"Atrapar lo insólito"correspondencias entre la narrativa breve de Julio Cortázar, el cine y las artes visuales

Abstract

The present Ph.D. thesis focuses on the conjunction between text and image throughout Julio Cortázar’s literary output. To that purpose, this essay will analyze the author’s inclusion of other visual artistic manifestations –photography, cinema, collage, etc.– in both his individual works and collaborations with artists from different disciplines. The research on these multilateral relationships shows how the author seeks narrative and formal experimentation as a means to trespass borders separating artistic genres, on the basis of an aesthetic, ethical, and social purpose. The rationale behind such decisions will be laid out by an inquiry into the corpus of his letters, interviews, and criticism. The goals of this project encompass the study of the diverse manners of interartistic creation in Cortázar and his collaborators’ works, as well as the use of techniques peculiar to graphic storytelling, diagramation, recontextualization, fragmentation, and combinatory as mainstays of an aesthetic revolution that can turn literature into an equally revolutionary tool due to its potential for subverting social expectations. Furthermore, the need for a widening of the field of investigation in literature so as to include the intersection between artistic disciplines (which can feature different stages of technical development, autonomy, or recognition) will also be argued. In order to reach these objectives, several landmark works will be analyzed and discussed: three films by Manuel Antín, Cortázar’s symbiosis of text and image with photographers Sara Facio & Alicia D’Amico, and the analogous operation conceptualized and performed by Cortázar himself in his almanacs. A more thorough insight into this kind of studies will lead to a better understanding of the relationships among formats and techniques, the reception process, and the connections between authors and audience –which in Cortázar’s conception must adopt an active role. Therefore, the author subject of this essay stands out as a superb example of the process of building bridges between author, addressee, disciplines, arts, and, ultimately, the fantastic and the uncanny as part of the quotidian reality. Comparative Literature, especially in his interartistic area, and literary criticism will be key elements in the methodology employed throughout this research. Leading authors referred include Guillén, Wellek & Warren, or Praz. Apart from the development of systemic theories of literature by Lotman and Even-Zohar and Bourdieu’s field theory, the theory of image informs this review of the historical relationships between literature and the other arts as well as its modes of interaction. Thus, authors such as Mitchell, Crary, Bryson, Bal, or Jay are discussed in order to detail how the pictorial turn, considerations about the notion of ut pictura poesis, and the decline in the model of the mere text as the key figure in humanities can complement literary studies, especially when applied to the Latin American area. After the diachronic review, the synchronic approach will comprise not only the analysis of works from the standpoint of criticism, but also the social and cultural contexts –Cuban Revolution and Latin American Boom– and its impact on Cortázar’s oeuvre. Essays by Gilman, Fiorucci, De Diego and other authors focus on these aspects. Concerning the relationships between image and textuality in the Argentinian writer’s works, his reinterpretation of the surrealist and existentialist theoretical basis set forth in pieces such as Teoría del túnel can be ascribed to the artistic context of neo-vanguards in mid 20th century. His creation of heterogeneous works in which genre divisions are diluted follows the composition principles of the collage, combining fragmentation, intersection, and juxtaposition or text and image. In addition, with respect to the aesthetic scope, said disruptive creations illustrate in form certain aspects from Cortázar’s theory on the concept of the image and the interstitial: the text disrupted by external arts mirrors the irruption of the uncanny and the fantastic in our reality. These arguments will be supported by works by Batarce, Batres Cuevas, Mac-Millan, Luna Chávez, or Gabbay. The investigation lines developed throughout this dissertation will converge in a series of conclusions. On the one hand, Cortázar establishes different modes of relationship with the image within his narrative production: if cinema represents the quotidian element of reality, photography portrays the irruption of the uncanny in these coordinates, while diagramation evidences the combinatory, playful, and subversive exercise Cortázar proposes both in his ethical and aesthetic revolutions. On the other hand, the appeal to image in Cortázar’s experimental works –many of them realized in collaboration with Julio Silva–, reinforces non-sequential operations in reading, the complicity of the reader in the creation of meaning, and the openness to intuitive constellations of hermeneutical understanding – all of the above being ruling principles of Cortázar’s storytelling–. Finally, image serves as a tool for experimentation as well as legitimation: in the case of cinema, it grants a larger scope for his output prior to international acclaim; in the field of photography, it configures his public character; and, in the case of miscellany, it helps the writer owning the narrative in the extent of his role as intellectual.