Destructive and Ironically Redemptive Fantasy in Cortazar

M ANY OF THE SHORT STORIES of Julio Cortaizar present situations that appear to be absurd or fantastic-a man vomits up live rabbits; an individual becomes converted into a Mexican salamander; the identity of a student is invaded and crushed by the reincarnated spirit of a dead Nazi soldier; a man slowly sinks into the ground without his family or his fiance phantasms take over a house, driving out the occupants; a dead man comes to Paris to visit the woman who jilted him to marry his brother; a tiger prowls through a country estate, dominating the lives of the strange family who lodge it.' These stories of the bestial and the demonic may be interpreted on two different levels. One is the purely fantastic or supernatural, in which time is cyclical and the self has avatar identities. Metempsychoses occur not only between two human souls but between

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