Literature and Politics

It is generally assumed that Julio Cortázar’s trip to Cuba in 1963 not only divided his life into a inexorable before and after, into the bourgeois artist vis-à-vis the committed socialist, but also that this event created an unambiguous distinction between the writer’s so-called ‘apolitical’ writings and those which express a given ideological stand. This, in turn, was understood also as a drastic turning point for the aesthetic quality of Cortázar’s fiction, and therefore, the texts that followed the groundbreaking Rayuela (published in English under Hopscotch), were generally considered aesthetically inferior and poor given their implicit or explicit political content. I argue that there are not two different Cortázar periods, but rather, that there is an “essential unity”, which in itself is charged with a marked political interest. Throughout his life, politics – as well as history – were, for this iconic Argentinian writer, permanent sources of reference, and they can be traced in his fictional writings. This paper will analyse some of Cortázar’s early texts, including Divertimento, Los reyes and El examen. Written during the rise of Peronism in Argentina in the late 1940s, these texts remained mostly unpublished until Cortázar’s demise in 1984. In the year of the 25th anniversary of the death of one of the founders of the ‘Boom’ of Latin American literature, the study will reappraise and challenge the accepted criticism, showing that even some of the first of Julio Cortázar’s incursions into the fictional realm were, in many respects, highly political.