forcing them to judge or be
judged, to accept the narrative at face value or risk moral opprobrium.
Testimonial narratives impose upon the reader the burden of making a moral
choice, partly because they make ethically unacceptable the option of reading
them as fiction.
The clipping’s second strategy is the use of the performative, which
shifts the clipping’s textual dimension to the level of an act. A text such as the
first clipping addresses itself to the readers, asking, almost demanding, that
they do something. But what? Certainly, art or literature is not what first
springs to mind. For the artists—Noemí, the sculptor, or Cortázar himself—
the clipping poses an almost existentialist dilemma of how to react without
betraying their personal identity, of which literature (in Noemí’s and
Cortázar’s case) forms an inseparable part. Cortázar’s life and work, in
particular, despite his ludic inclinations, were always characterized by his
desire to be true to his vocation as a writer, as his sometimes strained but
always close relationship with the Cuban Revolution attests: To the demands
by the Marxist and fidelista hard-liners that he deal with subjects such as
revolution and oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, Cortázar replied
that he would do so, but “in my own way” (“Policrítica,” 128). In interviews,
Cortázar insisted on “the horror I feel toward anyone who is an ‘engaged
writer’ and nothing else. In general, I’ve never known a good writer who was
engaged to the point that everything he wrote was subsumed in his
engagement, without freedom to write other things. [...] I could never accept
engagement as obedience to an exclusive duty to deal with ideological
matters” (Prego, 131–2; my translation).
Speaking about A Manual for Manuel, Cortázar states that in that novel
he tried to “achieve a convergence of contemporary history ... with pure
literature.... That extremely difficult balance between an ideological and a
literary content ... is for me one of the most passionately interesting
problems in contemporary literature” (Prego, 133; my translation). The
Argentine mother’s clipping, however, does not allow for any such “balance.”
It is an imperative text, which demands that the reader give an ethically
unambiguous reply to its appeal. But is a literary reply ethical? In “Press
Clippings,” Cortázar addresses the question of how to react ethically as a
writer to acts of violence and evil, only to discover that literature itself is
violent. Like the torturers and their dictatorial masters, literature is
impassive and heartless, not given (in Noemí’s phrase) to “sentimental
exaggeration.” In the end, Cortázar appears to agree with Bataille’s dictum
that “Literature is not innocent.” But he does so grudgingly and with
profound anguish, as this notion runs counter to Cortázar’s publicly stated
view of literature as ludic, childlike, and therefore innocent.14 At the story’s
end, in a last twist of figuralism and chiasmus, the orphaned little girl
becomes a figure for the Argentine mother and for Noemí herself. A witness
to the horrors of the second clipping, the little girl, her innocence lost, is to
be picked up by a “social worker” (“Press Clippings,” 96), swallowed up by
society. The best literature can do, it seems, is to “graft” the Argentine
mother’s clipping onto its own textual body and pass it on to the reader, along
with the ethical dilemma it poses.
NOTES
1. My layman’s understanding of ethics is heavily indebted to a group of current books

that attempt to link ethics with literature, some of which seek to expand on Jacques
Derrida’s rather cryptic statement in Signéponge/Signsponge: “the ethical instance is at work
in the body of literature” (“l’instance éthique travaille la littérature au corps”; 52–3). Among
those which I have found most useful—although they often differ widely among themselves
in approach—are: Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics
(1992); J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and
Benjamin (1987) and Versions of Pygmalion (1990); and Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative
Ethics (1995). Harpham, whose synthesis of the current problematics of ethics and literature
I find persuasive, cautions that “ethics is not properly understood as an ultimately coherent
set of concepts, rules, or principles—that it ought not even be considered a truly distinct
discourse—but rather that it is best conceived as a factor of ‘imperativity’ immanent in, but
not confined to, the practices of language, analysis, narrative, and creation” (5). Harpham
nevertheless identifies certain recurrent traits in discourses dealing with ethics (such as
works by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Cavell, Derrida, Foucault, and Levinas) or
where it plays a visible role (as in the narratives of Joseph Conrad): A fundamental one is
the concern with the Other, particularly with “an otherness that remains other, that resists
assimilation” (6). In his view, “the appearance of the other marks an ‘ethical moment’ even
in discourses not obviously concerned with ethics” (7). Glossing a passage from Paul De
Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979), J. Hillis Miller observes that the ethics of language
requires that language be referential (i.e., that it speak of something other than itself), even
if that same referential impulse leads it (inevitably, according to De Man) into confusion,
error, or falsehood (Miller, 46). In its discursive form, ethics does not escape the same
contradiction: It has to be referential, which in its case implies passing judgment,
formulating commandments, and making promises about good and evil; but at the same
time it happens that such judgments, commandments, or promises cannot be evaluated as
to their truthfulness outside the domain of language. Commandments like “Thou shalt not
kill,” “Thou shalt not lie,” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” for example, are neither
true nor false: They simply are. Ethical discourse is tautological; it is impossible to verify
with reference to any rule or example outside itself (Miller, 49–50). In this, it resembles
fiction, since it can be argued that the “falsehood” of any work of fiction can always be
recovered as a “truth” on another level. At a strictly referential level, for instance, Góngora’s
Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613) is false, but this is not necessarily the case at a symbolic
or an allegorical level. Commandments are also like fictions in that, although they refer to
real-world situations in which specific individuals may be involved, they greatly over
simplify and generalize these situations.
2. In Chapter 6 of my book Journalism and the Development of Spanish American
Narrative, I comment extensively on works by García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Vargas
Llosa. On Carpentier, see my essay “Etica y teatralidad: El Retablo de las Maravillas de
Cervantes y El area y la sombra de Alejo Carpentier.”
3. Other recent essays that comment on “Press Clippings” are Susana Reisz de
Rivarola’s “Política y ficción fantástica” and Maurice Hemingway and Frank McQuade’s
“The Writer and Politics in Four Stories by Julio Cortázar.” Unlike Boldy and Peavler,
these critics view “Press Clippings” as a story that attempts to reconcile the fantastic with
the political.
4. The quandary is similar to that in Borges’s short story “Averroes’ Search,” when,
in the final paragraph, the narrator notes: “I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what
drama is without ever knowing what a theatre is, was no less absurd than I, wanting to
imagine Averroes with nothing but a few drams of Renan, Lane, and Ásín Palacios. In the
last page, I felt that my narrative was a symbol of the man I was while I was writing it, and
that in order to write that narrative I had to be that man, and that to be that man I had to
have written that narrative, and so until infinity” (El Aleph, 101). All translations are mine,
save where otherwise indicated.
5. See my essay “Revolución y alegoría en ‘Reunión’ de Julio Cortázar,” 96–109. The
most complete treatment of figural allegory is still Erich Auerbach’s classic essay, “Figura.”
In it, he defines figural allegory as “the interpretation of one worldly event through
another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical
events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about
them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still
to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event” (58).
6. For a more detailed explanation, see González, Journalism, 109–11.
7. Her maiden name, Laura Beatriz Bonaparte, suggests that (like the biblical Ruth)
she is not of Jewish origin, but she is married to Santiago Bruchstein, who is insulted by
the military as “a Jew bastard” (“Press Clippings,” 86).
8. Noemí’s acquaintance with the sculptor dates back twenty years; “Press
Clippings,” 81.
9. Inquiring about the origin of the wishes that incite dream-wishes, Freud remarks
(in a passage that is highly suggestive in terms of “Press Clippings”): “I readily admit that
a wishful impulse originating in the conscious will contribute to the instigation of a dream,
but it will probably not do more than that. The dream would not materialize if the
preconscious wish did not succeed in finding reinforcement from elsewhere.... From the
unconscious, in fact. My supposition is that a conscious wish can only become a dream-instigator
if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious wish with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement
from it.... These wishes in our unconscious, ever on the alert and, so to say, immortal,
remind one of the legendary Titans, weighed down since primaeval ages by the massive
bulk of the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods and
which are still shaken from time to time by the convulsion of their limbs. But these wishes,
held under repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we are taught by the
psychological research into the neuroses. I would propose, therefore, to set aside the
assertion ... that the place of origin of dream-wishes is a matter of indifference and replace
it by another one to the following effect: a wish which is represented in a dream must be an
infantile one” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 591–2; Freud’s emphasis).
10. See Susan Gubar’s overview of sexual/textual metaphors and women’s writing in
“‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Women’s Creativity,” 244–7.
11. In London’s “Lost Face,” an exiled Polish patriot, Subienkow, who had joined with
Russian fur trappers in Alaska in the early 1800s, faces certain death by torture at the hands
of an Indian tribe. As he hears and watches his comrade, Big Ivan, being tortured by the
women of the tribe (in the passage alluded to in Cortázar’s story), he devises a way to
achieve a quick, clean death at the hand of his enemies. Subienkow, who regards himself
as “a dreamer, a poet, and an artist” (“Lost Face,” 4), uses his wits to trick the chief into
beheading him, thus depriving the tribe of the pleasure of torturing him. The narrator
makes it clear that Subienkow is no pure, unsullied hero. Despite his cultivated
background and his noble dream of an independent Poland, he too had killed innocent
people: the traveler in Siberia whose papers he stole (7, 8), and, of course, numerous
Indians (7). “It had been nothing but savagery” (7) is a phrase that recurs like a leitmotiv
throughout “Lost Face.” Interestingly, this is a story that also caught Jorge Luis Borges’s
attention. Borges translated it into Spanish and included it in an anthology he edited of
short stories by London, Las muertes concéntricas (1979). It is likely, however, that Cortázar
read the story in the original English long before Borges’s translation appeared.
12. The story Che had in mind is probably London’s “To Build a Fire.”
13 As Roberto González Echevarría remarks about the myth of the Minotaur in
Cortázar’s early play, Los reyes (1949): “The confrontation of the monster and the hero
constitutes the primal scene in Cortázar’s mythology of writing: a hegemonic struggle for
the center, which resolves itself in a mutual cancellation and in the superimposition of
beginnings and ends.... This primal scene appears with remarkable consistency in
Cortázar’s writing. I do not mean simply that there are monsters, labyrinths, and heroes,
but rather that the scene in which a monster and a hero kill each other, cancel each other’s
claim to the center of the labyrinth, occurs with great frequency, particularly in texts where
the nature of writing seems to be more obviously in question” (The Voice of the Masters, 102,
103).
14. “Ever since I began writing ...,” Cortázar has said, “the notion of the ludic was
profoundly meshed, confused, with the notion of literature. For me, a literature without
ludic elements is boring, the kind of literature I don’t read, a dull literature, like socialist
realism, for example” (Prego, 136–7). See also, González Bermejo, 103–12, and Picón
Garfield’s comments on games and the “man-child” in Cortázar’s works in ¿Es Julio
Cortázar un surrealista? 189–99.
REFERENCES
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Bataille, Georges. La Literature et le mal. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
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Literary Biography: Volume 113, Modern Latin American Fiction Writers, First
Series, 119–33. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark. Layman, 1992.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1972.
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of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
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Cortázar, Julio. “Policrítica a la hora de los chacales.” In Carlos Fuentes, “Documentos. El
caso Padilla.” Libre 1 (September–November 1971): 126–30.
———. “Press Clippings.” In We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales, trans. Gregory
Rabassa, 81–96. New York: Knopf, 1983.
———. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972.
———. Todos los fuegos el fuego. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY
Cornell University Press, 1982.
De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
———. Signéponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
González, Aníbal. “Etica y teatralidad: El Retablo de las Maravillas de Cervantes y El arpa y
la sombra de Alejo Carpentier.” La Torre (Nueva Epoca). Revista de la Universidad
de Puerto Rico 27–8 (1993): 485–502.
———. Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative. Cambridge
———. “Revolución y alegoría en ‘Reunión’ de Julio Cortázar.” In Los ochenta mundos de
Cortázar: Ensayos, ed. Fernando Burgos, 93–109. Madrid: Edi-6, 1987.
González Bermejo, Ernesto. Revelaciones de un cronopio. Conversaciones con Cortázar.
Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1986.
González Echevarría, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing azul Authority in Modern
Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Gubar, Susan. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Women’s Creativity.” Critical Inquiry:
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Hemingway, Maurice, and Frank McQuade. “The Writer and Politics in Four Stories by
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Chronology
1914 Julio Florencio Cortázar, son of Julio Cortázar and María

Herminia Scott, is born in Brussels.
1918 The Cortázar family returns to Argentina and the father
abandons his wife and two children. Julio is raised by the
women of the family: his mother, an aunt, his grandmother
and his sister Ofelia.
1928 He attends the Mariano Acosta Normal School for
teachers.
1932 He obtains his Normal Teacher Diploma, which allows him
to teach first primary and then secondary school.
1935 He studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, but
due to financial difficulty at home he abandons his studies
to start teaching.
1937 Appointed teacher at the National School of Bolivar, a
small town in the province of Buenos Aires, Cortázar writes
short stories that he leaves unpublished.
1938 Using Julio Denis as a pseudonym, he publishes his first
poems under the title of Presencia (Presence)
1939 Assigned to the Normal School of Chivilcoy.
1944 Cortázar moves to Cuyo, Mendoza where he teaches
French Literature at the University. He publishes his first
short story, “Bruja” (“The Witch”), and takes parts in anti-
Perón meetings.
267
268 Chronology
1945 When Juan Domingo Perón wins the presidential elections

Cortázar quits his teaching post and returns to Buenos
Aires. His first volume of short stories, entitled La otra orilla
(The Other Shore), appears.
1946 He publishes the short story “Casa tomada” (“The House
Taken”) in the review Los Anales de Buenos Aires, whose
director is Jorge Luis Borges.
1947 His short story “Bestiario” (“Bestiary”) appears in the
review Los Anales de Buenos Aires.
1948 Cortázar obtains his certification as Public Translator for
English and French.
1949 He publishes the dramatic poem Los reyes, the first work to
be released under his own name. The work is generally
ignored by the critics.
1951 Sudamericana publishes Cortázar’s first volume of short
stories Bestiario (Bestiary). He obtains a scholarship from the
French Government and he travels to Paris, where
Cortázar works as a translator for UNESCO.
1952 The short story “Axolotl” appears in Buenos Aires in
Literaria.
1953 He marries Aurora Bernárdez, an Argentinean translator.
1954 Cortázar continues to work for UNESCO as an
independent translator. He completes Historias de cronopios y
de famas (Cronopios and Famas), which he had begun in 1951.
1956 The collection of short stories Final del juego (End of the
Game and Other Stories) is published in Mexico. Cortázar
also publishes a translation of Poe’s prose work.
1959 Las armas secretas (Secret Weapons), a collection of stories
including the short story called “El perseguidor” (“The
Pursuer”), appears.
1960 He travels to the United States and publishes the novel Los
Premios (The Winners).
1963 Sudamericana Publishers publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch);
5000 copies are sold in the first year. That same year,
Cortázar visits Castro’s Cuba for the first time.
1965 The English translation of Los Premios (The Winners) is
published.
1966 Cortázar releases a collection of stories Todos los fuegos el
Chronology 269
fuego (All Fires the Fire). His essay “Para llegar a Lezama
Lima,” on the Cuban writer Lezama Lima, is published in
Havana. English and French translations of Rayuela
(Hopscotch) appear in print.
1967 Cortázar publishes his first collage-book, La vuelta al día en
ochenta mundos (Around the day in 80 worlds), which a
collection of short stories, chronicles, essays and poems.
1968 Cortázar publishes the novel 62, Modelo para armar (62: A
Model Kit) in Buenos Aires.
1968 In Último Round (Last Round), another collage-book,
Cortázar compiles essays, short stories, poems, chronicles
and humorous texts. The book also includes a letter written
in 1967 to Roberto Fernández Retamar regarding the
situation of the Latin American intellectuals. The English
translation of Historias de cronopios y de famas (Cronopios and
Famas) appears.
1970 He travels to Chile with his second wife, Ugne Karvelis, to
witness the inauguration of President Salvador Allende.
1973 Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel) is published in
Buenos Aires by Sudamericana. Cortázar receives the
“Medici Award” in Paris for this book.
1975 He visits the United States and goes to Mexico City, where
he gives a series of lectures about Latin American literature
and his own work; two of these appear in The Final Island:
The Fiction of Julio Cortázar (1978).
1978 English version of Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel)
appears.
1979 He publishes Un tal Lucas (A Certain Lucas) in Alfaguara,
Madrid. He divorces Ugné Karvelis, and travels with Carol
Dunlop, his third wife, to Panama.
1980 Cortázar publishes the short story collection Queremos tanto
a Glenda (We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales).
1981 Thanks to François Mitterand, Cortázar receives French
citizenship. That same year, he is diagnosed with leukemia.
1982 His wife Carol Dunlop passes away in November.
1983 He travels to Havana, Cuba, and later to Buenos Aires to
visit his mother after the fall of the dictatorship.
1984 Cortázar dies on February 14 of leukemia and is buried at
270 Chronology
the Cemetery of Montparnasse in the same tomb were

Carol Dunlop rests.
1986 Alfaguara Publishers begin the edition of his complete
works.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale

University. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking
(1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970),
A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a
Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon
(1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and
Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor
Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great
writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How
to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize.
JAIME ALAZRAKI, Professor of Spanish at Columbia University, is the

editor of many fundamental scholarly works on Borges and Cortázar, as well
as the recent collection entitled Teorías de lo fantástico (2001). Professor
Alazraki is also the author of Borges and the Kabbalah: and other essays on his
fiction and poetry (1988) and Hacia Cortázar: Aproximaciones a su obra (1994).
ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ ECHEVARRÍA is Sterling Professor of Hispanic

and Comparative Literatures. He is the author of numerous scholarly works
including The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin
271
272 Contributors
American Literature (1985) and Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in

Spanish and Latin American Literatures (1993), editor of The Oxford Book of
Latin American Short Stories (1997), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of
Latin American Literature (1996). His most recent publication is The Pride of
Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999).
STEVEN BOLDY is the author of Novels of Julio Cortázar (1980), the work
cited in this collection, and Before the Boom: four essays on Latin-American
literature before 1940 (1981). His latest critical study, Memoria mexicana
(1998), examines Carlos Fuentes’ novel La region mas transparente.
ANA HERNÁNDEZ DEL CASTILLO is the author of Keats, Poe, and the
Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis (1981). In addition to critical essays on
Cortázar, Professor Hernández has published studies on Horacio Quiroga as
well as on Cuban poets including Magali Alabau, Lourdes Gil and Maya
Islas.
GORDANA YOVANOVICH is a professor with the School of Languages

and Literatures at the University of Guelph. She is the author of Julio
Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction (1991) and Play and the
Picaresque: Lazarillo de Tormes, Libro de Manuel, and Match Ball (1999).
Professor Yovanovich has published several critical essays on Cortázar, as
well as Nicolás Guillén. She is also the editor of New World Order: Corporate
Agenda and Parallel Reality (2003), a study of social and political aspects of
globalization.
DORIS SOMMER, professor of Romance Languages at Harvard

University, has written extensively on Latin American literature and its
rhetoric. Professor Sommer is the author of Foundational Fictions: the
National Romances of Latin America (1991). In addition, she is the editor of
The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America (1999), a study of
the relationships of history and regionalism.
ISABEL ALVAREZ BORLAND is Professor of Spanish at Holy Cross

College. In addition to many critical essays on Latin American writers such
as Gabriel García Márquez and Severo Sarduy, Professor Alvarez-Borland is
the author of Discontinuidad y ruptura en Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1992) and
Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (1998).
Contributors 273
ILAN STAVANS, Professor of Spanish at Amherst College, is the editor of

several scholarly collections including Oxford Book of Latin American Essays
(1997) and Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003). Professor Stavans has published
extensively on translation, language, and Latin American culture. He is the
author of Julio Cortázar: a Study of the Short Fiction (1996).
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, author of countless fundamental works of Latin

American literature such as La casa verde (Green House) (1965), La ciudad y los
perros (Time of the Hero)(1967), and Conversación en la cathedral (Conversation
in the Cathedral)(1969), also has participated in the political scene in his
native Peru. Vargas Llosa’s political experience informs his recent novel,
Fiesta del Chivo (Feast of the Goat) (2000), based on the brutal regime of
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
LUCILLE KERR, professor of Spanish at the University of Southern

California, has published numerous critical essays on Latin American
authors such as Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, and Manuel Puig, as well as
Julio Cortázar. Professor Kerr is the author of Suspended Fictions: Reading
Novels by Manuel Puig (1987) and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions
from Spanish America (1992).
ANÍBAL GONZÁLEZ is the Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Spanish and

Portuguese at Pennsylvania State University. In addition to numerous
critical essays, Professor González is the author of La crónica modernista
hispanoamericana (1983) and La novela modernista hispanoamericana (1987).
His latest publication is Killer Books: Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern
Spanish American Narrative (2001).
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———. A Certain Lucas. Gregory Rabassa, trans. New York: Knopf, 1984.
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Levinson, Brett. “The Other Origin: Cortázar and Identity Politics”. Latin
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McNab, Pamela J. “Julio Cortázar’s Axolotl: Literary Archaeology of the
Unreal”. International Fiction Review 24(1997): 12–22.
———. “Shifting Symbols in Cortázar’s ‘Bestiario.’ ” Revista Hispánica
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———. “Justice to Julio Cortázar”. Southwest Review 81 (1996): 288–310.
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———. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996.
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of Contemporary Fiction 17 (1997): 25–34.
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Robbe-Grillet”. The Comparatist 13 (1989): 29–36.
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‘Bestiario’” Romance Notes. 13, No.2 (1971) 239–242.
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Acknowledgments
“Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch” by Jaime Alazraki. From The
Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. © 1978 University of Oklahoma
Press. Reprinted by permission.
“Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing” by Roberto González

Echevarría. From The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. © 1978
University of Oklahoma Press. Reprinted by permission.
“Libro de Manuel” by Steven Boldy. From The Novels of Julio Cortázar. ©

1980 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of
Cambridge University Press.
“Woman as Circe the Magician” by Ana Hernández del Castillo. From Keats,
Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopeoesis. © 1981 John Benjamins B.V.
With kind permission by John Benjamins Publishing Company,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia. www.benjamins.com.
“An Interpretation of Rayuela Based on the Character Web” by Gordana

Yovanovich. From Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic. © 2003 Gordana
Yovanovich.
“Grammar Trouble: Cortázar’s Critique of Competence” by Doris Sommer.

From Diacritics 25, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 21–45. © 1995 The Johns Hopkins
University Press. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
279
280 Acknowledgments
“Cortázar: On Critics and Interpretation” by Isabel Alvarez Borland. From

INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispanica, nos. 43–44 (Primavera–Otoño 1996). ©
1996 INTI. Reprinted by permission.
“Justice to Julio Cortázar” by Ilan Stavans. From Southwest Review vol. 81,
no. 2 (Spring 1996). © 1996 by Southern Methodist University. Reprinted
by permission.
“The Trumpet of Deyá” by Mario Vargas Llosa. The Review of Contemporary

Fiction vol. 17, no 1 (Spring 1997): 25–34. © 1997 The Review of Contemporary
Fiction. Reprinted by permission.
“Betwixt Reading and Repetition (apropos of Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit)” by

Lucille Kerr. From Julio Cortázar: New Readings, edited by Carlos J. Alonso.
© 1998 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of
Cambridge University Press.
“‘Press Clippings’ and Cortázar’s Ethics of Writing” by Aníbal González.

From Julio Cortázar: New Readings, edited by Carlos J. Alonso. © 1998
Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge
University Press.
Index
Adam Buenosayres, (Marechal), 203 on creativity, 190

Alazraki, Jaime Aragon, 222
on form, 128 Argentina, 4, 200
on Toward the Last Square of the Argos, (publishing house), 204
Hopscotch, 3–25 Arlt, Roberto, 201, 205
Alcott, L.M., 204 a careless stylist, 201
Aleixandre, Vicente, 146 Armstrong, Louis, 1
All Fires the Fire, 211 and visible target, 156
no victory in, 34 Around the Day in Eighty Worlds,
theme of, 33 211, 223–224
American jazz, 166 Arreola, J.J., 206
Anacalypis, (Higgins), 93 Artificial Respiration, (Piglia), 203
Anatomy of Melancholy, (Burton), 77, At Your Service, 213
85, 96 Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,
Andrade, Oswald de (essay), Bakhtin, 168
on cannibalism, 151 on hero and author, 169
Andres, (character in Libro de redemption through death, 171
Manuel), 22 “Automatic writing,” 196
the black plot, 53 Autonauts of the Cosmopike, 223–224
the dream, 52 Axolotl, 13, 221
dualism in his life, 52 and metaphor, 14
his journey to Verrieres, 55–56 Ayala, Francisco, 202
on liberating man, 23
the message, 57–58 Babel, Isaac, 2, 209–210
Animal Farm, (Orwell), 102 Bakhtin, Mikhail
Apocalypse in Solentiname, 213, 246 on author and hero, 170–171
Approach to Almotasim, (Borges), 201 on “consummation,” 168
Apuleius, 93 dialogism, 171
“Apuntes para una poetica,” 183, and the polyphonic novel, 104
189 redemptive love, 170
281
282 Index
Banfield, Argentina, 197–198 128, 196–197, 201

Bar Don Juan, (Callado), 53 and deals with human culture, 11
Barrenechea his first writings, 7
on Rayuela, 82 and reality, 10
Barth, John, 208 his sophisticated fictions, 201
Barthes, Roland, 151 his verbal style, 205
on myth writing, 28 Borland, Isabel Alvarez
Bastos, Roa, 41 on Cortazar: On Critics and
Bataille, Georges, 245 Interpretation, 183–193
on literature and evil, 253–254 Brawne, Fanny, 73
Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 6, 76, 203 Brecht, 136
Beat Generation, 196 Breton, Andre, 14, 46, 58, 103,
Beckett, Samuel, 123 195–196, 202, 222
Benedetti, 46–47 “Bright Star,” (Keats), 74–75
“Berenice,” (Poe), 94 Broden, Brita, 126–127
Bernardez, Aurora, (wife of Bruno, (character in The Pursuer),
Cortazar), 77, 207 34–37
Best Detective Stories, The, admits his shortcomings, 156
(Borges/Casares), 203 his book, 165–166
Bestiary, 2, 7, 13, 81, 206 on freeing himself from Johnny,
Bianco, Jose, 202, 207 174
Bierce, Ambrose, 76 his grammar, 174
Birth of the Odyssey, The, (Giono), a jazz critic, 149
204 his jealousy, 173
Birth of Tragedy, The, (Nietzsche), 38 his lack of imagination, 184
Blackburn, Paul, 4, 36, 160 the present perfect tense, 158
“Black Cat, The,” (Poe), 94 and professional shaming, 156
Blanchot, 9 relief in Johnny’s death, 174
Blocked off Door, The, 222 as target of Johnny’s hostility,
Bloom, Harold 155–156
introduction, 1–2 an unconventional artist, 164
Blow-Up, 213 and unsure of himself, 153,
bop Jazz, 1 155–156
Boedo Group, 201 Bryan, C.D.B., 3
Boldy, Steven Buenos Aires University School of
on Libro de Manuel, 41–70 Liberal Arts, 5
on Oliveira, 142–143 Buñuel, Luis, 202
Book of Fantasy, The, Burton, Robert, 77, 85
(Borges/Casares/Ocampo), 207 Butor, Michel, 196, 208
Book of Sand, The, (Borges), 207
Booth, Wayne, 145 Cabalgata, (magazine), 7, 202
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1–2, 8, 52, 55, Caillois, Roger, 13, 202, 221
Index 283
Callado, 53–54 the critic’s dilemma, 191

Calvino, 2, 197 on Cuba, 44
Campbell, Joseph, 71 on death, 12, 196, 213–214
Canclini, Garcia, 46 his education, 199
Cardenal, Ernesto, 197 on Fanny Brawne, 79
Carpentier, 29, 41, 246 his fictional world, 11
Carr, J.D., 203 fiction as tool in understanding
Casa de las Americas, (magazine), 209 history, 195
Casares, Bioy, 52, 203, 207 on the hero, 97–98
Castillo, Ana Hernandez Del on horizontal writing, 50–51
on Woman as Circe Magician, his indictment against criticism,
71–100 185
Castro, Fidel, 197, 208 irony in his work, 108–109
Cecilia Valdes, 171–172, 174 on Keats, 72–73, 77–79, 91
Cervantes, 10, 104, 199 his mental problems, 199
Chambers, Ross his multidimensional characters,
the reader, 154 146–147
on text, 153 his novels, 196
Chesterton, G.K., 204 on poetry, 6
Chosich, Dobrica, 143 and reality, 12, 43, 90–91
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, resisting perfection, 168–169
(Marquez), 246 his schooling, 5
Circular Ruins, The, (Borges), 207 his search for liberation in
Cocteau, Jean, 6 Rayuela, 144
Coleridge, Samuel, 52, 196 and self-promotion, 167
Collazos, Oscar, 43, 210 his sexuality, 213–214
Commentary, (magazine), 3 and socialist writer, 144
Complete Works, 204, 207 started as a critic, 189
Confabulario, (Arreola), 206 his study of translation, 204
Connolly, Cyril, 202 his style, 222–223
Conrad, Joseph, 245 supporter of Revolution,
Coover, Robert, 208 208–209
Continuity of Parks, 13 his text, 15
Conversacion en la catedral, (Llosa), 41 his use of language, 8
Cortazar, Julio, 1 on women, 75–77
his adult life, 204–205 and writing, 4
his birth, 4, 197 Cortazar, Miguel Alascio, 42, 48–49
his bisexuality, 2 Cronopios and Famas, 208, 218
and challenging the reader, 183 Cuba, 208
the change in him, 224–225 Cuban Revolution, 197
on characters , 9, 144 Cuello de gatito negro, 86
criticism of, 42–43, 135 Culler, Hobathan, 257
284 Index
Curfew, (Donoso), 200 “Eve of St. Agnes,” (Keats), 75

Evert, Walter, 72
Dabove, Santiago, 207 Exam, The, 214
Dante, 30. Excelsior, (newspaper), 214
Dario, Ruben, 201 Except Dusk, 212, 214
Death and the Compass, (Borges), 203 Existentialism, 197
Debray, 54–55
Defoe, Daniel, 204 Faerie Queen, (Spenser), 101
Dehumanization of Art, The, “Fall of the House of Usher,”
(Ortega), 28 (Poe), 94
Delia Manara, 81–83 Fall of Hyperion, The: A Dream,
de Mann, Paul, 159 (Keats), 88
De Quincey, 250 Fantomas contra los vampiros
Derrida, Jacques, 257 multinacionales, 27
de Sola, Graciela, 110 Fernandez, Macedonio, 207
Dichter, 161–162 Ferry, or Another Trip to Venice, The,
Doctor Zhivago, (Pasternak), 143 213
Donoso, Jose, 197, 200 Fish, Stanley, 154
Don Quixote, (Cervantes), 199 Flame-throwers, The, (Arlt), 201
Don’t Look Now, (film), 20 Florida Group, 201
Dostoyevsky, 104 Foppa, Alaide, 197
Foucault, 28–29
Echevarría, Roberto González Fraga, (character in Los pasos)
on Los reyes: Cortazar’s his manipulation, 188
Mythology of Writing, 27–40 his research on a poet, 186–187
Edymion, (Keats), 72 revealing his hoax, 187
El idolo de las Cicladas, 83 “Fragmentos para una oda a los
Elizondo, S., 206 dioses del siglo,” (Lonstein), 48
Ellington, Duke, 1 Francine, (character in Libro de
El otono del patriarca, (Marquez), 41 Manuel), 37
El Que te dije, 59–62 Franco, 45
El rercurso del metodo, (Carpentier), Frank, Waldo, 202
41 French nouveau roman, 197
El sueno de los heroes, (Casares, 52 Freud, 1, 29, 199
Emmanuel, (character in Rayuela) and repression, 65
awareness of self, 129–130 Fuentes, Carlos, 3, 41, 43, 166, 197,
End of the Game and Other Stories, 4, 208
206, 208
Eros and Civilization, (Marcuse), 65 Galeano, E., 209
“Ethics of writing,” 246 Garfield, Evelyn Picon, 103, 213
Etienne, (character in Hopscotch), on interview with Cortazar,
11–12 190–191
Index 285
Genover, Kathleen and controversy of, 197

on Rayuela, 101 on “expendable chapters,” 259
Gide, Andre, 202, 204 the notion of play in, 219
Gillespie, Dizzy, 1 on reality, 17–18
Giono, Jean, 204 and self-referential writing, 29
Gittings, Robert, 72, 85 success of, 3
Golden Ass, (Apuleius), 93 what it taught us, 221–221
Gonzalez, Anibal the word person, 37–38
on “Press Clippings” and Houghton, Lord, 204
Cortazar’s Ethics of Writing, House Taken Over, 7, 198
245–265 Huella, (magazine), 6
Grail legend, 75 Huizinga, Johan, 218
Graves, Robert, 72 Human Constellations, 20
Great Habit, 11 Huxley, Aldous, 202
Greene, Graham, 202 Hyppolite, 29
Guevara, Che, 197, 256
Idol of the Cyclades, The, 220
Harp and the Shadow, The, Imagen de John Keats, 77, 83
(Carpentier), 246 Illiad (Homer), 29
Harss, Luis, 75, 213 Iman, (publishing house), 204
and describing Cortazar, 200 Immoralist, The, (Gide), 204
Hawes, Hampton, 163–164 Inferno, (Borges), 52
Hawkins, Coleman, 1 Iser, Wolfgang
Heart of the Matter, The, (Greene), on text, 152
202
Hegel, 29 James, Henry, 222
‘the spirit of the age,’ 104–105 Johnny, (character in The Pursuer),
Hemingway, 2 34–38
Hernandez, Felisberto, 211 accuses Bruno of a false portrait
Hero With a Thousand Faces, The, of him, 186
(Campbell), 71 his death, 174
Higgins, Godfrey, 93 his jazz, 166
Hitler, 45 his reference to time, 160
Hodeir, Andre, 163 his refusal to acknowledge Bruno,
on Charlie Parker, 164–165 155
Holistic criticism, 39 Johnson, Dane, 215–226
Homer, 29 Joyce, 2, 29, 106
Hommes et problemes du jazz, Juan, (character in 62), 235–236
(Hodeir), 163 as conspicuous figure, 237
Homo Ludens, (Huizinga), 218 his episode at Polidor, 235, 238
Hopscotch, 1, 11–12, 15, 195, 208 Jung, C.G., 71
on characters in, 16, 18
286 Index
Kafka, 2, 9, 123 Last Round, 211, 223–224

Keats, 71, 203–204 Latin America
his attitude toward women, transformation of, 196–197
72–73 Latin American literary “Boom,”
on his early poems, 72 166
goddesses in his works, 83–84 La vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos, 27
on the hero, 97–98 Lawrence, D.H., 2
his letters to Fanny, 73–75 Lear, Edward, 76
his sensitivity, 76 Le Guin, Ursula, 207
Keene, Donald, 3 Lejana, (The Distances), 7
Kerouac, Jack, 196 the beggar in, 13
Kerr, Lucille, 227–244 the bridge symbol, 126
Keyserling, Hermann de, 202 protagonist in, 16
Kierkegaard, Soren, 202 Letters from Mama, 222
King Lear, (Shakespeare), 135 Letter to a Lady in Paris, A, 13
Kings, The, 203, 206 Levinas, Emmanuel, 159
Klaren, Sara Castro on “totality,” 167–168
and defining Cortazar’s poetics, Levi-Strauss, 10
190 Libro de Manuel, 22, 37, 84–85
on phenomenology, 190 after the revolution, 64
Kubla Khan, (Coleridge), 52, 196 the black plot, 52–53, 68–69
ending of, 67
“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” mystery of, 44
(Keats), 75, 80, 85–87 on revolution, 46
the sorceress and the hero, 95 sexual liberation in, 64
La cabeza de la hidra, (Fuentes), 41 triangle in , 56
La Litterature et le mal, (Bataille), and two discourses, 45
245 Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
La Maga, (character in Rayuela), (Philostratus), 96
133, 138, 145 Life and Letters of John Keats,
and selfless inspiration, 129–130 (Houghton), 204
Lamia, (Keats), 74–75, 80, 85, 87, Like the Night, (Carpentier), 29
89–92 Lima, Jose, 189, 199–200
the sorceress and hero, 95 Literature and Evil, (Bataille), 253
La muerte y la brujula, (Borges), 55 Literature in Revolution & Revolution
Language of art, 186, 190 in Literature, 210
Language of criticism, 186, 190 “Little Bull,” 221
Lanham, Richard A., 248 Little Women, (Alcott), 204
La Quinzaine Litteraire, (magazine), Llosa, Vargas, 41–42, 166, 197, 207,
9 210, 246
Las menades, 83, 221 his friendship with Cortazar,
theme of, 84 215–217
Index 287
on The Trumpet of Deya, Mc Shann, Jay, 163

215–226 Meeting, 249
London, Jack, 254–256 Memoirs of Hadrian, (Yourcenar),
Lonstein, 46, 48, 50–51 204
Lorca, Garcia, 102 Memory of Fire, (Galeano), 209
Los anales de Buenos Aires, (literary Menard, Pierre, 10
journal), 7 Metamorphoses, (Ovid), 87
Los olvidados, (film), 202 Milton
Los pasos en las huellas on setting reader up, 154
reader reception of, 187–188 Mingus, Charles, 1
theme of, 186–187 Modernista movement, 201
Los reyes, 27, 29, 34 Modern music, 166
as subversion of the myth of Modern writing, 166
Theseus, 31 Motive, The
Lost Face, (London), 254–255 plot in, 8
Love Glenda So Much, We, 169, 246 Murder Considered as One of the Fine
theme of, 170 Arts, (De Quincey), 250
Love in the Time of Cholera, Murry, 91
(Marquez), 1, 200
Lugones, Leopoldo, 207 Nabokov, 1
Lukacs, Georgy, 125 Nadia, (breton), 222
National Book Award, 3
Mac Adam, Alfred, 31 “Neofantastic,” 9, 13–14
on Rayuela, 106 Neruda, Pablo, 195
Magritte, Rene, 76 Neumann, 81, 84
Mallarme, 6, 203 New Republic, The, 3
Mann, Thomas, 46 New York Times, 3
Manual for Manuel, A, 211, 221, 246 Nicaraguan Sketches; Nothing for
Man Who Knew Too Much, The, Pehujo, 214
(Chesterton), 204 Nietzsche, 29
Marcha, (magazine), 210 Night Face Up, The, 13, 220
Marcuse, 65 Nobel Prize of Literature, 197
Marechal, Leopoldo, 203 Noemi, (character in Press Clippings),
Mariano Acosta School, 5 247, 250–251
Markus, Stephen, 64–65 figural allegory of, 252
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 1, 41, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,
128, 195, 197, 246 (Rilke), 204
meeting Cortazar, 200 Noticias de los Funes, 189
Marxism, 43 depicting critics in a negative
Massacre in Mexico, (Poniatowska), way, 188
246
May Revolution, (Paris), 47 Obra Critica, 202
288 Index
Observatory Prose, 211 interpreting, 190

Ocampo, Sylvina, 207 Paris Peasant, (Aragon), 222
Ocampo, Victoria, 202 Parker, Charlie, 1, 16
Octaedro, 186 pioneered a variety of styles, 163
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 204 Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria,
Odessa Stories, (Babel), 209–210 (Guevara), 256
Oliveira, (character in Rayuela), Paso, Fernando del, 208
106–113, 118 Pasternak, Boris, 143
his active participation in daily Pastora, Eden, 197
life, 121 Paz, Octavio, 3, 29, 197, 210
and becoming insane, 123–124 on fiesta, 144
the bridge theme, 126 and wrote obituary for Cortazar,
and dreams, 134 210
his gradual liberation, 135 Pelayo, 199, 245
on longing for pity, 139–140 Peralta, Carlos, 207
and pity, 135 Perec, Georges, 197, 208
as poet, 127 Perfume, (Susskind), 250
as protagonist, 125 Peron, 5, 200
his relationship to Pola, 119 Peronismo, 197
his relationship with Talita, 134 Peyrou, Manuel, 207
his search, 125–126 Philostratus, 96
his struggle, 134 Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote,
One Hundred Years of Solitude, (Borges), 201
(Marquez), 1, 195, 208 Piglia, Ricardo, 203
O’Neill, Eugene, 202 Plato, 42
Organon, (Brecht), 136 Pleasure of the Text, (Barthes)
Ortega, 28, 212 text as fetish object, 151
Orwell, George, 102 Plutarch, 30
Oscar, (character in Libro de Poe, Edgar, 1–2, 4, 83, 94, 196, 203
Manuel), 61–64 Poetic sadism, 91
Other Victorians, The, (Markus), 65 “Poison,” 197
“Oval Portrait, The,” (Poe), 94 Pola, (character in Rayuela, ), 119
Ovid, 86 becoming conscious of himself,
129
Pacheco, E., 206 Policritica a la hora de los chacales, 246
Padilla, Herberto, 42, 210 Polyrhythms, , 163
his arrest, 43 Poniatowska, Elena, 246
Pameos y Meopas, 6–7, 211 Ponty, Merleau, 190
Paradise Lost, (Milton), 154 Poulet, Georges
Paradiso, (Lima), 189 on text, 152
Para llegar a Lezama Lima, 189 Pound, 29
on Cortazar summarizing not Powell, Bud, 1
Index 289
Presencia, 5–6, 202 the bridge theme, 126–135

Press Clippings, 246 characters in, 101–102
the element of journalism, 249 on Club de la Serpiente, 113–115
ethical questions in, 258–259 and culture as a game, 136
fantastic in, 258 ending of, 142
complexities in, 248 goal of, 123, 136
on literature and reality, 254 the importance of human life,
primal scene in, 253 142
psychoanalytic element in, 257 irony in, 145
religious discourse in, 251 the meaning of the text, 105–106
story of Ruth, 251 metaphor in, 102, 145
symbolic in, 258 as mimetic novel, 142
synopsis of, 247 multiple interpretations of, 146
use of chiasmus, 257 music in, 117–118
view of writing, 257 the pity theme, 135–147
Prix Medicis, 212 as polyphonic novel, 145
Prizes, The, 198 relationships in, 107
Pursuer, The, 1, 208 secondary characters in, 109
Bruno and Johnny threaten one and struggle for socialism, 146
another, 167–168 synthesis in, 57
on looking at people, 15 Realidad, (magazine), 202
Nietzschean quality in, 38 Red Chivalry, (Babel), 209–210
overtones in, 2 Reich, Wilhelm, 64–65
primal scene in, 34 Retamar, Fernandez, 144, 209
reality in, 18 Reunion, 246
and refusal to overcome Revista de Bibliotecologia, 203
difference, 167 Revista de Occidente, (magazine), 204
on the subject of jazz, 184 Revolution in the Revolution?,
the text, 150 (Debray), 54
theme of, 34, 184 Richards, I.A., 14
writing in, 160 Rilke, R.M., 204
Rimbuad, 6
Queen, Ellery, 203 Roach, Max, 1
Quixote,10 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 196
Robinson Crusoe, (Defoe), 204
Rabassa, Gregory, 3 Roeg, Nicolas, 20
Rabelais, 104 Romero, (character in Los pasos),
Rabid Toy, The, (Arlt), 201 186–188
Rayuela, 3, 13, 41, 43, 56, 183 Room for Maneuver: Reading (the )
alienated discourse in, 42 Oppositional (in) Narrative,
the black mass, 53 (Chambers), 153
the board scene, 106 Rosetti, 6
290 Index
Ruben Dario Metal, 213 theme of, 19–20

Rushdie, Salman, 208 and unconventional, 229
Sommer, Doris, 149
Sabato, Ernesto on Grammar Trouble: Cortazar’s
on dreams and poetry, 134–135 Critique of Competence,
Saki, 76 149–181
“Sancionar comparativamente,” 191 Sontag, Susan, 208
Sarduy, Severo, 256 Sosnowski, Saul
Sarmiento, Domingo F., 166 and metaphor, 128
Sarraute, Nathalie, 196 on poetic intuition and the poet,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101 127
Schriftsteller, 161–162 Spenser, Edmund, 101
Secret Sharer, The, (Conrad), 245 Stavans Ilan
Secret Weapons, 206, 208, 222 on Justice to Julio Cortazar,
Self-referential writing, 29 195–214
Seven Madmen, (Arlt), 201 Stendhal, 212
Sexual Revolution, The, (Reich), “Stood Tip-Toe, I,” (Keats), 72
64–65 Streetcorner Man, (Borges), 8
Shakespeare, 104, 135 Sudamericana, (publisher), 206
Shua, Ana Maria, 214 Sunk House and Other Stories,
Simon, Claude, 196 (Hernandez), 211
Sinner, The, (Chosich), 143 Sur, (magazine), 7, 201–202
Six Problems for Isidro Parodi, Surprised by Sin, (Fish), 154
(Borges/Caseres), 203 Surrealism, 1, 6, 11, 197
62: A Model Kit, 19, 41, 211, 221 Susskind, Patrick, 250
authorial reading of, 238 Symbols of Transformation, (Jung), 71
characters in, 20–21
Cortazar’s view of, 227 Talita, (character in Rayuela), 129
form of, 20 as incarnation of poetry, 130
and hidden meanings, 237 on maintaining her identity,
interconnected scenes in, 233 131–132
as literary experiment, 229 her struggle, 133
making sense of, 234 Tatum, Art, 1
narrative in, 230–232 Textual grafting, 257
prefatory remarks in, 231–232, Texturologias
235 on depicting critics in a negative
as proposition, 229 way, 188
questions about reading, 229 misuse of language in, 189
on reading novel, 239 Theseus myth, 29–30
relationship to Hopscotch, 231 Times Literary Supplement, (London),
and repetition, 239 3
the text, 21, 228, 230–233 Torre, Guillermo de , 45–46
Index 291
“Towards a Poetic,” 127 Cortazar), 42

Traveler, (character in Rayuela), 142 Vuelta, (magazine), 207, 210
and life is absurd, 131
Turn of the Screw, The, (James), 222 Ward, Aileen, 72
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the War of the End of The World, The,
Sea, (Verne), 198 (Llosa), 246
Tzara, Tristan, 202 White Goddess, The, (Graves), 72
Whitman, Walt, 1
Ultimo round, 27, 47, 58, 183 Winners, The, 3, 15, 33, 207
Ulysses, (Joyce), 106 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 195
Unamuno, 29, 123 Wong, (character in Rayuela), 115
United Chilean Front, 212 his approach to life, 116
Universal History of Infamy, A, Wood, Michael, 2
(Borges), 201 Wright, W.H., 203
University of Buenos Aires, 202
University of Cuyo, 5 Yo el supremo, (Bastos), 41
Yourcenar, Marguerite, 204
Valdes, Mario, 102 Yovanovich, Gordana
Valenzuela, Luisa, 214 on An Interpretation of
Verne, Jules, 198 Rayuela—Based on Character
Viaje alrededor de una mesa, 42 Web, 101–147
Viaje alrededor de una silla, (M.A.

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

African American Kate Chopin Henry James

Edited and with an introduction by

Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contributing Editor: Elizabeth Beaudin

Editor’s Note vii

Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch 3

Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing 27

Woman as Circe the Magician 71

An Interpretation of Rayuela Based on the Character Web 101

Grammar Trouble: Cortázar’s Critique of Competence 149

Cortázar: On Critics and Interpretation 183

Justice to Julio Cortázar 195

The Trumpet of Deyá 215

Betwixt Reading and Repetition

“Press Clippings” and Cortázar’s Ethics of Writing 245

My Introduction centers upon Cortázar as a short story writer, since I prefer

Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch

J ulio Cortázar, the most Argentine among Argentine writers, is also,

Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentine parents whose

My birth in Brussels was the result of tourism and diplomacy. My

As for his beginnings as a writer, he made the following comments:

Like all children who like to read, I soon tried to write. I

Cortázar’s reference to the anonymous twenty-year-old author of a

most libraries or collections, circulate nonetheless among friends and

And what once was true is no longer true,

One can understand Cortázar’s reluctance to permit the reedition of this

I began writing in a very factitious and baroque style. I believe

Curiously, it was Borges who published Cortázar’s first short story,

It couldn’t have been a more auspicious beginning for Cortázar as a fiction

... in a great style language ceases to be a vehicle for the

Le grand fantastique, le fantastique qui fait les meilleurs contes,

Neither Borges nor Cortázar is interested in this nocturnal side of man, in

everything can be neatly described as was upheld by the philosophic and

themselves from them, as Morelli would like to do from the word

The second obstacle Cortázar stumbles upon in this search for

The notions of time and space, as they were conceived by the

As much as Cortázar sees the East as an alternative to this preoccupation

space, it lies in a relentless confrontation with them in a manner similar to

or fantastic feeling, it is because in our daily lives we follow logical notions

Il est vrai que certain de mes contes sont nés directement de

When I wrote “The Pursuer,” I had reached a point where I felt

As in “The Pursuer,” in Hopscotch reality lies also somewhere behind:

of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which

Cortázar’s next novel, 62: A Model Kit, derives from chapter 62 of

The novel is, as Cortázar advances in the foreword, a transgression, not

Besides, what was the true morality of action? A social action

Andrés, the protagonist of Libro de Manuel and a sort of outgrowth of

1. Carlos Fuentes, “A Demanding Novel,” Commentary (New York), October 1966,

Los reyes: Cortázar’s Mythology of Writing

A lthough I refer to Los reyes in my title, I do not intend to carry out an

insemination or generation, and in its more common meaning of notion or

There is no doubt that the “civilized” work cannot be dealt with

As often happens in discussions of myth, whether they be “civilized” or not,

expression, as well as the question of being, become historical—language and

center that resolves itself in a mutual cancellation and in the superimposition

Oh, his pained monologues, which the palace guards heard in

If in other versions of the myth the birth of reason, morals or politics is at