Word: cortazar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cortazar has long been in the vanguard of contemporary Latin American authors who employ surrealist and experimental techniques. With his emphasis on fantasy and indigenous mythology, and his use of innovations in novelistic form, he attempts to assert his intellectual independence from Western literary traditions. Like his Argentine compatriot, Jorge Borges, Cortazar portrays a reality in which past, present and future exist simultaneously; a world where his characters are trapped in the labyrinth of modern society. Cortazar's two best-known works, the short story "Blow Up" (on which director Antonioni based his film) and the novel Hopscotch, exemplify...
...DOES CORTAZAR BELIEVE in what his exiled rebels are striving towards? One thinks not. He prefaces his novel with an indictment of Argentine military rule and a call to socialism, but he is too sophisticated to believe his characters' irresponsible lifestyle can save their nation. They lack a coherent ideology or strategy, and their leisurely french fries and ontological arguments are too removed from Argentine realities; they never discuss the country's brutal regime and economic inequalities. They experience revolutionary movements solely through newspaper clippings. Like the spiritually ship-wrecked "Club," each member of the "Screwery" struggles more with...
...Although Cortazar's characters are politically naive, he should be credited for ending his 25-year-long public neutrality. Since 1951 when his Parisian self-exile began, he has lauded Allende's and Castro's governments, but has not openly condemned his own nation...
...this change, then? It may be that Cortazar is bending to criticism for his lack of political commitment. Or perhaps with age he is less concerned with hermetic mind-games and more with society. It is also likely that, as his exile progresses, Cortazar realizes that the government must change hands if he hopes to return to Argentina...
Like his perplexed characters, Cortazar is not equipped to offer the solution for society's ills. He also stands quietly aside in Paris, unsure of the true path to a new reality, and advocating political revolution not for its own sake, but as a vehicle to a new state of being...