Rayuela
Rayuela , a novel by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), was first published on February 18, 1963 (German: 1981 by Suhrkamp as Rayuela: Himmel-und-Hölle ).
Cortázar's masterpiece is a literary experiment in the tradition of the Nouveau Roman , which is one of the most important Spanish-language novels of the 20th century and is admired by contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez , Mario Vargas Llosa or José Lezama Lima .
title
"Rayuela" is the Spanish name of the children's game, known in German as Himmel und Hölle or Hickelkasten. Cortázar refers to the Argentine version in which the first field is "tierra" (earth) and the last is "cielo" (sky). The protagonist is searching in vain for "heaven": an authentic way of being.
The protagonist perceives the "heaven and hell" drawings on Parisian streets more incidentally, just as his weakness for threads and cords there seems to be of secondary importance, purely playful (he makes "objects" out of them, which he then sells). In the second part, in Buenos Aires, both the game and strings gain existential importance, the latter also being very practical.
construction
The book consists of three parts: "Del lado de allá" (From there), chapters 1 to 36, is set in Paris; "Del lado de acá" (From here), chapters 37 to 56, in Buenos Aires; "De otros lados" (From elsewhere), chapters 57 to 155, contains the "Capítulos prescindibles" (dispensable chapters), a colorful mixture of texts of different types of text: further novel chapters, inner monologues, newspaper articles, quotations, pseudo-quotations.
The author suggests two readings: a linear one from chapters 1 to 56 (i.e. the first two parts). The second begins in the middle of the third part (with chapter 73) and is continued with the chapter indicated in brackets at the end of the chapter. The chapters of the first two parts are run through in the same order as in the first reading (except for Chapter 55, which is replaced by other chapters), supplemented by the more or less illuminating "dispensable chapters". The notes of the fictional writer Morelli take up a large part here. The "Club of the Snake", to which all the protagonists of the first part belong, worships him like a guru. At the same time, considerations are ascribed to him that ultimately led to the construction of the present novel, Rayuela , whose readers should be encouraged to read it actively and to become complicit with the author. Cortázar tried to implement Morelli's poetological considerations from Chapter 62 in his next novel 62 / Model Kit.
Here is the order in which the chapters should be read for the second reading:
73 - 1 - 2 - 116 - 3 - 84 - 4 - 71 - 5 - 81 - 74 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 93 - 68 - 9 - 104 - 10 - 65 - 11 - 136 - 12 - 106 - 13 - 115 - 14 - 114 - 117 - 15 - 120 - 16 - 137 - 17 - 97 - 18 - 153 - 19 - 90 - 20 - 126 - 21 - 79 - 22 - 62 - 23 - 124 - 128 - 24 - 134 - 25 - 141 - 60 - 26 - 109 - 27 - 28 - 130 - 151 - 152 - 143 - 100 - 76 - 101 - 144 - 92 - 103 - 108 - 64 - 155 - 123 - 145 - 122 - 112 - 154 - 85 - 150 - 95 - 146 - 29 - 107 - 113 - 30 - 57 - 70 - 147 - 31 - 32 - 132 - 61 - 33 - 67 - 83 - 142 - 34 - 87 - 105 - 96 - 94 - 91 - 82 - 99 - 35 - 121 - 36 - 37 - 98 - 38 - 39 - 86 - 78 - 40 - 59 - 41 - 148 - 42 - 75 - 43 - 125 - 44 - 102 - 45 - 80 - 46 - 47 - 110 - 48 - 111 - 49 - 118 - 50 - 119 - 51 - 69 - 52 - 89 - 53 - 66 - 149 - 54 - 129 - 139 - 133 - 140 - 138 - 127 - 56 - 135 - 63 - 88 - 72 - 77 - 131 - 58 - 131 (sic!) -
content
The protagonist of the novel is Horacio Oliveira, a bohemian with more intellectual than artistic leanings. He comes from Buenos Aires , but lives in Paris for the first part of the novel , where he gets by with odd jobs and transfers from his brother. This lifestyle is shared by his lover Lucía, called "the maga" (sorceress), and his friends, rather unsuccessful musicians and visual artists, who together form the surrealist "Club de la serpiente" (Club of the Snake). The club's activities mainly consist of listening to jazz records together and discussing art, metaphysical issues, works and theories of a writer whose last name is only known: Morelli.
The Maga also comes from South America ( Montevideo in Uruguay ). Otherwise she represents a kind of counter-image to Horacio Oliveira: Little educated, spontaneous, trusting her judgment, she seems to be in unconscious harmony with the world, a state that Horacio struggles for in vain. There is a break between the two, in which third parties may or may not have a share. Maga throws Horacio out of their shared apartment, a 14-square-meter room that they recently shared with Maga's sick toddler. The following night, the Snake's entire club, including Oliveira, gathered in this room for various reasons. After several hours, the Maga discovers what everyone else has long known: their son has died. After the funeral she disappears, nobody knows where to go, and Oliveira begins to look obsessively for her. He suspects that she threw herself into the Seine . At no point does the reader find out what 'really' happened. Horacio, who no longer has a roof over his head, befriends some homeless people, has sex with a clocharde in public and is expelled.
In the second part we get to know Oliveira's old friend Traveler, who has been married to Atalía, known as Talita, for several years. Talita, a pharmacist with both feet on the ground, reminds Horacio very much of the Maga, despite all the dissimilarity. This inability to tell people apart guides his actions more and more. He also does not perceive Traveler as an independent person, but sees in him and sometimes calls him his doppelganger (the German word is actually used). Traveler and Talita are also caught in this blurring of boundaries. They do not really know what is actually happening, but at least they can talk to each other about it, while Oliveira becomes increasingly entangled in his delusions. However, he is not entirely alone either, because Gekrepten, the woman he had left behind, seizes him on his return from Paris without encountering any resistance, although he despises her from the bottom of his heart. After an episode in which Talita balances three stories above the street on an improvised wooden bridge to give Horacio a few small items from her household - which can be described as the key scene of the novel - Traveler succeeds in getting Horacio a job To create a circus that he and Talita have been working for for years. But the days of the circus are numbered: the director sells it and buys an insane asylum in which the former circus staff get work. One night Horacio completely loses touch with reality, believes Traveler is his mortal enemy and, with the help of a patient, transforms his room into a bizarre fortress made of threads and ball bearings. Finally, he thinks about the possibility of throwing himself out the window. The novel has an open ending .
expenditure
- Julio Cortázar: Rayuela . 20th edition. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid 2008, ISBN 978-84-376-2474-7 (Letras hispánicas; 625).
- Julio Cortázar: Rayuela. Heaven and hell; Roman ("Rayuela"). from the chip. by Fritz Rudolf Fries. With an afterword by Christian Hansen ; Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-46057-3
literature
- Robert Brody: Julio Cortázar - Rayuela . Grant & Cutler, London 1976, ISBN 0-7293-0014-5 .
- Ingrid Fehlauer-Lenz: From translated irony to ironic translation. On the problem of intercultural translation of literary texts using a Spanish and German example (J. Cortázar: "Rayuela" and Thomas Mann : " The Magic Mountain ") . Dissertation, University of Halle 2008.
- Rita Gnutzmann: Rayuela, Julio Cortázar . Alhambra, Madrid 1989, ISBN 84-205-1912-X .
- Iris Hermann: Heaven and Hell. Paris as a literary topography in Julio Cortázar's novel “Rayuela” . In: Christiane Fäcke u. a. (Ed.): Multiethnicity, Migration and Multilingualism. Festschrift for Adelheid Schumann's 65th birthday . Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-89821-848-1 , pp. 249-261.
- Julio Ortega: Julio Cortázar, Rayuela . Editorial ALLCA, Madrid 1996, ISBN 84-89666-15-6 .
Web links
- Santiago Juan-Navarro: Un tal Morelli. Teoría y práctica de la lectura en "Rayuela" de Julio Cortázar (PDF; 1.2 MB) . In: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos , Vol. 16 (1992), Issue 2, pp. 235-52.
- Michi Strausfeld : The scattered cronopium . Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 23 August 2014; accessed July 30, 2016.