inventing politics
In 1973, when the original Spanish edition of his most explicitly political novel, A Manual for Manuel, was published, Cortázar wrote:
I believe more than ever that the struggle for socialism in Latin America should confront the daily horror with the only attitude that can bring it victory one day: a precious, careful watch over the capacity to live life as we want it to be for that future, with everything it presupposes of love, play and joy. . . . What counts, and what I have tried to recount is the affirmative sign that stands face to face with the rising steps of disdain and fear, that affirmation must be the most solar, the most vital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, his demand for a dignity shared by everybody in a land free at last of that daily horizon of fangs and dollars.”1
A ringing affirmation of socialism may well sound dated to our ears today. And indeed, it might well seem dated—if Cortázar had not invented, in the sense I’ve been exploring throughout this book, the very meaning of the word as he used it. In that case, the dynamic and vital forces of freedom which Cortázar designated with the word “socialism” will seem dated only if we stop listening to him the moment we read that word.
His times were dominated by three interrelated questions: the question of third world revolution in the context of the Cold War, the question of counter-revolutionary dictatorship and of exile, and the question of the “responsibility” of the intellectual in these settings. Cortázar spoke to all of these questions at one time or another. And I think that the way he spoke of them, if we can allow ourselves to be moved by his sometimes dated-seeming vocabulary, can teach us something about how to invent, as Cortázar might put it, the politics of our time.
For is it really dated to call for an attitude of vigilance over “the capacity to live life as we want it to be”? Do we live now in a world where it is no longer necessary to affirm, “in the face of fear and disdain,” the most vital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, his demand for a dignity shared by everyone”? Has this new century opened upon a planet in which all human beings can feel their lives driven by these vital forces, or even by simple dignity? Is this true even of those of us lucky enough not to worry over our next meal? And what about those three billion people—half the humans on this planet—who live on less than two dollars a day? How could that question ever become outdated?
Cortázar’s political position, I mean the public stances he took on the political issues of his time were always rooted in a basic affirmation of this sort. He wrote in 1967 to Roberto Fernández Retamar, cultural eminence of the revolutionary government in Cuba, that the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and its first few years in power were to him “an incarnation of the cause of man as I had finally come to understand it and yearn for it. . . based on the essential facts of human existence, on the fundamental ethos – the simple yet inconceivably difficult principle that humanity will begin to be worthy of its name on the day in which the exploitation of man by man comes to an end.”2 Elsewhere in the letter, Cortázar made clear that he was affirming these values not as a Latin American, nor as an intellectual, nor even as a Marxist. He accepted this political stance as the only one that was consonant, given the present, with a deeper vision of the world and of the human being’s place in it, and in turn this deeper vision was the one that also drove Cortázar to live his personal life as he lived it, to write his words down as he wrote them.
This isn’t to make of Cortázar some implausible ideal of perfect integrity. To be human, particularly to be a human being in the way he was, means to be in such sensitive contact with the world that I know that change, on one scale or another, is constant and inevitable. It is to know, consequently, that my vision can only ever be partial and always in relation to this or that contingent, local situation or event and this, of course, would entail change and growth, contradiction and revision. I’m holding only that his political positions were more consistent than not with the underlying way of seeing and being in the world that shaped his writing, and that these still have something useful to say to us today.
Julio pushed the work of imagination to the limit and found that its paths don’t lead away from the world, from the life of the world and the people in it, but directly to the heart of the world, to a heart of the world throbbing still beneath the crust of party banners and platforms. He could say, and have earned the assertion in an honest engagement with his many and varied impulses, “In the most gratuitous thing I might write, there will always appear a will to make contact with the historical present of man, to share in the long, difficult march toward a more excellent humanity—both collective and individual.3
1 Julio Cortázar, A Manual for Manuel, Tr. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 4-5.
2 Julio Cortázar, Cartas 2: 1964-1968, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), p. 1137.
3 Julio Cortázar, “A Roberto Fernández-Retamar, May 10, 1967,” Cartas 2: 1964-1968, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), p. 1141.