inventing revolutionary individuals
Julio also felt obliged to exclaim in 1981, “How little revolutionary the language of revolutionaries tends to be!”1 He addressed this to a group of revolutionaries gathered at the Casa de Las Americas publishing house in Havana, Cuba. It’s part of speech fundamentally supportive of socialism and of revolutionary aims.
But as always Cortázar seeks to go beyond shared ideals. He wants strong allies. The group he addressed was gathered to elaborate upon a brief statement that had been released (and signed by, among others, Julio Cortázar) calling for “sovereign and democratic rights for the people of our Americas.” He certainly supported the call, but equally he sought to pull the rug out from under certain assumptions that he felt would actually block the achievement of the aim.
Julio questioned, to begin with, the “manichean” distinctions implied by the invocation of the “pueblos de nuestras Americas”. To him, reality was too complex and potentially treacherous to treat with such blunt instruments as “our” and “their” or “the people.” To suggest that the rights of Latin Americans, en masse, were constrained only by non Latin Americans, was not only too simple. It was dangerously impractical in overlooking the obvious fact that “our most oppressed peoples are so largely for fratricidal reasons.”2
Julio wasn’t looking to refine the picture for the sake of science or the advance of knowledge. Nor of course, was he interested in letting the US government and multinational interests off the hook for their activities in Latin America. Rather, he aimed to improve the practical efficacy of the language used by revolutionaries.
Julio was interested in generating, from a deep and sober contact with realities, the language necessary to move suffering people, to infect them with an awareness of their own power to shed the burdens which oppress them, whether those burdens have come from the United States, their own government, their putatively revolutionary parties, or their own psyches.
As Julio reminds his comrades, “revolutions have to be made in individuals so that, when the day arrives, the people can make them”3 He doesn’t mean other individuals. He directs this to his fellow intellectuals. He invites them to join him in the examination of the micro-fascisms within and on a journey of self-invention that would necessarily involve invention in language.
It’s in this spirit that Cortázar agreed “absolutely” with Ernesto González Bermejo’s characterization during an interview of Manual for Manuel as “an attempt to demystify a monastic conception of revolution; to say that political events occur in human beings that do not cease to be such because they belong to such and such an organization and that they must, they should and it is inevitable that they combine political action with making love, with eating spaghetti or taking a walk on the Champs Elysées [Ù54-60].”4
1 Julio Cortázar, “Mensaje (al Primer Encuentro de Intelectuales por la Soberanía de los Pueblos de Nuestra América)” [1981] Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 305-310, my translation.
2 Julio Cortázar, “Mensaje (al Primer Encuentro de Intelectuales por la Soberanía de los Pueblos de Nuestra América)” [1981] Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 308, my translation.
3 Julio Cortázar, “Mensaje (al Primer Encuentro de Intelectuales por la Soberanía de los Pueblos de Nuestra América)” [1981] Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 310, my translation.
4 Julio Cortázar, Conversaciones con Cortázar, with Ernesto González Bermejo (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1978), p. 127. For a thoughtful account of the relationship between imagination and history, or literature and politics in Julio’s writing see Jaime Alazraki, Hacia Cortázar: aproximaciones a su obra (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994), pp. 299-322.