Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires

Octavio Paz: "If you love art, do something, Fantomas!"Fantomas: "I will, you candepend on it."

First published in Spanish in 1975 and previously untranslated,Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires is Julio Cortazar's genre-jumpingmash-up of his participation in the Second Russell Tribunal on human rights abuses in Latin Americaand his cameo appearance in issue number 201 of the Mexican comic book series Fantomas: TheElegant Menace. With his characteristic narrative inventiveness, Cortazar offers aquixotic meta-comic/novella that challenges not only the form of the novel but its political weightin contemporary cultural life. Needing something to read on the train from Brussels (where he hadattended the ineffectual tribunal meeting), our hero (Julio Cortazar) picks up the latest issue ofthe Fantomas comic. He grows increasingly absorbed by the comic book's tale ofbibliocide (a sinister bibliophobic plot to obliterate every book from the archives of humanity),especially when he sees the character Fantomas embark upon a series of telephone conversations withliterary figures, starting with "The Great Argentine Writer" himself, Julio Cortazar (andalso including Octavio Paz and a tough-talking Susan Sontag). Soon, Cortazar begins to erase thethin line between real-life atrocities and fictional mayhem in an attempt to bring attention to thehuman rights violations taking place with impunity in the country from which he wasexiled.

One of the most influential literary figures to emerge from Argentina in the twentieth century, Julio Cortazar is best remembered for his experimental 1963 counter-novel Hopscotch (Rayuela) and for his short story "Blow-up," on which the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni was based. Cortazar was officially exiled by the Argentine junta in the 1970s and spent the rest of his life in France, where he died in 1984.