There was still a time to put Oliveira after the magician trail in Hopscotchhis most famous novel. In the southern winter of 1944, Julio Cortázar was a young lanky, hairless and repeated who was about to cross the thirty. He had just accepted the commission to give three chairs of literature at the newly created National University of Cuyo (UNCuyo), in Mendoza, Argentina, at the foot of the Andes. Until then, I had signed a poems, Presenceunder the pseudonym of Julio Denis, who also stamped in his books and letters. Year and a half later, he left the position, definitely abandoned teaching and buried Julio Denis under his real name. In early 1946, Mendoza Dolly Lucero is justified in a letter: “I want to be a writer, not a teacher!”
Mendoza writer and journalist Jaime Correas documented the passage through his city of the author of All fires The fire In the book Cortázar in Mendoza. A crucial encounter (Alfaguara, 2014). From a cafeteria in the department of Godoy Cruz, close to one of the residences that Cortázar occupied, Correas explains to El País the importance of this stage in Cortázar’s literary career. “When he arrives, he has already published some story with pseudonym and has a book in his hands” that will then destroy. At that time, the author who would later become one of the greatest figures of the Latin American bum of the sixties has taught classes in two cities in the province of Buenos Aires, Bolívar and Chivilcoy. “The university atmosphere” and the friendship that initiates “with the artist Sergio Sergi and his wife, Gladys Adams,” discover “a cultural universe” with which he had never crossed before. “This is where he ends up deciding on being a writer and traveling to Europe,” says Correas. It is perceived even in “the tone of its correspondence. Before Mendoza is very formal, but then becomes a chronopio.”
Cortázar receives the proposal to move to Mendoza “casual,” says Correas. In a bookstore in Buenos Aires, his friend Guido Parapagnoli, professor at UNCuyo, offers him to give the chair of northern literature and two others of French literature, despite the fact that the young professor lacks a title for it. In the “beautiful city, rumorous of ditches and high trees”, as described by letter to her friend Mercedes Arias, Cortázar discovers an environment that, as she points out in the postdata, seemed “that he entered Harvard, or Cornell.” The lessons that you teach also satisfy you. His friend Julio Ellena de la Sota states that he has fun “enormously” diving his students “in Rimbaud, in Valéry, in Nerval”, in Baudelaire and Lautréamont. “These people still have a lot of mountain in the spirit; I cruelly come to take away their innocence, that Rimbaud defended with such atrocious blasphemies that sometimes blush to my students,” he sentence.
Necessary sacrifices
In conversation by email, the professor of Hispanic -American literature at the University of Zaragoza (Unizar), Daniel Mesa, points out that Cortázar’s “professional tasks” of Cortázar in Bolívar and Chivilcoy “were seen as necessary sacrifices that interfere with the literary vocation and should be overcome.” “The university work in Mendoza,” continues table, “was an important step for overcoming that contradiction, because the objective of teaching approached its true literary interests.” “Cortázar arrives at a germinal moment of the university, created in 1939 and with a great humanist imprint,” Ratizo Zonana, Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at Uncuyo. The Mendoza Campus “nourishes prestigious people”, such as the Spaniards Claudio Sánchez Albornoz or Joan Corominas. He also meets Daniel Devoto, musician and writer with whom he will share literary generation.
Con Presence (1938), a poems “of totally classical invoice, with sonnets of Mallarmeana structure”, according to Zonana, “Cortázar is part of the romantic generation of 40, along with Alfonso Sola González, Eduardo Jonquières, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, César Fernández Moreno or Daniel Devoto, a phenomenon that is replicated throughout Latin America.” In Mendoza “it is linked to poets on the same line, such as Américo Calí or Abelardo Arias, who participate in Mendoza cultural movements, in which magazines such as Eclogue o Puddle”, Continues.“ Publish here The Greek ballot box in John Keats’ poetry In the magazine of Classic studies of the Uncuyo or its story Station of the hand in eclogue, Together with pieces by Fernández Moreno, Carlos Alberto Álvarez, Devoto and Calí ”. Signs both texts such as Julio F. (from Florencio) Cortázar.
But, in belts, the authentic transformation of Cortázar is determined by the writing, during a vacation in 1946, of its story House taken. “That text the typing Gladys, Sergi Sergi’s wife”, in the house of the writer Alberto Dánao in Lunlunta, where Cortázar has his most related gang. The story was going to be part of The other shore, A book that was published posthumously, but first appeared alone in the magazine The Annals of Buenos Aires, directed by Borges, and then in his first narrative book, Bestiary (1951). “House taken It is a founding story, “says Mesa,” gives a tone that will remain during the fifties, surely even The persecutor ”, that appears in Secret weapons (1959) and is another of his most emblematic works. Both reveal “the contrast between two narrative models: the story from an environment closed and rarely in the face of the presentation of a world that an external observer cannot access.”
The expansion of Peronism and the handles to control the Uncuyo, a dispute in which “Cortázar does not feel comfortable in either of the two sides and declares himself independent of the students side,” according to Correas, away from the writer of Mendoza, a city to which he will return in 1948 and in 1973, to visit Sergi. Your footprint will appear in Bestiaryin The return to the day in 80 worlds, in Image of John Keats, even mentions it in Hopscotch. From there he passes to Buenos Aires, where he graduates as a translator, integrates into the Literary world of Buenos Aires and meets Aurora Bernárdez, his first wife, with which he is established in Paris. In One Lucas (1979) will remember its departures to the Potrerillos tourism, towards the border USPALLATA, Puerta del Aconcagua: “I have a smell of Mendoza ditches, the Álamos de Uspallata …”. “He loved to get lost in the mountain,” says Correas.