Cortázar y la pasta de dientes

Abstract

When Cortázar publishes his most important novel, Rayuela, he verifies that the work has been better received among young readers, despite being a highly complex text from a formal point of view. From this finding, the author discusses the possible causes of this phenomenon, which can be handled, both by the historical moment Rayuela appears, as well as in the very sense and manner that the Argentine writer imprints on his narrative. The entire work of Cortazar becomes deeply insurrectionary. It implies a criticism without concessions to the dictatorship of reason, the impositions of power, to the inauthentic and dehumanizing. Instead he proposes alternative searches, including intuition, the poetic, in the search for an authentic human being. The reader is compelled to choose and, in that role, must choose to confront his essential condition: the man understood as a being of possibilities. In this perspective, Rayuela is a political novel, which also addresses a host of issues inherent in the human condition. A ‘rebellious’ novel, even in relation to the literary tradition of the West; therefore, he writes what he calls an anti-novel and proposes a de-writing, a de-literaturization, seeking a radically new art.