On Cortazar

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Inventing AutonomiesMeditations on Julio Cortzar and the Politics of Our Time

S A N T I A G O C O L S

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Our possible truth must be INVENTION (Cortzar 1966, 384). Sodeclares the narrator near one of the possible beginnings of Julio Cortzarsnovel Hopscotch. In this essay I will argue, essentially, that our possibletruth, today, must be invention as well. Or, at least, that in reexaminingCortzars notion of invention we would add a valuable tool to those wealready have with which to think the possibilities of transformation in ourtime. In the pages that follow, I will develop this argument by first, elabo-rating Cortzars notion of invention, especially as it functions in a fewof his literary works; second, examining its operation in his own politicaldiscourse; and finally, reflecting a bit on how the notion and practice ofinvention might engage not only the politics of our time, but some of theother conceptual tools we have to think about that politics.

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The poet, Cortzar once wrote, if she cannot connect them by intrinsicfeatures, does what everyone does when looking at the stars: she invents the

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Angelia Fell

constellation, the lines linking the solitary stars (Cortzar 1996, 300). Hewrote this around 1950 in a long study of the British Romantic poet JohnKeats that would not be published until after Cortzars death. Cortzar wasaround 35 at the time, had yet to publish the first of his eight volumes of shortstories or any of the novels that would secure his fame as a writer. But inven-tion and its derivatives run like a subterranean vein throughout his works,never central to any of them but never absent. Thus, at the end of his life, ina chronicle of a road trip he had made with his wife Carol Dunlop, Cortzarexpressed his hopes that the work will have opened for you some doors too,and that in you germinates already the project of some parallel freeway ofyour own invention (Cortzar and Dunlop 1996, 44; my translation).

In that first passage, Cortzar identifies invention with the creativeactivity of the poet. The poet-inventor connects, and in connecting consti-tutes new relationships among otherwise solitary elements of the given.Prior to the creative activity of the poet, the stars simply are. There maywell be an intrinsic relationship among them, and perhaps that is availableto human understanding. But failing that availabilityand its failure is theemphasized premise of the poet-inventors creative activitythe poet mustconstitute new relations in a given field of elements. Here appear alreadythe basic elements of Cortzars notion of invention. Invention, through-out Cortzars writing, comes to mean the process by which we can makesomething newa word, an experience, a world, a selfby rearranging theelements and the relationships that constitute a particular, received situa-tion: the night sky, for example.

This may be illustrated with another example. If we think of a word asa situation, like the night sky, then we might see that this situation is madeup of elementslike the solitary starscalled letters, configured in agiven way according to certain rules. There would be, of course, many dif-ferent ways of making a new word from that given word. We could subtractletters or add new letters. We could, at least for certain given words, reversethe order of the letters, as in a palindrome. But in Cortzars fiction, theprivileged way of making a new word is always the anagram, whereby thegiven letters are shuffled into new relationships, with nothing added andnothing subtracted in order to make something new. The problem with

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palindromes, says Lozano, the protagonist of Cortzars story Tara, isthat you are left the way you started (Cortzar 1995, 32). A palindrome,which offers you only the mirror image of the given, has no strengthbecause it doesnt teach you anything new. But anagrams are a differentstory. The young girl protagonist of The Distances makes an anagram ofher name (Alina Reyes es la reina y . . .) and notes in her diary that it isbeautiful because it opens a path (Cortzar 1968, 16).

As in the example of the stargazing poet-inventor, the makers of ana-grams create something new by constituting a new set of relations amonggiven elements. In both of these examples, another critical facet ofCortzars notion of invention comes to light: it works immanently. By thisI mean simply that it does not depend upon the belief that something existsoutside the given. If it is possible to transcend the given, it is not because ofthe secret existence of some element beyond the given that will alter it orredeem it. Rather, the given can only be transcended by the constitution ofnew relationships within the situation, and this practice, in Cortzarsview, is always a creative, inventive practice.

In both these examples, we may also glimpse the emergence of anotherfacet of Cortzars invention: potency (Lozano referred to strength; AlinaReyes to the opening of a new path). This aspect of invention will bemore apparent by taking a look at two brief examples from elsewhere inCortzars fiction. The young narrator of Los venenos (The Poisons)has dreams of flying; but of course, he cannot really fly. He has dreams, thatis to say, of possessing a power, a capacity, he does not, in his waking life,possess. So what can he do? I ran down the alley with the cry of SittingBull, running in a way I had invented at that time and that was runningwithout bending my knees, like kicking a ball. It didnt tire you and it waslike flying (Cortzar 1994c, 300; my translation). It might appear at firstthat this invention contradicts my previous examples since he runs with-out bending his knees, so that his invention seems to entail a subtraction.But I would argue that, upon further reflection, this without bendingreally just points to a reconfiguration of relationships. All the substantiveelements of his running are still there: hips, femur, tibia, and a surface. Butthe situation called running usually involves femur and tibia in a specific

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relation: bent. The narrator has invented a new relation within the given(and still present elements): without bending or, as he might have easilysaid, straightening. And this gives him not the power to fly, which ofcourse is impossible, but the feelingthe joyof flying, which might, inthis case anyway, really be the point of those dreams anyway. Perhaps thisis what Henry Miller meant when he evoked, in Sexus, the art of dreamingwhen wide-awake (1965, 20).

This potency of invention appears also in Cortzars story Silvia. Inthe story, the narrator recalls a series of outdoor dinners among a group offriends: himself and two couples, each with two children. The children, weare told, have invented Silvia. The parents explain this to the narrator todismiss her, to ward her off. But Silvia works, like the narrator straighten-ing his legs, to produce real effects: Silvia lifted him up to the sink, washedhis bottom, and changed his clothes; Silvia washed off the bump; Sheplays with us; She takes care of Renaud; she played a little game to con-sole him; Silvia emerged from the darkness and leaned between Gracielaand Alvaro as if to help them cut their meat or take a bite (Cortzar 1986c,187, 190, 189, 191). Silvia enhances the powers of the children. She does forthem, and hence they do not need their parents or other adults. They haveinvented Silvia and, in so doing, have invented autonomy, ones capacity todo for oneself, freely to direct oneself. Silvia herself, invention though shemay be, does what she wants, the same as us, the children explain (191).As with the young boy in Los venenos, the children desire a power or acapacity, but the world as it is cannot or will not allow for it. Cortzar callsinvention the process by which one may immanently reconfigure rela-tions among the elements of the world as it is, so as to produce the sameeffects as if one had that powerlike hot-wiring a car to make it run asthough you had the keys.

Lastly, in the story Silvia we see a final important facet of inven-tion: it is communicative. By this I mean that it is infectious or contagious.It does not communicate by representing itself or any power it mightrelease. Rather, like a virus or a radio signal, it simply establishes a connec-tion and passes itself on. In Silvia, Alvaro has invented Silvia, but soon allthe children have caught the fever, and we learn that she only comes when


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they are all four together. Alvaros father calls his sons penchant for inven-tion mythomania and thus diagnoses Alvaro, warning that he contami-nates everyone [todo el mundo, or literally, all the world] (Cortzar 1986c,190). Even the adult narrator of the story falls victim, seeing and desiringSilviawriting, in fact, as he admits, with an absurd hope of conjuration,a sweet golem of words (186).

Thus, from this brief survey of invention in Cortzars early criticalwriting and short fiction, we can come up with something like the follow-ing provisional definition of the practice: the potent and infectious processof generating something new, of transforming a received situation byimmanently reconstituting the given relationships among the given ele-ments so as to produce real effects. I want to turn now to look, through thelens of this working definition of invention, at Cortzars most famouswork, the 1963 novel Hopscotch, and within that novel, at its protagonist andsometimes narrator, Horacio Oliveira. In particular, I want to look at theway in which invention appears as a way of immanently generatingpotent, ultimately ethical transformations from within a field of givendichotomous abstractions that feel sterile or constrictive.1

Horacio has a dreamthe dream of a child, his friend calls itinwhich a loaf of bread he has cut cries out in pain. But the worst, he com-plains to his friend, is not the dream. The worst is what they call wakingup. He wonders: Hasnt it ever happened to you that youve awakenedsometimes with the exact feeling that at that moment a terrible mistake isbeginning? (Cortzar 1966, 45052). Horacio is aware that there is some-thing troubling about the transition from dreaming to waking, that thereis some truth in the dream that slips away as you wake up and call what youwere just thinking about a dream. But, I would argue, he is not yetinventing. He is simply, at this point, proposing a reversal of the termsdream and reality, and valorizing the dream in a way that leaves theboundary between them fully intact. If we were to think of the boundarybetween dreaming and waking as the space between letters in a word, thenHoracio has created a palindrome, reversing the terms, which leaves him,as Lozano told us, with what he started. But a bit later he will come up withsomething that looks more like an anagram: The real dream was located


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in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake;he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, elim-inate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didnt mean a thing, locatehimself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would besuggested (490). Here, Horacio establishes an inventive relationship tothe given elements dream and waking.

Horacios struggles with his dreams are instructive because they are aninstance of more general problems that dog him, problems for which inven-tion could also serve as a solution. He wants to get to an other side of areality that feels superficial, conventional, false, and limiting. So Horaciospends his time looking for passages, openings to a preexistent state heimagines as another side. But his real problem, I would argue, stems from hisperception of two distinct zoneslike dreaming and being awakewith arigid, wall-like boundary between them. When he imagines the wall as per-meable, it still only permits a passage for himself. Only rarely and fleetinglycan he actually imagine inventing: shuffling the stuff on either side of thewall back and forth so as to create a zone that could be called in-between, except that wall and thus the terms on either side of it have dis-solved, and with them the paralyzing dualities in which Horacio is trapped.

Horacio himself poses this problem, and invention as a solution, whenwe first meet him. There, in chapter 73, he is searching for the other sideof habit, but wonders whether even such a search is not itself a clichd lit-erary commonplace, simply the obverse of the coin of stifling habit. Heglumly concludes that yes, everything is merely writing, merely a fable,before suddenly glimpsing the possibilityin the passage with which Ibegan my essaythat maybe in that case, Our possible truth must beinvention, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture,pisciculture, all the tures in this world (Cortzar 1966, 384).

And what follows is precisely writing, a fable, now borrowed from abook by Morelli, his favorite author,

about a Neapolitan who spent years sitting in the doorway of his house look-

ing at a screw on the ground. At night he would gather it up and put it under

his mattress. The screw was at first a laugh, a jest, communal irritation, a


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neighborhood council, a mark of civic duties unfulfilled, finally a shrug-

ging of shoulders, peace, the screw was peace, no one could go along the

street without looking out of the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling

that it was peace. The fellow dropped dead one day of a stroke and the

screw disappeared as soon as the neighbors got there. One of them has it;

perhaps he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and goes

off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand, an

obscure reproach. He only calms down when he takes out the screw and

looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears footsteps and has to put it away

quickly. Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a

god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in

accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped

like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon.

The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but he also might have been the

inventor of a world. (Cortzar 1966, 384)

The Neapolitan is an inventor because he rearranges the elements of a givensituationin this case, himself and the screw. By looking at it in a way thatone would not if the screw were merely a piece of hardware, or of junk, hecan make it act as though it is something more. It begins to provoke effectsquite unusual in an ordinary screw. It is as though, through his invention,he has released other possibilities, manifested other dispositions andpropensities in the screw. Horacio himself concludes, from this fable, thatthere can be no freedomno choiceoutside of (no other sidebeyond) the process of invention. For this process insinuates itself withinthe fixed, category-creating boundaries, and works therein to blur themand create possible spaces of autonomy.

This is why Morelli offers an alternative to what he sees as a twentieth-century obsession with transcendent millenary kingdoms, Edens, nostal-gias, and other worlds. He proposes, instead, invention as the activity ofimmanently transforming this disenchanted world into a magical place.

Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting

out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find


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it in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to

create it like a phoenix. The world exists in this one, but the way water

exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, 456 of the

dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of

a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso. Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to

be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary

as dictionary? If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples

there finally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a mar-

velous hint of what could be born of her in turn? (Cortzar 1966, 379)

At another point, Horacio reads a page that Morelli has covered with theunpunctuated words underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyondbecause there isnt any. Horacio spies, however, a place where the wordany is missing. Reading this page, Horacio knows that the words echotheir meaning, forming a wall behind which there is nothing. But he alsofeels that a sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the lightthat shows through (Cortzar 1966, 307). There is no saying for sure, but itis hard not to feel that the eye is hypersensitive, that Horacio has made toomuch of a typographical error, imbuing sheer contingency with a burden-some charge of secretly coded meaning. At the very least, we might arguethat if there is a way to go beyond, to change things, to connect, then thelesson of the passage abovethe lesson, in fact, of Cortzars inventionisthat such a possibility lies in an alternative arrangement of the given, andnot in the opening of a hole through to a transcendent space. In otherwords, if Horacio perceives a light on the page, it is not shining througha hole. Rather, it is a light generated immanently by the page itself. Or,more precisely, generated from the productive energy that Morelli containswith his steadfast refusal of any beyond.

It is true that Morelli has created a surface, but not every surface is awall. It could be a wall. We cannot really say with certainty that it is not. Butwe might ask Horacio what he gets by calling it a wall. Seeing a wall leadshim, according to his tendency, to look for and find a hole in the wall. Evenso, there is nothing wrong with this, except that not much fits through theholes that Horacio finds in the walls he perceives. Not his lover, not his


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friends, not even all of him, which helps to explain why he so often isplagued by a feeling of solitude. And that may be why Cortzar always pre-ferred (and so thus constructed the laws of his universe) the more modest,sustainable process of continual changes figured by the kaleidoscope.

Morelli rejects any idea of another world, another existence, outside ofor beyondthis one. For this common view leaves one with the task of con-juring, like Horacio, magical passageways or transportational devices bywhich to move from one side to the other. Morelli instead offers thereconfiguring activity of inventionwhich he equates with reading,noticeas the only means of generating, immanently, autonomy. Inventionis the only solution to the dilemma because it takes as its point of departurenot the problem of how to get from this side to the other, or vice versa, but ofhow to generate multiple spaces from the space in which you find yourself.

Now, the divide that most persistently nags at Horacio is the one hebelieves separates him from his fellow human beings. A divide, we mightsay in other words, between subject and object. In the prevailing trendsof Western culture, the constructed gap between subject and object istaken as premise, and from this fabricated conceptual gap flow many of theepistemological, ontological, and ethical dilemmas that characterize theWestern philosophical tradition. To span this divide of our own making,we extend the two divergent bridges of rationality (philosophy or science)and anti-rationality (art, religion, madness). Horacio approaches the edgeof this perceived chasm between his self and the world outside it, butspends all his time contemplating which bridge to take across. And thoughhe seems aware that there is something wrong with this way of looking atit, he disdainfully (but secretly fearfully) dismisses the one facultycom-passionwhich might lead him to invent an alternative arrangement of theterms self and other. All invention entails the risk of experimentation, ofshattering certainty in the interests of something new, which might also besomething better. And inventing with the self in this way may pose thebiggest risk of all. Of course it may also carry, at least in ethical terms, thebiggest payoff. Horacio sees this, for a moment, when he suspects that trueotherness might be made up of delicate contacts, marvelous adjustmentswith the world, and that it could not be attained from just one point, but


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would require instead joining together in partnership of some kind, orcommunity (Cortzar 1966, 99).

It might be worth seeing the events that unfold near the end of Horaciosstory as a tentative experiment with invention of the self. Having physicallyclosed himself off from others behind an elaborate web of threads, wash-basins, and rulemans (ball bearings), Horacios childhood friend Travelercomes to visit him in his room, as the staff of the asylum where they bothwork gathers in the courtyard beneath Horacios open window and outsidehis bedroom door. Unsuccessful in convincing Horacio that he means himno harm, Traveler, leaving the room with tears in his eyes, advises Horacioto bolt the door behind him. By relinquishing his control over the events inthe situation, even to the point of safeguarding Horacios freedom to killhimself, Traveler offers his friend an example of genuine ethical compas-sion. A few moments later, as Horacio looks down at Traveler and his wifeTalita, standing arm-in-arm on the hopscotch board in the courtyard, heregains a glimpse of Morellis truth that the other world exists imma-nently in this one and can be realized, materialized, only through the act ofinvention. And so, with Cortzars famous ambiguityHoracios thoughts,at least, seem to hurl him out the windowhe will take the leap that figures,as dramatically as possible, the invention of the self in a nonbounded form.As if to confirm the value of this risky practice of invention, the next sevenchapters show Horacioinjuredsurrounded by friends caring for himwith a simple, unspectacular love. And then, as if to emphasize theindefinite nature of invention, the altogether different time scale one enterswhen one enters the zone of experimentation, the novel drifts back andforth between chapters 58 and 131, until you get tired or frustrated, or maybeuntil you realize that there is no end to invention, and that the next step isto close the book and continue to invent a different relation between writ-ing and reading and living. Ultimately, in Hopscotch, one may discover anextended parable of the kinds of autonomy that invention can yield.

But Cortzar does more than unfold such a parable before his readerspassive eyes. He also provokes his reader into an inventive reading. ForCortzar, writing already involves an inventive reading of what has alreadybeen said. And this, in turn, implies an inventive writing that blurs the


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boundaries between writing and living. In Hopscotch, Cortzar tries explic-itly to draw readers into this process, believing, like the narrator of Silvia,that invention, like a contagious illness, can be communicated. Thus, read-ers are invited to read the chapters comprised by Hopscotch in more thanone sequence, to treat the chapters of the novel like the letters of a word. Inthe process of doing so, we follow Horacio in shuffling stuff (the chaptersof the novel) across divides (the three partsFrom the Other Side,From this Side, and From Diverse Sidesthat make up the novel). Inthe process, also, we risk losing the satisfaction of a linear narrative, or thesecurity of conclusive meaning, or of resolved tensions, scratched itches. Inreturn, we gain the effect of softening a bit the wall separating our subjectfrom the object of Cortzar and his novel.

This is not about an ideal of absolutely free participation on the part ofa reader. Such an ideal, like the absolutes and beyonds to whichHoracio mistakenly directs his vision, can never be realized. As Morelli cau-tions Horacio, Youve got to be careful, were all chasing after purity. . . .But watch out, my friends, what we call purity is probably . . . (Cortzar1966, 556). And invention is never pure. It always works with some given,with some restrictions, like the rules of a game. Effective Willie Starkexplains this about goodness to the principled but impotent Dr. AdamStanton: You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it outof badness. Badness. . . . Because there isnt anything else to make it out of(Warren 1974, 257). In Hopscotch, we are invited, like Horaciowhom theailing Morelli asks to arrange his loose-leaf papers for publicationtoarrange the simples with which Cortzar provides us into our own novel;or rather, into a novel that a new entity of our inventionthat combines insome way Cortzar and ourselveshas composed. Horacio might be afraidof messing things up in the process, but we need not be, as Morelli reassur-ingly reminds us: Who cares, you can read my book any way you want to.Liber Fulguralis, mantic pages, and thats how it goes. The most I do is set itup the way I would like to reread it. And in the worst of cases, if they domake a mistake, it might just turn out perfect (Cortzar 1966, 56).

Cortzar consistently manifested an interest in the possibilities forhuman beings to change, affirmatively, their ways of life, both as individuals


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and as societies. He knew that individuals could be more free; less afraid;more adventurous, playful, and humorous; and more cooperative. He knewthat societies could thus become more peaceful, less rigid in separating workand play, less violent, without the perceived need to enforce social hierar-chies. It was evident enough to Cortzar that any changes in society thatwere sustainable would have to be comprised of changes in individuals com-municating with each other. That is to say, I am suggesting, Cortzar con-ceived of social transformation as an essentially poetic act in which any one(or all) of us become stargazing poet-inventors creating new constellations,new groupings, from the apparently solitary stars that so much in our worldencourages us to see ourselves as being.

But Cortzar conceived this desirable change as possible only on twoconditions. First, change should not come at the price of rejecting onespast. As John Dewey knew, Only when the past ceases to trouble andanticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united withhis environment and therefore alive (Dewey 1980, 18). For Cortzarbelieves firmly in the tenacity and persistence of the past in the present, allthe more so when the individual would deny or disavow that past. Nodurable change can depend upon a definitive transcendence of the past.The past, or elements of it at least, must come into the future with us as wechange. Second, Cortzar will not allow change coming from outside: nosaviors, no knights on white horses, no charismatic party leaders. The onlystuff we have to work with as our raw materials for transformation is thestuff we already have. Hence the kaleidoscope over the hole in the wall.Hence, for Cortzar, the supreme importance of invention, the art of mak-ing something new just by rearranging the relationships among the thingsyou already have. That is why any change has to be understood, and iffigured, figured in images of process, not rupture.

I I

I would like, as I said at the outset, to argue that we might usefully plug thenotion of invention, as I have drawn it forth from Cortzars literary work,into the thinking we do today, to try to come to grips with the politics of our


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time. But in order to do so, I think it will be useful to look at how Cortzardeployed the notion and the practice of invention to come to grips with thepolitics of his own time. His times were dominated by three interrelatedquestions: the question of Third World revolution in the context of theCold War, the question of counterrevolutionary dictatorship and of exile,and the question of the responsibility of the intellectual in these settings.Cortzar spoke to all of these questions at one time or another. And I thinkthat the way he spoke of them, if we can allow ourselves to invent hissometimes dated-seeming vocabulary, can teach us, in turn, somethingabout how to invent, as Cortzar might put it, the politics of our time.

Let us invent, instead of accepting, the labels they stick on us(Cortzar 1994a, 170). Cortzar was speaking on the subject of literatureand exile. It was the late 1970s, a dark time indeed for Latin Americans andtheir writers. The youthful enthusiasm expressed in and sparked by theCuban Revolution of 1959 had given way to an awesome display of counter-revolutionary force, backed by the might of the U.S. government, and fueledby the fearful and fearsome quiescence of many Latin Americans caught inthe headlights of inconceivable brutalities. It would be easy, Cortzar said,to point fingers of blame at the generals, at the U.S. government, at its cor-porate heads: too easy and hypocritical, actually, are his exact words.Instead, Cortzar marshaled the only weapon he ever had: invention. Hedid not make light of exile or trivialize its attendant emotional traumas; hedid not make a silly game of it. But he did challenge his audience to makesomething new out of it, the way poets have always made something new ofthe elements at hand, the way life makes something by combining what islying around, the way the stargazer makes something out of a group ofgleaming pins stuck in the cool cushion of the night sky.

The first step, as always for Cortzar in any process of invention, is to letyour self go. In this case, speaking to his fellow exiled writers, it meant letgo of the self you have identified as innocent victim: it would be possibleto invent in exile, out of the stuff of exile, he cautioned, only if the writersfirst took a step backwards to see themselves newly, to see themselvesnew. Only then could a writer slip off the garment of names imposed uponher by the dictatorship and invent new names for herself. Only then could


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the exiled writer transform the imposed distance of exile into the adopteddistance of balanced perspective and say, This banned or burned bookwasnt altogether good: let us write now another, better one (Cortzar1994a, 172).

What, Cortzar asks, if we then were able to see exile as positive, as anopportunity, refusing thus the exiles view that he had been victim of agrave trauma? How do we free ourselves, Cortzar asks, from the fact(read: given situation) that they have expelled us from our countries?This is not precisely the world of Silvia. It is not, of course, a fictional tale,and the exiled writers of the 1970s are not children faced with the benevo-lent dismissals of their parents. But the strategy Cortzar recommends is,nonetheless, remarkably similar. What emerges as the crucial theme in hisspeech is that the writers should not fall into the trap of thinking that thedictatorships have the power. Or rather, and more precisely, the writersshould not fall into the trap of desiring the power that the dictatorshipshave, because doing so can only lead them to ignore the power they have, apower that exceeds the rigid power of the dictators.

Because our true efficacy lies in extracting the maximum advantage from

exile. . . . The Latin American dictatorships do not have writers, but rather

scribes: let us not convert ourselves into the scribes of bitterness, of resent-

ment, or of melancholy. Let us be truly free, and to begin with let us free our-

selves of the commiserating and tearful label that tends to show itself too

frequently. Against self-pity it is better to hold up, as crazy as it might sound,

that the true exiles are the fascist regimes of our continent, exiled from the

authentic national reality, exiled from social justice, exiled from joy, exiled

from peace. We are more free and we are more in our land than they. Ive

spoken of madness: it also, like humor, is one of the ways to break the molds

and open a positive path that we will never find if we keep folding beneath

the cold and sensible rules of the enemies game. (Cortzar 1994a, 169; my

translation)

So Cortzar calls for invention, beginning with the invention of the selfthat has been exiled, and proceeding to an invention of the condition of


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exile. Notice that invention empowers, as it did the children in Silvia, andthat it does so, first of all, by putting a choice back in the hands of his audi-ence, exactly when they identify themselves by the lack of a choice. Now,Cortzar reminds them that they have a choice: the choice of how, as writ-ers, to write the story of their exile. From there, in choosing an affirmativeroute, they will be writing also the future story of the pastwhich is to say,writing the story of their present. And to write the story of ones present isalready to begin to author ones own history, to compose ones own life. Adictator, who requires an obedient scribe, cannot bear to have a writerinvent her own words, cannot bear to have anyone else write the story ofthe present.

Some years before, in December 1969, Cortzar wrote an essay for theUruguayan cultural periodical Marcha that prefigures the inventive strategyhe would recommend to writers in exile a few years later. In this essay, hewas invited to respond to Oscar Collazos, who in an earlier issue publishedhis view that the authors of the Latin American so-called new novel(Cortzar and Mario Vargas Llosa, plus Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel GarcaMrquez, and Jos Donoso) had a neurotic, dependent relationship withEuropean literature. And, moreover, that this relationship prompted themto imitate the technical innovations of their European heroes and thus keptthem from responding to their own Latin American realityan assertionthat would become an unquestioned commonplace in leftist criticism ofthe so-called Booms (as if the authors collected in this name were identi-cal) liberal imagination (Franco 1997).

Cortzar replies that no novelist he knows worries about Europeanwriters. On the contrary, the very fact that they do not compare themselveswith European writers (favorably or not) makes the Latin American novel-ist capable of inventing, taking advantage of, or perfecting the most variedtechniques totally naturally and authentically (Cortzar 1977, 40).Cortzars compatriot Jorge Luis Borges had already taken a similar stance,some 40 years earlier, faced with critics who felt he was neglecting whatthey called his reality. In that essay, El escritor argentino y la tradicin,Borges argued that the ease of appropriation of so-called foreign techniques(to which Cortzar also refers) derives from Argentinas eccentricity in


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relation to the European tradition, and that this ease is common to anyeccentric position (Borges 1974). Thus the Irish, or the Jews, Borges wrote,are able to approach traditional canons with inventive ease because thosetraditional canons (mainly the English and German in these cases) havenever really belonged to them, at least not in the sense that these canonshave rewarded an investment in them with any kind of cultural, let alonepolitical power. Gilles Deleuze makes of this eccentricity (he calls itbecoming minor) the very essence of style. A style is managing to stammer in ones own language. It is difficult, because there has to be a needfor such stammering. . . . Being like a foreigner in ones own language(Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 4). He is talking, like Borges, of writing withinyour language, but from the sidelines or from undergroundas if it wereforeign, as if you were an alien, or alienated from the benefits of the native.

Cortzar here evokes the more general conditions from which emergesthe constituent power of the writer-as-inventor. In fact, his remarks uponthe potential of exile simply describe a specific subset of these more generalconditions of apparent eccentricity. The good writer, he explains, is thatperson who partially modifies a language. It is the case of Joyce modifyinga certain way of writing in English (Cortzar 1978a, 21; 1979, 66). Inventionis at work, I would argue, in that the language is made new not because youactually go out and learn a new language, but simply by adjusting the rela-tionships among elements (you, native tongue, native land).

Indeed, invention (employing whatever elements) always requires oneto see the endless possible configurations and reconfigurations, the infiniteset of possible relations, in a given array. And this always runs counter to thetemptationso common on the leftfirst, to reduce power, in any given sit-uation, to the status quo of those-in-power-over, and second, either tocling fiercely to that power if they have it or, if they do not, to desire it.Invention troubles this conventional relationship to power. Invention, inother words, might be seen as little more than one name for the process ofseeing and acting in accordance with the truth that those-in-power-overalways rest in an uneasy relationship to those-with-power-toto a forceupon which they depend but which, finally, they know they cannot control.Invention begins to rearrange the given relations in the received situation so


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as to free up the creative potency of those-with-power-to, even from thethose-in-power-over within each of us.

This no doubt is why Cortzar also felt obliged to exclaim in 1981, Howlittle revolutionary the language of revolutionaries tends to be! (Cortzar1994b, 310). He addressed this to a group of revolutionaries gathered at theCasa de Las Americas publishing house in Havana, Cuba. It is part of aspeech fundamentally supportive of socialism and of revolutionary aims.But as always, Cortzar seeks to go beyond shared ideals. He prefers hisallies strong. The group he addressed was gathered to elaborate upon a briefstatement that had been released (and signed by, among others, JulioCortzar), calling for sovereign and democratic rights for the people ofour Americas. He certainly supported the call; but equally he sought topull the rug out from under certain assumptions that he felt would actuallyblock the achievement of the aim.

Cortzar questioned, to begin with, the Manichaean distinctionsimplied by the invocation of the pueblos de nuestras Americas. To him,reality was too complex and potentially treacherous to treat with suchblunt instruments as our and their or the people. To suggest that therights of Latin Americans, en masse, were constrained only by nonLatinAmericans was not only too simple; it was dangerously impractical in over-looking the obvious fact that our most oppressed peoples are so largely forfratricidal reasons (Cortzar 1994b, 308). Cortzar was not looking torefine the picture for the sake of social-scientific accuracy or the advance ofknowledge. Nor, of course, was he interested in letting the U.S. governmentand multinational interests off the hook for their activities in LatinAmerica. Rather, he aimed to improve the practical efficacy of the languageused by revolutionaries.

Cortzar was interested in generating, from a deep and sober contactwith realities, the language necessary to move suffering people, to infectthem with an awareness of their own power to shed the burdens whichoppress them, whether those burdens have come from the United States,their own government, their putatively revolutionary parties, or their ownpsyches. As Cortzar reminds his comrades, revolutions have to be madein individuals so that, when the day arrives, the people can make them


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(Cortzar 1994b, 310). And he does not mean other individuals. He directsthis to his fellow intellectuals. He invites them to join him in the examina-tion of the microfascisms within, and on a journey of self-invention thatwould necessarily involve invention in language. It is in this spirit thatCortzar agreed absolutely with Ernesto Gonzlez Bermejos characteri-zation during an interview for Manual for Manuel as an attempt to demys-tify a monastic conception of revolution; to say that political events occurin human beings that do not cease to be such because they belong to suchand such an organization and that they must, they should and it is inevitablethat they combine political action with making love, with eating spaghettior taking a walk on the Champs Elyses (Cortzar 1979, 127).

Understanding this can help us to better make something of some ofCortzars earlier political writings. Thus, for example, in that same 1969response to Oscar Collazos, entitled Literature in the Revolution andRevolution in Literature, Cortzar attempted to distinguish between thetask of the writer in bourgeois societiesto which, he writes, the goodwriter is almost invariably in oppositionand that of the writer in revo-lutionary society, within which the writer must situate himself construc-tively, criticizing to edify and not to lay low (Cortzar 1977, 53). But alreadyin that essay, already in 1969, Cortzar confessed that this differentiation ofthe writers tasks had caused, and would probably continue to cause himno few conflicts. If so, maybe that was in part because those terms,plugged into that essay and following the prevailing vocabulary of the time,were already too neat and rotund, too abstracted from the particulars ofdaily life as experienced by human beings around the worldwhether thenation states of which they are citizens or residents call themselves social-ist or bourgeois, free, democratic, capitalist, or communist.

In 1973, when the original Spanish edition of his most explicitly politi-cal novel, A Manual for Manuel, was published, Cortzar 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 vic-

tory 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


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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 affirma-

tion 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.

(Cortzar 1978b, 45)

A ringing affirmation of socialism may well sound dated to our ears today.And indeed, it might well be dated had Cortzar not invented, in the sensethat I have been elaborating, the word socialism. In that case, thedynamic and vital forces of freedom which Cortzar designated with thisword will seem dated only if we stop listening to him the moment we readthat word. For is it really dated to call for an attitude of vigilance over thecapacity to live life as we want it to be? Do we live now in a world whereit is no longer necessary to affirm, in the face of fear and disdain, the mostvital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, hisdemand for a dignity shared by everyone? Has this new century openedupon a planet in which all human beings can feel their lives driven by thesevital forces, or even by simple dignity? Is this true even of those of us luckyenough not to worry over our next meal? What about for those three bil-lion peoplehalf the humans on the planetwho live on less than two dol-lars a day?

In a little book written in 1958, one year before the Cuban Revolution,the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, at the time living in Detroit,Michigan, was able to write the following: In one department of a certainplant in the U.S. there is a worker who is physically incapable of carryingout his duties. . . . The workers in that department have organized theirwork so that for nearly ten years he has had practically nothing to do. . . .this is the socialist society (James 1958, 33). Taking a brief detour fromCortzars texts in order to look more closely at what James is here doingcan serve to elaborate the political effects of invention, in the very sensethat Cortzar tried to advance them. And it can also help to suggest animportant continuity between Cortzar and his times, places, and vocabu-laries, and those of our present.


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See what James does to the term socialist society. First, he fills theterm up with an ongoing process that pushes all the static thingness outof it. Then, he sticks that process into the middle of the nation-state, whichperhaps epitomizes the anti-socialist society and thus drains socialist soci-ety of its connotations of all or nothing Manichaeism. Perhaps the namesand concepts Cortzar used obscure the actual facts of daily life that mightcontradict, or at least complicate, those names.

If so, this would be a problem of thought and discourse and vision. Yetas such, it parallels closely the problem of politics that C. L. R. Jamesdescribes so plainly in Facing Reality. There, too, abstract representations(unions claiming to represent worker desire, political parties claiming torepresent popular will, states claiming to represent people), like theabstract representations bourgeois and socialist used by Cortzar, pre-vail over complex, dynamic processes far too rich in detail and variation tolend themselves to representation, at least by any of the representationaldevices available at that time.

Of course, James can still see that there are, by and large, two differentkinds of society, two different ways of organizing the activities necessaryfor the production and reproduction of life. But he prefers narrative to the-ory, verbs to nouns. So, one way of organizing is characterized by authori-tarian, top-down decision-making structures, and by manipulation anddeceit, where brute force is necessary to ensure submission to the regimesdictated by those in power. This way of organizing is found, James pointsout, in the national governments of the world (however they may stylethemselves), in trade unions, and in official party organizations. The lead-ers or representatives in this regime, from shop foreman to U.S. president,operate by abstracting themselves from the material processes of daily life,instead dictating to others upon whose freedom and autonomy theythereby encroach, and the results of whose living labor they thereby poach.The other manner of organizing, that event that James calls socialist soci-ety, is present wherever we see cooperation and self-organization in theproduction of goods for use. It is present whenever we hear dialogue andwitness experimentation. It is present in every affirmation of autonomyfrom abstract programs and dogmas.


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In other words, for C. L. R. James, wherever you open your eyes, lookdeeply at a particular situation, and see these values and forces operating,there you have what ought to be called socialist society. This event orprocess called socialist society bursts through the abstracting, regiment-ing forces of bourgeois society. In socialist society, representational rela-tionships are eluded in favor of more direct and immediateto say nothingof practicalforms of organization, expression, and activity. In the sameway, Jamess vision, his thought, and his discourse elude the abstractionsthat briefly snared Cortzar, preferring instead the narration of particulars,Cortzars usual realm. Cortzar always said he knew nothing of politics. Inthis sense, he was right (though not in the sense usually intended by thoseobservers who think that Cortzars leftist sympathies are evidence that heknew nothing, and so, that he should have restricted himself to writing fan-tastic fiction).

For James, this was the new society: the future in the present, as hecalled itevoking Morellis image of the immanent generation of anotherworld from the elements given within this onethe struggle for happi-ness, as he elsewhere named this process. It was constant and in constantmotion. You could not see it if you were looking through the lens of large,blocky, static, and abstract concepts like nation-states, or the revolution.Theories, Jane Jacobs advises, are powerful tools only in the limitedsense that the Greek mythological giant Antaeus was powerful. WhenAntaeus was not in intimate contact with the earth, his strength rapidlyebbed (Jacobs 2000, ix). Jamess socialist society resembles the roilingsurface of boiling water: bubbles surface here, vanish, and reappear else-where, but there is always a bubble somewhere. It is hard to say with muchcertainty, even with an intimate knowledge of the depth and surface condi-tions, where or when the next bubble will appear. So the most we can do,James thought, was first, to be sure to notice and report the fact of the bub-bles and their attendant conditions, in all their complex, dynamic particu-larity, and second, to nourish the conditions for their proliferation in anygiven instant. Keep up the heat.

Maybe Jamess vision of a constant and fleeting and darting revolution-ary process makes it easier to understand what Cortzar tried to express to


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Collazos (and elsewhere) about the politics of his writing, about what hetried to affirm in his writing. Cortzars time and place and his own expe-riences did not furnish him with a political vocabulary of sufficient sub-tlety. But he also was not satisfied, as many other writers of his generationwould be, with simply turning his back on the situations that this vocabu-lary sought to understand and transform. So often in this period, Cortzarseems (especially to the aficionados of his rich, dynamic prose and of thecomplex ambiguities of the thought deposited there) like a clumsy, lum-bering-if-well-meaning, cloddish childor worse, like an adolescent pup-pet stridently channeling the extremist voices of his time. But I suspectthat Cortzar sensed, somewhat inarticulately, that the socialist society hecommitted himself to was exactly what C. L. R. James described. Maybethe difficulty of situating his life and writing in political terms stems, thus,from the untimeliness of his understanding relative to the available posi-tions and vocabularies of his situation. (James, too, for that matter, wasdeemed eccentric by the Left his entire life). If you doubt that Cortzarsvision of socialist society meshes with what James describes, then con-sider, as you read and reread his fiction, the ways in which the values putforth in Jamess vision come through and suffuse Cortzars inventedworld. This world includes, of course, many kinds of processes, manykinds of characters, many attitudes. But I believe one can see that, as awriter, he almost invariably affirms autonomy, experimentation, and self-realization, creativity (James 1958), and rejects (sometimes by satirizingand sometimes by dramatizing the violence, or sadness, or futility of ) ego-tism, competition, authority, and conformity to external powers.

Cortzar turned up the heat on that pot of simmering water by practic-ing and encouraging others to practice invention that is born, as the fabu-lous animals were born, from the faculty of creating new relations betweenelements that are dissociated in daily life (Cortzar 1977, 55). Thus,Cortzar describes the task of the revolutionary writer in relation to his orher reality in a way very similar to C. L. R. James. Both believed that task tobe extending the socialist society by forging connections (in language andvia other media) between otherwise isolated instances. Cortzars term forthis revolutionary rearrangement of the elements of the given, here and in


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many other places, was invention. In two other little texts on the subjectBroken Doll and Glass with RoseCortzar describes this idea of rev-olutionary invention as the genesis of 62: A Model Kit, the very novel thatCollazos and other politically oriented critics lamented as an escapist, for-malist turning point in Cortzars work (Cortzar 1986a, 1986b).

Cortzars political positionI mean the public stances he took on thepolitical issues of his timewere always rooted in a basic affirmation ofthis sort. He wrote in 1967 to Roberto Fernndez Retamar, cultural emi-nence of the revolutionary government in Cuba, that the triumph of theCuban Revolution in 1959 and its first few years in power were to him anincarnation of the cause of man as I had finally come to understand it andyearn for it . . . based on the essential facts of human existence, on the fun-damental ethosthe simple yet inconceivably difficult principle thathumanity will begin to be worthy of its name on the day in which theexploitation of man by man comes to an end (Cortzar 1989, 78).Elsewhere in the letter, Cortzar made clear that he was affirming thesevalues not as a Latin American, nor as an intellectual, nor even as aMarxist. He accepted this political stance as the only one that was conso-nant, given the present, with a deeper vision of the world and of thehuman beings place in it, and in turn this deeper vision was the one thatalso drove Cortzar to live his personal life as he lived it, to write his wordsdown as he wrote them. This is not to make of Cortzar some implausibleideal of perfect integrity. To be humanparticularly to be a human beingas Cortzar wasmeans to be in such sensitive contact with the worldthat I know that change, on one scale or another, is constant andinevitable. It is to know, consequently, that my vision can only ever be par-tial, and always in relation to this or that contingent, local situation oreventand this, of course, would entail change and growth, contradictionand revision. I am holding only that his political positions were more con-sistent than not with the underlying way of seeing and being in the worldthat shaped his writing, and that these still have something useful to sayto us today.

Cortzar pushed the work of imagination to the limit, and found that itspaths do not lead away from the worldfrom the life of the world and the


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people in itbut directly to the heart of the world, to a heart of the worldstill throbbing beneath the crust of party banners and platforms. He couldsay, and have earned the assertion in an honest engagement with his manyand varied impulses, In the most gratuitous thing I might write, there willalways appear a will to make contact with the historical present of man, toshare in his long march toward excellence as a collectivity and as human-ity (Cortzar 1989, 83).

I I I

This is the poem Slaba viva, or Living Syllable(Cortzar 1969):

Qu vachach, est ah aunque no lo quieran,

est en la noche, est en la leche,

en cada coche y cada bache y cada boche

est, le largarn los perros y lo mismo estar

aunque lo acechen, lo buscarn a troche y moche

y l estar con el que luche y el que espiche

en todo el que se agrande y se repeche

l estar, me cachendi. (11)

I do not know how to translate this poem because it is literally about thesound che that appears in a number of words that might otherwise not befound together in the same piece of language: night (noche), milk (leche),car (coche), pothole (bache), brawl (boche), hunt (acechen), pell-mell (atroche y moche), fights (luche), speechifies (espiche), leans (repeche), god-damn it (me cachendi). All these words, in Spanish, have the syllable che inthem. Cortzar tells us that this syllable is everywhere, even if you do notwant it; even if you try to hunt it down, it will be there, in all these words.Che is also a kind of filler phrase common to Argentine Spanishso com-mon, in fact, that Argentines are sometimes known as ches. Now Argentineshave a famously vexed relationship with other Latin Americans, who feel,perhaps rightly, that Argentines consider themselves superior, moreEuropean than other Latin Americans. Maybe this poem is a little joke,


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by an Argentine, that says to other Spanish speakers: no matter how muchyou would like to get rid of us, we will be everywhere.

Maybe it is also just nonsense, or, in the specialized vocabulary of liter-ary studies, pure formalism: not about anything other than the language,the sound of the words themselves. Words usually work like paths to getyou somewhere. Maybe to an intended idea, or an object in the world, or toan understanding with another person. You might consider the sensualqualities of the path only insofar as these help you get somewhere else, orkeep you from getting somewhere elsewherever you think you want togo. With this little poem, Cortzar offers you an opportunity to notice thesensual qualities of the path for their own sake, for the sake of the pleasureor irritation they provoke when they pop up in relief alongside and againstthe ordinary meanings of words. Maybe, then, it is a living syllable (slabaviva) because it appears to have a life of its own, dancing in and out of thewords we discover. And it is also a living syllable because it is free notonly to participate in the conveying of meaning but also to exist for its ownsake, for the sake of the sound that it is and the sensate experience it deliv-ers to you. In short, perhaps the syllable is living because, for it, work(meaning) and play (sound) are one.

It is a poem that suggests all this just by being about a syllable, che. Butby being about that particular syllable, the poem opens itself back out againinto the world of things and people that are named by words. For the sylla-ble che also names an individual, Che Guevara, the asthmatic Argentinephysician who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolutionbefore resigning his position in Fidels new government to take the revolu-tion elsewhere. Che was killed in Bolivia in October 1967. Cortzar wrotethis poem not long after that: Slaba vivaLiving Syllable. And now Iwill translate:

Whatcha gonna do about it, hes there even if you dont want him,

he is in the night, he is in the milk,

in every car and every pothole and every brawl

he is, you will send the dogs after him and all the same he will be

though you hunt him, you search for him haphazardly


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and he will be with whoever fights and makes speeches

and in everything that grows and leans

he will be, god damn it.

Cortzar certainly believed that Che Guevara fought and died to allow peo-ple to live, in just the sense that the syllable che was living. In paying hom-age to Guevaras effort, and in making che a living syllable, Cortzar alsoreveals the ways in which Che, the person, remains alive.

Now this poem stuns me because it contains and resolves perhaps thecentral tension that marked Cortzars life as a writer. People who studyCortzar, even people who loved him, seem to fall into one of two parties:the party of literature and the party of politics. The party of literature saysCortzar was a great writer until around 1968, roughly the time he wrotethis poem, because he respected the intrinsic power of literature and nevermobilized it for extrinsic purposes like a political cause. The party of poli-tics says Cortzar was a good, playful writer until around 1968, roughly thetime he wrote this poem, when he began to accept his responsibility as awriter and stopped goofing around to mobilize his skill for political pur-poses. I exaggerate only slightly. In this little poem, Cortzar, like the sylla-ble and person he writes about, eludes those who would hunt him downand dismiss him with labels and judgmentsand remember that eluding,however deadly serious a game it might have been for Che, always bears themarks of its origins in the Latin word (ludere) that means to play.

But Cortzars poem notwithstanding, Che is, in fact, dead. The LatinAmerican literary Boom that Cortzar helped in 1963 to inaugurate withHopscotch is dead. The utopian aspirations of the 1960s and early 1970s thatswept Latin America and much of the world, and with which Cortzar anda number of other Boom authors identified their works, are dead. AndJulio Cortzar himself, of course, is dead. So it is fair to wonder whether allthat I have elaborated in this essay is of purely historical interest, useful forunderstanding only the ways in which one writer tried to live, think, andwrite his time and place. It might seem reasonable to conclude first, that histime and place are simply too different from ours, so that second, his waysof thinking that time and place, and particularly his notion of invention,


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simply have no point of contact with our own time and place. I will con-clude here, however, by arguing that this is not the case for two principalreasons: first, because Cortzar, as we have seen, was never quite as at homein the vocabularies of his time and place as the collective, retrospectiveimage of him among literary critics would have; and second, because histime and place might just as easily be seen as the beginning of our time andplace, rather than the last gasp of a misguided utopianism.

This last point, at least, echoes the way that Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri read the last 35 or so years of history (Hardt and Negri 1994, 2000,2004). The usual rationale for seeing the upheavals of the late 1960s andearly 1970s as the end of something is that around 1973 and in the years fol-lowing, capital undertook a series of transformations in its own operationsand in relation to the state and to labor. Late capitalism, post-fordism,flexible accumulation are some of the terms that are given to this newconfiguration of capitalism in our time. And it is held, therefore, that arange of older vocabularies for thinking critically about capitalist societiesand cultures no longer engage this new realitywith its global flows of vir-tual money, its disarticulation and globalization of the labor process toavoid the demands of organized labor, and its weakening of the social func-tions of the state. But Hardt and Negri see things differently. They view thenew initiatives of capital and its states (whether nominally capitalist orcommunist) as a response dictated by the political forces unleashed duringthe 1960s and early 1970s.

This certainly helps us understand the history of Latin America fromCortzars time to the present. Most observers of recent Latin Americanhistory agree that the region has undergone major and probably irreversibletransformations over the past few decades (Williams 2002, 28). The coun-terrevolutionary dictatorships that took power in much of the region in the1970s cleared the social and political ground of the region for the imple-mentation of neoliberal reforms that occurred on the watch of the formallydemocratic regimes that followed in the 1980s and that remain in place inmost of the region. In the process, many of the social and economic respon-sibilities previously assumed by Latin American states have now been reas-signed to the private sector; that is, to the global market. This process, now


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three decades in the making, began, in the most immediate terms, as aresponse to the growing threat of revolutionary socialism, initiated in 1959with the victory of Fidel Castro in Cuba and spread in myriad formsthroughout the 1960s to Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia,Chile, Uruguay, and El Salvador, to name just the best-known instances.

In short, the period of widespread, utopian hopes of transformationwhether social or psychologicalthat marked the Latin American sixties,as they marked the sixties in so many parts of the world, provoked first, anastonishingly brutal backlash, and then, the endless horizon of free-market reforms under the auspices of globalization and what one observerhas termed low intensity democracy. And certainly, in the process, theperiod of the sixties and early seventies has come to appear as either a best-forgotten period of subversive danger (from the extreme right), a best-forgotten period of idealistic but misplaced energies (among liberals), or abest-forgotten period of inspiring but now irredeemably outdated politi-cal and social visions and strategies (among those on the left).

The critical transformation, for those who feel that neoliberal global-ization has rendered obsolete the political vocabularies and visions ofCortzars time, is that the current configuration of capital seems both soextensive and so intensive that it no longer permits the credible assumptionof any position outside of its operation. And, since so many of the politicalstrategies of the 1960s inherited and reproduced a belief in the necessity ofsuch a positionthe vanguard faction in politics or in culture, the rural orurban guerrilla cellthen they can no longer be of use to us today. Dreamsof a radically pure point outside of capitals operation, from which anequally radically pure and total transformation of capitalist society into autopian alternative might be leveraged simply do not hold up under theconditions of contemporary capitalism. In effect, what is argued is that theimmanent surface of contemporary capital has disabled the transcendentrevolutionary rhetoric and strategy of the sixties.

Stated in these terms, that argument seems reasonable enough.However, it rests on two assumptions that Negri, in my opinion, convinc-ingly debunks. The first assumption concerns what we might call, simply,the priority of capitalist initiative. In the argument above, capital sets the


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terms and the Left can only respond. Within what Harry Cleaver has calledworkerist Marxismof which C. L. R. James forms a major moment, asdo Negri and the Italian political movement of Autonomiathe develop-ment of capital is dictated always by the initiatives of labor or, as Negri hastermed it more recently, multitude (Cleaver 1977, 4366). The secondassumption entails a homogenization of the sixties as a period of exclu-sively transcendental political rhetoric of total revolution. It may well bethat this, in fact, is the retrospective, collective perception we have of thatperiod. But a closer look at the cultural and political initiatives of the periodmight reveal a more complex situation wherein, if indeed many politicaland cultural movements sought to leverage a total transformation ofWestern society from a privileged transcendent space immune to the effectsof that society, other political and cultural movements conceived of trans-formation as a more immanent (and sometimes transitory) process of cre-ating temporary autonomous zones out of the heterogeneous spaces andelements given in Western capitalist societiessomething along the linesof what we have seen in C. L. R. James and Cortzar.

With these alternative assumptions in mind, we might construct a dif-ferent version of the decades that have passed since the heyday ofCortzars interventions. For example, in Hardt and Negris version ofevents, to summarize briefly, capitalwhich he recasts as Empire inorder to better take into account the essentially super- and extra-nationalnature of its dynamicsresponded to the significant worldwide insurrec-tion of the 1960s and 1970s by diffusing itselfin a sense, by disassemblingitself as an obvious target for (and so eluding) a political strategy that placeditself outside the terrain of capitalist operation (Hardt and Negri 2000,26079; Negri 2004, 5972). But in doing so, capital (and for that matter,most of the Left) mistook the critical dimension of that insurrection. Whatreally threatened capital in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s was notthe oppositional purity of the militants nor the total and transcendentalscope of their aspirations for change, but precisely the opposite: the degreeto which these movements mixed heterogeneous elements together (theclassroom, the home, the factory, the bedroom, the rock concert, the film)and identified all of them as sites for the release of creative energies they


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saw as deadened by the effects of capitalsites whose transformative valuethey steadfastly refused to gauge by their potential to revolutionize all ofcapitalist space, for once and for all. Capital, then, was already a step behindthe multitude when it undertook its neoliberal reconfigurations. And inthis sense, for Hardt and Negri, the response that the 1960s and early 1970sprovoked in capital, and in its states and cultures, did little more thanunderline the reality already perceived by the militants of that time, and sofuel the fire and augment the sheer numbers of those feeling the weight ofcapitalist power upon their lives.

If Negri, for his part, is sensitive to this possibility and capable of pro-ducing best-selling descriptions of it, then that is probably because theItalian Autonomia movement of the 1960s and 1970s, of which he was anintegral part, already was living that time and place in that way (Virno andHardt 1996; Cleaver 1977, 5166; Negri 1984, 1930). The great strengthsand some on the Left would say weaknessesof Autonomia lay in the factthat it did not prioritize spaces of revolutionary activity, that it refused togrant transcendent power to any single vision of what the outcome of rev-olutionary activity should be, and that it rejected any model of revolution-ary activity that located transformative power anywhere other than in theself-valorizing activities of a heterogeneous group of individuals (house-wives, students, professors, factory workers, etc.) engaged in the process ofreconfiguring the relations that made up their daily livesfrom the bed-room to the classroom, from the demonstration to the factory floorso asto realize their creative potential (Agamben 1993; Negri 1999, 2004).

This, in turn, gives us a way to get a handle on Cortzars own vexedrelationship to the political vocabularies of his own time, and indeed to thecurious reception (or lack thereof ) that his writing has received of late (seeAlonso 1998, 13; Larsen 1998, 5758). For we can now see that many ofCortzars political interventions were made precisely to remind fellowtravelers first, to be sensitive to and appreciative of the vital, transformativevalue of mixing heterogeneous elements, and second, of where they wereceding power, even if only to their own idealsrevolution, socialism,engagementconverted into transcendent norms that wound up disabling


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the inventive, constituent powers they had been exercising. In his book onSpinoza, Negri elaborates the difference between Power (the centralized,mediating, transcendental force of commandpotestas) and power (thelocal, immediate, actual force of constitutionpotentia) (Negri 1991, xiii).In the later work Insurgencies, Negri offers a history of the antagonismbetween these two forces, now renamed constituted and constituentpower (Negri 1999, 30313). It would not be too much to say that Cortzarmobilized inventionboth the word and the activityalways in the serv-ice of constituent power (what I earlier called those-with-power-to).This is why Cortzar would at times precisely antagonize his comrades onthe left whenever he believed that they were losing what we might call theinternal battle with constituted power. Thus, in his own time, Cortzar wasreceived as either too rightist or too leftist, not because he was in the mid-dle, but rather because he was always moving with the current of con-stituent power. And thus also, with the homogenizing retrospective viewthat we have today of his times as containing a utopian, transcendental,revolutionary energy, we cast away the baby of a constituent power thatremains active and relevant today with the bathwater of the occasionaloverreaching of that power into constitution.

Hardt and Negri encourage us, in Empire and its companion volume,Multitude, as in all of Negris earlier, more systematic, and difficult writingsin political philosophy, to recognize that we have power, and indeed, thatnothing could be a more obvious sign of that power than the responses ofcapitalism and its states and cultures to our last great exercise of that power.All of the concepts and practices of Autonomia (for Negri might best beseen simply as the participant in Autonomia who, for various reasons, hasgained a voice in the United States) suggest that what was most significantfor our time in the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s was the emphasison revolutionary activity as the immanent, creative reconfiguration of therelations making up the fabric of our lives and our society in such a way aswould free up the true potency of the human subject. It is in this sense thatI began by suggesting that our possible truth, like Cortzars, must be inven-tion. And it is in this sense that I believe further understanding invention


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and its possible relevance to our time could supply us with yet another crit-ical tool with which to thinkand inventanother possible present fromamong the elements of the one we have.

In this light, Cortzars Slaba viva, the poem that so playfully ani-mated Che, brings to mind a name, at once more contemporary and mucholder than Ches: multitude, Negris more recent termdrawn, however,from Spinozafor the agent of constituent power. Multitude, in this sense,need not designate any actual population. Rather, it is the name that pointsto and connects together any manifestation of the affirmative, constitutiveforce that strains or even blows through the forces that would command,would name, would narrow our being to any particular facet or function.Che, or the multitude, works whenever we assert that we are more than anyname Power would impose upon us, more than any categorized social func-tion it would command us to fulfill. In this sense, we constitute Che, we con-stitute the multitude wherever and whenever we insist we are morethan . . .: more than foreign, more than exiles, more than socialist, morethan citizens, more than intellectuals, more than artists, more than organ-isms mining coal for profit, more than hungry, more than productive, morethan critical, more than rich, more than resisting, more than human.

IN O T E S

Thanks to Ana Ros, Gareth Williams, and Cristina Moreiras for useful comments on drafts ofthis essay.

1. See Levinson (2004) and Moreiras (1998) for readings of Cortzars short stories,House Taken Over and Apocalypse in Solentiname, respectively, that show a sim-ilar dynamic at work there.

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Borges, Jorge Luis. 1974. El escritor argentino y la tradicin. In Obras completas. Madrid: Emec.Cleaver, Harry. 1977. Reading Capital Politically. Austin: University of Texas Press.Cortzar, Julio. 1966. Hopscotch. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon.. 1968. The Distances. In Blow-Up and Other Stories. New York: Collier.. 1969. Slaba viva. In Ultimo Round. Mxico: Siglo Veintiuno.. 1977. Literatura en la revolucin y revolucin en la literatura: Algunos malentendidos

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On Cortazar

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