Julio Cortázar

Argentine novelist, short-story writer, poet, and translator

• Born: August 26, 1914
• Place of birth: Brussels, Belgium
• Died: February 12, 1984
• Place of death: Paris, France

Biography

Julio Cortázar, unquestionably one of the pivotal figures in Latin American literature, was a master of the short story, and his novel Hopscotch is widely considered to be a masterpiece of Latin American literature. Born in Belgium to Julio José and María Descotte de Cortázar, Cortázar learned French along with his native Spanish, and his French Argentine duality underlies all his work. His father abandoned the family soon after they returned to Argentina in 1920, and Julio was brought up by his mother and aunt. After earning degrees in primary and secondary education, with a concentration in literature, he first taught high school in several small towns and in Mendoza. He then taught French literature at the University of Cuyo, but his agitation against the Peronist regime led to his arrest and his subsequent forced resignation from the university. During his teaching years he wrote steadily but, dissatisfied with the quality of his work, refused to publish anything other than the collection of poems Presencia (presence), which appeared in 1938 under the pseudonym Julio Denís, and the long philosophic-dramatic poem Los reyes (the kings), which appeared in 1949 under his own name, as did a few magazine stories. It was fellow author Jorge Luis Borges, with whose work Cortázar’s has often been compared, who published his compatriot’s first story, “House Taken Over,” in the journal Los Anales de Buenos Aires.

Oppressed by the political and literary atmosphere of his native land, Cortázar took advantage of a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris. He left Argentina in 1951 to settle permanently in Paris, where he earned his living working as a freelance translator and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1953 Cortázar married the Argentinian Aurora Bernardez, who was also a freelance translator. The year 1951 marked the official start of Cortázar’s literary career with the publication of Bestiario (bestiary), his first collection of short stories. Bestiario contains Cortázar’s trademark signature, the gradual intrusion of a mysterious subversive element into the lives of ordinary people. Rarely is this force seen as an instrument of good, or at least liberating change; rather, it serves as an obsessive harbinger of destruction and death. (Julio Cortázar was the Spanish translator of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe.)

Cortázar’s next volume of short stories, End of the Game, and Other Stories, contains some of his best prose, including six of the eight stories in Bestiario, as translated from the Spanish to English by Paul Blackburn. Stories such as “Axolotl” and “The Night Face Up” have become classics of the genre, and “Devil’s Drool” introduced Cortázar to an international audience through Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cinematic version Blow-Up (although the film bears little relation to the story). By 1960 Cortázar had become widely known as a craftsman of intricate, beautifully written short stories that often had cunning, sleight-of-hand endings. The publication in that year of The Winners marked a drastic change in his artistic vision, however, for here the purely aesthetic gives way to metaphysical preoccupations. Variously interpreted as allegory, social satire, or thinly camouflaged political criticism, The Winners recounts the ill-fated voyage of a group of passengers who have received tickets for a mysterious cruise as a state lottery prize.

Hopscotch is regarded by most critics as Cortázar’s masterpiece. An immediate success in Argentina when it was published as Rayuela in 1963, it soon gained international acclaim, helped by the prize-winning English translation by Gregory Rabassa that was published in 1966. Hopscotch demands active reader participation. According to the “Table of Instructions” at the beginning, there are at least two ways to read the novel, and the reader has to choose which path to follow through the book—a path that is never-ending, since the last two chapters refer endlessly to earlier ones. The main narrative of Hopscotch deals with the Argentinian Horacio Oliveira’s endeavor to shatter the mundane world of supposed reality and rationality and find the secret harmony underlying all things. Artistically, by means of its disjointed structure; the originality of its language; its black humor, often aimed directly inward; and, above all, its self-conscious awareness of itself as artistic creation, Hopscotch represents a manifesto against all closed literary structures and credos.

After Hopscotch Cortázar continued his literary experimentation. 62: A Model Kit is a demonstration of the literary theories of the writer Morelli in the concluding paragraphs of Hopscotch. There is no basic structure and no unifying sense of time, space, character, or plot. The reader must piece together the disparate components of the work to create a whole. Much of Cortázar’s later work can best be called “collage.” A Manual for Manuel combines fiction and history, the thriller with factual statistics and articles concerning political torture and oppression. Cortázar had often been criticized for his seeming indifference to the social and political realities of his native land, but toward the end of his life his writing began to include overt political statements. He donated the royalties of A Manual for Manuel to the families of political prisoners and became a supporter of the Cuban and Nicaraguan governments. Nicaragua awarded him the Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence.

Cortázar’s last collagelike work, A Certain Lucas, describes an expatriate Argentine writer living in Paris struggling humorously with the effects of time and a growing illness. Cortázar, himself gravely ill with leukemia, spent much of his last months in and out of hospitals. Cortázar died on February 12, 1984, in Paris.

Cortázar was gifted with a sense of whimsy, and he used humor to awaken the reader from passivity and reveal opportunities of wider significance. He once said, “I’ve always thought that humor is one of the most serious things there is.” His humor, along with all of his innovative techniques and linguistic fireworks, is enlisted in aid of one cause, the shattering of all artificial, conventional barriers that hinder the search for self-realization. Cortázar’s characters are expatriates, exiled not only physically from their native land but from their inner selves as well. Along with Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Cortázar’s importance as a major figure in the emergence of Latin American literature is not debated. His originality, inventiveness, and daring use of language have been recognized and acclaimed. Cortázar countered the charge that he had “abandoned” his native country by insisting that it was time for Latin Americans to see themselves as citizens of the world and stop making cultural isolation a virtue. The political content of his later work and his interest in social concerns also helped to silence these critics.

Author Works

Long Fiction

Los premios, 1960 (The Winners, 1965)

Rayuela, 1963 (Hopscotch, 1966)

62: Modelo para armar, 1968 (62: A Model Kit, 1972)

Libro de Manuel, 1973 (A Manual for Manuel, 1978)

Short Fiction

Bestiario, 1951

Final del juego, 1956

Las armas secretas, 1959

Historias de cronopios y de famas, 1962 (Cronopios and Famas, 1969)

End of the Game, and Other Stories, 1963 (also known as Blow-Up, and Other Stories, 1967)

Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966 (All Fires the Fire, and Other Stories, 1973)

Octaedro, 1974 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980)

Alguien que anda por ahí y otros relatos, 1977 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980)

Un tal Lucas, 1979 (A Certain Lucas, 1984)

Queremos tanto a Glenda y otros relatos, 1981 (We Love Glenda So Much, and Other Stories, 1983)

Deshoras, 1982

Poetry

Presencia, 1938 (as Julio Denís)

Los reyes, 1949

Pameos y meopas, 1971

Salvo el crepúsculo, 1984

Nonfiction

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, 1968 (English translation, 1968)

Último round, 1969

Viaje alrededor de una mesa, 1970

Prosa del observatorio, 1972 (with Antonio Galvez)

Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales: Una utopía realizable, 1975

Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura, 1976 (with Mario Vargas Llosa and Oscar Collazos);Paris: The Essence of Image, 1981

Los autonautas de la cosmopista, 1983

Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce, 1983 (Nicaraguan Sketches, 1989)

Translations

Robinson Crusoe, 1945 (of Daniel Defoe’s novel)

El inmoralista, 1947 (of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste)

El hombre que sabía demasiado, c. 1948-1951 (of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much)

Vida y Cartas de John Keats, c. 1948-1951 (of Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of John Keats)

Filosofía de la risa y del llanto, 1950 (of Alfred Stern’s Philosophie du rire et des pleurs)

La filosofía de Sartre y el psicoanálisis existentialista, 1951 (of Stern’s Sartre, His Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)

Miscellaneous

La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, 1967 (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1986)

Último round, 1969

Divertimiento, 1986

El examen, 1986

Bibliography

Alazraki, Jaime, and Ivan Ivask, eds. The Final Island. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. A collection of essays, including two by Cortázar himself, about the role of magic or the marvelous as it works alongside what appears to be realism in Cortázar’s fiction. Contains a chronology and an extensive bibliography that offers data on Cortázar’s publications in several languages.

Alonso, Carlos J., ed. Julio Cortázar: New Readings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature series. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Boldy, Steven. The Novels of Julio Cortázar. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980. The introduction provides a helpful biographical sketch linked to the major developments in Cortázar’s writing. Boldy concentrates on four Cortázar novels: The Winners, Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit, and A Manual for Manuel. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.

Garfield, Evelyn Picon. Julio Cortázar. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Garfield begins and ends her study with personal interviews that she obtained with Cortázar at his home in Provence, France. She studies the neurotic obsession of the characters in Cortázar’s fiction and offers firsthand commentary by Cortázar on his methods of writing and his own experiences that helped create his work. Cortázar’s philosophies, his preferences, and even his own personal nightmares are expounded upon, illuminating much of the symbolism found in his work. Chronology, analysis, complete bibliography, and index.

Guibert, Rita. Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. New York: Knopf, 1973. Includes an important interview with Cortázar, who discusses both his politics (his strenuous objection to U.S. interference in Latin America) and many of his fictional works.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Includes an English translation of an important interview in Spanish with Cortázar.

Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981. Studies the influence of John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe on the work of Cortázar. The author states that of these two poets, whose works Cortázar translated, Poe had the greater influence on Cortázar. Studies the role of the archetypes in mythology and psychology and how they have been used in the works of all three writers. Contains an excellent index, which includes references that have had an enormous impact on trends in the twentieth century.

Peavler, Terry J. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peavler divides Cortázar’s short fiction into four categories—the fantastic, the mysterious, the psychological, and the realistic—in order to show how Cortázar used these genres as games to study discourse. Includes a chronology and a through bibliography.

Stavans, Ilan. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. See especially the chapters on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Cortázar’s fiction, his use of the fantastic, and his reliance on popular culture. Stavans also has a section on Cortázar’s role as writer and his interpretation of developments in Latin American literature. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Sugano, Marian Zwerling. “Beyond What Meets the Eye: The Photographic Analogy in Cortázar’s Short Stories.” Style 27 (Fall, 1993): 332-351. Summarizes and critiques Cortazar’s analogy between the short story and photography in his essays, “Some Aspects of the Short Story” and “On the Short Story and Its Environs”; explains how Cortázar dramatizes the analogy in “Blow-Up” and “Apocalypse at Solentiname.”

Verdié, Adriana. "Composing Rayuela: The Musical Element in Julio Cortazár's Narrative." Australian Literary Studies, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 2014, pp. 130–47. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=113745766&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 28 Apr. 2017. This article presents literary criticism of Cortázar's acclaimed novel Hopscotch and analyzes the influence of jazz music on the novel's structure.

Yovanovich, Gordana. Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Three chapters focus on Cortázar’s four major novels and his fluctuating presentations of character as narrators, symbols, and other figures of language. Includes notes and bibliography.