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By: Irene Pérez Beltrán
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao
Brief context: Julio Cortázar (1914-84) was an Argentinian writer that became one of the members of the Latin American Boom, a period during the 1960s and 70s when a group of Latin American authors became globally popular. He spent the beginning of his career in Argentina, which was governed by the authoritarian Peronist Regime under Juan Domingo Perón from 1946. In 1951 Cortázar moved to Paris in self-imposed exile, where he wrote the collection of stories Final del Juego and his most famous novel Rayuela.
Living in a context of political instability and repression, Cortazar has been widely criticised for using the fantastical elements of his short stories to avoid addressing the real issues that the Argentinian society of the 1950s was forced to face. However, this article will show how the themes that he explores in his collection of stories Final del Juego, despite being seemingly unrelated to the context in which they were written, actually provide a deep reflection on the reality of individual experience. Namely, I will focus on the story Una Flor Amarilla and how it reflects Cortázar’s experience as a writer that had to suffer both the pressures of the authoritarian Peronist regime and the restrictions from intellectual and literary spheres.
By looking at the story ‘Una Flor Amarilla’, one can see how the surrealist storyline of a man meeting his own reincarnation in a young boy provokes an ontological reflection on life and existence. The fact that the protagonist is able to meet his reincarnation before his death is described as an (translated from Spanish) ‘error in the mechanism’, which also accurately describes how the reader experiences the story when comparing it to the assumptions of everyday life. Cortazar triggers this questioning and sense of confusion by using a double narrative. This way, instead of the storyteller narrating directly to the reader, he tells his story to another man in a bar, who then narrates his reaction. Despite the detailed storyline being incredibly convincing, the narrator’s comments of disbelief, namely how drunk the storyteller was, create this tension between reality and illusion palpable throughout the narrative. This inner conflict created in the reader, unable to decide whether to believe this alternative presentation of existence, in a way mirrors the experience of those unwilling to succumb to the imposed way of life under an authoritarian leader such as Juan Domingo Perón. In Cortázar’s case, this desire to break away from the impositions of Perón’s regime resulted in his exile to Paris, where he would obtain the literary freedom for his metaphysical explorations in Final del Juego, published in 1956.
Towards the end of the story, the storyteller implies that he killed the young boy to prevent him from following the steps of his unfulfilled life, but is then overwhelmed by the thought of being the first mortal soul. In this dark turn of events, where Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on the Argentinian writer is evident, one can see how the reflexion over the reality of life and existence expands to include the anxiety surrounding the questions of death and afterlife. This more abstract contemplation could also be applied to the subject of literary legacy and the idea of the writer’s craft being part of a broader existence that transcends the author’s life.
Being heavily influenced by Surrealist art since the beginning of his literary career, Cortázar was exposed to the broadly accepted head figures of Surrealism, who often encouraged artists to follow certain guidelines to create a sense of unity within the movement. Notably, the 1938 Manifesto by André Breton and Diego Rivera advocated for an ‘Independent Revolutionary Art’, urging Surrealist art to promote socialist ideals. This was in turn criticised for being oxymoronic, as an artist cannot be simultaneously free and subject to a specific political alignment, and stimulated a rise in Existentialism. This view sees value and purpose in the individual rather than in a higher political or social structure, and thus seeks to question the assumptions imposed by such structure by searching the answers purely in the individual. The influence of this notion on Cortazar’s work is seen in the anxiety experienced by the storyteller. As a mortal, his existence is no longer part of a bigger, overarching structure that transcends his ephemeral life.
Through Una Flor Amarilla, Cortazar captures perfectly how, once one decides to break away from external influences and is thus reduced to one’s individual experience, the fear of the futility of life is practically unavoidable. Nonetheless, Cortazar’s comments on Jean Paul Sarte’s work, primary exponent of Existentialism, illustrate how he sees this questioning as allowing the reader (translated from Spanish) ‘to be reborn, if he is able to, above the ashes of his historic self, his conformist self’. He thus describes this existentialist exploration as a sort of awakening, an end goal that allows the individual to reach a higher level of experience.
Overall, Final del Juego is a collection of short stories that, as seen with Una Flor Amarilla, discusses the themes of life, death and existence. Through the use of surrealist elements, the writer manages to paradoxically achieve a more comprehensive exploration of individual reality, both his personal one and that of the contemporary reader, and its relation to political and social external forces.
Irene Pérez Beltrán is a 2nd Year International Relations student at King’s College London with a passion for Latin American Literature and sustainable development.
