Notes for a Poetics of Writing in Julio Cortázar: Notions on His Existential Poetics

Abstract

This article examines Julio Cortázar’s poetics of writing through what the author defines as an existential poetics, understood as a sustained attempt to dialectically integrate life, language, literature, art, and philosophy. Focusing on key theoretical and narrative texts—such as Theory of the Tunnel, Hopscotch, The Winners, short story essays, and interviews—the study shows how Cortázar conceives writing as an act of openness that challenges traditional genre boundaries between short story, novel, poetry, and theater. Through concepts such as openness, play, analogy, image, anti-poetics, and anti-novel, the article argues that Cortázar’s narrative project aims at an anthropophany, that is, the revelation of the human being through language. The author highlights the ludic yet deeply serious nature of writing in Cortázar, as well as his rejection of purely intellectual or rhetorical literature in favor of a narrative capable of condensing lived experience. The fragmentary and combinatorial structure of Hopscotch is analyzed as the culmination of this poetics, where the reader becomes an active accomplice. The article concludes that Cortázar’s work represents an ethical and aesthetic quest to transform literature into a space of existential encounter among author, reader, and world.