That Other Unreality: Place, Non-place and the Fantastic in Julio Cortázar's 'The Island at Noon [La isla a mediodía]'

This paper focuses on the opposition between place and non-place in Julio Cortázar's short story 'La isla a mediodía (The Island at Noon, 1966).' The question of spatiality in Cortázar's oeuvre has not received a great deal of detailed critical attention, and yet recent scholarship suggests that this dimension is essential to understanding how the fantastic operates in his works. I contend that the sense of place of Marini s island can be read as the element of the fantastic which invades the non-place of the aircraft cabin. Augé (1995) categorizes place as a location concerned with history and identity, imbued with human characteristics; while non-place is a space of transit emptied of history and identity. As the story concludes, place and non-place collapse into each other producing a fantastical rupture in the discursive plane and the creation of two possible unrealities.