Thesis Prospectus: Carpe Diem! Seizing the Fantastic through Julio Cortázar

In the dissertation I will elaborate further on Infinite Jest and the other ways that I connect it to fantastic literature. Since there is not much room in this prospectus, I focus only on the one passage mentioned in the paragraph above.




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Jaime R. Brenes Reyes
Carpe Diem! Seizing the Fantastic through Julio Cortázar
Thesis Prospectus
There is no cure for the fantastic. Once trapped in it, the mind is seized and, normally, it attempts to fathom fictions that would help discharge its anxiety. As Julio Cortázar writes in the first chapter of Rayuela (chapter 73), "Nuestra verdad posible tiene que ser invención, es decir escritura, literatura, pintura, escultura, agricultura, piscicultura, todas las turas de este mundo" / "Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world" (388-9/384). The fantastic, I argue, may be a 'tura,' an invention to ground itself in the everyday and remain, at the same time, on the borders of reality. I will attempt to explore fantastic literature from the perspective of Cortázar, whom I regard not only as a prominent writer of the genre but also as a significant literary theorist. At the same time, I aim to elaborate the main theory of the fantastic put forward by Tzvetan Todorov, for whom there exist very specific lines between literary genres while also leaving a point of escape near that bordering of language that literature has to put pushing in order to survive. In addition, I will present the work by critics of Todorov, such as Stanislaw Lem, Susana Reisz, and David Roas, among others, in order to counter the reductiveness of his structuralist approach, and provide room for perspectives that focus rather on the indefinability of the fantastic. My thesis will add to the scholarship of the fantastic by supplementing those theories and by incorporating Cortázar's views to Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of becoming: fantastic literature as texts that speak by themselves and, in the process, initiate an effect on both reader and writer that they cannot seize. The fantastic, I argue, takes possession of the mind by propagating itself through linguistic and non-linguistic avenues that open up new potentialities for both language and reality.
Todorov's take on the fantastic, as pointed out by Lem, is scientific in that it delimits via rational arguments what is to be regarded as the fantastic. Hence, any theory or thesis that wants to enter and explore fantastic literature needs to take Todorov into account. While this thesis will argue against a merely rational explanation of the fantastic, in order to revise the theories of the fantastic, I will propose what I call the "Cortázar syndrome": writing as a form of possession and exorcism. Cortázar describes an urge to write, an anxious feeling to translate "productos neuróticos, pesadillas o alucinaciones" / "neurosis, nightmares and hallucinations" into words "como si el autor hubiera querido desprenderse lo antes posible y de la manera más absoluta de su criatura, exorcizándola en la única forma en la que era dado hacerlo: escribiéndola"/ "as if the author had wanted to get rid, as quickly and utterly as possible, of his creature harboured within him, exorcising it the only way he could: by writing it" ("Del cuento" 37 / "On the Short Story" 35). By using and incorporating elements from structuralism and scientism, my goal is to redefine and renegotiate the limits established by those schools of thought into a type of literature that may have the unique quality of transcending itself, and thus escaping, by its own nature, from being seized. In this case, Cortázar is the one narrating, with what could be deemed symptoms, how he gets to write (or be written through), and the literary theorist as the expert that rationalizes the fantastic. I aim, however, for something different: for an understanding of the fantastic text as a catalyst for becoming, and the syndrome as part of the force that literature may have to alter the limits of the real.
In order to prove my thesis and explore fantastic literature through the eyes and feelings of Cortázar, I have selected three other writers: Felisberto Hernández, Italo Calvino, and David Foster Wallace, who, as I will argue, there is a close link of influence between them and Cortázar. 'The fantastic that seizes' is present in these four writers' texts, which abound in myriads of sensation, arousing playfulness and complex, yet certain fluidity. Each of these identified qualities will, in turn, be discussed in comparison with becoming (Deleuze), deconstruction and dialogism (Paul de Man), and mysticism (Michel de Certeau). Thus, the seizing effect of the fantastic that Cortázar senses will be put to work toward a philosophy of literature and language that challenges the limits of what is understood as 'real.'
Whereas the 'real' and the 'fantastic' have been confronted in literary theory as opposites, I intend to demonstrate the much more intricate relationships between these two concepts. The fantastic, I will argue, supplements reality in the sense of adding and expanding its borders. Cortázar is exemplary in this regard of placing literature on the verges of the abyss, a point at which the writer of fantastic literature and a critic such as Todorov intersect – literature needs to push itself until it nears suicide in order to survive. As Todorov writes: "Literature can become possible only insofar as it makes itself impossible. Either what we say is actually here, in which case there is no room for literature; or else there is room for literature, in which case there is no longer anything to say" (175). Multiple questions emerge surrounding the epistemology and ontology of (fantastic) literature: What does it mean to write? How do these processes, commonly called writing and reading, engage their agents to the point of being caught by their texts? Where does the urge, or the anxiety to write and read come from? In what ways do they, once fathomed, enable us to capture the "essence" of the fantastic? And, finally, which are the ways of avoiding the contagion that Cortázar finds in this literary genre, and whether avoidance is an option?
By "essence" of the fantastic, I mean an understanding of fantastic literature that focuses on the effect that it might exert on writer and reader. Using a Deleuzian approach, the fantastic text is a becoming, a rhizome that links a state of being that apprehends and takes hold of the existing realms of reality in order to go further beyond. Together with Félix Guattari, Deleuze conceives of the rhizome as a form of propagation in their A Thousand Plateaus; that is, as "lines [that] always tie back to one another." Even if broken, a rhizome "will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines" (9). Deleuze and Guattari compare it to "the geography" of ants, as they form an animal rhizome that continues to reappear. Later on in the book, which they divide into plateaus – of which a rhizome is made up – Deleuze and Guattari add that a line of becoming does not connect points, but rather "passes between points" through the middle with "neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination" (292). There are multiple points of similarity between Cortázar's understanding of the fantastic and the rhizome in order to think of the fantastic as a line of becoming. For instance, the contagion that Cortázar perceives is out of his control and yet makes him write; that is, it is a writing process that has neither a beginning nor an end as it propagates itself into the mind of the writer and from there to the reader's. The text, I will argue, stands by itself, as a plateau, a space in which lines of flight collide and connect taking the subject into a de-subjectified area that escapes the confines of the everyday reality. The anxiety, I argue, surges from the unrecognizability of such space – the choice is to enter the fantastic, as Cortázar does, with caution: by writing it as if exorcising it and at the same time opening the doors for it to enable its force into literature and conceptions of the real. The fantastic seizes, but it also requires, as Todorov points out, to make itself impossible, and, I add, to offer the rhizomes and lines of becoming to those ready to flow and play with it.
It follows that the fantastic requires a writer that knows how to enter that plateau of literature. In my dissertation I will expand on why the four writers I have selected present, in their texts, the playfulness and fluidity necessary for the fantastic to appear. In this prospectus, I will concentrate on the aspect of de-subjectification; that is, the ability for the writers to write themselves off – which explains why it is difficult to reclaim property of any of these literary creations. Beginning with Cortázar, Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) is an example of ludic literature where, of course, the homo ludens plays a central role in altering language and forms of knowledge. The structure of the novel itself is an invitation to the reader to jump back and forth between chapters. As to whether the chapters connect between each other is a question that remains open and I will argue that rather than a novel, Rayuela is a collection of short stories. It is important to underline the relevance of the short story for this thesis as the fantastic mostly operates in an economy of brevity through which it makes the most impact. Similarly, Felisberto at times writes short fiction and also brief novellas that surround themselves with a narrative that seeks to animate and motivate memories and sensations. Calvino, who claims to have been influenced by Felisberto, makes room for science in his fantastic pieces in a way that defies the apparent divide between the fantastic and the empirical. All of these elements come together in Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), a long novel at first sight, yet divided into multiple stories and structures that resemble of the back and forth Rayuela, while at the same time projecting a possible societal future through its lines of flight.
These, however, are no escapes from reality. These writers provide expansions of the reality of everyday life. De Certeau's work on historicism, discourse and mysticism will contribute to the discussion about the space that fantastic literature offers for such a concept to exist and to come into effect. Heterology is a term that de Certeau puts much attention into as it names both a space and a discourse of the Other. It must be pointed out that, for de Certeau, heterology does not necessarily have positive connotations as it can be appropriated and used against those who are regarded as the Other. For him, the proper space for the voice of the Other to be uttered comes when the 'I' itself has been silenced and deprived of its authority. As he elaborates in his essay "Mystic Speech," for the 'I' to speak the language of the Other, "a subtle gradation" is required, "far removed from the common faith that has been subjugated by authority, in other words, by a 'memory' which articulates the other of the past" (200). In connection with the conceptualization of the fantastic that I propose, silenced 'I' resonates in the sense that writers such as Cortázar follow a philosophy of literature in which the writer is not necessarily an 'author'; that is to say, an authority upon the text. The difference between writer and author will occupy a relevant part of my argument of the seizing – it is as if the writer becomes the channel through which the text comes into fruition and an aperture to other perspectives of reality, even beyond the scope of the person with the pen, are brought about.
For the fantastic that I explore, the writer writes itself off in the process of writing. There is a gray zone for that heterology to take place, an area in which it is hard to discern who is writing. In the past, the fantastic has incorporated such indefinability by narration in the third person; however, the writers I select go beyond by creating more complicated narratives of de-subjectification. For instance, Cortázar's short story "Las babas del diablo" ("Blow-Up"), from his collection Las armas secretas (The Secret Weapons, 1964), begins: "Nunca se sabrá cómo hay que contar esto, si en primera persona o en segunda, usando la tercera del plural o inventando continuamente formas que no servirán de nada" / "It'll never be known how this is to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing" (77/78). Language, in its normative and conjugative form, becomes useless for the 'narrator', Michel, a photographer and translator living in Paris, who witnesses a bizarre series of events in a park, and who does not know how to put his observations into words. At many points during the story, Michel is unsure about who is narrating. The whole plot is surrounded by fogginess, including the description of the woman he saw in the park: "tú la mujer rubia eran las nubes que siguen corriendo delante de mis tus sus nuestros vuestros rostros. Qué diablos" / "you the blond woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell" (77/78). Language as representation of events and subjects is broken in this story and concurs with what Deleuze and Guattari would call a 'plane of immanence', those areas that open up the subject to a becoming that "neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification" (Plateaus 237). The becoming and the fantastic intersect at that point in which the writer does not seek to provide the text with a sense of oneself; instead, the immanence of the text is of a fluidity that problematizes the contacts with what is normally known and assumed. It is precisely through language that these writers are able to provide those fields of becoming.
Language, therefore, will occupy a central component of my dissertation. The question will be more centred in what those techniques are for the writer of fantastic literature to use language in a way that breaks with resemblance, imitation, and identification – how to make language in a story seize oneself. In Cortázar's "Las babas del diablo" as well as his other stories, such as "Axolotl," "Continuidad de los parques" ("Continuity of Parks"), and "La noche boca arriba" ("The Night Face Up"), one notices the insistence on rupture in the concept of the 'self'. The subjects or protagonists of these stories go through experiences that dislocate their sense of subjectivity. Again, in resonance with Deleuze and Guattari, Cortázar's fantastic generates a multiplicity of selves within the one subject pronoun 'I'. In Deleuze and Guattari's words, "The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities" (Plateaus 249). However, for that multiplicity to erupt, the writer, I argue, intervenes (or allow themselves be intervened) with the fantastic touch: it is the writer who modifies language into their story and then the text can have a major impact. In other words, rupture requires aperture, and it is the writer, in this case, who foresees the seizing force of the fantastic: the writer becomes the door for the becoming of multiplicities.
In the model of fantastic literature that I propose, such intervention is fundamental in the writing process in order to incorporate the language necessary for the seizing effect. And in many cases the play with language is non-linguistic. Felisberto's oeuvre offers many examples that prove it. Felisberto, a musician himself, brings into the language of his stories and novellas a rhythm that many literary theorists have categorized as characteristic of his style of writing. Ana María Hernández, one of the main scholars of Felisberto, for example, points to the similarities between Felisberto's and Cortázar's philosophies of literature in the way they strive for sensations to have a place in their texts via counterpoint and palimpsest, thus creating musical and visual compositions through writing. In this prospectus, I take Felisberto's novella Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling (Around the Time of Clemente Colling, 1942) in relation to themes of sensation and memory that fantastic literature recovers through this de-subjectified and fluid style. Colling is a blind pianist, who gets to know the narrator of the story through a lifelong friendship. In the opening paragraphs, the narrator writes: "Los recuerdos vienen, pero no se quedan quietos … reaparecen sorpresivamente, como pidiendo significaciones nuevas, o haciendo nuevas y fugaces burlas, o intencionando todo de otra manera" / "The memories come, but they don't keep still … they reappear unexpectedly, as if to ask for new meanings, or to make new and fleeting jokes, or to inflect everything with a different purpose" (9/3-4). This is another text in which the narrator faces challenges in recovering, through language, what he experiences. The memories that survive of Colling, in his friend's mind, collide with each other and deny his control over them. The 'he' becomes a multiplicity, especially as most of these memories are sensorial in nature. Throughout the story, the narrator often finds himself conflicted when trying to explain and describe Colling: "Ni sabía – y hallaba placer en no saber – qué misterio habría en cada ser humano puesto en el mundo – en un ser humano como Colling, por ejemplo –; qué misterio me sorprendería primero, cómo sería yo después de haberlo sentido, o qué le pasaría a mi propio misterio" / "Nor did I know – and I found pleasure in not knowing – what mystery might dwell in every human being set down here on earth, a human being like Colling, for example. I didn't know what mystery would first surprise me, what I would be like after having experienced it, and what it would do to my own mystery" (24/26). It is through the questions about Colling that the narrator is able to enter what could be a mystery within his own self. The fact that Colling is blind is important in the story because the blindness presents another view of the world to the narrator. His memories do not include visual images, but aural, olfactory and tactile sensations, along with words that acquire synaesthesia-like meanings.
In Clemente Colling, Felisberto remarks "Pero no creo que solamente deba escribir lo que sé, sino también lo otro" / "But I don't believe I must write only what I know. I must also write the other things" (9/3). It is an affront, in other words, to both reader and writer as they enter this unknown realm. The mystery penetrates everything for Felisberto: from objects, to facts, to feelings that are then transformed into memories. The fantastic in Clement Colling is one of dissonance attempting to make sense of those memories while conscious that narrative might fail in capturing the whole composition. It is similar to Cortázar's "Axolotl" (from Final del juego / End of the Game, 1956) in the disarray of a narrative that transposes a man into an amphibian through the play of language. The first paragraph ends with "Ahora soy un axolotl" / "Now I am an axolotl" (161/161), creating movement between the recreation of memories and the narration of the present. As Lem puts it in his critique of Todorov, "The perfidy of modern creative writing lies just in making life – that is, semantic decisions – difficult for the reader" (233). If so, there ought to be agency in the question of becoming: not only is the writer providing the texts, but the narrator, who is presented to the reader, also has a hand in making Clement Colling's memories; or in the transformation of the man into an axolotl.
Agency in fantastic literature relates to a form of dialogism that trespasses simple conversations between two parties. Morelli, the writer in Rayuela, in chapter 79 proposes a model of literature in the form of clay with which to play; however, for the clay to be such the writers has to put from their own. Agency and dialogism come from both without having to come to an agreement – whether in semantic or epistemological terms – between writer and reader. As Morelli says, this is a literature that gives "una fachada, con puertas y ventanas detrás de las cuales se está operando un misterio que el lector cómplice deberá buscar (de ahí la complicidad) y quizá no encontrará (de ahí el copadecimiento). Lo que el autor de esa novela haya logrado para sí mismo, se repetirá (agigantándose, quizá, y eso sería maravilloso) en el lector cómplice" / "a façade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the cosuffering). What the author of this novel might have succeeded in for himself, will be repeated (becoming gigantic, perhaps, and that would be marvelous) in the reader-accomplice" (401-2/398). As to the question of whether this is Cortázar's perspective itself, becomes clear throughout the novel that he is aiming to be that writer, but it is more so with the reader-accomplice whom he brings into the novel, Horacio Oliveira, who asks, at the beginning of Rayuela for the cure from the 'turas' mentioned above. In chapter 1 continues the question to "¿Encontraría a la Maga?" / "Would I find La Maga?" (15/3) – agency disrupts individuality.
Cortázar wants the individual to face a multiplicity of voices when reading the fantastic. In Felisberto's Clemente Colling, the narrator, trying to make sense of memories, loses himself to the person he is remembering and takes the reader along the journey. The exploration of the fantastic requires the condition under which this complicity can occur; that is, the dialogism necessary to let the reader be free. The becoming cannot be forced, as is the case of the assumption of the one and only 'I'. For dialogism, de Man's take on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy is of utmost interest and relevance. For de Man, from his elaboration on the apparent dialogue in Nietzsche between Apollo and Dionysus, the text "seems to assert this without question: it acts by denying the oneness and the sameness of things … [it] deconstructs the authority of the principle of contradiction by showing that this principle is an act, but when it acts out this act, it fails to perform the deed to which the text owed its status as act" ("Action" 22). There is an inherent denial of affirmation and authority within the text. Stories such as Cortázar's "Las babas del diablo" and Felisberto's Clemente Colling stand in principle with de Man. Stories such as these offer the reader and the writer a different type of dialogue that is based on elements beyond simple semantics. These are stories that create problems and invite the reader to intervene in the act.
For de Man, Nietzsche "is interested in the distinction between speech acts and other verbal functions that would not be performative (such as knowing)" (25). In other words, there is the possibility that not all knowing remains within the confines of what is normally understood as 'knowledge'. For instance, Cortázar's neuroses that become stories shows an anxiety inherent in the writing process, and yet pushes him to write with the idea that the urge is to translate feelings into words, and for these words to transmit the feelings; that is, it is a performative knowing. This anxiety in the fantastic, from which some search for a rational explanation, might emerge from this challenge to knowledge. These are stories whose flux aims at escaping the authority of language. De Man states in "Dialogue and Dialogism" that it is not a question of fact and fiction in literature but rather of compatibility, whether that dialogue can be established and through which avenues, or, for the purpose of this dissertation, methodology. The question of 'methodology' might have been responded when de Man argues: "things become 'truly real' only by being appropriated and seized upon with all the etymological strength implied in Begriff, the German word for concept. To understand is to seize (begreifen) and not to let go of what one has thus taken hold of" ("Epistemology" 24). This thesis, then, may need its own seizure, a way to structure its understanding of the fantastic in order not to let it be a static concept, but rather to follow the philosophy of literature from the writers explored, and, with them, to open the doors to a more ludic and free sense of what distinguishes this type of literature.
Sensations, I argue, remain elemental for the understanding (or seizing, in the other sense of the word) of the fantastic as a dialogue of becoming and deconstruction. Calvino – who, as Cortázar and Felisberto, plays with language in the narrative and structure of his stories – makes an interesting case in this regard in his unfinished collection of short stories about body senses, Sotto il sole giaguaro (Under the Jaguar Sun). In the story that gives the collection its title, Calvino presents a couple traveling through Mexico. They begin in Oaxaca, where their sense of taste opens up to flavours they have not experienced before. While eating 'chiles en nogada', the narrator tells "Come accade nei momenti migliori della vita d'una coppia, avevo istantaneamente ricostruito il percorso dei pensieri d'Olivia, senza che ci fosse bisogno di dire di più: e questo perché la stessa catena d'associazioni s'era srotolata anche nella mia mente, se pure in modo più torpido e nebbioso, tale che senza di lei non avrei potuto acquistarne coscienza" / "In the best moments of a couple's life, it happens: I immediately reconstructed the train of Olivia's thought, with no need of further speech, because the same sequence of associations had unrolled in my mind, though in a more foggy, murky way. Without her, I would never have gained awareness of it" (30-1/4-5). The dialogue in this story extends beyond the exchange of words and becomes intimate as both characters enter an unknown terrain of body sensations. There is a bonding or illumination between the two of them that implies obscurity and fogginess.
As Calvino's story continues, the bodily tension rises. While having dinner, Olivia notices that her partner is not eating and asks him why. He feels that Olivia is eating him: "Situazione non completamente passiva in quanto mentre venivo masticato da lei sentivo anche che agivo su di lei, le trasmettevo sensazioni che si propagavano dalle papille della bocca per tutto il suo corpo, che ogni su vibrazione ero io a provocarla: era un rapporto reciproco e completo che ci coinvolgeva e travolgeva" / "The situation was not entirely passive, since while I was being chewed by her I felt also that I was acting on her, transmitting sensations that spread from taste buds through her whole body. I was the one who aroused her every vibration—it was a reciprocal and complete relationship, which involved us and overwhelmed us" (51/23). Both characters are seized by feelings of such unknown intensity, to the point that their newly acquired affinity nears cannibalism. They are overtaken by the mystery of what enters their mouths and are unable to put into words, or concepts, their emotional and physical palates. Anxiety reappears with the potential of becoming something that they do not know – in this case the food they are supposedly physically digesting; however, the case might be the contrary.
There is a mystique of the fantastic in Calvino's story that question not only whether words and concepts fail to capture a very relevant aspect of existence (i.e., relationships), but also what a subject considers as real. As de Man puts it, the subject takes hold of an understanding by seizing it and not letting it go. Fantastic literature, on the other hand, has the potential to disrupt this seizure by turning things around and transforming subjects. For de Man, "Entities, in themselves, are neither distinct nor defined; no one could say where one entity ends and where another begins. They are mere flux, 'modifications'" ("Epistemology" 24). By entering the fantastic text, I argue, the reader becomes one more entity in 'danger' of un-seizing concepts and letting itself be seized. Although this overwhelms the range of this thesis, I would like later to extend such an argument to empirical psychology; more to the point, whether sensations arouse with the reading of Calvino's story, for example. However, my concern remains theoretical: to question the concepts of the fantastic by bringing into light the obscurity that this literary genre can create in the minds of readers and writers, the parties whose agency in the fantastic requires letting the text speak by itself without much interference from themselves, entities in flux of mystery.
However, I must point out that the goal is not to exclude subjects (be it the reader or the writer) from the subtle conversation that I find in the fantastic. Going back to Cortázar, his story "Continuidad de los parques" from Final del juego, exemplifies the affinity and relationship to which I was referring. Composed of only two paragraphs, "Continuidad" reflects on the interexchange between reader and text by presenting the case of a reader who engages so deeply with the text that it becomes difficult for the real or actual reader to know who is reading what: whether the story about the reader of the story or is it the text that the reader-character is reading. The fictional text within the text comes to life by the second paragraph with its characters able to open the door and get near, physically, to the reader-character, with the mystery remaining about whether the character from the text within the text kills the reader-character. There is in "Continuidad," indeed, in its brevity, continuity and fluidity as a form of play between illumination and obscurity, leaving the reader in the abyss makes for the impact of the story on one's mind.
Appealing to the inexplicability as its nature has been a constant in many studies of the fantastic. David Roas, in his collection Teorías de lo fantástico, compiles texts by literary scholars, such as Martha Nandorfy, Susana Reisz, and Todorov, among others, who, despite their differences, seem to agree in their explanation of the fantastic within the scope of a structuralism that establishes limits. In other words, these are attempts to assimilate and understand something that, for them as literary critics, is inexplicable! Roas, himself a writer of fantastic literature, in his critique Tras los límites de lo real: Una definición de lo fantástico, makes a strict distinction between reality and fantasy in order to argue for the fantastic as an effect of fear that was born after the Enlightenment as a challenge to rationalism and scientism. However, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, in their Antología de la literatura fantástica, include stories from a wider timeline while in their prologue pointing out that there are many ways to explain and elaborate on the fantastic, and also insinuating that they do not endorse any. If it is a question of the effect and/or of the indefinability, another writer, Alberto Manguel, in his compilation Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, bets on the 'surprise' that the fantastic can have on the reader, while at the same time leaving it as part of life and reality.
If the issue over the debate about the fantastic is how to explain its inexplicability, I propose to focus on the interaction between illumination and obscurity, in which one can find potential for seizing the textual qualities that characterize such literature. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, points to paradox as a basis for philosophical inquiry and, hence, for propelling becoming. In his words, "Philosophy is revealed not by good sense but by paradox. Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy. There are several kinds of paradox, all of which are opposed to the complementary forms of orthodoxy – namely, good sense and common sense" (227). Deleuze's conception of philosophy and fantastic literature shares a reliance on paradox and, thus, resistance to common sensical explanations. Both philosophy and fantastic literature lose force as people attempt to put them in language that does not pay attention to their paradoxical nature. Interestingly Deleuze adds, "It is not surprising that, strictly speaking, difference should be 'inexplicable'. Difference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be cancelled; this means only that difference is essentially implicated, that its being is implication" (228). Is it not similar to the fantastic? The 'inexplicable' should not serve as an excuse or an 'explanation' for what, as its own nature, cannot be understood without having to push and challenge the limits of what is normally understood as the real. The mystique of illumination and obscurity, then, serves its purpose to leave the fantastic within the scope and margins of reality.
Illumination and obscurity appear both with force in Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Primarily a futuristic image of North America united into one country, this is a novel composed of multiple stories that range from a boarding school on the outskirts of Boston to a group of people dealing with addiction to narcotics to a double (and at times triple) secret agent in the Arizona desert to a cell of Quebecois rebels who take hold of a video recording which, once beginning to watch it, no one can take their eyes away from the screen. At many stages throughout the novel, the obscurity of addiction, traumas and violence is illuminated through the narrative of a writer who himself attended sessions of Narcotics Anonymous in order to try to grasp the sensations these people experience. At one of these meetings, Wallace's narrator learns "That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form or trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz." However, he also learns "That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels" (205). The discord between two poles in the same world reveals the inherent divisions that coexist and, in many cases, do not make for 'common sense.' Although Wallace portrays the narrative in the future, it speaks widely to the current state of affairs in which addictions – or seizures – to entertainment have become the escape from reality that others consider to be the fantastic. The future that Wallace envisions in his novel is based on spectacles, unrealities that become the 'real'.
The fantastic, to recapitulate, captures those spaces of reality that have been relegated to the obscure. Fantastic literature does not cast a shadow, but rather a light into potential areas of knowing and understanding that escape the normality of everyday life. As a de-subjectifying agent, the fantastic takes possession of the subject through a narrative and structure of the text that destabilize, seizing at first the writer and then the reader, in complicity and 'cosuffering', as Cortázar, through Morelli, puts it in Rayuela. My project in this thesis is to enter the conversation about the fantastic through Cortázar as I find in the Argentine writer a perspective that can help achieve a different understanding of this genre. Through his stories and philosophy of literature, one finds similarities with Felisberto, Calvino, and Wallace, in the ways they embrace a literature of sensations and memories with an open message with which the reader can play. In addition, philosophers and theorists such as Deleuze, de Man, and de Certeau have not been fully discussed with regards to the fantastic, despite the references that overlap with the writers herein presented in their similar stance about the opening of a door to a ludic reality.
The thesis will be divided according to the themes of playfulness, sensations, and fluidity, while keeping in mind the mystique of illumination and obscurity to counteract the apparent division between the fantastic and the real. Cortázar will be the main focus in order to explore the other writers while also adding from them to the perspective of the Argentine. Apart from the texts that have been mentioned in this prospectus, I plan to complement the discussions with other theorists as well as additional stories from Cortázar, Felisberto, Calvino, and Wallace. More specifically, Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture is a must when dealing with the theme of playfulness, with Cortázar's book-collages Último round and La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos as supplements. Regarding sensations, Georges Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality serves well to discuss Calvino's planned Norton Lectures published under the title of Six Memos for the Next Millennium in order to open a conversation about feelings and death in literature, as in the case of Calvino's novella Sotto il sole giaguaro. Flowing from it, Felisberto's 'false explanation' of his way of writing rhymes compared to Morellianas in Rayuela, serves as a demonstration of the influences of Felisberto on Cortázar. To extend the fantastic into more recent literature, as in the case of Wallace, will require a discussion of Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical, where the realms of reality juxtapose each other in the immanence of life. "Writing is inseparable from becoming," Deleuze asserts (Essays 1). I argue, as an accomplice of Cortázar, the fantastic reader is a seizing of "mon semblable, mon frère."


Main Sources
Calvino, Italo. Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1986.
Cortázar, Julio. Final del juego. 1956. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972.
---. Las armas secretas. 1964. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972.
---. Rayuela. 1963. La Habana: Fondo Editorial Casa de Las Américas, 2004.
Hernández, Felisberto. Novelas y Cuentos. Ed. José Pedro Díaz. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. 1996. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
Translations
Calvino, Italo. "Under the Jaguar Sun." Under the Jaguar Sun. 1986. Trans. William Weaver. Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 3-29.
Cortázar, Julio. Bestiary: Selected Stories. Trans. Alberto Manguel, Paul Blackburn, Gregory and Clementine Rabassa, and Suzanne Jill Levine. London: Harvill Press, 1998.
---. Hopscotch. 1966. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
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