Life & Wisdom Quote by Julio Cortazar

Cortazar isn’t calling for book burnings; he’s calling for sabotage from inside the canon. The provocation hinges on a delicious contradiction: a writer exists to make literature, yet he insists the writer’s highest use is to destroy it. That tension is the point. “Literature” here isn’t the act of writing but the institution of Literature: the polite rules, inherited forms, and prestige economy that decide what counts as serious, safe, and sellable. Cortazar, a central figure in the Latin American Boom and a lifelong experimenter (Hopscotch is basically a dare), frames destruction as an ethical and aesthetic duty: break the template or become its employee.

The slyest move is the “And us...” pivot. He drags the audience into complicity, refusing the romance of the solitary genius. Destruction becomes collective labor, a community of readers and writers refusing to behave. It’s also a political echo. Writing from a region shaped by censorship, dictatorships, and U.S. meddling, Cortazar knew that official culture often functions as soft policing: reward the legible, punish the unruly. To “help” in the destruction is to disrupt the ways stories domesticate reality.

The rhetoric is mock-utilitarian: “What good is...?” as if art’s value can be audited. Cortazar uses that managerial language to mock it, then flips it into a manifesto: usefulness equals insubordination. He’s not rejecting literature; he’s trying to rescue it from becoming a museum, where masterpieces are admired like relics and never allowed to infect anyone’s life.