Through Absence: Narrating From Death in Cortázar’s Stories

Abstract

This paper offers a survey of Julio Cortázar’s stories in which death is semioticized in the voice of the dead character, who takes over the narration in: Las armas secretas, Llama el teléfono, Dalia, Retorno de la noche and Historia con migalas. The presence of disembodied voices allows us to reflect on the fantastic mechanics of the stories considered in relation to the narrative (de)construction of the body of the characters. The next step is to focus on the analysis of the story Las babas del diablo (Las armas secretas 1959) in order to illuminate precisely the relationship between the absent body and the narrative voice as a problematization of the absence of the character. Crossing the reflections of Giorgio Agamben (2017) and David Le Breton (2012), the intention is to demonstrate that, by being produced from and following the present voice of absent characters, the stories explore the ultimately inappropriable substance of the body, while problematizing the very concept of narration as originating from an inappropriable with which it is intimately related and to which it does not cease to refer.