“A Three that Stands and Dances”: Community Meanings of Sandinista Experience in the Writing of Julio Cortázar

Abstract

This article reflects on the singular ways in which Julio Cortázar writes and inscribes his experience of the Sandinista revolutionary project in the Latin American context. Contrary to a specialized reading that places him as a clearly optimistic observer of said process, the textual itinerary that we propose to go through starts from a rereading of his short story "Apocalypse of Solentiname" to think about the political and community implications of the apocalyptic dimension in Cortázar Nicaraguan texts. The hypothesis that we offer is that his writing recovers the critical potentiality of idiocy, in its particular philosophical sense, to open a thirdness that suspends the dominant bipolar thinking in the Latin American intellectual field of the late 1970s and early 1980s and allows us to conceive other ways of making community.