Introduction to Julio Cortázar, The Situation of the Latin American Intellectual

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Notes

1 The letter is dated May 1967 in Vaucluse; it was published later that year in both the Cuban Casa de las Américas and the Argentinean Primera Plana. Cortázar reproduced the letter as the final entry in his 1969 volume Último Round, under the title ‘Acerca de la situación del intelectual latinoamericano’ [‘On the Situation of the Latin American Intellectual’].

2 Arguedas' initial attack on Cortázar, incorporated into this first diary, was previously published in the Peruvian journal Amaru in mid-1968.Cortázar responded with an article in Life en Español in early 1969, which in turn prompted a final response by Arguedas in Lima's El Comercio in June of the same year. As the variety of these sites of publication suggests, what was also at stake in this debate was the relation of the nation-state to its constituent parts and to the larger continental arena, not to mention to international politics, economics, and aesthetics.

3 This polemic might seem a rehearsal of the Paris-peripheries debate which has been resuscitated in recent years by the publication of Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters (1999; English trans. 2004). In this light, a little-known article by Arguedas entitled ‘París y la patria’ [Paris and the Fatherland], published in El Comercio on December 7, 1958, is surprisingly illuminating, forming a clear contrast with his negative portrayal of New York at the opening of Los zorros; Arguedas here registers his wonder on encountering unexpected bounties of nature and human diversity in the French capital, which prompts the startling realization that he has never – except in his own village – felt more at home.

4 A bias toward Arguedas' perspective is also evident in the few sustained analyses of the polemic, such as Moraña or Ostria González.