From Diaspora to Agora: Cortazar's Reconfiguration of Exile

Like few other intellectuals in the twentieth century, Julio Cortázar stages in his life and in his writing the tensions and contradictions which characterize the relationship between culture and society. Upon receiving the “Orden de Rubén Darío” in 1983, he praised the Nicaraguan Revolution for pushing culture out on the streets “as if it were an ice-cream or a fruit cart,” offering it to the people with the friendly gesture of one who is offering a banana. ¹ And yet his texts rarely offer such simple, direct access to cultural forms making their way into the materiality of the world. In fact, Cortázar’s fiction enacts a series of cuts and separations setting culture in a world apart. And were it to be ingested like a piece of fruit, it would be of a kind that only a selected few would be able to identify, savour and digest.

How does Cortázar negotiate his desire to produce cultural forms of accessible consumption with his almost messianic conception of the intellectual as the outsider who can approach the revelation of transcendence from the privileged locus of distance and isolation? To what extent do his stories and novels dramatize the tensions between exile and affiliation, between the individual as visionary or intellectual, and a group which he (rarely she) becomes a member of? If the imagination is a workshop for elaborating the forms of associative life and the possibilities of civil society, how are they fleshed out in the fictions of Cortázar? Finally, how do all these questions stage the problematic relationship between culture and society, literature and political life, the intellectual and his audience? In Cortázar’s case this relationship underwent insistent scrutiny and revision; it seems fair to say he never worked it out in a definitive way. In fact, he kept going back to the question of exile so as to fashion it in a way which would strip it of notions of disloyalty and voluntary separation. “From diaspora to agora,” he fetchingly proclaimed as he put forward the notion that the choice of geographic separation did not preclude strong affiliation and commitment. ² And, indeed, his later works reveal his efforts at producing literature which elicited a politics of reading.

But it is hard to ignore the sense that Cortázar’s tales tell the story of multiple exiles and separations, so that agora rarely obtains. Even when the characters are firmly rooted in their home towns, they seldom belong: the narrative trigger which produces the well-known “Cortázar effect” frequently leads to a powerful but solitary confrontation with the “other” marked, indeed, by the elusive experience of transcendence, but also, undoubtedly, establishing a break with social affiliation. As I will try to show, the narrative circuits through which readerly pleasure is produced have a disposition to separation as the precondition of revelation. This may in part have to do with Cortázar’s surrealist beginnings, in that esthetic practice is set radically apart from bourgeois life. It can also be seen as a productive contradiction to be located as both a creative nucleus—in which exile must be transformed into the positivity of writing—and the imposition of distance and alienation. More interestingly, I hope, the questions at hand will be a reminder of the multiple subject positions which constitute what Foucault would call the “author function” in Cortázar. Rather than erase the different positions, I want to suggest that the name “Cortázar,” referring to a historically specific figure, helps tie together potentially contradictory discursive strands. Further, these discursive strands are produced in dialogue with shifting contexts of enunciation, so that the author function actually assembles but never resolves statements and positions which stem from the disparity of historical change.

Without attempting to produce a systematic reading of Cortázar’s work, I will map some of the ways in which social energy circulates and is negotiated in a few of his short stories and novels, deliberately eschewing the question of the fantastic and its metaphysics of otherness. Perhaps...