Beyond Marcuse: Guevara’s Influence on the Revolutionary Erotic in Julio Cortázar’s <em>Libro de Manuel</em>

Authors

  • Rebecca Rae Garonzik The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Keywords:

Literature

Abstract

In the studies that have been written about Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel (1973), most scholars attribute the presence of the erotic in the novel, as well as its theoretical elaboration, directly to the writings of Herbert Marcuse and the political culture of the New Left. By looking only to Marcuse to delineate the theoretical basis of the erotic within this text, scholars have tended to overlook the degree of cultural exchange that occurred between the New Left and the leftist political culture in Latin America, as well as the pre-existing parallels between Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Ernesto Che Guevara’s El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965). While not making use of the terms ‘eros’ or ‘the erotic,’ Guevara’s essay delves into the relationship between politics and affect in a way that mirrors the relationship between the political and the erotic in Marcuse’s political philosophy and that closely resonates with Cortázar’s use of the erotic in Libro de Manuel. In order to fully understand the significance of the erotic in Cortázar’s novel one has to consider both the ideas presented in Guevara’s essay as well as those appearing in Marcuse’s text, and the way that these related yet variant concepts came together in the political cultures of the 1960s and 70s. Moreover, such an understanding of the theoretical complexity of the erotic in Cortázar’s text opens the door to a fuller understanding of the role of the revolutionary erotic in the Latin American political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and its distinctive presence in the socially committed literature of that period.

Author Biography

Rebecca Rae Garonzik, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Rebecca Rae Garonzik, originally from Baltimore, MD,  has been a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill since Spring of 2010. She received her BA in Spanish Languages and Literatures from Goucher College in 2005, and her MA in English and Comparative Literature from UNC in 2009. Her areas of comparative focus are contemporary Latin American literature and contemporary Latina/o literature, and she is currently writing her dissertation on the intersection of eroticism and politics in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o lit. She has published articles in Chasqui: Revista de Literatura LatinoamericanaLetras Femeninas, and Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura, and she was one of the founding members of the Literatures of the Americas Working Group.

Published

2016-02-06

How to Cite

Garonzik, R. R. (2016). Beyond Marcuse: Guevara’s Influence on the Revolutionary Erotic in Julio Cortázar’s <em>Libro de Manuel</em>. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 13(2), 287–310. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/1437

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Section

Articles / Artículos