From the Teoría del túnel to the Último round: Notes for a Poetics of Cortázar Último round

Abstract

In the Julio Cortazar's work, poetry and prose are imbricated and, from his arrival in Paris, Julio Cortázar begins a process of creative inter-penetration with the city that makes the poetic spirit of Paris is reflected in the works of Cortázar, at the same time that he writes from Paris from a poetic viewpoint, it is also a personal process, since the phases that divide them correspond with the life studies of Cortázar. All of this has been gathered in the varied synthesis of Último round, but, in order to understand this, first we should analyze the poetic theory of Cortázar and the bases of his narrative in Teoría del túnel (compilation of essays written in 1947) and in “Para una poética” from 1954, an other Cortázar's texts linked with Último round, in which Cortázar talks about intrinsic writing and about the common axial point between poetry and narrative that defines his writing. So we will see the interweaving that exists between narrative and poetry, the genesis of the concept of the gap and the proposal of the poet in the face of the nineteenth-century narrator, the seed of a literary revolution that Cortázar already anticipated and whose preface he observed in the works of authors such as Joyce and that will crystallize in Último round.