Julio Cortázar: the Poetics of Exile
Eugenia Demuro (University of Sydney)
Cite Article: Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.1, January 2008
(The following paper was presented at the 2007 ACLA Annual meeting in Puebla, Mexico. Its original title was “National and Literary Perspectives: Cortázar and the Ideology of Form and Politics of Identity.”)
The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar is a superb example of the issues surrounding the Latin American writer in exile: he spent the majority of his writing life in Paris yet his work is a compelling re-presentation of what it is to be Argentinean. The influence of Paris on Cortázar is undoubted; the present paper will extrapolate the complex relations between literature, reality, exile and identity to present Cortázar’s poetics. Exile can be said to play out as a divided commitment to the ideologies of form, and the politics of national and continental identity. Cortázar proposes a formalism which is not purely aesthetic and an ideology which is not explicitly political. Through its content his work explores and invents the Latin American subject; in its style it owes a huge debt to Surrealism. The notion of exile is an important trope throughout Cortázar’s work – he himself stated that exile enabled him to write what he wrote: exile opened up new perspectives and ways to understand his personal identity, his national identity, and wider Latin American realities. Cortázar’s literature is thus closely tied to the social and cultural realities of Latin America, particularly Argentina, without any recourse to social realism.
Born in Brussels of Argentine parents, Julio Florencio Cortázar lived in Argentina until the age of 37. During the Peronist era, in 1951, Cortázar chose to exile to France, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. Though he was not directly persecuted as a political dissident, he had been jailed during an uprising at the University of Cuyo, in Mendoza (Plimpton 109). He openly opposed Perón’s rise to power and government, and stated that he left Argentina because he felt that to live under Perón was analogous to losing his individual freedom. Later in life, Cortázar would confess with some irony that this feeling of ‘violation’ that he attributed to Perón was at least, in part, the result of his own class privilege:
At that time, within Argentina, the confrontations, the frictions, the feeling of violation we felt daily at this popular upsurge, our situation of young bourgeois who read in several languages, prevented us from understanding the phenomenon. We were very annoyed by the loudspeakers on the corners shouting, ‘Perón. Perón, how great you are’, because they interrupted the latest Alban Berg concerto we were listening to. (Cortázar in Boldy 38)
It is important to note that Cortázar was not, at the time of leaving Argentina, a political writer. In effect at the beginning of his career, Cortázar was perhaps the most apolitical of the writers of the Latin American ‘boom.’ His preoccupations on the literary front were purely aesthetic, and it would not be until later in life that precise political questions would be included in his literary production. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 –which he witnessed from France- Cortázar became a political figure, openly supporting and defending that revolution, along with the struggles faced in Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. However, even as Cortázar became more committed to the political and social struggles of Latin America he maintained that his political inclinations were never ‘directly’ translated into his literature: he was not a didactic writer. Much to the annoyance of the Left, Cortázar differentiated between his political commitments and his vocation of writing, maintaining: “When I do politics, I do politics, and when I make literature, I make literature[.]” (Cortázar in Sosnowski 17-18).1
For Cortázar revolution signified a break with the rational, realist consciousness, and its corresponding literary tradition. In his writing, best exemplified by his most renowned work Rayuela(1963), Cortázar defied realist literary conventions – such as a chronological representation of time, linear narrative structures, and the realist claim to a ‘transparent’ language. For him, thematic exploration, stylistic experimentation and an innovative use of the Spanish language are based upon an analogy between the literary work and ‘reality’: the writer’s rebellion on the face of those realist conventions is simultaneously a critique of the rationalist discourse of ‘reality’ that they represent. Thus, the challenge to the literary achieves a revolutionary break in reality. The ideological exists in Cortázar’s work as an attitude toward reality, and not an explicit proposing of a political position.
Though living in France, as he gained a more concrete political consciousness, Cortázar would return to Latin America regularly. France, however, was where he wrote the majority of his works, including Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963).2 As he explains in several interviews (Weiss, Barnechea, Picón Garfield), Europe afforded him a particular vantage from which to view Latin America, and exile enabled him to write what he had written. Discussing the significance of his exile to his literary production, Cortázar says:
Buenos Aires me asfixió y fue París precisamente lo que me permitió que yo redescubriera una visión distinta de mi país y de Latinoamérica. Paris –Europa mejor- me abrió un horizonte total, planetario, que yo no tenía desde Buenos Aires. […] [S]e que sin París no hubiera escrito lo que escrito.3 (Cortázar in Barnechea 1997 p79).
Cortázar’s affiliation to Paris was at least in part due to his familiarity with French culture and literature. He had already expressed a connection with the positions of Surrealism and Existentialism, and was versed in the writings of Balzac, Verne, Hugo, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, even before he was familiar with the literature of Argentina (Weiss 81). In a Paris Review interview Cortázar declared that Paris and “French culture on the whole” held a strong attraction for him. Having read French literature with a passion whilst still living in Argentina, he “wanted to be [t]here and get to know the streets and the places one finds in the books, in the novels.” (Cortázar in Plimpton 121-122)
Exile, for Cortázar, implied a personal process, and the subsequent transformation of experience into literature. It also allowed him to re-discover his nationality and the conditions of his being a Latin American writer and thinker. In this sense it provided him with a new space, a new horizon, from which to explore this Latin American condition. In another sense, it allowed him to undergo a process of de-nationalisation, to view himself within his larger, continental context. This would be transferred into his writing, culminating in the exemplary novel, Hopscotch. In unambiguous terms, Hopscotch adopts the theme, exile, and portrays the experience of an Argentinean living in Paris. From the outset, the novel is structured as division and fragmentation, presenting the geographical juxtaposition of Buenos Aires and Paris. A principle of juxtaposition and interference both dominates the novel’s structure, and is fundamental to the experience of exile.
In this disjunctive space, Cortázar achieved distance and reflection, allowing him a new perspective on his native identity. This led Cortázar to call upon other Latin American writers to perceive exile in a positive light. In the essay “América Latina: Exilio y Literatura” Cortázar re-evaluates the negative valorisation of exile, proclaiming the ‘necessity’ to transform exile into a liberating and proactive experience, and not a negative and silencing one. It is a way of attaining a truer picture of the self. He states: “El primer deber del exiliado debería ser el de desnudarse frente a ese terrible espejo que es la soledad de un hotel en el extranjero y allí, sin las fáciles coartadas del localismo […] tratar de verse como realmente es”4 (Cortázar “Exilio y Literatura” 227).
Despite having lived the majority of his life in France, Cortázar always remained closely tied to his national identity. He defined himself as distant only in physical terms – his commitment to the political causes of Latin America, and the production of more than ten books that purported to deal with aspects of Latin American reality, were presented as proof that “He was not there and yet he was there definitely” (“De ese no estar aquí y a la vez estar definitivamente”). (Cortázar in Barnechea 82).
Cortázar explores the limits of nationality and culture as “a writer who works in an intimate relation with his national and linguistic context”5 (Cortázar "América Latina: Exilio Y Literatura" 216). He wrote in close relation to his newly important native identity: character, language and geography are all particularly Argentinean in his works. As Irby claims, “Cortázar has a uniquely sensitive ear for his countrymen’s living speech, which he humorously stylises and plays off against abstractions in an effort to demolish rhetoric, [and] jargon” (Irby 64-65).
In his exile Cortázar underwent a transformation that affected how he understood and produced literature. In a now famous letter – later published in the House of the Americas magazine (CASA) – Cortázar stated:
From Argentina left a writer for whom reality, as imagined by Mallarmé, should culminate in a [the] book; Paris saw the birth of a man for whom books must culminate in reality.6 (Cortázar "Carta a Roberto Fernández Retamar (Sobre <<Situación Del Intelectual Latinoamericano>>)" 49).
What is expressed in this quote is a shift from purely aesthetic concerns to political ones – or, rather, the discovery that the literary text is intrinsically related to ‘reality’. Though, he maintained that artistic freedom cannot be conditional – for Cortázar the social revolution occurred inside of the literary revolution. To invoke Barthes, it is through the private language of style where Cortázar’s “personal and secret mythology” (Barthes 10) comes into coincidence with the world. In this manner he is able to at once engage the social, while maintaining “no clear destination” (Barthes 11) for his work, for this style “resides outside the pact which binds the writer to society.” (Barthes 12). And it is this that provides the ideology of form, inherently related to the newly acquired politics of identity – of the individual, and the individual as a Latin American and Argentinean. These individual and cultural identities and their private ideologies furnish his work with its styles, that dismantle the realist literary forms, and thus oppose their corresponding discourse. Cortázar’s poetics is situated between aesthetics and politics: the tension between the two is explored, and plays out, in his theoretical and fictional texts. With the exception, perhaps, of those early works written before exile, his entire work is dedicated to the central problematic of literature in, or of revolution.
Cortázar maintained that the social and the literary must remain two separate bodies, so that the writer have creative freedom and is not subjected to limits external to their art. Expressing this, he stated:
El error más grande que podríamos cometer en tanto que revolucionarios consistiría en condicionar una literatura o un arte a las necesidades inmediatas7 (Cortázar "Viaje Alrededor De Una Mesa" 32)
Yet, what may be also argued is that there is a working correlation between what the writer can do within literature and what he must do ‘as a social actor’. It is not a simple position, and in order to explore the correlations in more detail we need to turn now to Cortázar’s concept of reality.
For Cortázar reality cannot be completely explained, nor grasped, through reason and rational discourse. He maintained that the laws offered in explanation of reality did not suffice, nor did they expose how an individual experiences it. His critique was of the scientific, philosophical and psychological discourses that attempt to provide absolute frameworks for phenomena, which, according to him, can never be completely accounted for. He stated:
[M]e negué a aceptar la realidad tal como pretendían imponérmela y explicármela mis padres y mis maestros. Yo vi siempre el mundo de una manera distinta, sentí siempre, que entre dos cosas que parecen perfectamente delimitadas y separadas, hay intersticios por los cuales, para mí al menos, pasaba, se colaba, un elemento, que no podía explicarse con leyes, que no podía explicarse con lógica, que no podía explicarse con la inteligencia razonante.8 (Cortázar "El Sentimiento De Lo Fantástico" 2)
This provides a glance into reality in its relation to the fantastic, which is the basis for his understanding of literature. Precisely because he views reality as fantastic, his literary production is an expression of this. For him, the fantastic is not a genre or a theory, but an intuitive component of reality that one ‘feels,’ and that is ever present in the everyday. Weiss explains that “For [Cortázar] the fantastic was above all a feeling, the invitation of a parallel or alternate world that may at any moment interfere with or erupt into our own rational order of things” (Weiss 84). Reality itself is fantastic and mysterious, and the laws that are applied to make sense of our experience of it, are never sufficient – there is always something ‘more,’ a hidden truth behind the ordinary façade of things.
Cortázar’s attitude toward literature, his stylistic approach to the novel, his signature playfulness, the irony, the inventive potential taken to its extreme, now come to be substantiated by an ideology which presents itself in opposition to the reign of logic. It is not difficult to see that this perspective echoes in some detail the position offered by André Breton in the first Surrealist manifesto, and Cortázar felt a close affinity with Surrealism even before he left for Paris. He viewed Surrealism as much more than a ‘literary movement’: it was an attitude towards ‘reality’. Surrealism provided an alternative to dominant discourses and an ‘aesthetic’ mode of encounter and expression.9 As Surrealism was a pervasive attitude in everyday life, so too was the fantastic a constituent part of the reality that we inhabit.
Breton alludes to the reconciliation between the internal self and the external world, and it is this aspect, perhaps more than any other, that resonates in Cortázar. Breton provided the position of aesthetic discourse and model for aesthetic response, and though Cortázar did not consider himself a Surrealist, he advocated the rejection of the realist attitude in art and in life, which entailed the submersion of the psychological, philosophical and political within literature, the subversion of established realist conventions, and, ultimately, the creation of a self-reflexive literary mode.10
I have stated that for Cortázar literature cannot be subjugated to a political cause. As he became more preoccupied with the social and political realities of Latin America, these political issues became more pertinent in his works. However, Cortázar never abandoned the writing of the fantastic (albeit his own version of the fantastic), and his stories continued to be driven by surrealist underpinnings. As he stated in 1984:
[I]n these last few years, my efforts concerning certain Latin American regimes –Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and now above all Nicaragua—have absorbed me to such a point that I have used the fantastic in certain stories to deal with this subject—in a way that’s very close to reality, in my opinion. (Cortázar in Plimpton 113)
We arrive thus, at the juncture of Cortázar’s political and aesthetics positions – the writer comments upon the social and political ‘reality,’ parting from the assumption that s/he is above all a writer. This has resonances with the Magic Realist position: attention is focussed upon the aesthetic demand of the text, which itself signals a departure from the normative modes of perception. This reveals itself in the text as style. The political, in both instances, is a challenge to the quotidian life, rather searching for the hidden meanings of the ‘magical,’ ‘fantastic,’ or ‘surreal’. In reflecting upon his own career, Cotrázar said:
[T]hirty years ago I was writing things that came into my head and I judged them only by aesthetic criteria. Now, although I continue to judge them by aesthetic criteria, first of all because I am a writer –I’m now a writer who is tormented, very preoccupied by the situation in Latin America; consequently that often slips into my writing, in a conscious or in an unconscious way. But despite the stories with very precise references to ideological and political questions, my stories, in essence, haven’t changed. They’re still stories of the fantastic. (Cortázar in Plimpton 113).
Cortázar sought to maintain the balance between his aesthetic position and what he knew was ‘right’ politically. “For me,” he said, “what I do must always be literature, the highest I can do… to go beyond the possible. But, at the same time, to try to put in a mix of contemporary reality. And that’s a very difficult balance” (Cortázar in Plimpton 113).
There is no doubt as to the significance of exile for Julio Cortázar: it had a profound effect on his considerations of the aesthetic and the political in literature. In his own words, it opened up new horizons and allowed him to look at single Latin American realities as part of a larger, continental legacy. After the Cuban revolution his political concerns took on a more prominent role, and his literary works ceased to be purely imaginative. It seems important to highlight, however, that the political entered Cortázar’s works not as an explicit critique of political systems, but as reflections on how reality itself is perceived and experienced.
Notes
1 “Cuando yo hago política, hago política, y cuando hago literatura, hago literatura.” (Cortázar en Sosnowski, pp17-18).
2 For further details on Cortázar’s autobiography, consult: Aira, Cesar. Diccionario de Autores Latinoamericanos, Emece, Ada Korn Editora, SA. Buenos Aires, 2001, pp152-153.
3 “Buenos Aires asphyxiated me, and it was Paris, precisely, that allowed me to re-discover a different vision of my country and Latin America. Paris – Europe rather – opened before me a new horizon, […] that I did not have from Buenos Aires. […] I know that without Paris I would not have been able to write what I have written”
4 “The first duty of the exiled should be that of becoming naked in front of that terrible mirror that is solitude in a foreign hotel and there, without the facile excuses of localisms […] try to see oneself as one really is.”
5 Cortázar speaks of himself as: “[U]n escritor que trabaja en intima relación con su contexto nacional y lingüístico (Cortázar Exilio y Literatura, 216).
6 De la Argentina se alejó un escritor para quien la realidad, como la imaginaba Mallarmé, debía culminar en un libro; en Paris nació un hombre para quien los libros deberán culminar en la realidad. (Cortázar Carta a Retamar 49)
7 “The greatest error that we could make as revolutionaries consists in conditioning literature or art to immediate needs” (Revise trans.)
8 I refused to accept reality as was imposed and explained to me by my parents and teachers. I always saw the world in a different way, I felt that between two things that seem perfectly de-limited and separate, there are interstices in which, at least for me, something else passed, an element that could not be explained with laws, or with logic, that could not be explained by intelligent reason.
9 El verdadero surrealismo es indestructible, es una actitud, un modo de conocer que se da diariamente de mil maneras que, por suerte, no son forzosamente literarias [9] (Cortázar in Barnechea 68).
10 What is at stake is the provision of a position that can express the negation of positivist thinking: “Cortázar wholeheartedly continues, in his own fashion, surrealism’s vast dream of undoing the whole rational machinery and routine of Western thought and regaining man’s true spiritual abode” (Irby James, 64).
Works Cited
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Cortázar, Julio. "El Sentimiento De Lo Fantástico." Universidad Católica Andrés Bello: Solo Literatura, 1982.
—-. "Viaje Alrededor De Una Mesa." Rayuela. Buenos Aires: —-, 1970.
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—-. "Carta a Roberto Fernández Retamar (Sobre <<Situación Del Intelectual Latinoamericano>>)." Julio Cortázar: Obra Crítica. Ed. S. Sosnowski. 1st ed. Vol. 3. Buenos Aires: Suma de Letras Argentina, 2004. 39-60.
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