From the Experimental to Experimentalism

1 FROM THE EXPERIMENTAL TO EXPERIMENTALISM Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar in Paris (1963-1973) Jèssica Pujol Duran University College London Ph.D. Comparative Literature 2 “I, Jèssica Pujol Duran confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.” 3 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses a shift in the history of experimental writing during which literary experimentation stopped being circumscribed by the historical avant-gardes and adopted a more democratic, ludic and inclusive approach to the textual experience: what I will term an experimentalism. In order to illuminate this shift I will explore works written in Paris by Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino between 1963 and 1973, including Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch (1966)], 62: Modelo para armar (1968) [62: A Model Kit (1972)] and Libro de Manuel (1973) [A Manual for Manuel (1978)], and Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche (1965) [Cosmicomics (1968)], Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969) [The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1976)] and Le città invisibili (1972) [Invisible Cities (1974)]. I will also pay special attention to their collaboration, La fosse de Babel (1972), as it combines their experimentalisms and is pivotal to the shift I theorise. I will read this development of the experimental as a product of a history that begins with Émile Zola’s Le Roman Experimental (1880), through which the novel became a laboratory for social experiment, changing with the emergence of the historical avant-gardes between the 1910s and 1930s, as the experiment focused on language in order to challenge tradition and the establishment. I will offer a revision of Umberto Eco’s reading on this shift while challenging his ideas on the open work. This will allow me to undertake a comparative study of Cortázar’s and Calvino’s experimental writings in Paris, where other new avant-garde groups such as the nouveau roman writers were publishing innovative novels and members of the Oulipo were exploring the potentiality of literary constraints. I will, however, contend that the events of May ’68 triggered a point of no return for their experimental practices. Influenced by the Cuban revolution, Cortázar developed his revolutionary poetics further, while Calvino continued to play with combinatorial inventiveness, vouchsafing his membership in the Oulipo in 1973. Such a comparison will provide a contextual understanding to these authors’ experimentalisms at the same time that will venture a re-examination of its political and critical meanings. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My family supported this research. My dad Jaume Pujol, my mum Marta Duran, my step-mum Marta Lluch, my dear sister Ariadna and my little brother Jaume, and, indirectly, my boss Lamya Hachicho and her son Dominic. For their emotional and financial support, I thank all of them. I also thank my colleagues and friends from University College London, Dr Guillermo Laín Corona, Dr Mazal Oaknin, Dr José Valentino Giannuzi and Dr Constanza Ceresa, who provided insight, expertise and moments of fun that greatly assisted my research. I thank my supervisors Dr Claire Lindsay and Dr Florian Mussgnug, for their assistance with the research and methodology of the thesis, and Professor William Rowe and Professor Stephen Hart for comments that greatly improved the manuscript. I also thank Dr Carles Álvarez for sharing valuable information on Cortázar with me, and Alastair Brotchie for his ’Pataphysical insights. I would also like to show my gratitude to my friends Dr Annabel Haynes and Dr Tim Atkins for sharing their pearls of wisdom with me during the course of this research, and, above all, I shall thank my husband, Dr Richard Parker, for his understanding, and because this thesis would not have become a reality without his patience and assistance. I am also immensely grateful to the Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Hemeroteca of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno of Buenos Aires. And, obviously, to Isabel Liarte, Rut Fadó, Andrés Galeano, Meritxell Ribalta, Siobhan Girling, Amy De’Ath and my in-laws, Ian and Jenny, for their support, and because they are always there. Thank you all for believing in me, and in this. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 6 CHAPTER 1: THE EXPERIMENTAL & THE OPEN WORK .................................... 33 1. THE CONCEPTUALISATION OF OPENNESS ........................................................................................ 33 2. TOWARDS A NEW CHAOSMOS .............................................................................................................. 37 3. NEW MEANINGS & OLD FORMS ......................................................................................................... 40 CHAPTER 2: EXPERIMENTALISM IN HOPSCOTCH .............................................. 46 1. JOYCE’S RECEPTION & INFLUENCE ON HOPSCOTCH ....................................................................... 46 2. HOPSCOTCH, OPEN WORK OR WORK IN PROGRESS? ....................................................................... 58 3. UTOPIAN QUESTS & EXPERIMENTALISM ........................................................................................... 65 CHAPTER 3: RE-ENACTING THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDES IN PARIS .... 73 1. THE PARADOX OF THE NEW NEW ...................................................................................................... 73 2. CALVINO’S AND CORTÁZAR’S NEWNESS ............................................................................................ 79 3. IMPERSONAL CHARACTERS ................................................................................................................... 85 4. A CONSCIOUS EXPERIMENTALISM ...................................................................................................... 97 CHAPTER 4: CHANCE ENTERS THE EXPERIMENT ........................................... 105 1. LA FOSSE DE BABEL: A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT ....................................................................... 105 2. PLAYING AT COMBINATORIAL GAMES ............................................................................................. 113 3. WHAT MACHINES DO ......................................................................................................................... 120 4. CONSCIOUS EXPERIMENTALISMS ...................................................................................................... 125 CHAPTER 5: CALVINO’S DOUBLE ENGAGEMENT .............................................. 133 1. CALVINO’S CULTURAL TENSION ....................................................................................................... 133 2. VISIBLE EXPERIMENTS ........................................................................................................................ 147 3. CALVINO’S ENGAGED DISENGAGEMENT ........................................................................................ 157 CHAPTER 6: A POETICS OF FAILURE IN A MANUAL FOR MANUEL .......... 163 1. CORTÁZAR’S “DESAFÍO CORDIAL” .................................................................................................... 163 2. NEW POLITICS / NEW FICTION ......................................................................................................... 170 3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS UNDER URGENCY ................................................................................... 178 4. A POETICS OF FAILURE ....................................................................................................................... 190 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 197 APPENDIX I ................................................................................................................... 210 APPENDIX II .................................................................................................................. 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 220 6 INTRODUCTION “By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.” Max Sebald1 This thesis focuses on the work of two authors, Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino, who lived in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose work has recurrently been labelled experimental by critics such as R. M. Berry, Brian McHale, Umberto Eco and Maria Dolores Blanco Arnejo. Though much has been written on experimental writing, the conceptualisation of what experimental literature means has only recently begun in earnest, heralded by such publications as Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale’s The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012), Gibbons’s Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (2012), Patricia Suzanne Sullivan’s Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies (2012) and Julie Armstrong’s introductory guide Experimental Fiction (2014). The Companion is a first attempt to group a wide range of practices that for different reasons have been labelled experimental throughout the twentieth century. In the Introduction the editors state that experimental literature is extremely diverse because it spans from “[u]nfettered improvisation” to “the rigorous application of rules,” from “accidental composition” to “hyper-rational design.”2

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