Thirty-five years ago, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar died after an illness, in Paris, at the age of 69, and with him went one of the more unusual and delightful sensibilities in the republic of letters.
Cortázar was as comfortable writing about cats that are telephones and a woman who vomits up rabbits as he was about weightier matters concealed in metaphors that even he had trouble deciphering. On his death, the Madrid newspaper El País ran 11 pages of tributes over two days. He was less known in the English-speaking world, as he remains despite excellent translations by Gregory Rabassa.
Cortázar, who grew up in a Buenos Aires suburb, was a sickly boy who liked to stay in bed and read Jules Verne. Although he was unwell, it is the unfortunate child who never dreams of other worlds, and the rare adult like Cortázar who can make them. Of course, he became the enemy of authority.
Cortázar taught high school, then, in 1944, became a professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza. Juan Perón was the strong man of the Argentine government, which had tried to stay neutral in World War II. Perón’s populism and demagoguery was a slap in the face to intellectuals – this may remind you of something today – and it worked both ways: Perónists chased Cortázar out of his university. He emigrated to France in 1951.
There, the real work began. Cortázar wrote short stories such as the one with bunnies (a description he would have liked), “Letter to a Lady in Paris”; and novels, the best known being Rayuela, or “Hopscotch,” published in 1963. It begins, “A su manera este libro es muchos libros ...”:
“In its way, this book is many books, but above all it is two books. The reader is invited to choose one of the following two possibilities: The first book is read in the ordinary way, and ends in chapter 56, at the foot of which there are three showy stars ... The second book is read beginning with Chapter 73 and then following in the order indicated at the end of each chapter. ... 1,2,116,3,84,4 ...”
Cortázar became a pillar of the Boom Latinoamericano, along with Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Cortázar’s countryman, Jorge Luis Borges, authors who trafficked in magical realism, which one critic called “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”
They felt the reproof to fascism was what it sought to quench, imagination. You might not want a steady diet of it, but we always need some in our impoverished, political landscape, like an escape hatch.
In 1976, when a rightist military junta seized control of Argentina and declared the nation’s enemies included Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein because they had destroyed the Christian concepts of family, society and time and space, it proved authority could be as surreal as Cortázar’s fiction. Although he had made his home in France for more than two decades, the junta paid him the compliment of exiling him.
“I remember when I was little,” Cortázar once said, “when my parents came to say, ‘You’ve played enough, come take a bath now,’ I found that completely idiotic.” This is a good attitude to carry into adulthood when the brutes and lunatics are in charge.
We were thinking of Cortázar the other day when we were on a walk with a collie and met up with some cat acquaintances. They meowed, we meowed and we thought of the cat telephones and what a lovely man Cortázar was. It hardly mattered that he was no longer here since he continued in his books; and it gave us comfort to think that even now – when any criticism is perceived as an attack, and so many politicians do not distinguish what is real from what is rhetorical, or much care for the freedom of the individual simply to be, or to be somewhere else, or to be left alone – another child, lama-like, is beginning a journey to become one of the secret legislators of the world.
