SOURCE: “Discursive Anarchy or Creative Pluralism? The Cases of Cortázar and Puig,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 71-82.

In the following essay, Cosgrove analyzes two Argentine novels, Puig's El beso de la mujer araña and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela, in terms of their opposition to the notion that “novels should be enabling vehicles for presenting fictional worlds of coherence and stability.”

Critics, theorists, and novelists, as diverse as George Steiner, Michel Foucault, and John Barth have made compelling cases that the narrative voice of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is somehow primordially emblematic of the age in which we live.¹ Poet, short-story writer, and essayist, Borges as practitioner scrupulously eschewed the novel. The minimalist demands of his art could not, he felt, be accommodated in the grand unlimited terrains of the novelistic form. But the philosophical concerns of Borges's ‘fictions’ have osmotically...