Julio Cortázar Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Bell Gale Chevigny

Critical Essay by Bell Gale Chevigny

In A Manual for Manuel, Julio Cortázar no longer obliges his reader to leap about, as he did in Hopscotch: the page itself jumps…. As in Hopscotch, play and war with communication obsess Cortázar and he still demands that his reader be an accomplice.

But an accomplice in what projects? Not, it seems, those of Hopscotch: we are no longer led in pursuit of the East, the "center," madness, or the unity behind discrete words and egos. Nor are we made to help discern and construct, as in 62: A Model Kit, the patterns of forces neither historical nor psychological that govern behavior. For the first time, Cortázar plays his revolutionary practice of literature against social and political revolution. And our complicity is demanded in Cortázar's battles for commitment and play, revolutionary dedication and cultural subversion, the defeat of institutions and the invention of feeling, the murder of literature and...
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