Julio Cortázar Long Fiction Analysis
The Winners
Julio Cortázar’s first novel, The Winners, tells the story of a voyage aboard a rather sinister ship. This mystery cruise—the ship’s destination is never revealed—is a prize awarded to the winners of a lottery, a heterogeneous group of Argentines who, as the novel begins, are gathered at the London Café in Buenos Aires. The group represents a cross section of the Argentine class structure, suggestive of the novel’s implicit sociopolitical critique. From the café, the winners are transported by bus to the ship, under a shroud of secrecy. The café is taken over by the Office of Municipal Affairs, arrangers of the lottery, and all but the winners are required to leave the premises. In the café, on the bus, and boarding the ship, the winners engage in conversations as varied as their class and cultural origins, making new acquaintances and provoking a few hostile confrontations.
The ship’s name, the Malcolm, is a clue of what is to come: The passengers are not “well come”; rather, they are regarded by the ship’s crew as an imposition. Attempting to speak to the officers, they discover that the crew speaks another language; the passengers are refused the itinerary and forbidden access to the stern. Protesting their treatment, they are informed that a rare strain of typhus has infected the crew, and this news provokes a division among the passengers between those who fear contamination and those who believe that they are being deceived (and offer other answers as to what is taking place). Jorge, a young boy, falls ill, and a group of passengers (led by Gabriel Medrano, who admits to a frivolous previous life) storm the radio room hoping to cable ashore for help. A sailor shoots and kills Medrano, ending the cruise. Medrano’s body is removed under mysterious circumstances while the remaining winners are transported to Buenos Aires in a hydroplane. There, the officer in charge urges them to sign a statement, allegedly to prevent rumors about the incident. Most accede, but some refuse to forget the senseless killing and to believe the official explanation.
Aside from possible allusions to the “ship of fools” theme, it is obvious that the novel is fraught with existential implications: The unknown destination of ship and passengers represents the situation of the existentially unaware, those who have not taken charge of their lives and begun to chart their course through time. The secrecy surrounding the trip is emblematic of the existentialist tenet that there is no answer to the ultimate questions, no essential meaning or absolute truth, and the epidemic on the ship is a symbol of “being-toward-death” as well as of death’s ultimate inescapability. Medrano, with his previously unaware (existentially inauthentic) life, represents the individual who comes to terms with his existence and endows it with meaning by his death. On a secondary level of meaning, the political implications of life under a totalitarian regime are likewise well developed: the high-handed way in which authorities on land treat both the winners and the general public, the inability of the passengers to communicate with the crew, their not being privileged to know the itinerary or to have access to areas of command, as well as the violent retribution when they transgress the regime’s rules and prohibitions. The ending is a clear allegory of censorship and news “management.”
Structurally, the novel is composed of nine chapters, with passages in italics that convey the linguistic and metaphysical experiments of Persio (a passenger and amateur astronomer). His monologues provide a metaphysical, loosely structured commentary on events that some critics have found distracting—an unnecessary...
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digression—whereas others have seen therein an adumbration of the innovative structure ofHopscotch. Persio’s monologues, often poetic, provide a contrast with the realistic and prosaic style of the remainder of the novel; they exemplify the “automatic writing” propounded by Surrealists. Although Cortázar denied such imputations, many critics also have seen The Winners as an allegory of Argentinian society and the constant struggle between civilization and barbarism.
Hopscotch
Hopscotch is Cortázar’s best-known novel and probably his literary masterpiece; according to The TimesLiterary Supplement, it was the “first great novel of Spanish America.” Critically acclaimed throughout the Spanish-speaking world, it was promptly translated into many languages, receiving well-deserved praise from critics and reviewers (the English version by Gregory Rabassa received the first National Book Award for translation).
A significant and highly innovative aspect of the novel is its “Table of Instructions,” in which Cortázar informs the reader that “this book consists of many books, but two books above all.” The first can be read in normal numerical order from chapter 1 to chapter 56 and is divided into two sections titled “From the Other Side” (that is, Paris) and “From This Side” (Argentina). Upon completing chapter 56, the reader may ignore the rest of the book “with a clear conscience.” This, however, would be the conventional reader (hembra, or feminine/passive), as opposed to the more collaborative (macho, or masculine/active) reader, who becomes the author’s accomplice in the creative act, reading the book in the hopscotch manner to which the title alludes. In this second book, the reading begins at chapter 73, following a sequence of chapters—nonconsecutive and apparently haphazard—indicated by the author at the end of each chapter in question. Upon reaching the final chapter, however, the collaborative reader is directed to return to chapter 58 (the next to the last), which in turn sends him or her back to chapter 131, the final one. Thus there is no definitive ending, but an endless movement back and forth between the last two chapters. This double (or multiple) structure is a principal basis for the novel’s fame, involving two prime factors: the study of man’s search for authenticity (by Oliveira, theprotagonist) and a call for innovation or change in the structuring of narrative fiction, a departure from the traditional novelistic form.
Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian intellectual living in Paris around 1950 (and thus a possible mask of the author), is involved in a search for authenticity. Some forty years old, he spends his time in continual and prolonged self-analysis and introspection. With a group of bohemian friends who call themselves the Serpent Club, he drinks, listens to jazz, and converses on philosophy, music, literature, art, and politics. Obsessed with the unconventional, Oliveira, during one of many drunken binges, strives to gain some sort of mystical vision through sexual intercourse in an alley with a destitute combination streetwalker and bag lady. Discovered by the police, he is deported to Argentina, where he encounters old friends and continues his search, first working in an emblematic circus and then in an equally symbolic insane asylum. Despite the inconclusive end described above, some suggest that he committed suicide, while others see a positive ending.
Given Oliveira’s overpowering importance in the novel, the remaining characters are foils whose major and all but exclusive function is to provide a better perspective on him. The members of the Serpent Club, representing different countries and cultures, afford opportunities for comparison and contrast. They include Ossip Gregorovius, a Russian émigré and intellectual whom Oliveira suspects of having an affair with his own lover, “La Maga,” an Uruguayan woman living in Paris with her infant son Rocamadour. Also prominent are a North American couple, Babs and Ronald; a Chinese named Wong; a Spaniard, Perico; and two Frenchmen, Guy and Étienne.
The Argentinian section or half of the novel presents the mirror image (the doppelgänger theme) in La Maga’s counterpart, Lolita, whom Oliveira imagines to be the woman he left in Paris and whom he attempts to seduce. As a result, he fears that his friend (ironically and symbolically named Traveler), who is also his double, is attempting to kill him, a probable exteriorization of his own self-destructive urge. While talking to Lolita from a second-story window moments after the attempted seduction, Oliveira appears to fall or jump, allowing for the interpretation that he has committed suicide. Other chapters, however, suggest (without explaining how) that he survived the fall and insinuate as well that he became insane. Like the children’s game of hopscotch, at once simple and complex, the novel has many possibilities, numerous variants, and a similar cluster of meanings, depending ultimately on the reader-player for its specific form and resultant action, and thus for its interpretation and elucidation. All of this places the work very much in the mainstream of experimental fiction and novelistic theory, in which the reader is incorporated as an important and essential part of the creative process.
62: A Model Kit
In Cortázar’s next novel, 62: A Model Kit, separated by some five years from Hopscotch, there are traces of chapter 62 of Hopscotch, and, lest the reader overlook this, the author mentions it in his introduction, stating that his intentions were “sketched out one day past in the final paragraphs of chapter 62 of Rayuela [Hopscotch], which explains the title of this book.” In that chapter, one of those termed “expendable,” Morelli plans to write a book in which the characters will behave as if possessed by “foreign occupying forces, advancing in the quest of their freedom of the city; a quest superior to ourselves as individuals and one which uses us for its own ends.” Even more so than Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit may be considered an antinovel. The suggestions of science fiction or fantastic narrative notwithstanding, it is an extremely difficult novel, as yet little studied and less elucidated by critics.
On one level, there is experimentation with language and polysemous signification, a semiserious meditation on connotation and denotation and the possible mystical or metaphysical meanings of their congruence. Thus, at the outset, Juan overhears a customer in a Paris restaurant order a château saignant (a rare steak) and deliberately confuses this with a château sanglant (a bloody castle), with all the obvious attendant gothic associations regarding such juxtaposition as a “coagulation” of myriad meanings and events. Such constellations are formed throughout the novel through the manipulation by several characters whose paths cross in the separate realms of the City and the Zone (reminiscent of the two cultures—Argentine and French—in Hopscotch). The Zone, where apparent existential authenticity is the norm, offers characters who attempt to master their fate and negate the mundane, while in the City, conformity and ritualism reign supreme and characters are engaged in compulsive searches of which they have no understanding, an atmosphere at once Kafkaesque and absurd, with occasional undertones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Principal characters include Juan, an Argentine interpreter and thus a hypothetical fictional double of the author; he loves Hélène, an anesthetist (who may symbolize Nirvana or ataraxia by reason of her profession), but she is hostile, cold, and bisexual. Juan’s lover, the sensual Dane Tell, accompanies him on his travels. Celia, a young student at the Sorbonne, runs away from her family and eventually becomes Hélène’s lover. The married couple, Nicole and Marrast, live in Paris and visit London; he is an artist, bored with his wife and generally plagued by ennui, seeking new means of amusement. Upon seeing an advertisement for Neurotics Anonymous, he writes an open letter suggesting that all neurotics gather at a gallery to see a certain painting, thus all but precipitating a riot because of the mob of neurotics who attend. Marrast makes the acquaintance of Austin, a neurotic young lutist whose sexual naïveté and ludicrous experiences with a prostitute, Georgette, Cortázar humorously exploits. Georgette insists that during intercourse Austin must take extreme care not to disarrange her coiffure. Marrast’s wife, an illustrator of children’s books, no longer loves her husband and, although she continues to live with him, draws gnomes that may reflect her feelings toward him. Two especially strange characters, Calac and Polanco, Argentines referred to as Tartars or Pampa savages, exemplify linguistic experimentation in their continual, senseless conversations in the subway before curious crowds; their speech consists almost totally of neologisms. Finally, and most difficult, paredros can be considered a sort of collective double of all the characters mentioned—although any one of them might be another paredros, and yet in other instances the paredros emerges alone and contemplates characters from an external vantage point, while participating at times in conversations and external events.
Throughout the novel, Cortázar drops hints that the whole is a gothic tale, that it is in fact a variant of that particular subgenre of the horror story that deals with vampires, and during a trip to Vienna, Juan and Dane visit the Basilisken Haus on Blutgasse (blood street), encountering legends that tell how one resident, the Blood Countess, Erzebet Bathori, bled and tortured girls in her castle, bathing in their blood. Juan and Dane associate these tales with what they imagine to be the intentions of another guest of the hotel, Frau Marta, regarding a young English girl, and manage to prevent the girl’s seduction, although the door is left open to possible vampirism rather than lesbian sexuality. Otherwise, a parallel exists between Frau Marta and Hélène, as both are seduced young girls (perhaps a reappearance of the doppelgänger). Both may be considered mirrors or doubles of the Blood Countess. Although there is no clear resolution, the thematic connections between such incidents and the opening reflections on rare steak and bloody castles are immediately evident.
The fact that the structuring function exercised by plot in the conventional novel has here been replaced by a sort of poetic counterpoint and reiteration, with sustained or connected sequential action replaced by thematic repetition or idea rhyme, is but one of the several convincing arguments for classifying this work as an antinovel. Such noncharacters as the paredros, as well as the noncommunication of the dialogues of Calac and Polanco, are additional cases in point. The handling of time is another, as it is neither linear nor connected and usually rather vague as well, so that the reader wonders whether the “kit” of the title will prove upon assembly to be a working model with moving parts or more of a static jigsaw puzzle. The novel’s concerns seem to be more with form, narrative theory, and literary double entendre than with such immediate, human, and accessible considerations as appear in The Winners and Hopscotch, points that probably explain its relative lack of popularity with the public, if not with critics.
A Manual for Manuel
An excellent example of the perils of writing committed fiction appears in A Manual for Manuel, a novel that is more a political pamphlet than a work of art. Cortázar’s purpose in writing this piece was to denounce the systematic torture of political prisoners in Latin America, with the somewhat naïve hope that his protest might curb such inhumane behavior. During a visit to Buenos Aires in 1973 upon publication of the book, he contributed the authorship rights to two Argentine organizations involved in working for the rights and release of political prisoners and to such prisoners’ families. On the formal level of the novel, there is nothing new: The structure repeats that of Cortázar’s earlier works, with similar patterns and characters; the language is stereotyped, with frequent instances of Marxist rhetoric.
Andrés, the protagonist (much like Oliveira in Hopscotch), finds himself torn between two worlds, although in this case they are not so much geographic and cultural as ideological. Faced with choosing between bourgeois comforts and Marxist commitment, he is unable to decide which path to take (and thus falls short of achieving existential authenticity). In a fashion recalling the collage technique of La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, the novel mixes truth with fiction through the author’s insertion of new articles detailing the horrors suffered by political prisoners within the fictional text, which likewise abounds in references to real-life guerrilla activities, societal taboos (especially homosexuality), and other sociological data.
Essentially, the plot concerns the activities of a group of revolutionaries in Paris who kidnap an important Latin American diplomat in order to obtain the release of political prisoners at home. The narration is handled from the perspective of two characters: Andrés, with his indecisiveness about joining the group, and a member of the guerrillas, usually identified only as “you know who.” At the same time, there is a metaliterary level, where the business of writing a novel is interwoven with the political plotting, an implied contrast between two approaches to novelistic construction: Should the novelist proceed from a preconceived, fully elaborated plot, or should he follow the internal logic of the characters and situations rather than forcing them to conform to some prior plan? The two narrative perspectives of Andrés and “you know who” correspond to these approaches, for the guerrilla attempts to develop a logical progression that takes into account the characters and their circumstances, while taking notes on the plans and execution of the kidnapping. Andrés in effect assumes the position of the omniscient author-narrator who has a godlike overview, obtained in his case by reading the assault plans and thus coming to understand what is the plot of the novel. From his original posture of uncommittedness, Andrés moves to engagement, becoming an active participant in the events of Verrières as reflected in his later writing or rewriting of the novel (with the benefit of hindsight).
Mechanically, the plot hinges on the smuggling into France of twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit bills by two Argentineans who rendezvous with the guerrillas and exchange the money in various Paris banks. Although the diplomat is kidnapped, the group is apprehended by police and most of the guerrillas are deported, at which point Andrés becomes the novelist, compiling and ordering the notes taken by “you know who”—and thus (the reader is to believe) the novel is born. In addition to a somewhat tardy indication of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and the notion of politically committed literature, the novel exhibits a certain attenuated formal experimentation in the combination of the collage technique with metaliterary motifs and dual narration. Whether the novel falls by reason of its ideological weight or because of insufficient integration between the revolutionary plot (straight out of the novel of espionage and intrigue) with the factual material on political torture is an open question, but the result is not: A Manual for Manuel is the least fortunate of Julio Cortázar’s novels.