SOURCE: Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia. “Writing/Fantasizing/Desiring the Maternal Body in ‘Deshoras’ and ‘Historias que me Cuento’ by Julio Cortázar.” Latin American Literary Review 25, no. 49 (January-June 1997): 7-23.

In the following essay, Schmidt-Cruz elucidates the role of Oedipal desires in “Deshoras” and “Historias que me cuento.”

I suspect that one of the reasons why Cortázar's stories hold such a strong grip over many readers is because they often portray seemingly unnatural or “perverse” instinctual urges which threaten to unravel the very fabric of our civilized society, but which are ultimately kept in check by their status as literary fantasies which call attention to their fictional nature. Many of Cortázar's stories unfold through a dynamic tension between the characters' routine quotidian lives and an underlying world of intense and frustrated desires. The characters view this submerged realm with a mixture of fear and longing. On one hand, they...