ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of texts in which the issues which they raise are at stake, and thereby produce readings that demystify his representations of sexuality and elicit all of the conflictual complexities which they invoke. Despite the numerous ways in which woman figures and is figured in all of Julio Cortazar's work, there have been surprisingly few detailed studies of the various roles assigned to female characters and the different deployments and 'functions' of femininity in the texts. Julia Kristeva has associated the somatic 'voiceness' of the voice, its profusion of tones and intensities, with the semiotic. The analogy to abstract painting is also pertinent, since Kristeva has also referred to it as an artistic practice in which the semiotic predominates. Critics have rightly drawn attention to the structural role played by leitmotifs. The motifs seem to emerge as aleatory signifying fragments, perhaps the result of chance association.
