Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The final chapters of Cortázar's Rayuela : madness, suicide, conformism?

1980; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382802000357233

1469-3550

Steven Boldy,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: RAYUELA [J. CORTÁZAR] Notes 1. Page numbers in parenthesis, unless otherwise stated, refer to Rayuela, 11th edn. (Buenos Aires 1969). 2. See David Viñas, De Sarmiento a Cortázar: literatura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires 1971). 3. Montevideo is here equivalent to Buenos Aires: ‘Montevideo era lo mismo que Buenos Aires’ (36). 4. Los signos en rotación y otros ensayos (Madrid 1971), 73. 5. The visit to the morgue is a sort of descent to Hades. In all Cortázar's novels there is the pattern of the murder, lossorillnessofacharacterrepresentingavitalforce (Jorge [Los premios], [Rocamadour] la Maga [Rayuelo], ‘elmuchacho muerto’ [62], Ludmilla [Libro de Manuel]), followed by an act of transgression, usually rape (Felipe; la Maga [Talita]; ‘la inglesa’, Celia; Francine), which precedes a descent to Hades to recover the lost force. 6. La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Madrid 1970), II, 127–28. Cortázar seems to attribute greater perspicacity to the inmates than to their guardians. To the astonishment of the latter, the ‘locos’ demand the death of an invisible dog. This is the dog which separates Juan and Hélène in the ‘ciudad’ of 62. Modelo para armar, the dogs which punish Acteon's transgression in 62, and in Prosa del observatorio. Like the office worker in ‘Tema para San Jorge’, they are the only ones able to see the monster, which is ‘una nada viva, una especie de vacío que abarca y posee’ (Vuelta al día, I, 43). 7. This was pointed out by G. A. Davies in ‘Mondrian, abstract art, and theosophy in Cortázar's Rayuela’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Literary and Historical Section, XVI (1975–78), 140. 8. Nietzsche's position vis-à-vis Kant is very similar. See Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth 1974), 16–18. 9. 62. Modelo para armar (Buenos Aires 1968), 141. 10. Julio Cortázar o la cachetada metafísica’, in L. Harss, Los nuestros (Buenos Aires 1973), 286. 11. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (Harmondsworth 1962), 172. 12. Watts, 147. 13. There are many other such repetitions. The triangular constellation of characters, (Gregorovius-) Maga-Oliveira-Pula; (Gekrepken-) Oliveira-Talita-Traveler, is perhaps the clearest. Oliveira, having got his feet wet in Paris with Berthe Trépat, a motif indicating human suffering and solidarity, sets a bowl of water on the floor when barricading his room so that Traveler will repeat the experience. La Maga as Goethe's Margarete is perhaps repeated in her more homely form Gekrepken-Gretchen.