Julio Cortázar's 1963 novel, Hopscotch, encapsulates much of the spirit found in his 1962 work, Cronopios and Famas.
Indeed, it feels as though those freedom-loving, game-playing,
frolicking Cronopios have transformed themselves into the very blood
cells coursing through the veins and arteries of main character, Horacio
Oliveira. He comprehends that life is a game to be enjoyed, rather than
an unending drudgery to be endured. Keep it up, Oliveira! Don't let any
dull, uptight Famas hold you down. Maintain those Cronopios blood cells
in optimal condition by consistently infusing life with renewed
freshness.
The language sizzles, crackles, sparkles, and dances the tango as a reader hops from chapter to chapter via Julio's Table of Instructions or reads in the normal fashion ending with chapter 56 (also per the instructions), or continues to read to the last page at the end of chapter 155, or any other hopscotching way you would like. However, one thing is constant: Oliveira constantly proves himself a true Cronopio, when he proclaims, one of many such proclamations, "I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses."
Hopscotch weighs in at 564-pages, brilliantly translated by the great Gregory Rabassa and features a plot set first in Paris and then in Buenos Aires. Yet, how central is plot? After all, La Maga tells Horacio, “You think that you're in this room, but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.” This not-being-all-there hearkens back to Julio (so much like Horacio) starting out as a child carrying an adult inside and then, with age, an adult carrying a child inside. Doing the Julio-flip! In Julio's own words taken from his Around the Day in Eighty Worlds:
“I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del camino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world. Much of what I have written falls into the category of eccentricity, because I have never admitted a clear distinction between living and writing; if in my life I have managed to disguise an only partial participation in my circumstances. I still cannot deny that eccentricity in what I write, since I write precisely because I am only half there or not there at all.”
By my reading of Hopscotch, we are well to keep Julio's not-half-or-not-all-there-at-all in mind when hopscotching on characters and themes when reading either in the conventional page after page way or turning back and forth through pages using our own or Julio's sequence. Sure, there's order vs. chaos and Oliveira vs. society and Oliveira vs. the outside world; however, by my judgement, the ultimate lens of this vs. that is the world of Cronopios vs. the world of Famas, that is, the otherworldly world of lit, art and imagination vs. the all-here world of rigidity, conformity and the drab ho-hum.
My somewhat reckless rec: read Hopscotch like a Cronopio.
Now that it's 2023, here's how I picture beautiful La Maga
Julio Cortázar, 1914-1984
The language sizzles, crackles, sparkles, and dances the tango as a reader hops from chapter to chapter via Julio's Table of Instructions or reads in the normal fashion ending with chapter 56 (also per the instructions), or continues to read to the last page at the end of chapter 155, or any other hopscotching way you would like. However, one thing is constant: Oliveira constantly proves himself a true Cronopio, when he proclaims, one of many such proclamations, "I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses."
Hopscotch weighs in at 564-pages, brilliantly translated by the great Gregory Rabassa and features a plot set first in Paris and then in Buenos Aires. Yet, how central is plot? After all, La Maga tells Horacio, “You think that you're in this room, but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.” This not-being-all-there hearkens back to Julio (so much like Horacio) starting out as a child carrying an adult inside and then, with age, an adult carrying a child inside. Doing the Julio-flip! In Julio's own words taken from his Around the Day in Eighty Worlds:
“I will always be a child in many ways, but one of those children who from the beginning carries within him an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del camino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world. Much of what I have written falls into the category of eccentricity, because I have never admitted a clear distinction between living and writing; if in my life I have managed to disguise an only partial participation in my circumstances. I still cannot deny that eccentricity in what I write, since I write precisely because I am only half there or not there at all.”
By my reading of Hopscotch, we are well to keep Julio's not-half-or-not-all-there-at-all in mind when hopscotching on characters and themes when reading either in the conventional page after page way or turning back and forth through pages using our own or Julio's sequence. Sure, there's order vs. chaos and Oliveira vs. society and Oliveira vs. the outside world; however, by my judgement, the ultimate lens of this vs. that is the world of Cronopios vs. the world of Famas, that is, the otherworldly world of lit, art and imagination vs. the all-here world of rigidity, conformity and the drab ho-hum.
My somewhat reckless rec: read Hopscotch like a Cronopio.
Now that it's 2023, here's how I picture beautiful La Maga
Julio Cortázar, 1914-1984
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