How does Cortázar leave the fantasy genre, engage with cutlers, challenge Borges, and above all, create a time for reading that is almost simultaneous with time for writing in his novel “Tango de Vuelta”? In general, reads and writes occur sequentially, almost by the laws of physics. First write, then read. It’s impossible to ignore the difference. Everyone writes now, and the digital age has greatly reduced reception times, but people read it later, like it later, and link to it after they see or read it. This is my second time. And time defines it.
Before networks, Cortázar understood this phrase as a link. He succeeded in bringing the reader closer to the moment of writing. It’s as if this column is being read at the same time I’m writing it. This is no literary pirouette. Cortázar can delay or hasten fate. If anything, it poses a challenge to him. Time intervenes in writing. Octavio Paz said that words are real time, not the sound of a clock. And if you read between the lines, there is something like Cortázar’s vertigo, which gives the impression of another transit. I will transcribe a few phrases from this wonderful late story. Its main character is a doctor or nurse who likes to write down bits and pieces of his life. “When I write, I see what I write, I really see it, I see Emilio the morning I arrive from Ezeiza…” we read as the narrator observes what he is describing. Not Cortázar, but his character. I pay very close attention to people’s stories, and I like to receive stories and write them down in my notebook, even if I don’t publish them. “What I like to do is write. When I’m done, after I’ve enjoyed it, I lay down and sleep comes, and the next day it’s like something hits the window. I work in a clinic, and I like it when the notebook is gone. Something hits the window, and I’m off again. It’s like an ambulance or a new notebook.”
Just write without seeking effect or recognition. If there is value in being alive, then there is also value in writing about (and reading) remarkable creatures about life. I emphasize this text of Cortázar’s because it is alive, refers to others, includes the reader, and creates time. suspense, plot. We enjoy reading texts that concern us with the why and how, but we’re there with Cortázar, reading as his characters write “times and images that make us vomit.”
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a fundamental pillar of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
I wonder where everything written on the network ends up. Are they texts that contain others, or are they a way of getting rid of what has been read, more like an expulsion than an invocation? How can we create a discussion on the network that includes our readers without turning it into a hodgepodge of opinions? How can we have a joint adventure? Or is approval only sought, with no consequences other than rejection? Is it possible to write to the network with a Cortazarian impulse, seeking a participating readership? We can no longer deny this circulation of opinions, ideas, events. If everyone writes at least one line a day, wouldn’t it be very utopian to think about concave networks instead of convex ones?