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Prosa del observatorio / J. Cortázar.
Abstract
Julio Cortázar, escritor argentino nacido en Bruselas en 1914 y muerto en París en 1984. Es uno de los destacados protagonistas del famoso "boom latinoamericano" y un autor central de la literatura fantástica. Su obra incluye: Bestiario (1951), Historias de Cronopios y famas (1962), Rayuela (1963), Las armas secretas (1964), La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967), 62: modelo para armar (1968), Ultimo round (1969), El libro de Manuel (1973), Octaedro (1974), Un tal Lucas (1979) y Queremos tanto a Glenda (1981), por citar algunos títulos.
Dancing is to do philosophy" , a disturbing expression that Mónica Alarcón (2016) wrenched from life. With this phrase, the value of action as a vehicle for the meaning of existence itself is exalted. In the words of Monica: "You cannot find meaning in existence without giving something, without feeling something" (personal communication, 07 December 2016). There are also other expressions that highlight the sense of action as a primordial value in the exercise of creation: "You put energy into food. If one is in a bad mood, then one ends up eating all the bad things one felt". These words were collected by the artist Rómulo Sánchez from each of the actors invited to the filming of Banquete Socialista (2018) 1 , as they set out to prepare the staging of what it would be like to feed oneself in Venezuelan society during our times. Either the words, the moving images, the concepts, or the physical objects are vehicles of sensibility. Ultimately, they are all ways of understanding that life has something in common: feeling in order to research, researching in order to create and creating in order to feel. A circle that models research based on feelings in order to create and understand our own existence. Research is an action through which the subject manages to develop aptitudes that allow him/her to approach and link to an environment in order to understand him/herself. To investigate implies astonishment and restlessness, as capacities to coexist with the other and to survive in space and time. For example: the conviviality in Dante (1307) is one of the main ways of accessing the structured society of the 14 th century, which achieved a sense of nourishment as an essential action for collective survival; or the case of Das Observatorium 2 and the unwise logic of time based on the prevailing restlessness of the subject, who observes and speaks just for the fact of feeling that he is alive.
This article investigates two texts that the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar produced in relation to his experience and trips to India: Prose of the observatory (1972) and the text Turismo aconsejable [Advisable tourism] included in Último round (1969). Both texts contain photographs, which generate a kaleidoscopic gaze characterized by cultural distance and closeness, as well as aesthetic experience. The hypothesis is that a kind of observatory is generated from which the writer observes, perceives and interprets the sensitivity of Latin American and Indian cultures in dialogue. The objective of this study is to identify the Cortazarian kaleidoscopic gaze that permanently generates both an approach and a distance, through the reading of these hybrid texts whose photographs and words produce a playful and experimental space.
This chapter covers the life and work of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), including his contributions to the literature of the fantastic, his translations of English and French letters into Spanish, and his role as a cultural mediator between Latin America and Europe. It highlights the importance of Paris, where Cortázar spent three decades, on his writings, the tensions between his early aesthetics and his later embrace of leftist politics, and his travels. It also discusses the cosmopolitan nature of his 1963 magnum opus, Rayuela (Hopscotch), a crucial work of the Boom of Latin American narrative fiction during the 1960s. The chapter charts the itinerary that made Cortázar a figure in postmodern literature and assesses his place in the international Republic of Letters.
Of Julio Cortázar’s many photographic projects, only in Prosa del observatorio is he both author and photographer. One of the least studied works by Cortázar, Prosa presents photos of the astronomical observatories in Jaipur and Delhi designed by Jai Singh in the eighteenth century. This article explores the verbal-visual dynamic in Prosa in the context of the urban gaze that weighs on both the verbal and the visual discourse. The Western, Parisian perspective comes up against the Asian perspective of Jaipur to undermine the urban imperative.
Drawing on earlier studies on Cortázar’s Orphism, most notably by Graciela Coulson and D. Mesa Gancedo, this article readdresses
the problem by focusing more closely on the fundamental textual qualities of Cortázar’s oeuvre. Beyond occasional references to Orphic motives in his writings, four principal aspects seem to link his work to the Orphic
universe: (1) an ontological aspect, according to which there is a resonance between literary writing and some deeper stratum
of human nature; (2) an “exilic” aspect, epitomized in the fateful backward glance; (3) a posthumous aspect, projecting the
work beyond the limits of death; and (4) a Utopian aspect, akin to Marcuse’s reading of the Orpheus figure in terms of unproductive,
autotelic desire. From a focus which places the corpus of Cortázar’s writings within a more encompassing, comparatist perspective,
his search for an Orphic dimension is traced beyond the extant books and well into the extensive Cortazarian “Nachlass.”
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