Julio Cortazar You Never Know the Whole Story
JULIO CORTAZAR, 1914-1984: THE SIMON BOLIVAR OF THE NOVEL
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March 4, 1984
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Section vii , Page
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Carlos Fuentes's novel ''Terra Nostra'' has just been reissued with an afterword by Milan Kundera. He has newly completed a novel well-nigh the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in revolutionary Mexico.
S sometimes happens, I knew him before I met him. Some of the starting time short stories of Julio Cortazar, who died on Feb. 12 in Paris, appeared in a literary mag I was editing in Mexico in the mid-1950'south. I was even able to find and read the manuscript of a fascinating novel in which Cortazar buried the corpse of a famous Argentine woman under the Obelisk in downtown Buenos Aires, from where it spread terror, plague and abulia in concentric rings. He later withdrew this manuscript, judging it also topical: Readers might have idea he was referring to Eva Peron. I idea this characteristic of a man I had only seen, dimly, in a grouping photograph of contributors to the legendary Argentine literary magazine, Victoria Ocampo's Sur.
In this pic Cortazar appeared as a solemn, thick-lensed, lean-faced effigy in black, with the plastered hair of the stereotypical Porteno, or inhabitant of Buenos Aires. And so that when in 1960 I finally made it, after much correspondence with him, to his studio on the leafy Identify du General Beuret in Paris, under the shadow of the elevated Metro, I idea that the beau who came out to greet me was Cortazar's son.
Tousled chestnut pilus, hairless face, abundant freckles, old jeans and shortsleeved shirt. He looked no more than 25 then, and his face was constantly animated by a deep laugh, a long greenish innocent look under ii knit and knowing eyebrows. Cortazar was always willing to insult anyone who violated the purity of his gaze with a resonant Spanish ''hijo de puta.'' With him was his first wife, Aurora, a tiny, alert woman who kept things humming in the onetime mews the Cortazars had transformed into a studio, long, alpine and narrow, like to its primary; at that place, co-ordinate to one of his formulas for moving effectually in a dangerous and comical world, you could only descend the stairs by climbing them.
But when that boyish face laughed or became self- absorbed, it would startlingly fill with minute webs of historic period, as though they were the fangs of an existence earlier his own, parallel to his own or simply a continuation of his ain. Thus was born the legend of Julio Cortazar as Dorian Gray. The truth is that I have never met anyone quite so attuned to what Henry James chosen ''the sense of visitation,'' the feeling that reality was itself
and
its ghost, its contiguous presence, its permanent possibility. Cortazar believed men and women had more than 1 dream; so in that location was more than ane paradise.
He knew everything; he was the Latin American in Europe who showed the Europeans that he knew something more than they - and this was the fact that the Old Earth discovered the New Globe only had then been unable to imagine it. This made his literary appeal both profound and compelling. He always said the literature of the Americas was but a dozen fries on the table of Globe Literature, whereas those of France, Spain and England had stacks by the thousands. We had to imagine more.
An Argentine through and through in spite of his long years in Paris, he would write and reflect and motion around patiently drinking from a bubble- shaped cup the bitter mate of the pampas. Ane night in Paris, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I taped one 60 minutes of Mexican revolutionary ballads; then Cortazar sang an hour total of tangos on the aforementioned tape with an almost religious concentration. From the language of Buenos Aires, he was capable of deriving a slang all his own, erotic, onomatopoetic, wildly funny - and then making it understandable to a cheering crowd of Nicaraguans filling a stadium in Managua to hear him read. At the Academy of California in Berkeley and Barnard College in New York, the handsome, bearded, warm, half dozen-foot-v-inch Cortazar knew comparable triumphs tardily in his life.
I once chosen him the Simon Bolivar of the Latin American novel; he liberated us all with a new, airy, humorous and mysterious linguistic communication, both everyday and mythical. ''Hopscotch,'' his 1963 novel, is one of the great manifestoes of Latin American modernity; through its extremely free verbal and structural creativity we were able to see ourselves, our doubts and possibilities, clearer than ever. Cortazar was always amazed at the pop success of his novel. It found a ready audition among the young in Latin America and fifty-fifty amidst students on campuses all over the United States. Cortazar thought that peradventure it had been written by the company of the Cronopios, those mythical figures he invented in ''Cronopios and Famas,'' enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity - a band of literary Marx Brothers.
Julio Cortazar was a human total of joy considering his vast culture was joyful. I remember him when Garcia Marquez and I joined him on an incommunicable mission to Prague in 1968, there to pretend with our Czechoslovak literary friends that somehow the semblance of cultural freedom could be maintained even as Russian tanks surrounded the urban center. As nosotros ate sausages and drank beer on the train, he talked exhaustively of detective fiction in sleeping cars. A hateful saxophone player, he sniffed out the best jazz club in Prague, where one evening he evoked the history of the world through the greatest musical moments of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Louis Armstrong. I remember pounding the pavements of Paris with him, going from one cinema house to another, seeing films we had seen 10 times equally if for the kickoff fourth dimension, because Cortazar had an well-nigh childlike sense of renewed marvel. He seemed to exist thanking those painters or moving picture makers who helped him see afresh, as if the deep green wells of his eyes had to be replenished every day.
Formed in the schoolhouse of surrealism, he was forever searching for expansion of liberty through expansion of the senses and the mind. Here lay the path to a dual revolution, internal and external. He did not want to sacrifice either. He supported the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua, criticizing them constructively in private and refusing to offering public consolation to the American Governments, which he saw as less inimical to Communism than to Latin American independence.
Cortazar had a graphic symbol in ''Hopscotch'' called Traveler, a man who had never gone anywhere. But Julio loved his namesake Jules Verne and honored him by writing a book chosen ''Around the Day in Lxxx Worlds.'' He visited Mexico late in his life and was enthralled by the constant affirmations of the coexistence of civilization and nature to be found in my country. Simply, in a way of speaking, he had been in Mexico before - in the optics of the Aztec axolotl in an aquarium, a animate being with a human face up that happens to exist that of the author-spectator; or in the dream of a man on an operating table in a Parisian infirmary who sees himself being sacrificed to the Indian gods. In that very instant, an Aztec warrior feels the obsidian knife opening his breast and dreams himself on a white tabular array in a white room somewhere far away, a white knight ripping his chest open.
Cortazar had the literary cloak-and-dagger for conceiving a 2nd reality where houses are patiently taken over, room by room, by unknown forces, or where a commercial gallery in Paris naturally leads to a commercial gallery in Buenos Aires. If you wish to connect things, all you have to do, as in ''Hopscotch,'' is to join two balconies of an insane asylum with a shaky plank. He was, indeed, the translator of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe into Castilian.
His terminal years were his happiest. He lived and loved and played with a young Canadian author, Carol Dunlop, and constitute a clear space for their lives high up in a Parisian building full of tailors and seamstresses. And then Carol died at 37 final yr, and Cortazar was left totally alone with the other face of things, the invisible globe of possibility and the imminent forms of reality. E is the first figure of the so-called Latin American boom to go. Merely for us he meant something more. Ortega y Gasset suggested that nosotros should place ourselves in generational eras of 15 years. In this sense, Julio Cortazar and Octavio Paz, both built-in in 1914, were the heads of my own generation. For those of u.s.a. born around 1929, Cortazar and Paz, the two most alert esthetic minds of this Latin American generation, gave a sense to our modernity and allowed us to believe a bit longer in the adventure of the new, when everything seemed to say that novelty was no longer possible because progress was no longer meaningful. Both Cortazar and Paz spoke of something more than than novelty or progress - they spoke of the radically new and joyful nature of every instant, of the torso, the memory and the imagination of men and women.
Cortazar in one case wrote a marvelous short story about the world'due south biggest traffic jam, on the Paris-Marseilles expressway, where people are trapped forever in their cars. His concluding book, written with Carol and recently published in Barcelona, is called ''Los Autonautas de la Cosmopista'' (The Autonauts of the Cosmohighway). Information technology rediscovers that same highway as if for the start time, the manner Columbus described the Caribbean Sea. A few days later on Cortazar's death, the highway from the French Alps into Italy became totally clogged with cars unable and trucks unwilling to budge. Perhaps this was the work of the Cronopios in
hommage
to the expressionless writer.B
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/04/books/julio-cortazar-19141984-the-simon-bolivar-of-the-novel.html