Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 – February 12, 1984) was an Argentine intellectual and author of several experimental novels and many short stories.
Biography
Julio Cortázar (sometimes called "Grandísimo Cronopio" in reference to a genus of fantastic creatures he created) Definition of a Cronopio: Naive and idealistic, disorganized, unconventional, and sensitive creatures who stand in contrast or opposition to famas (who are rigid, organized and judgemental if well intentioned) and esperanzas (who are plain, indolent, unimaginative, and dull). Although many would describe him as the great "Cronopio", he may have in fact been a "fama", for only a person with an organizaed dicipline and perseverance could have written so much. Perhaps he was a Fama with heart and soul of a Cronopio.
Julio Cortázar was born to Argentine parents on the 26th of August, 1914, in Brussels, Belgium. He was born so far from his homeland because his father was involved in a commercial venture as part of the Argentine diplomatic presence in the country. Many years later, he would say "my birth was a product of tourism and diplomacy". "Cortázar" is a Spanish surname.
Because the Cortázar family were nationals of a neutral country, they were able to pass through Switzerland and later reach Barcelona, where they lived for a year and a half. Cortázar played regularly at the Park Güell and its colourful ceramics would remain vivid in his memory for many years.
When Cortázar was four years old, his family returned to Argentina where he spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, together with his mother and his only sister, who was a year younger than the writer. By that stage in Cortázar's life, his father had already abandoned the family.They would never see each other again. In Banfield Cortázar lived in a house with a yard out back from where he obtained inspiration for future stories, but his time there was not happy and he would later describe it, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (4th December, 1963,) as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness."
Cortázar was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed where reading became his great companion. His mother selected the books for him to read and because of this she played an important role in developing the writer he was to become, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar would admire for the rest of his life. He was to say later, in the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, 5/1975) "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different to everybody else's".
After completing his studies at the University of Buenos Aires, he taught in several provincial secondary schools and in 1938 published a volume of sonnets, which he later disparaged, under the pseudonym Julio Denis. In 1944 he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo, Mendoza. In 1949 he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
In 1951, in opposition to the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Cortázar emigrated to France, where he lived until his death. From 1952 he worked for UNESCO as a translator. His translation projects included Spanish renderings of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It is generally accepted that Poe's influence is recognizable in his work. Alfred Jarry and Lautréamont were other decisive influences.
In later years he underwent a political transformation, becoming actively engaged with leftist causes in Latin America and openly supporting the Cuban Revolution and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
He was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez (in 1953), Ugné Karvelis and Carol Dunlop.
Julio Cortázar died, reportedly of leukemia, in Paris in 1984 and was interred there in the Cimetière de Montparnasse. The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi has stated that he died from AIDS contracted via a blood transfusion; sources close to Cortázar have denied this. He did suffer from pituitary gigantism and acromegaly, which may have contributed to his demise.
Notable works
Cortázar is highly regarded as a master of short stories of a fantastic bent, with the collections Bestiario (1951) and Final de Juego (1956) containing many of his best examples in the genre, including the remarkable "Continuidad de los Parques" and "Axolotl." These collections received early praise from Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, and selections from the two volumes were published in 1967 in English translations by Paul Blackburn, under the title End of the Game and Other Stories (in later editions, Blow-Up and Other Stories, in deference to the English title of Antonioni's celebrated film of 1966 of Cortázar's story Las babas del diablo.)
One of his most notable short fictions is El perseguidor ("The Pursuer"), loosely based on the life of jazz musician Charlie Parker. He also published several novels, including Los premios ('The Winners', 1965,) Rayuela ('Hopscotch', 1966), El libro de Manuel ('A Manual for Manuel', 1978), and Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (1983). Recognizing his importance to the development of the genre in Latin America, emancipating it from European models, Carlos Fuentes dubbed him "the Simón Bolívar (i.e., the Liberator) of the novel."
Cortázar's masterpiece, Hopscotch, is a dazzling literary experiment that ranks among the best novels written in Spanish in the past century and has been praised by other Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and José Lezama Lima. The novel, which loosely recounts the story of Argentine expatriate Horacio Oliveira's exile in Paris and his subsequent return to Buenos Aires, has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear reading or a non-linear one that interpolates additional chapters. Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, or stream of consciousness, is reminiscent of the Modernists, but his main influences were Surrealism and the French Nouveau roman as well as the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz.
Cortázar's strength as an author reside in his delightful and irreverent sense of humour, technical skill, poetic and innovative use of language and carefully balanced deployment of the uncanny.
Although his poetic and dramatic production is generally considered inferior to his fiction, he also published poetry, drama, and various works of non-fiction. One of his last works was a collaboration with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, entitled The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute; it related, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple's extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner [A dragon in Wagnerian music drama!].
Works
- Presencia (1938)
- Los reyes (1949)
- El examen (1950, first published in 1985)
- Bestiario (1951)
- Final de juego (1956)
- Las armas secretas (1959)
- Los premios (The Winners) (1960)
- Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962)
- Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
- Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966)
- La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967)
- 62, modelo para armar (1968)
- Último round (1969)
- Prosa del Observatorio (1972)
- Libro de Manuel (1973)
- Octaedro (1974)
- Alguien anda por ahí (1977)
- Territorios (1978)
- Un tal Lucas (1979)
- Queremos tanto a Glenda (1980)
- Deshoras (1982)
- Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (1983)
- Divertimento (1986)
- Diario de Andrés Fava (1995)
- Adiós Robinson (1995)
- Cartas (2000)
Bibliography
- Julio Cortazar (Modern Critical Views) / Bloom, Harold., 2005
- Mothers, lovers, and others : the short stories of Julio Cortázar / Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia., 2004
- Julio Cortazar (Bloom's Major Short Story Writers) / Bloom, Harold., 2004
- Understanding Julio Cortazar / Standish, Peter., 2001
- Questions of the liminal in the fiction of Julio Cortázar / Moran, Dominic., 2000
- Critical essays on Julio Cortázar / Alazraki, Jaime., 1999
- Julio Cortázar : new readings / Alonso, Carlos J., 1998
- Julio Cortázar : a study of the short fiction / Stavans, Ilan., 1996
- The politics of style in the fiction of Balzac, Beckett, and Cortázar / Axelrod, Mark., 1992
- The contemporary praxis of the fantastic : Borges and Cortázar / Rodríguez-Luis, Julio., 1991
- Julio Cortázar's character mosaic : reading the longer fiction / Yovanovich, Gordana., 1991
- Julio Cortázar (Twayne World Authors Series) / Peavler, Terry., 1990
- Julio Cortázar : life, work and criticism / Carter, E. Dale., 1986
- The novels of Julio Cortázar / Boldy, Steven., 1980
- The Final island : the fiction of Julio Cortázar / Alazraki, Jaime., 1978
- Julio Cortázar / Garfield, Evelyn Picon., 1975
See also
External links
