Cortázar and Music by Nicholas Roberts

Abstract

MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to later free experiments. e Introduction looks at Cortázar’s theories on music, especially in his early prose criticism (such as ‘Elogio del jazz’ and ‘Soledad de la música’), and how ideas around language, textuality, and repeatability are drawn from music to inform his literary practice. Cortázar was a frank and honest essayist, and a very generous epistolarian, but his philosophical ideas have aged less well than his fiction. Today a marriage between surrealism and existentialism may lack the urgency it had for the fledgling writer in the s; but the stories that emerge from the same intellectual milieu retain their power to move and perplex. is is a way of saying that the opening pages are something of a slog, and this is not entirely Roberts’s fault—the author himself concludes that Cortázar’s fiction is a far better source than his meta-textual elucubrations (p. ). Subsequent analytical chapters are much more engaging. Despite his lifelong love of jazz, classical music also played an important role in Cortázar’s thinking and fiction. is is explored in the first chapter, with reference to the late story ‘Clone’, which revolves around performances of madrigals composed by Carlo Gesualdo. e second chapter looks at Cortázar’s more explicitly political writing—for many critics his least satisfying work—and the role played by Chopin, for example, in ‘Alguien anda por ahí’, read in the light of an earlier attempt at (Cuban) revolutionary fiction, the Che Guevara-themed and Mozart-scored ‘Reunión’. Chapter  turns to tango, and Cortázar’s ambivalent feelings towards a music at once deeply conservative in its values and profoundly linked to nostalgia towards the homeland he had le in the s but which remained the ‘here’ of his writing  Reviews (and, until dictatorial intervention prohibited, where he published his work). In this and other chapters, Roberts draws productively on archival material, including the Cortázar manuscripts held in the Benson Collection, Austin. e final three chapters all focus on jazz. is weighting is justified by the profound impression, from an early age, that the music of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker had on Cortázar, alongside its repeated appearances in some of his best fiction—the novel Rayuela, or the pivotal short story ‘El perseguidor’, itself a ciphered version of Charlie Parker’s darkest days. Roberts argues, in short, that Cortázar’s exploration of improvisation, freedom , and translation in jazz and writing about jazz points to a view of the genre as ‘ultimately characterised by and as a self-perpetuating, relentless tension’ (p. , emphasis original). Roberts is not blind to the more problematic aspects of Cortázar’s work— the rather dated gender politics and some questionable depictions of the black musicians whose music is, nevertheless, central to his conception of ‘swing’, that undefinable characteristic of the sounds he adored. But in contrast to, say, Neil Larsen, in his...