Moving Through Paris: The Discontinuous Forms of Julio Cortázar’s 'Rayuela' (1963) and Luisa Futoransky’s 'De Pe a Pa' (1986)

This essay examines the way in which two late twentieth-century Latin American novelists address movement through the city of Paris. Building on existing work by Julie Jones (1998), Jason Weiss (2003), Axel Gasquet (2007) and especially Marcy E. Schwartz (1999), this project moves beyond a genealogy of Latin American writers in Paris towards a conception of the relationship between narrative form and depictions of urban navigation. It proposes that Julio Cortázar in Rayuela (1963) and Luisa Futoransky in De Pe a Pa (1986) enact a mode of movement through the discontinuous and episodic forms of their novels, and that the contrast between their depictions of movement, and particularly their depictions of the relationship between fragmentation and continuity within this movement, can be most clearly understood along the axis of gender. That is, while for Oliveira in Rayuela movement through the city is largely uninterrupted and can preserve at least an illusion of fluidity, for Laura in De Pe a Pa the woman’s movement through Paris is always discontinuous, difficult and even dangerous. Futoransky revises that earlier male writer’s formulation of movement to draw attention to a masculine complacency which organises Rayuela and to propose a new model for female urban navigation.