29 pages • 58 minutes read
Julio CortázarContinuity of Parks
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Julio Cortázar
Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1914 to Argentine parents, Julio Cortázar returned to Argentina with his family in 1919 and grew up in a suburb of Buenos Aires. He studied languages and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires but, due to financial pressures, left before completing his degree. He went on to work as a high school teacher and then as a university professor teaching French literature. In 1946 he was arrested for participating in an anti-government demonstration and had to leave his teaching post. Spurred by his dissatisfaction with Juan Peron’s government and offered a scholarship to study in Paris, Cortázar went to France in 1951. He spent the rest of his life there, though he traveled widely and remained involved with Argentinian and Nicaraguan political causes. Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.
One of the foremost writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, Cortázar was a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. He wrote many volumes of short fiction. Among his best-known stories are “Continuity of Parks,” “Bestiary,” “House Taken Over,” “Blow-Up,” “Axolotl,” “The Night Face Up,” and “The End of the Game.”
In his feature article on Cortázar’s short stories, Chris Power describes how he “enthusiastically seeds his realistic settings […] with impossible invasions of the fantastical and supernatural. The effect is often a refined philosophical take on the ‘uncanny tales’ strand of speculative fiction” (Power, Chris. “A Brief Survey of the Short Story, Part 22: Julio Cortázar.” The Guardian, 20 Oct. 2009).
Together with his radically innovative novel Hopscotch, Cortázar’s short stories were quickly translated from Spanish into other languages. They have had a formative influence on generations of readers and writers in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
Literary Context: Experimental Fiction and the Latin American Literary “Boom”
Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963) is one of the earliest of the Latin American Boom novels to win international attention. An experimental “anti-novel” designed to break through the governing conventions of the genre, Hopscotch frees itself from the restriction of linear temporality. It invites readers to proceed through non-linear narrative paths that they themselves choose. It might be seen as a pioneering, intellectually sophisticated example of what has come to be called the “choose your own adventure” story.
Some defining characteristics of Boom literature include its determination to break free of literary conventions, ambiguity and open-endedness, an alliance of the realistic and the fantastic, and a conceptual sophistication and playfulness. Cortázar’s fiction shares literary ambitions and features with other Latin American Boom writers. The most notable of these are Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. In his use of fantasy, the uncanny, and the surreal to explore metaphysical issues, Cortázar walks alongside Jorge Luis Borges, another Argentine fiction writer who is sometimes included in the Boom grouping.
In distinct ways, these authors reject the limits of Western European realism and pursue novel approaches to literary representation. The drive to go beyond realism propels the metaphysical fiction of writers such as Borges and Cortázar. These stories represent “impossible” things—events, worlds, beings—that cannot be confirmed through the conventional objective, empirical understanding of material reality. Thus, “Continuity of Parks” shows the “impossible” but imaginable continuity of two realities.
In the fiction of some Boom writers, this ambition to reach beyond the limits of empirical rationality takes the form of what is called “magical realism.” This technique represents the coexistence of the marvelous and magical alongside the perfectly commonplace and realistic. It resists any attempt to resolve the contradictions and incompatibilities between these two dimensions of experience.
Although the initial work of the Boom writers was rooted in the political, social, and cultural climate of their countries during the 1960s and 1970s, its literary and cultural reach has stretched well beyond national frontiers to influence the development of fiction, especially the novel, around the globe. The inspiration of “magic realism,” for example, can be seen in Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece, Midnight’s Children (1981), a novel written in English about the events surrounding the partition of India in 1947.
