Julio Cortazar

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 was born to Argentine parents on August 26, 1914, in Brussels, Belgium, where his father was involved in a commercial venture as part of Argentina's diplomatic presence. Many years later, Cortázar would say "my birth was a product of tourism and diplomacy."

Because the Cortázar family were nationals of a neutral country not involved in the First World War, they were able to pass through Switzerland and later reach Barcelona, where they lived for a year and a half. Cortázar regularly played 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 spending the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, together with his mother and his only sister, who was a year his junior. During his childhood, Cortázar's father abandoned the family; Cortázar would never see him again. In Banfield Cortázar lived in a house with a yard out back from which he obtained inspiration for future stories. His time in Banfield, however, was not happy; he would later describe it, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (4 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, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired 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".

Although he never completed his studies at the University of Buenos Aires where he studied Philosophy and languages, he taught in several provincial secondary schools. In 1938 he published a volume of sonnets under the pseudonym Julio Denis. He would later disparage this volume. 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, Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. 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 resides 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)
End of the Game and Other Stories (1963) later published as Blow-up and Other Stories (1966)
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)
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975)
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

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Julio Cortazar

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

Julio Cortazar ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

History of "Julio Cortazar"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.