Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Cortázar’s Phenomen(ologic)al Fictions

Resumen

This essay is about Julio Cortázar's literary that concerns shifted notably from his early concern with art and artistic expression to the strong political commitment of his later work. Despite this shift, certain basic ontological questions remained constant, questions that coincide with those of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and may be stated generally as follows: how do embodied human beings experience the world, and how do they know and express that experience? For Merleau-Ponty, being is being-in-the-world, for Cortázar, art is the expression of being-in-the-world in the sense that Merleau-Ponty intends.