ABSTRACT
It is hardly surprising that medicine is a ubiquitous and almost invariably sinister presence in the fiction of Julio Cortazar. Cortazar's writing does not deal solely with physical illness and its effects. Instead, rather as for Karl Kraus psychoanalysis was the disease for which it purported to be the cure, medicine and certain of the assumptions and principles that underpin it came to be viewed by Cortazar as a symptom of a deep-seated malaise. It blighted the whole of Western society and culture, betokening a pervasive and pernicious scientific rationalism that reduced human life to bloodless mechanics and sapped it of all that was instinctive, spontaneous and truly vital. Cortazar provides people with a final, chilling indication of just how high a psychological price the surviving family members have to pay for their dissimulation. CortAzar links the viewpoint of the child to that of the rebel, pitting both against a hostile authority characterised via the use of medical terminology.
