Phenomenology from Robbe-Grillet to Julio Cortázar: An Essay on the Poetics of Presence

One of the most appealing aspects of comparative literature is its capacity to accommodate the undecided. Those who love scholarship but hesitate in their intellectual endeavors between different forms of art, national literatures, or disciplines, are welcome in the field of comparativism. And certainly some of the undecided are those who oscillate between the areas of philosophical and literary inquiry. A particularly meaningful declaration of unconditional affection to both philosophy and literature is found in Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1990):

Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content—an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth. But this suggests, too, that there may be some views of the world and how one should live in it—views, especially, that emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty—that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder—but only in a language and in forms themselves more attentive to particulars.

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Nussbaum’s fragment interests us here, above all, for its equation of philosophy and literature as statements of truth. Since truth is necessarily a matter of epistemology, and since philosophy and literature are, according to Nussbaum, statements of truth, both disciplines must find their starting point in the specific discipline of cognitive inquiry, namely, epistemology.

My goal in this essay is to bring a very specific form of epistemology to bear upon a set of works of literature from both the European and the Latin American traditions. This bearing will disclose not only the intrinsic relation existing between philosophy and the literary texts at hand, but also a line of continuity extending between instances of European and Latin American literature at the level of what Nussbaum calls content. The specific epistemology that I have in mind is the one generally subsumed under the term phenomenology, a sort of a philosophical stance that defies definition as a school, trend, or discipline, and that demands qualification within our text.

Phenomenology and Literature: A Cross-Atlantic Perspective

In terms of its literary import, phenomenology has frequently been linked to the French nouveau roman; however, something akin to the search for essences outlined by the Husserlian method can also be found in Spanish-American literature. Taking select examples of Julio Cortázar’s short prose as paradigm cases, I aim to show how phenomenology and its specific epistemology traveled from the European tradition to arrive at the heart of some Spanish-American texts.¹ I will start with a discussion of some of the key concepts of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy in relation to phenomenology as a descriptive method. From a comparison of Husserl’s work with select fragments of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels, showing the latter’s implication for phenomenology as a mode of literary writing, I will move into a consideration of Martin Heidegger’s development of the Husserlian epistemological inquiry into existential phenomenology. I will then proceed to an analysis of selected pieces of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction, read in the context of Heidegger’s text. This will demonstrate how both the philosophical and the literary texts in question render reality from a similar cognitive perspective, arriving at a mutually corresponding truth. This idea of truth is cognitively bound to Husserlian phenomenology, in the case of Robbe-Grillet, and to Heideggerian existential phenomenology, in the case of Cortázar. My premise is that this type of reading of philosophy and literature in a comparative key heightens the experience of the texts at hand, elucidating the concepts of reality and truth as represented in the authors under discussion. In sum, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s epistemologies will operate as analytical tools to unfold the common phenomenological-literary procedures of Robbe-Grillet and Cortázar.

Julio Florencio Cortázar was born in Brussels, in 1914. He returned to Argentina with his family only after the First World War was over...