Paper short abstract:

This paper reexamines Julio Cortázar’s canonical short story collection _Todos los fuegos el fuego_ (1966). Whereas critics have often opposed his ‘closed’ short stories with his ‘open’ multi-media works, my contention is that his short stories are in fact intrinsically intermedial.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I shall reexamine one of Julio Cortázar's most canonical texts: the 1966 short story collection _Todos los fuegos el fuego_. It is by now a commonplace of Cortázar criticism to oppose his 'closed' short stories with his 'open' multi-media works - an opposition which Cortázar himself helped to construct in his famous 1962 lecture 'Algunos aspectos del cuento'. Against this critical trend, I shall argue that his short stories in fact enclose and preempt the logic of his experimental collage works, particularly _Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires_ (1968) and _Fantomas contra vampiros multinacionales_ (1975). Moreover, their fragmentary form will be linked with that of the different media advertised in the journals in which Cortázar published his work in the 1960s, Visión and Confirmado: notably, photography, cinema and telephony. Close readings of two short stories, 'Todos los fuegos el fuego' and 'El otro cielo', will enable me to argue that these seemingly hermetic, literary stories are in fact intrinsically outward-looking and intermedial. My contention is that it is precisely the dialectical relation between closure and openness, containment and uncontainment, that underpins the aesthetics of the short story.