The significance of Bad Place in “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar

Abstract

The semiotic perspective of production of sense of the neo-fantastic is born from the conception of the sign as a cultural unit that produces meanings within a system (the literary text) remissory to specific knowledge overlapped in the construction of archetypal images, alogical metaphors, syntactic inconsistencies and symbols that nourish the polysemy of the text and reveal the “enigma” immersed in the conflict of the work, all of which is elaborated through the discursive strategy marked by the point of view from which the narrator is situated. Based on this semio-narratological conception of neofantastic fiction and Jung’s archetype theory, this article analyzes the significance of the archetypal figure of the Bad Place in the horizons of the diegesis of the short story “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar. The Bad Place is approached here as a figurative space that spurs the reader’s interpretative skills to produce various possibilities of textual significance oriented towards three complementary optics: as an invasive force that alters the status quo of the protagonists; as a taboo territory in which a communication network is established with the characteristics of fear fiction; and as an ontic circumstance of sinister effect arising from horror rhetoric and incidents separated from the norm.