Julio Cortázar’s 62 / Modelo para armar: a literature outside of the margins

Franco Harnache, Andres [UCL]

Julio Cortázar’s practice as a photographer helped him develop the acclaimed short story Las babas del diablo [Blow up] and explore the photo-literature genre stemming from the Surrealist movement, particularly in the works Último round [Last Round] (1969) and Prosa del observatorio [From the Observatory] (1972). Despite its significance, the role of Cortázar’s photographs in his works and creative process has not been sufficiently examined. This paper will focus on Cortázar’s article and photo series La muñeca rota [The Broken doll] (1969), and the novel 62 / Modelo para armar [62: A Model Kit] (1968). Through the analysis of the additional material found in Cortázar’s photographic archive at the Centro Gallego de las Artes de la Imagen in A Coruña (CGAI), and through applying Vilém Flusser’s concept of the photographic gesture (1984; 1993), I propose that 62 / Modelo para armar is an intermedial novel that should be read together with the pictures of La muñeca rota. Although this photographic series could be simply interpreted as a paratextual element in the creative process of the novel, its aesthetic scope, composition and technical qualities, in dialog with the surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Jacques-André Boiffard, as well as Cortázar’s collaboration with the artist Julio Silva, make it an autonomous work that, combined with the novel, approaches what Nachtergael identifies as neo-literature (2017; 2020), a literature pushing outside the margins of the book. This case study proposes an intermedial reinterpretation of one of Cortázar’s major works, now mostly forgotten, as it puts forward the idea of Cortázar, not only as an influential Latin-American writer, but also as a Latin-American photographer and artist in tension with both American and European photographic and literary traditions.