A Manual for Manuel by Julio Cortázar

First published:Libro de Manuel, 1973 (English translation, 1978)

Type of plot: Social morality

Time of work: From 1969 to 1972, during which time Argentina, under the military dictatorship of General Alejandro Lanusse, suffered widespread violation of human rights

Locale: Paris and Buenos Aires

Principal Characters:

• Ludmilla, a Polish actress who lives with Marcos
• Gomez, a Panamanian and a member of the Screwery who lives with Monique, another member of the Screwery
• Monique, a French graduate student who lives with Gomez
• Lucien Verneuil, a French member of the Screwery
• Heredia, a Brazilian member of the Screwery
• Marcos, an Argentine member of the Screwery
• Andres, an Argentine, the protagonist, a somewhat political intellectual who listens to music, a former lover of Ludmilla
• The One I told you, never identified by name
• Francine, a French bookshop owner and the lover of Andres
• Oscar, an Argentine who lives with Gladis
• Manuel, the son of Patricio and Susana,
• Gladis, a woman who lives with Oscar
• Lonstein, an Argentine who works in a morgue and is intellectual, not political
• Roland, a French member of the Screwery
• Fernando, a newly arrived Chilean
• Susana, the mother of Manuel, a translator for UNESCO
• Patricio, the father of Manuel, a member of the Screwery

The Novel

As the novel begins, Susana translates and discusses articles from the newspaper with other members of a revolutionary group called “the Screwery.” A telegram from London and a reference to something called the “Vincennes business” constitute the reader’s introduction to the group’s plan to smuggle counterfeit money in order to finance a political kidnapping. The target is a top Latin American police official, referred to as the Vip, whose headquarters are in Paris. He is to be held for ransom until Latin American political prisoners are released.

As the kidnapping preparations are under way, Andres takes Francine to a sleazy bar. He then tells her about a dream in which he sees himself in a film theater which has two screens at right angles. He is there to see a Fritz Lang thriller. Suddenly a messenger arrives and tells him that a Cuban wants to speak with him. Andres follows the messenger until he enters a room where he sees a figure on a sofa. It is the Cuban. At this point, the most important point in the dream, the dream’s narrative is interrupted. The next thing that Andres sees is himself, now spectator of and participant in a thriller, leaving the room. Andres interprets the dream to mean that since he has spoken to the Cuban, he now has a mission to fulfill. He has no idea, however, what the mission might be. Andres’s quest is directed toward one goal: to find the message cut from his dream, a message that will show him the road he should elect between the beloved solitude of his life as an intellectual in Paris and total political commitment.

The kidnapping does not occur until three-quarters of the way into the book, and the account of the actual moment, provided by the unnamed character, who is identified only as “the one I told you,” is no more than “a general impression of total confusion.” The details that would have “made a good narrative” are missing. Andres, who is not present at the kidnapping, is awakened from sleep when the Cuban from his dream says to him, “Wake up.” He arrives at the scene of the police shoot-out, where the Screwery is holding the Vip. The Vip is released, saved by the police. Gomez and Heredia are next seen in prison. They discuss the fact that “Marcos would have thought” that the operation went well. Proceedings of a press conference on human rights follow this scene. Accounts from Argentines who have been tortured appear in one column juxtaposed to testimony from North American soldiers who witnessed or participated in torture in Vietnam. The novel ends with two glimpses of the return to everyday life: Monique cares for the baby and waits for news from Gomez; Andres tells Susana that he must pick up a Joni Mitchell record and put the notes of “the one I told you” in order, and that the water pitcher story must be added. It is implied that “the one I told you” has died. Lonstein returns to his job washing bodies in the morgue.

Yet the novel ends with a fantastic twist: The body that Lonstein washes, after picking up a water pitcher, is not identified, but Lonstein recognizes him and says, “It had to be us, that’s for certain, you there and me with this sponge, you were so right, they’re going to think we made it all up.” The reader must link “the blackish stain,” which Lonstein removes with the sponge, to the character who went out to pick up a Joni Mitchell record, Andres.

The Characters

In comparison with more traditional novelists of the nineteenth century, Cortázar does not create memorable characters; rather, his characters emerge from cultural codes. That is, political discourse determines the boundaries of, for example, Heredia or Gomez, while the character of Andres is shaped by the aleatory music that he loves.

Cortázar is not concerned with a psychological analysis, a realistic representation, or a symbolic use of characters. Rather, his characters are placed in situations in order to provoke the reader.

Cortázar’s characters are typically marginal in relation to society; in Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), they are students, transients, circus performers, and mental patients. In A Manual for Manuel, they are a marginal political group. A Manual for Manuel is a sort of mirror image of Hopscotch. Traveler and Horacio reappear as Marcos and Andres; La Maga and Talita as Ludmilla and Francine. Just as Traveler was able to make a commitment to Talita, while Horacio could not make such a commitment either to politics or to La Maga, so Marcos is a member of the Screwery while Andres is on the edge of the revolutionary group. Ludmilla is confused by the activities of the Screwery. Francine owns a book and stationery shop and lives in an elegant apartment with her cat, library, and scotch. Ludmilla lives in disorder with pieces of leek “hung all over the place.” Andres is in love with both of these women, attracted to both their worlds. Other characters in the novel appear as couples: Oscar and Gladis, Susana and Patricio, Monique and Gomez. It has been noticed by one critic that the male characters are discussed much more often than are the female characters in Cortázar’s work and that, although he may be paving the way for the “new man,” his work leaves much to be desired with regard to the “new woman.”

With the exception of Monique, who is also writing her thesis, for the most part, Ludmilla and the other women characters make sandwiches, translate, and make love. Susana, however, is familiar with the events of May, 1968, having been at the Battle of the Sorbonne. Marcos and Andres are paternalistic toward women, while Lonstein points out to Andres that “the whole world is not a privilege of the males, anyone can project geometry, you thought that your scheme was acceptable and now you find out that women also have their triangle to say.”

Critical Context

A Manual for Manuel was awarded the Prix Medicis. One critic has called it a necessary second volume for Hopscotch. The narrative structure of A Manual for Manuel, although less complex than that of Hopscotch, is experimental and similar to the structure used by twentieth century musicians, both classical and jazz. It proceeds in a more or less linear way, but there are certain questions left unanswered, certain unfilled gaps, because of the way in which the story is told. There is no omnipresent narrator. Rather, the story is told primarily through the eyes of a narrator, “the one I told you,” and Andres. The fact that the modernist cannot get inside the historical event, rendering modernist literature helpless as a political educational tool, is of concern to Cortázar. His novel is about this problem, making the work post-modernist in that it examines the structure of the modernist novel.

Philosophically, Cortázar’s refusal of the role of omniscient narrator who would have access to the thing itself implies that there is no essence to be distinguished from appearance. Two possible conclusions arise: He is a Kantian, who believes that the object is unknowable, or he is a post-modernist, who refuses to distinguish between art and its object. The implication of this method is that reality becomes intelligible through the combined activity of the writer and reader who write or read the text. In A Manual for Manuel, “the one I told you” sees the kidnapping as “a multilenticular and quadrichromatic picture of the ants and the Vip himself. . . .” This “multilenticular” view joins the imaginings of “the one I told you” with the “sparser” information possessed by Marcos and Ludmilla. The active reader of the book must then take all this and attempt to reconstruct the event.

In terms of genre, Cortázar’s work has been linked to the literature of fantasy and Magical Realism, both by critics and in his own writing. Yet he sees his activity as a writer and the active participation that he demands on the part of the reader as a form of political practice that transcends the boundaries of traditional genres to become a testimony of Latin American reality. Certain critics have interpreted the freedom embodied in characters such as La Maga as a model for overcoming alienation and shaking epistemological assumptions. Cortázar sees the “Other,” the dimension of the fantastic, as our only salvation from conforming to the role of obedient robots that the technocrats would like us to accept and which we continue to refuse. In his own life, the political form of Cortázar’s refusal can be seen in his support for the Cuban revolution, Allende’s regime, the Russell Tribunal, and the Nicaraguan revolution.

A Manual for Manuel marked a turning point in Cortázar’s career, toward political literature. Not all critics greeted this change favorably, and many still believe that Hopscotch is a more successful literary work.

Bibliography

Alazraki, Jaime, and Ivar Ivask, eds. The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Perhaps the finest collection of criticism on Cortázar, a representative sampling of his best critics covering all the important aspects of his fictional output.

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.

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.

Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar’s Mythopoesis. Amsterdam: J. Benjamin, 1981. This is a part of the Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, volume 8. Cortázar praised this study for its rigor and insight.

Peavler, Terry L. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peavler begins with an overview of Cortázar’s life and career and his short stories of the fantastic, the mysterious, the psychological, and the realistic. Only one chapter is devoted exclusively to his novels. Includes chronology, notes, annotated bibliography, and index.

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.

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.