Reading as Resistance: Dialectics of Passivity and Agency in Cortázar’s Short Fiction

Abstract

This article re-examines Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks” (1956) and “Instructions for John Howell” (1963) through the lens of reader-response theory, hermeneutics, and cognitive narratology. Traditionally viewed as examples of the fantastic, these stories are interpreted here as complementary explorations of passive and active reading, offering a literary dialectic that parallels the reflections articulated in Cortázar’s Rayuela [Hopscotch] (1963). Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s theories of textual gaps and reader cooperation, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, and more recent approaches to cognitive immersion and narrative engagement, this study argues that both stories dramatize reading as an ethical and political act. “Continuity of Parks” illustrates the dangers of uncritical textual consumption, culminating in the protagonist’s epistemic and existential annihilation, while “Instructions for John Howell” presents a model of insurgent readership, where the spectator’s appropriation of the play foregrounds the risks and possibilities of narrative intervention. By analyzing the use of metalepsis, destabilized focalization, and narrative layering in these stories, this article highlights how Cortázar anticipates contemporary concerns regarding reader agency, interpretive autonomy, and the sociopolitical implications of literary engagement.

1. Introduction

In Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks,” a man reclines in his velvet armchair, engrossed in a novel whose plot revolves around a clandestine murder. Absorbed in the text’s seductive pull, he becomes, unbeknownst to him, the victim of the very narrative he consumes. This unsettling collapse of fiction into reality has often been interpreted as an ingenious metafictional game or an example of the fantastic. Yet, to reduce the story to a literary trick is to overlook its deeper provocation: it forces us to confront the political and existential stakes of reading itself. Cortázar’s short fiction, while frequently celebrated for its formal daring and surrealist inflections, demands to be read as urgent reflections on the reader’s complicity and agency in the unfolding of the literary work.

This article proposes that two of his most emblematic short stories—“Continuity of Parks” (Cortázar 1967) and “Instructions for John Howell” (Cortázar 1973)—should be understood not merely as exercises in narrative playfulness but as radical, self-reflexive allegories about reading as an act of ethical and political engagement. Their publication dates are significant: “Continuity of Parks” predates Rayuela (Cortázar [1963] 1984), while “Instructions for John Howell” emerges from the ferment of the 1960s, after the publication of Cortázar’s most experimental novel. This temporal positioning invites us to read these stories as forming a dialectic within Cortázar’s evolving conception of readership, one that oscillates between the depiction of passive consumption leading to annihilation and the painful awakening to insurgent agency.

While critics have commonly approached these works through the lens of absurdist or fantastic traditions, this study seeks to situate them within the broader horizon of reader-response theory,1 hermeneutics dialogism,2 and cognitive narratology.3 In doing so, I aim to show how Cortázar’s formal experiments—on metalepsis, embedded narratives, and unstable focalization—manipulate the reader’s cognitive faculties, pushing them toward an active co-production of meaning that transcends the boundaries of the fictional world. In this sense, his work anticipates and enriches late twentieth-century theories of readerly agency, embedding them within the sociopolitical context of Latin America’s revolutionary struggles and Cortázar’s own experience of exile from Peronist Argentina.

To articulate this dynamic, I draw on Wolfgang Iser’s foundational theories of textual gaps (Iser 1974, 1978), which posit that literary texts require readers to actively fill indeterminacies to co-create meaning.4 Complementing this, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation (Ricoeur 1981, 1988) reframes reading as an existential act where the text’s world merges with the reader’s horizon of understanding.5 This hermeneutics perspective allows us to see how Cortázar’s destabilized narratives function as laboratories for readerly transformation rather than mere literary puzzles.

Furthermore, I incorporate insights from recent cognitive narratology, particularly theories of mental simulation and narrative transportation, to explain how Cortázar’s stories demand immersive yet critical participation from the reader. Following theorists like Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, pp. 90–120; 2006, pp. 45–80) and Vera Tobin (2018, pp. 45–80), I argue that the act of navigating Cortázar’s layered diegeses compels readers to simulate possible worlds, negotiate ambiguous cues, and engage in a form of narrative problem-solving that has both cognitive and ethical dimensions. Such an approach also resonates with contemporary debates on digital culture and algorithmic curation, where passive consumption risks becoming a form of epistemic and political surrender.

The structure of this article reflects this methodological synthesis. The first section revisits “Continuity of Parks” as an allegory of hermeneutics surrender, where the protagonist’s failure to interrogate the text’s authority literalizes what Iser might call the death of the subject. The second section turns to “Instructions for John Howell,” where the protagonist’s violent conscription into a play-within-a-play dramatizes an ethics of insurgent reading, forcing him—and by extension the reader—into a position of radical agency. In the concluding section, I place Cortázar’s dialectic within present-day conversations about attention economies, participatory culture, and the politics of interpretation, arguing that his stories offer a prescient critique of narratives that weaponize passivity, while reclaiming reading as a subversive and liberatory praxis.

2. The Reader as Prey: “Continuity of Parks” and the Necropolitics of Passive Reading

A book should open old wounds, even inflict

new ones. A book should be a danger.

—E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (Cioran 1983)

Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks,” first published in 1956, marks an early and particularly stark articulation of his critique of passive readership. Though written before Rayuela, the story already stages a fundamental tension that would later be theorized explicitly in Morelli’s reflections on the role of the reader:6 the contrast between the complacent consumer of narratives and the active participant in meaning making. In this brief yet chilling tale, the protagonist—a wealthy landowner—immerses himself in a romantic thriller, only to become, in a disturbing narrative twist, the target of the assassin described within the very text he is reading. This metaleptic collapse of fiction and reality is not, as it might appear at first glance, a mere fantastical device, but rather a ruthless exposure of the necropolitics of reading when approached as a passive, escapist act.7

Cortázar carefully constructs the setting to underscore the protagonist’s bourgeois isolation. The man’s retreat into his study, with its “green velvet armchair” and “carefully closed door,” signals not only his physical withdrawal from the world but also his retreat into a literary universe sanitized of friction, ambiguity, or engagement. He approaches the text as a consumer of pleasure, expecting it to reaffirm his position of control and comfort rather than to challenge him. The novel, for him, is a discrete object to be devoured, its plot a spectacle to be absorbed without consequence.

It is precisely this uncritical consumption that Cortázar stages as fatal. The story’s notorious metalepsis—where the fictional assassin seamlessly crosses into the diegesis of the protagonist’s world—functions as a trap for both the character and the reader. Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reading provides a useful lens here. According to Iser, literary texts are structured around “blanks” or indeterminacies that “stimulate the reader’s creative participation” in constructing meaning (Iser 1978, p. 21). These gaps, as Iser argues, are not voids but invitations: “The blank… designates a vacancy in the overall system of the text, the filling of which brings about an interaction of textual patterns… By making his decision, the reader implicitly acknowledges the inexhaustibility of the text” (Iser 1978, pp. 168–69). In “Continuity of Parks,” however, these gaps become predatory snares. The protagonist’s hermeneutics failure—his refusal to interrogate the text’s implausible intrusion—culminates in his annihilation, literalizing Mbembe’s necropolitics (Mbembe 2003, pp. 11–40) as the narrative colonizes his agency. Rather than confronting the text’s ambiguity, he surrenders to its apparent seamlessness, treating it as a closed world. This passive consumption aligns with Roland Barthes’ lisible [readable] text, designed to be consumed rather than challenged (Barthes 1974, p. 4), but Cortázar twists the stakes: here, the readerly text becomes a weapon, its blanks luring the protagonist into a fatal complacency.

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” further illuminates the protagonist’s hermeneutics collapse. For Gadamer (2004), interpretation is always a dialogical encounter between the text’s world and the reader’s situated understanding.8 Yet, in “Continuity of Parks,” this dialog is aborted before it begins. The protagonist’s class privilege and intellectual lethargy preclude any genuine encounter with the text’s alterity. Instead of negotiating the dissonance between his world and the novel’s, he allows the text’s horizon to engulf his own, rendering him the passive object of its narrative violence. The climactic moment, when the assassin steps from the page to the protagonist’s reading room, literalizes this failed dialog as a necropolitical act. In Achille Mbembe’s terms, the text exerts necropower over the protagonist, transforming him from a sovereign subject into a disposable body in the service of narrative completion (Necropolitics).

Moreover, Cortázar’s narrative structure implicates the reader directly in this dynamic, mirroring the protagonist’s hermeneutics collapse. The absence of explicit cues marking the transition between diegetic levels forces readers to enact the very cognitive labor that the protagonist abdicates. The resulting cognitive dissonance serves as a mirror: while the protagonist drowns in the text’s seductions, the reader is tasked with retroactively piecing together the layers of narration, becoming complicit in the narrative’s violence by virtue of their interpretive labor. This reflexive move resonates with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, where understanding is not merely the deciphering of a message but the integration of the text’s world into the reader’s own horizon—a process Ricoeur defines as “the revelation of new possibilities of being for oneself” (Ricoeur 1988, p. 158). In “Continuity of Parks,” however, this appropriation is perverted: the reader who refuses to engage critically with the text’s indeterminacies is instead appropriated by the text itself, becoming an extension of its lethal machinery. Cortázar thus transforms Ricoeur’s dialogic model into a cautionary tale, where hermeneutics passivity enables the narrative’s colonization of the reader’s agency. This shift in Cortázar’s conception of literature had already been outlined in his 1965 essay “On Techniques, Commitment, and the Future of the Novel” (Cortázar 1965), published just a year before “Instructions for John Howell” appeared. Although “Instructions” is not yet an overtly political story of the kind Cortázar would produce in the 1970s, it reveals his growing interest in subverting narrative tradition as a form of ethical engagement. This concern aligns with the revolutionary movements with which he would gradually develop closer ties.9

Finally, this reading acquires new urgency when situated within the context of today’s algorithmic media cultures. Cortázar’s landowner, lulled by the comfort of a “fashionable novel,” prefigures the twenty-first-century subject anesthetized by curated feeds and algorithmic narratives. His death is not only a fictional device but an allegorical warning: the uncritical surrender to prefabricated narratives—whether in literature or in digital media—risks the erasure of subjectivity itself. In this regard, Cortázar’s story anticipates the critical concerns of scholars like Henry Jenkins, who warn against the passive consumption of mass culture, and Rita Felski, who calls for a reimagining of reading as an affective and participatory act rather than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski 2015, pp. 17–20).10 Felski’s critique of suspicion’s “paranoid” posture—its relentless unmasking of hidden structures—finds an eerie counterpart in Cortázar’s tale, where the refusal to question the text’s seams leads not to enlightenment but annihilation. Yet, Cortázar’s narrative also gestures toward Felski’s alternative: a reading that embraces ambiguity not as a threat but as an invitation to ethical collaboration. The story’s metalepsis, after all, implicates us in its violence, demanding we abandon passive consumption for what Felski terms “curiosity, care, and connection” (Felski 2015, p. 45). In this way, “Continuity of Parks” becomes both a cautionary tale and a provocation—a challenge to reclaim reading as a practice of critical intimacy rather than complacent surrender.

In “Continuity of Parks”, Cortázar thus offers a stark lesson: to read passively is to submit not only to the text’s authority but to its violence. The story demands that readers reject the comfort of textual immersion in favor of the vigilant, insurgent stance of the lector cómplice [accomplice reader]—the co-creating reader envisioned in Rayuela, whose task is not to surrender but to resist, negotiate, and survive the text’s seductions.

3. Staging the Reader’s Revolt: “Instructions for John Howell” and the Ethics of Insurgent Reading

To create is to resist. To resist is to create.

—Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Camus 1960)

Published three years after Rayuela, “Instructions for John Howell” reflects a more mature and overtly political phase in Cortázar’s reflection on reading, representation, and agency. Unlike “Continuity of Parks,” which depicts the annihilation of a passive reader at the hands of a predatory narrative, “Instructions” dramatizes the possibility—and the cost—of insurgent reading. It does so through the theatrical metaphor of a spectator, Rice, who is forcibly drawn onto the stage of an absurdist play and compelled to improvise his role in real-time, without a script, safety net, or escape. The story literalizes what Cortázar’s Morelli in Rayuela theorizes as the role of the lector cómplice: the reader who refuses the preordained plot and becomes an accomplice in the construction—and subversion—of meaning.

The initial premise of “Instructions for John Howell”—where the protagonist Rice, attending a play while on a business trip in Montevideo, is unexpectedly invited onstage to replace an absent actor—immediately destabilizes the boundaries between spectator and performer, reader and text. Cortázar employs metatheatrical devices to blur these lines, forcing both Rice and the reader into a liminal space where roles are imposed rather than chosen, and where the rules of the game are opaque, shifting, and ultimately oppressive. This metaleptic intrusion is not, however, a mere postmodern game of narrative layering; it is a metaphor for the political violence of texts—and regimes—that demand obedience under the guise of participation.

Rice’s initial hesitation, his awkward improvisations, and his futile attempts to break the fourth wall by appealing to the theater’s management or the audience all underscore the existential predicament of the reader confronted with a text that resists disengagement. The more Rice tries to assert his autonomy, the more entangled he becomes in the play’s sinister machinery, which increasingly reveals itself as a dystopian allegory of scripted social roles and authoritarian control. His forced complicity mirrors the reader’s uneasy position: to read the story is to become enmeshed in its web of power, where the only choices are to submit or to rebel without guarantees.

Cortázar’s narrative strategy here reflects his deepening engagement with the political ferment of the early 1960s, a period marked by anti-colonial struggles, student revolts, and guerrilla movements across Latin America. “Instructions” echoes this context by portraying Rice’s rebellion not merely as an aesthetic act but as a rehearsal for political action. The protagonist’s refusal to adhere to the script, his chaotic improvisations, and his final, desperate escape from the theater all suggest that reading—or spectating—is never a neutral activity. It is always already ideological, and the reader’s response constitutes a form of political positioning.

This dynamic aligns closely with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, wherein the act of interpretation is not a passive reception but an appropriation that “culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who […] begins to understand himself differently” (Ricoeur 1988, p. 158). Rice’s improvised responses, though clumsy and ineffective within the play’s rigged logic, nonetheless constitute a hermeneutics act: he refuses the given meaning and insists on articulating his own, however precarious. By rejecting the script’s “totalizing” logic (Ricoeur 1988, pp. 170–72), Rice embodies Ricoeur’s vision of reading as a transformative encounter—one that destabilizes both the text’s authority and the reader’s complacency. His rebellion is thus not against the play per se but against its closure, its pretense of reducing the world to a single, coercive narrative. Cortázar, like Ricoeur, positions interpretation as a battleground: to read is to risk oneself in the act of reimagining the text, even when such acts are doomed to fail.

Moreover, Cortázar’s portrayal of Rice anticipates the insights of cognitive narratology regarding narrative simulation and readerly agency. As Lisa Zunshine argues, fiction compels readers to “mind-read” characters’ intentions through gaps in the text (Zunshine 2006, p. 6), a process mirrored in Rice’s desperate attempts to decode the play’s opaque directives. Similarly, Patrick Colm Hogan contends that narrative immersion hinges on our ability to simulate “emotional universals” (Hogan 2003a, p. 15)—a faculty Cortázar weaponizes by denying readers the comfort of stable focalization. Like Rice, we are forced to “improvise” ethical responses to a narrative that refuses coherence, embodying Hogan’s notion of literature as a “laboratory for affective dissonance” (Hogan 2003b, p. 72). The reader, like Rice, must improvise cognitive and ethical responses to a scenario that offers no easy cues or resolutions. This aligns with recent work in cognitive narratology that emphasizes reading as an embodied, affective practice in which the reader must navigate uncertainty, dissonance, and conflicting scripts.

In this regard, “Instructions for John Howell” can also be read as a radicalization of the metaleptic gesture explored in “Continuity of Parks.” Where the landowner in “Continuity” succumbs to the text’s predatory logic, Rice confronts the violence of narrative scripts head-on, refusing to be assimilated into the machinery of authoritarian storytelling. His rebellion, however, is not without cost. By the end of the story, Rice has fled the theater, but the text offers no catharsis, no triumphant closure. He escapes into the night, battered and humiliated, leaving the reader to contemplate the ambiguous ethics of insurgent reading: resistance does not guarantee liberation; it merely keeps open the possibility of imagining other scripts.

Cortázar’s staging of this dilemma reflects the broader political ethos of Rayuela, where Morelli’s vision of the lector cómplice is not a romanticized ideal but a demanding ethical challenge. Just as Rayuela dismantles linear narratives and invites the reader to reconstruct the text through ludic engagement, “Instructions for John Howell” compels its reader to inhabit the uncomfortable position of the actor–reader, forced to improvise meaning in a hostile and unstable discursive field. Both works reject the notion of literature as a closed system of signification, instead positing it as a site of struggle, risk, and unfinished dialog.

Finally, “Instructions for John Howell” resonates powerfully with contemporary debates about participatory culture and the politics of reading in digital environments. In an era of scripted interactivity, algorithmically curated experiences, and gamified narratives, Cortázar’s story remains a potent allegory of the dangers and potentials of readerly agency. As Jenkins argues in his analysis of participatory culture, the shift from passive consumer to active participant is fraught with contradictions, as “concentrated media conglomerates maintain disproportionate power to shape the flow of communication” even within ostensibly open systems (Jenkins 2006, pp. 257–58). Cortázar’s narrative anticipates this tension by framing insurgent reading not as an escape from power dynamics but as an ongoing negotiation of them.

In summary, “Instructions for John Howell” offers a stark, unsettling vision of what it means to be an active reader in a world where texts—and powers—seek to script our roles in advance. By placing Rice in the impossible position of the improvising actor, Cortázar exposes the violence inherent in representation while insisting that the only ethical response is to risk rebellion, however flawed or futile. It is in this unresolved tension between complicity and resistance that the story articulates its most enduring—and urgent—lesson about the politics of reading.

4. Reading as Resistance: Cortázar’s Legacy and the Politics of Interpretation

The dialectic established by Julio Cortázar between “Continuity of Parks” and “Instructions for John Howell” constitutes one of the most sophisticated interrogations of reading, representation, and agency in twentieth-century Latin American literature. These two short stories, written at distinct moments in his trajectory—“Continuity” in 1956, before the radicalization embodied in Rayuela (Cortázar [1963] 1984) and “Instructions” in 1966, after the publication of his experimental novel—form a thematic diptych that dramatizes the stakes of literary engagement as an existential, cognitive, and political act.

This article has argued that Cortázar’s stories do not merely anticipate later theories of reader-response, narratology, or hermeneutics, but actively expand and politicize them from within the literary text itself. By mobilizing Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the implied reader and textual gaps, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of appropriation, and insights from cognitive narratology on narrative simulation and transportation, I have demonstrated that these narratives stage reading not as passive consumption but as a dangerous and transformative practice. The juxtaposition of these theories with Cortázar’s fiction reveals how the reader’s ethical positioning—whether as a compliant observer in “Continuity” or as a reluctant actor in “Instructions”—becomes the true site of conflict and responsibility.

In “Continuity of Parks,” the figure of the passive, bourgeois reader succumbs to the necropolitical violence of a text that devours him precisely because he refuses to engage critically with its structural gaps. The story literalizes the annihilation of subjectivity when reading is reduced to escapist consumption, exposing the predatory logic of narrative authority when unchallenged. Cortázar’s use of metalepsis operates not merely as a metafictional device but as a cognitive trap, forcing the reader to confront their complicity in the mechanics of textual violence.

In contrast, “Instructions for John Howell” offers no comfort, but neither does it allow for resignation. Rice’s improvisational rebellion against the rigged scripts of the play he is forced to inhabit allegorizes the reader’s potential to resist preordained meanings, even if such resistance leads to humiliation, exile, or disillusionment. The story enacts the predicament theorized by Cortázar’s Morelli in Rayuela: the lector cómplice is not a heroic figure but one who assumes the risk of entering the text’s unstable terrain, knowing that the only guarantee for survival is the refusal of closure. In this sense, Cortázar pushes Ricoeur’s hermeneutics into the realm of political praxis, portraying interpretation as an insurgent act of appropriation that destabilizes not only the text but the reader’s subjectivity.

By situating these readings within broader debates about participatory culture, algorithmic curation, and digital narratives, this article highlights the enduring relevance of Cortázar’s critique. In an era where texts are increasingly consumed within controlled, predictive environments, “Continuity” and “Instructions” offer a stark reminder that reading remains a battleground—a space where attention, agency, and interpretation are contested and where the stakes are nothing less than the survival of critical consciousness itself.

This imperative to read actively and critically also resonates, albeit from a different angle, with what Jaime Alazraki has defined as lo neofantástico [the neofantastic].11 As Alazraki argues, this modern variant of the fantastic does not merely seek to astonish but to unsettle the reader’s epistemological certainties by revealing the everyday world as a mask concealing deeper realities. From this perspective, the ontological breaches staged in “Continuity of Parks” and “Instructions for John Howell”—the blending of diegetic levels, the collapse of fiction and reality—function as metaphors of knowledge that challenge the reader to interpret rather than to consume. Even if this article brackets the traditional fantastic mode in favor of a hermeneutics and cognitive approach, acknowledging this neofantastical dimension further reinforces Cortázar’s commitment to engaging the reader’s interpretive agency through unsettling narrative forms.

Thus, Cortázar’s work stands as both an ars poetica and a manifesto for insurgent reading, presaging today’s algorithmic media landscapes where passive consumption risks epistemic surrender. By reclaiming the role of the lector cómplice, his stories urge us to resist narratives that weaponize complacency—an imperative as urgent in digital spaces as in literature. It challenges us to become Morelli’s accomplice-readers, to embrace the risks of textual engagement not as escapism but as a mode of ethical and political intervention. The relevance of this article lies precisely in reasserting that challenge, reclaiming Cortázar’s stories as not only literary experiments but as urgent calls to resist the necropolitics of passivity in all its contemporary forms.