Julio Cortázar on the performática highway

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the conceptual development of the novel Los Autonautas de la Cosmopista, by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. The analysis draws on reflections by authors who address both performance and writing. At first, the work presents a brief mapping of performance art characteristics in partnership with the study of the concepts of Scripture and Game proposed by Paul Zumthor (2005). The choice of the novel allows establishing a clearer and more effective connection between the performance and the literary text in one of the texts in which performance appears in a more latent way in Cortázar, without starting from the assumption of a performative possibility. Therefore, the choice of Los Autonautas de la Cosmopista is punctual, since not all novels carry justifiable and palpable performance traits. In the analyzed text, it is possible to see that the action described in the book is of performative origin, enabling the reader to interpret a performative act. In this way, Cortázar's work reaches the reader on different planes, since a text to be considered performative requires the presence of the body in action accompanied by a textual form and the use of the reader in the act of reading.