28 pages • 56 minutes read
Julio CortázarAxolotl
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952A 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
Julio Cortázar, born to Argentine parents in Belgium in 1914, was a novelist, poet, and playwright. Throughout his childhood, Cortázar relocated with his family across Europe due to World War I. The Cortázars eventually settled in Buenos Aires in 1919. Cortázar suffered from childhood sicknesses that often left him bedridden. He spent much of his time reading, and it was during this period of his life that he developed an affection for science fiction and fantasy—genres that would impact much of his writing.
Fueled by his frustration with Juan Perón’s presidency in Argentina and the economic uncertainties that came of Perón’s administration, Cortázar relocated to Paris in 1951. Paris, and the experience of living as an immigrant, both feature heavily in Cortázar’s fiction. His stories often center estrangement, the loss of identity, and the desire for connection as central themes. Despite his residency in France, Cortázar remained invested in Latin American politics. He was engaged with the social upheavals in Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile throughout the middle of the 20th century.
Cortázar penned a diverse body of work, including short fiction collections, four novels, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. He also translated English language work by Daniel Defoe, Edgar Allan Poe, and others into Spanish. The best-known adaptation of Cortázar’s fiction is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, which is a filmic take on the short story “Las babas del diablo.” As a key figure of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar has influenced a broad spectrum of contemporary writers.
Though far from autobiography, the interest “Axolotl” shows in The Dissolution of Identity and The Desire to Understand the Other mirror Cortázar’s experiences of immigration and estrangement. Born in Europe, he spent his formative years in Argentina and wrote exclusively in Spanish, only to return to France due to his sharp disagreements with the Argentinian regime. Despite being a French resident for the final 30 years of his life, Cortázar would become one of the foundational writers of the Latin American Boom—a movement that helped define Latin American literary identity in the eyes of the Anglophone world. Cortázar’s uneasy experiences of navigating transnational identities—particularly across the colonizer/colonized divide—inform the story’s investigation of the nature of selfhood, the loss of self, and the possibility of transformation.
Literary Context: Latin American Boom (“Boom latinoamericano”)
Cortázar was a prominent figure in the Latin American Boom (“Boom latinoamericano”), a literary movement in the 1960s and 1970s in which the work of young Latin American writers found new audiences in Europe and other English-speaking parts of the world. Cortázar’s most famous novel, Rayuela (“Hopscotch”), is often credited as being one of the foundational novels of this movement. Other prominent writers of the Latin American Boom include Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz.
The novels of the Latin American Boom are characterized by their engagement with the political instability of their regions; often, these novels use historical fiction as a method of commenting on the political climate their authors lived in. Another hallmark of Boom novels are their authors’ experimental and transgressive approaches to craft. As seen in “Axolotl,” the writing of the Latin American Boom often uses unusual approaches to perspective, point of view, and voice. Many of these narratives are nonlinear or incorporate unconventional chronologies. The movement is also strongly associated with magical realism, a mythic mode of writing that blurs the boundaries between the real and the unreal. Prominent examples of magical realism include Gabriel García Márquez’s multigenerational epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, set in the mythic town of Macondo, and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, in which a man visits a town inhabited by ghosts. Many of Cortázar’s most famous short stories—such as “La casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”), “Cefalea,” (“Headache”), and “La noche boca arriba” (“The Night Face Up”)—exist in the liminal spaces between fact and fantasy.
