Wallace is a writer and poet. In this essay, Wallace maps Cortázar's explosion of the categories of writer and character as well as his exploration of the entire project of writing.

An artist of great talent must, at some point, make a choice. One can stay comfortably, and probably successfully, within the borders of one's art as they have already been mapped. Or one can strike out into uncharted waters, unknown lands.

Julio Cortázar was a writer of great talent. Even before the publication of his first book of stories, Bestiary, his name was familiar to other Latin American greats such as Jorge Luis Borges, widely regarded as the father of Latin American realism, and an early publisher of the young Cortázar. In Bestiary, Cortázar played with the limits of realistic fiction, introducing elements of the fantastic into his...