Los espectros de los desaparecidos: pasajes entre compromiso político y visión literaria en los últimos cuentos de Cortázar

The uneasy relationship between literary conception and political commitment
is a recurrent subject of meditation in Julio Cortázar’s writings and
amongst his critics. The debate revolves around two main considerations: firstly, to what extent and how (if so) Cortázar managed to reconcile his aesthetic ideas with his ethical views; secondly, whether this reconciliation attempt meant a paradigm change in his poetics or not. These deliberations reached a culmination point and appeared in its most illuminating form in Cortázar’s last three short story compilations; particularly in those stories where the need for political and ethical engagement articulates with the fantastic, one of the predominant narrative modes in his poetics. This article examines four of these short stories as prime examples of Cortázar’s attempt to reconcile the individual metaphysical search typical of his early writings with his later political pledges. The hypothesis is that these stories actually represent an excellent instance of how he was able to achieve a harmonic symbiosis between his poetics and his politics in the last years of his life.