JULIO CORTÁZAR,
A MAGICAL THINKER Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914. He
studied the magistery and Letters and he worked as a teacher in many cities of
the interior. Some of his books of short stories are: Bestiario, Final del
Juego (End of game), Un tal Lucas (Some guy called Lucas), Queremos tanto a
Glenda (We love Glenda so much), Las armas secretas (The secret waepons), etc.;
But it was undoubtedly his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) the one that shocked the
literary and cultural panorama of his time. In this work, Cortázar, confronts
himself to the problem of expresing in the form of a novel the greatest
questions that philosophers have thought in metaphysical terms. It is about
representing the absurd, the chaos and the existential problem through a new
technique. The author intends throwing out the usual forms of the novel to create an antinovel, without plot,
intrigue, or descriptions and almost not cronology. In this work he achieves in
a complete way what he was trying to do throughout all of his production: to
implicate the reader in a creative game. Cortázar achieved without a doubt a poetic
of the untraditional fantastic, it is for this and for his incredible
trajectory that he is considered one of the best contemporary writers.
In 1951 he
wind a scholarship to study in Paris, where he finally radicates and where he
dies in 1984. Cortázar’s literature could be summarized as the man and a
different way to look at the world; from the ludic, from the fantastic, from
the estrangement “To squeeze a little spoon between the fingers and to feel its
metal beating…” he tells us, and he’s inviting us to break the routine to look
things from a different perspective “.
... And if suddenly a moth stands on a
pencil’s side and beats like an ashy fire, look at it, I am looking at it...”,
he propose us to continually enter in a different order, to risk our lives to
comprehend life, abandoning a passive attitude for a new one, the one of
participation and commitment to what surround us “Do not think that the phone
will give you the numbers that you’re looking for ¿Why would it give them to
you? The only thing that will come will be what you have resolved and prepared
(...) Smash the head to that monkey, run from the centre of the wall and make
your way”
In spite of
all that, Cortázar’s characters are not amazed, because what Cortázar tries is
to produce the reader’s amazement, confronting the day to day reality to the
strange, exploring that reality not from the stablished rules but from the
exceptions to those rules. “Los Famas” are the order, the institutions,
reality. “Los Cronopios” all the opposite. In “Historias de Cronopios y Famas”
all of Cortázar’s Literature is condensed. It is the book to start reading this
author, since it is undoubtedly the entry door to a world where solemnity and
boredom do not exist, a world through which a deep exploration of reality and
destruction of conventional categories, Cortázar intends rescuing, what it is
human.