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Abstract
Julio Cortázar partnered with visual artists on projects throughout his entire career. This diverse list of works includes graphic novels, illustrated poetry books, mixed media books, or as he put it, “libros almanaque,” and photobooks. Buenos Aires Buenos Aires (1968), the first of two collaborations he had with Sara Facio and Alicia D’Amico, two Argentine photographers, has received relatively little critical attention. In this essay I argue that the relationship between Sara Facio and Alicia D’Amico’s images, Cortázar’s text, and their subject, Buenos Aires, reveals a complex dialectic at play in its attempt to represent a place that is simultaneously familiar and foreign.
Notes
1 Most critics who have written about this book include a comma in the title when referring to it. In this article I will refer to it without the comma, as it is written on its cover and title page.
2 Cortázar’s contribution to another photo/text-collaboration titled Alto el Perú (Citation1984) demonstrates the meta-photographic relationship even more through a book-long conversation between him and the German photographer Manja Offerhaus regarding the relationship between textual and visual languages.
3 In this article, I will use the term “ekphrasis” and its derivatives in the sense of “the verbal representation of visual representation” as defined by Mitchell (151-52).
4 For the sake of style, the spectator who is also the reader will be referred to as the spectator/reader.
5 It should be noted that none of the photographs in Buenos Aires Buenos Aires have captions.
6 Though images cover the endpapers of the book, this photograph is the first displayed on a page after the flyleaf.
7 Schwartz’s “Cortázar Under Exposure” delves deeply into the flaneur perspective in his several image/text collaborations (119).
8 Diego Tomasi includes “La Infancia” and “Los amantes” in the list of Cortázar’s poems written before 1951 but I could not confirm this information (156). “Los amantes” also appears in Último round, which was published shortly after Buenos Aires Buenos Aires in Citation1969 (103).
“La Ciudad” was originally published in Cuadernos del viento, número 17 en México, 1961 (Aquilanti and Barea 59). It also appears as the second part of the poem “Cantos argentinos” from his 1949 novel Divertimento— posthumously published in Citation1986 (90).
“Viento de Esquina” and “Empleados nacionales, hurra!”, though part of the “Razones de cólera” section of poetry written in 1950 and included in Salvo el crepúsculo from Citation1984 (319, 321), appear to be published for the first time in Buenos Aires Buenos Aires (313-14). Initially, “Razones de cólera” appears in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967) but this early version excludes both “Viento” and “Empleados” (319, 321). In turn, the Salvo el crepúsculo version of “Razones” excludes the poem “Milonga,” which also appears in both La vuelta and Buenos Aires Buenos Aires.
9 The two stanzas from “Fauna y flora del río,” as will be discussed, are the exception.
10 The version that reads “monedas” is published in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos and El examen, but the “barajas” variation is the version included in Salvo el crepúsculo.
11 The insert of Cortázar’s text translated into French and English included in Buenos Aires Buenos Aires also includes an index of the majority of the photographs. To describe this image referenced here, the index indicates that the perspective is along Santa Fe avenue looking toward Callao avenue. The landmarks in the photo reveal that it is a westward perspective.
12 At least two other photographs in the book demonstrate this veiling characteristic (42-43, 157).
13 My reference to the index’s incompleteness is based on the fact that it does not provide information about every photograph. Alicia D’Amico took the photograph of the man drinking mate, but, for example, the index does not credit her. Only from other publications of her work does it become clear that she took the image (though the same publication, Fotografía argentina: Colección Rabobank, dates the photo incorrectly as from 1972) (59).
14 The main character in “Las babas del diablo” secretly photographs a scene and, after developing the film, obsesses over his position as spectator and the truth of an image (the picture in question depicts a woman speaking to a teenaged boy as an older man observes them from his car). In “Apocalipsis de Solentiname” the main character and narrator—Cortázar himself—takes photos of beautiful yet primitive paintings made by members of a marginalized community. Later, when viewing the images projected on his wall, the narrator is horrified to see violent scenes in place of the paintings. When his lover views the same pictures, however, she only sees the paintings, calling into question the objectivity and ethics of the spectator.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mac J. Wilson
Mac J. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he teaches classes in Spanish American literature and culture. His scholarly work involves ecocritical studies of twentieth-century poetry and visual culture from the Southern Cone region of South America.