Otherness in the works Argentine writer Julio Cortazar: An object of desire and fatalism

Not too many Latin American writers, contrary to Julio Cortazar ever since his first writings, have been able to elaborate a critique of the western subject and of western culture and to raise a set of issues on the relationship among power, culture, and subjectivity. This relationship leads to a number of concerns all throughout Cortazar's work: the problem of 'exile,' the relationship with the social and cultural Other, urban space-the hallucinating cities, the timeless cities-, the ways in which literature draws on the major projects of modernity, etc. Much of Cortazar's work introduces characters living daily lives which do not sustain them, which render them empty and melancholic, off-shore and boundless, as tramps who become alienated within rather apathetic relations. But the subject tries; the subject attempts to fill gaps by identifying himself or herself with the Other. The subject desperately and obsessively lets show a longing for and fatalism about Otherness. Not only does he or she establish that crucial bond with the Other (be it social, cultural, etc.), but he also starts a dialogue with his cultural heritage (especially with one of the founding tendencies of Argentinian literature and culture: that of the ideological matrix of "civilizacion y barbarie"). Cortazar's writings are disturbed by the tension of mixtures as revealed in narrations such as "Las puertas del cielo" (Bestiario, 1951), or symbolized by that very same tension and nostalgia which, for instance, in "El otro cielo" (Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966) he undoubtedly made explicit. The purpose of the present article is to observe the way Cortazar operates by productively conjugating that side of Argentinian literature with a fantastic inflexion on proposing "otro corporeo y presente de la cultura popular," on appealing to other areas of the Argentinian ways (which, incidentally, are not the same as those of Borges): Tango, Lunfardo, and the like, and on choosing the latest historical vanguard (Surrealism) and the existentialist thought of the very core of European culture in the 50's.