Drawing on earlier studies on Cortázar’s Orphism, most notably by Graciela Coulson and D. Mesa Gancedo, this article readdresses the problem by focusing more closely on the fundamental textual qualities of Cortázar’s oeuvre. Beyond occasional references to Orphic motives in his writings, four principal aspects seem to link his work to the Orphic universe: (1) an ontological aspect, according to which there is a resonance between literary writing and some deeper stratum of human nature; (2) an “exilic” aspect, epitomized in the fateful backward glance; (3) a posthumous aspect, projecting the work beyond the limits of death; and (4) a Utopian aspect, akin to Marcuse’s reading of the Orpheus figure in terms of unproductive, autotelic desire. From a focus which places the corpus of Cortázar’s writings within a more encompassing, comparatist perspective, his search for an Orphic dimension is traced beyond the extant books and well into the extensive Cortazarian “Nachlass.”