Julio Cortázar: The Novel That Refused an Order
When *Rayuela* was published in 1963 it arrived with instructions. Britannica describes it as "an open-ended novel, or antinovel" in which "the reader is invited to rearrange the different parts of the novel according to a plan prescribed by the author." It became the first of the Latin American boom novels to win international attention. Its author was a nearly fifty-year-old Argentine translator living in Paris, who had left Buenos Aires because he could not stomach Perón.
Born in Transit
Cortázar was born in Brussels on 26 August 1914, to Argentine parents who happened to be in Belgium. The family returned to Argentina in 1918, and shortly afterwards his father abandoned them — a disappearance that left the household without means and the boy without the conventional route through education and into a profession.
The Teacher in the Provinces
He cut short his university studies to support his mother and sister. There followed years of teaching in the Argentine provinces and then work as a translator in Buenos Aires, an apprenticeship in language that shows in everything he later wrote. He published early work under the pseudonym Julio Denis. Translation was never merely a job for him; it recurs inside the fiction, where the man who converts one reality into another is a standing figure.
Paris, 1951
In 1951, motivated in significant part by his disaffection with Peronist politics, Cortázar left Argentina for France. He would live there for the rest of his life. The same year he published *Bestiario*, the collection that launched his literary career. He married Aurora Bernárdez in 1953 and, much later, Carol Dunlop in 1980. The exile was permanent but never complete: his fiction kept both cities in play, and the traffic between Paris and Buenos Aires became one of his abiding subjects.
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Cortázar's reputation among writers rests as much on the stories as on the novels. *Final del juego* followed in 1956 and *Las armas secretas* in 1959. The latter contained "Las babas del diablo" — literally "the devil's drool," an idiom for morning fog — which remains the purest demonstration of his method.
Its narrator, Roberto Michel, is a French-Chilean translator and amateur photographer who watches an ambiguous encounter in a Paris park between an older woman and a teenage boy, photographs it, and only later notices a third figure waiting in a parked car. He enlarges the print and becomes captive to it, unable to reconcile what he remembers with what the image shows. Cortázar runs two interwoven narratives, one of them held inside parentheses, so that the separation between the event and the retelling is visible on the page — until the time planes blur, Michel begins to fear the incident is repeating itself with a worse ending, and he screams in order to break the narrative distance. The story asks whether perception and reality can ever be made to match, and declines to answer.
Michelangelo Antonioni's film *Blow-Up* took the premise and won enormous popular acclaim, though, as one scholarly account puts it, "little of Cortázar's story remains in the motion picture."
Rayuela
*Rayuela* — *Hopscotch* in English — follows Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine bohemian exiled in Paris, and his eventual return to Buenos Aires; La Maga is the presiding figure of the Paris section. Its innovation is structural. The reader may take the chapters in the printed order or follow the alternative sequence the author supplies, jumping backwards and forwards through the book, and the two routes produce materially different novels. The device was not decoration. A book about a man who cannot decide what his life means was built so that it could not decide what it was either.
Gregory Rabassa's 1966 English translation won the National Book Award for translation in 1967 and carried the novel to a worldwide readership. Encyclopedia.com's judgement is that *Rayuela* "has been considered the quintessential novel of the 'Boom' in Latin American literature."
Politics and Last Years
Cortázar's later life was heavily political. He supported the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and opposed the Argentine military dictatorship, and the commitment fed directly into the fiction, most visibly in *Libro de Manuel*. The other novels — *Los premios*, *62: Modelo para armar* — continued the formal experimenting without ever repeating *Rayuela*'s trick. He died in Paris on 12 February 1984, aged sixty-nine.
Why Julio Is Called a Genius
The distinctive faculty is formal invention in the service of feeling, which is much rarer than either quality alone. Plenty of writers have built elaborate structures; Cortázar built structures that enact what the book is about. *Rayuela* is a novel about contingency whose own order is contingent. "Las babas del diablo" is a story about the unreliability of witness, told through a point of view that visibly fractures on the page. Britannica's summary — that he "combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques" — is accurate but understates the difficulty of the combination, since experiment usually kills feeling. His masterpiece is recorded as the first boom novel to break through internationally, which means the entire subsequent global appetite for Latin American fiction passed through a door he opened.
The counter-case is real. Structural games age faster than sentences, and *Rayuela*'s alternative reading order is now more often described than performed; the book is widely revered and less widely finished. There is a persistent charge that the machinery is cleverness for its own sake, and the reputation leans heavily on a single novel from 1963 while the later long fiction never matched it. His politics, warmly committed to revolutionary governments that turned repressive, remain contested rather than settled. And there is a final irony worth stating plainly: his most globally famous work is a film that kept almost nothing of what made his story extraordinary. The strongest claim for Cortázar is not the novel everyone cites but the stories, where the innovation is invisible and total.
Legacy
Cortázar's influence runs through two channels. In Latin America he is the writer who proved that the boom's ambition could be formal as well as historical — that a novel could break its own shape and still be read everywhere. In the wider world he supplied a permanent model for fiction about perception: the idea that a story's structure is an argument about how much of reality we can actually see. Sixty years on, novelists still write books that ask their readers to choose the order, and every one of them is working in his debt.
Achievements
- Notable work: Hopscotch
- Worked as linguist, screenwriter and novelist
