Humor negro de diferente voltaje en la literatura de Julio Cortázar y Luisa Valenzuela =: Black humor of differing voltage in the works of Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela

摘要

This dissertation is a space of encounter between Andre Breton's Black Humor and Argentine literary sensibilities appearing in the writings of Julio Cortazar and Luisa Valenzuela, with Nelly Kaplan as a supplementary fulcrum. This humor has an atmospheric, explosive and seditious quality that, though it resists conceptualization, still infuses readers with an uncomfortable mixture of horror, hilarity and guilt. I identify black humor operationally as a subverter of conventional norms and as an electric metaphor generating paradigmatic models of erotic transactions. Black humor destabilizes through modus operandi that entail: treatment of an ill pur, cru, such as death, eroticism, torture; a process of one-upmanship taken to an extreme (Rosello's surenchere); and a dethroning of "centrisms" such as oculocentrism.After tracing the genealogy of the term in chapter one, I subsequently explore the dynamics of black humor in several emblematic intertextual instances. In chapter two, the selected texts illustrate black humor as a tactic aimed at overturning the poignancy of the pathetic. In this context, Cortazar and Valenzuela both deal with taboos, yet Cortazar's surrealistic hopefulness can overcome them and achieve euphoria, whereas an ominous social reality imposes boundaries on Valeneuela's treatment of taboos and leads to aporia. In chapter three, I look at examples of black humor and eroticism working in tandem to debunk melliflous sentimentality as protagonists leverage intimate transactions to maximal personal advantage and social control. In chapter four, the explored narratives question the nobility of sight, oculocentrism, and undermine its trustworthiness. In Cortazar's texts, black humor combines with artificial vision, photography, to capture the physicality of furtive perversions through close-ups etc. Valenzuela's writings associate sight with surveillance perpetrated at two levels: by a government dictatorship and a patriarchal system that objectifies women.In light of surrealist and post-structuralist criticism and the texts examined here, I conclude that black humor's strength lies in its interpellative power to agitate, with our acquiescence, many of our 'deadly serious' philosophical underpinnings, while avoiding any didactic aims.