As a high school teacher, Julio Cortázar lasted as long as the Second World War: from 1939 to 1945. In this stage, the aspiring poet combined the scribbling of verses and phrases (which no one was interested in) with a teaching that had nothing to do with the famous literature classes that concern us today. The first Cortázar professor practiced in two small Argentine towns explaining matters such as “voting procedures” or “what can and cannot be done in a so-called democratic society”.
As he confessed in his famous TVE interview, in those years he did not have too much fun and "far from it" he felt satisfied. Little could Cortázar the elder cronopio suspect that forty years after the days of Bolívar and Chivilcoy, the classes would be offered at the University of Berkeley, California, before more than a hundred students. And that the subject would be none other than himself, Julio Cortázar, with his phrases, his prose. And his stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FDRIPMKHQg
Julio Cortázar's literature classes
Alfaguara published in 2014, even with the unexpected roles and the five cool private correspondence books, these fabulous classes of must-read for any fan worth their salt. If anything, the last? round (now yes) of the cataract of volumes that make up the posthumous work of the father of Hopscotch. A novel that, by the way, turned half a century also in 2014. In total, 15 hours of an unprecedented Cortázar, intimate, humble, sincere and teacher. What not teacher. There is no teacher here.
Because these are not lessons. They are talks from you to you.
The famous and no less obligatory Course of European Literature of Vladimir Nabokov used to learn literature. Cortázar's classes serve to learn Cortázar.
It is striking that Nabokov, a vain writer like few others, used in his classes works of Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, James Joyce or Marcel Proust, while the Argentine, (“I am improvising these classes” “I am not a theoretician”, “I am not a philosopher”, “I am not a political scientist”) focused practically all of his teachings on his own work.
And in a hurry.
A victim of the rush of the barely eight lessons that made up the Berkeley University cycle, Don Julio Cortázar offers a fly-pen tour of his bibliography. Book candy. Delicious explanations of the hows and whys of his novels and some stories (the talk about the southern highway is the best of the book), with special attention to Rayuela and Manuel's book.
Nabokov, who in the classroom chose to "dive and bathe in the book instead of wading through it" prescribed rules and prescriptions, irrefutable sentences of "so yes-so no". For his part, Cortázar prefers to confess and recognize that what comes out of the mouth "It's not literary theory" but "hypothesis, little bottles into the sea that we can throw away and you can in turn discuss and criticize."
Political and social commitment of literature
Although not everything is speculation. If there is something worth mentioning, something that floats in the air from the first to the last page of this beautiful book, it is the “obligation” and the “duty”, says the Argentine, of being a committed writer.
In 1961, two years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Cortázar made a several-month trip to the island that would change him forever. Returning to Paris, he referred to Cuba in terms of "revelation" (adding that "the word is not exaggerated"). As is well known, the last stage of Cortázar's work was marked by a strong social and ideological burden, far from the two previous phases. He calls these phases in his classes aesthetic phase (fixation on the word, the syntax and its game possibilities) and Metaphysical phase (Rayuela, search for answers, Horacio Oliveira: all existential questions).
Regardless of how much one agrees or disagrees with this conscience-shattering writer-agitator drift, It causes some anger that Cortázar waited until so late to decide to give master classes. The whole book exudes idealism. Full conviction that purely aesthetic literature is no longer enough:
“To us, the writers, if something is given to us - within the little that is given to us - it is to collaborate in what we can call the revolution from the inside out; that is, giving the reader the maximum chance of multiplying their information… ”Cortázar accepted these classes in the imperialist United States, he would say, to please his friend, the Peruvian writer, historian and professor at Berkeley Pepe Durand. That same year, by letter: “The Spanish department will always regret having invited me; I left them an image of red such as the one that can be had in the academic environments of the USA…”
The book is an exercise in review and confession. The testimony of a sixty-year-old who, four years after death, tries as best he can to share what he has learned, pass on the baton, the tools, to a future generation that he hopes for, says "many writers come out." Here a miura veteran of writing revealing the kind of imprint that time and experience have left on his machinery:
“All this, as you can see, is a painful attempt to explain something fundamentally inexplicable to me. What I can say as an actor, as someone who lives the experience of writing, is that at certain moments of the narration, what the syntactic possibilities of prose and language give me are not enough; It is not enough for me to explain and say: I have to say it in a certain way that is already a little said not in my thought but in my intuition, many times in an imperfect and incorrect way from the point of view of syntax, in a way that For example, it leads me not to put a comma where anyone who knows syntax and prosody well would put it because it is necessary. The idea of the comma doesn't even occur to me, I don't put it ".
Brutal honesty, what his countryman Andrelo would say. Sincerity, also present in the answers to the questions, blessed questions, with which the students dig a little into the shell of this man capable of blushing even for signing a story: "Even if you think it's a paradox, I tell you that I'm ashamed sign my stories because I have the impression that they have been dictated to me, that I am not the true author. I am not going to come here with a three-legged table, but sometimes I have the impression that I am a bit of a medium that transmits or receives things, ”he replies, to explain that his story Night backs "it's almost a dream" that he had in the days of "semi-delirium" of the Parisian hospital where he was admitted after a motorcycle accident in 1953.
Reading Cortázar's literature classes in California strikes the reader with an unexpected and strange sadness. Julio Cortázar was such a beautiful being, so exceptional. This book, published thirty years after his death from leukemia, is the most beautiful legacy imaginable for a person who left us at the age of 69. Early. And so abruptly.
Julio Cortázar, Literature classes
Alfaguara, Madrid 2013
312 pages | 16 euros