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 s ubject and of western culture and to raise a set of issues on the relations hip among power, culture, and subjectivity. This relationship leads to a nu mber of concerns all throughout Cortazar's work: the problem of 'exile,' th e relationship with the social and cultural Other, urban space-the hallucin ating cities, the timeless cities-, the ways in which literature draws on t he major projects of modernity, etc. Much of Cortazar's work introduces cha racters living daily lives which do not sustain them, which render them emp ty and melancholic, off-shore and boundless, as tramps who become alienated within rather apathetic relations. But the subject tries; the subject atte mpts to fill gaps by identifying himself or herself with the Other. The sub ject desperately and obsessively lets show a longing for and fatalism about Otherness. Not only does he or she establish that crucial bond with the Ot her (be it social, cultural, etc.), but he also starts a dialogue with his cultural heritage (especially with one of the founding tendencies of Argent inian literature and culture: that of the ideological matrix of "civilizaci on y barbarie"). Cortazar's writings are disturbed by the tension of mixtur es as revealed in narrations such as "Las puertas del cielo" (Bestiario, 19 51), or symbolized by that very same tension and nostalgia which, for insta nce, in "El otro cielo" (Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966) he undoubtedly ma de explicit. The purpose of the present article is to observe the way Cortazar operates by productively conjugating that side of Argentinian literature with a fant astic inflexion on proposing "otro corporeo y presente de la cultura popula r," on appealing to other areas of the Argentinian ways (which, incidentall y, are not the same as those of Borges): Tango, Lunfardo, and the like, and on choosing the latest historical vanguard (Surrealism) and the existentia list thought of the very core of European culture in the 50's.