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Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar: summary, analysis and famous phrases from the novel

In the novel Hopscotch (1963), Julio Cortázar breaks with the traditional conception of the narrative by introducing playful elements and innovations of a very diverse nature. For this reason, it was quickly valued as a master novel of the boom Latin American. But what did Cortázar do singular? How did you manage to influence the international literary scene to such an extent with this work? What literary devices did he use?

But above all, how to read and interpret Hopscotch?

How to read Hopscotch?

The reader of Hopscotch is greeted by a warning from the author before the "first" chapter. In it, Julio Cortázar proposes a challenge or, better, a game. The novel can be read in at least two ways:

  1. with a linear reading, as usual, and only from chapters 1 to 56, in which case we will hardly know "a story";
  2. following the board of directors proposed by the author, which begins in chapter 73, that is, jumping from one fragment to the other.

This means that, although the novel has a visible three-part structure (“On the side over there”; "From the side here" and "From other sides"), Julio Cortázar suggests playing with her from the start, jumping from one painting to the other, as if it were a game of hopscotch.

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But could there be a third option?

The first time i read HopscotchJust when I was starting my university training, I wanted to follow the board of directors. One day I lost the bookmark on the page and relied on my memory to get back to reading order. As I reached the "end," I realized that I had missed something important. I checked the management board once more, only to find that I had missed several chapters. When I looked at the direction board again, I found the detour point, and also noticed that chapter 55 was missing. A misprint? No. A deliberate decision of the author.

This allowed me to understand that in Hopscotch there are not only two books, but many books are possible. I also discovered that Cortázar was playing games with me. Why else could the omission of chapter 55 or the specular effect of the last two chapters refer to each other be? These words serve to insist that Hopscotch it is a literary work that breaks with the traditional form of narrative. Let's understand how and why.

Structure and synopsis

hopscotch

From the side over there

The first part takes place in Paris. The narrator exposes the history of the relationship between Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual who works as a translator, and La Maga (Lucía), a Uruguayan, mother of little Rocamadour. Oliveira forms the Snake Club, a group of intellectual friends who meet to talk about art, literature (especially about Morelli, a fictional writer whom everyone reveres) and jazz.

La Maga, oblivious to these intellectual references, is the only piece that he seems not to wear. The luck of the Rocamadour baby precipitates the end of this forced alliance and of the relationship between La Maga and Oliveira. In this section the first crisis of the main character takes place.

From the side here

The second part of the story takes place in Argentina, a country to which Oliveira returns after separating from La Maga and searching in vain for her in Montevideo, Uruguay. Already in Buenos Aires, Oliveira meets Traveler and Talita. Life takes unexpected turns. Oliveira works in a circus and, finally, in a psychiatric clinic. A second crisis will take him to the gates of suicide.

From other sides

In the third part, called by the author himself "the expendable chapters", the narrator tells us presents not only the deepening of the history and the data that allow us to understand the story. It is also the place where the narrator exposes his literary theory and where, in fact, he puts it into practice. "From other sides" is the heart of Hopscotch, where everything makes sense.

Analysis

An experimental novel?

The break in Hopscotch is multiple, which is why many have described it as a anti-novel. The most evident thing is the rupture of the linearity of the reading (from beginning to end). It is not just that the story contains jumps back (analepsis) and jumps forward (prolepsis), something that has existed in the narrative since always and that Cortázar could have resolved by arranging the chapters in the order of the board other.

The genius is in the challenge of making the reader a kind of editor. The reader composes the reading, organizes the fragments of a kaleidoscope. The book itself (as a physical entity) is presented to him as material for play, for inquiry. It is an almost detective itinerary of clues, an interactive game. Cortázar proposes us a map to find a treasure, and our reading ambition, our greed for other worlds and other adventures, throws us with blind faith to accept the challenge. Hopscotch it's a game with participation prize.

As if from a foreshadowing of Matrix In any case, Cortázar acts as a Morpheus that presents the reader with two options: the capsule of oblivion (the great habit) and the capsule that will give him access to the deep world of the womb, in which he can participate, to which he can reveal the mechanisms of writing, in which he can immerse himself and to create.

Along with this, Cortázar introduces other elements. In a passage, referred to in another of his chapters, he exposes a new language invented by him: the giggly, that language that encodes the love relationship between Oliveira and La Maga, apparently indecipherable, but full of meaning, image, and poetics (see chapter 68 of Hopscotch).

Cortázar also invites us to read a chapter alternating its lines (odd and even); transcribes texts by other authors (he will do so almost 15 years later José Saramago in Painting and Calligraphy Manual) and make up quotes; he reflects on literature, violent spelling, in short... he makes us accomplices and through this he gives us a playful pleasure, a participatory action.

The rupture, the novelty, the invention, the "ture" of Cortázar in Hopscotch has been described by many as a literature "experimental". However, Mario Vargas Llosa, to say that Hopscotch is an experimental novel is, to say the least, unfair. This is not an experiment, but a conquest, a truly new world of literary and interpretive possibilities. Vargas Llosa points out that:

it would be unfair to call it an experimental novel. This qualification gives off an abstract and pretentious whiff, suggests a world of test tubes, retorts and slates with algebraic calculations, something disembodied, dissociated from immediate life, desire and pleasure. Hopscotch brims with life from all its pores, it is an explosion of freshness and movement, of youthful exaltation and irreverence, a resounding laugh in front of those writers who, as Cortázar used to say, put on collars and ties to to write. He always wrote in shirt sleeves, with the informality and joy with which one sits at the table to enjoy a homemade meal or listen to a favorite album in the privacy of home. Hopscotch taught us that laughter was not the enemy of gravity and that all that is illusory and ridiculous can nest in the experimental zeal, when it is taken too seriously.

An aesthetic reflection

What has been said so far is an indicator of two fundamental values ​​for Cortázar, very typical of this work in particular: the first, the value of the shape as content in itself; the second, the self-reflexivity aesthetics, that is, the reflection on one's own literary and artistic work in the work itself. Nothing else will be the character of the writer Morelli, almost a alter ego Cortázar himself.

Hopscotch it is at the same time a story, a thesis and a game, three different ways of looking at life, all of them indispensable, fundamental, certainly vital. It is a representation of the inexcusable thread of time that weaves the passing of life, and whose fibers, made memories, are the only thing left to shelter in the dark hour... or to make you fall.

It is a representation of the complexity of the world around us, which we can capture in binary oppositions: feminine versus masculine, abstract thought versus. symbolic thinking, reason vs. craziness; success vs. failure; shape vs. contents.

Hopscotch It is a search for the meaning of existence, perhaps made a metaphor in the search for the literary / narrative meaning of the novel; an infinite literature, an open reflection as a breeding ground for new creative and existential universes... complicity, a fun, an interactive world created before the "insignificant" (non-significant) virtual interactivity from today. Hopscotch in a place for him pleasure.

Much more would have to be said, but this sky of hopscotch must remain clear so that everyone can play his own game in it. The personal search for that heaven (as a reader, as a soul) is the invention, the ture, all the tures of this world.

Characters

  • Horacio Oliveira: protagonist, forty-year-old, Argentine, cultured man, lives in Paris. Member of the Snake Club.
  • La Maga (Lucia): protagonist, Uruguayan, lives in Paris, naive and ignorant in many matters of interest to the Snake Club.
  • Rocamadour (Carlos Francisco): son of the Magician.
  • Etienne: Franco-Argentine painter. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Ronald: American jazz pianist. Babs's boyfriend. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Babs: American potter. Ronald's girlfriend. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Ossip Gregorovius: Romanian intellectual, with an uncertain past. He falls in love with La Maga. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Wong: friend of Chinese origin. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Perico Romero: Spanish lover of literature. Member of the Snake Club.
  • Morelli: accomplished novelist, admired by the Snake Club. Probable alter ego of Cortázar.
  • Guy Monod: Etienne's friend.
  • Pola: Oliveira's French lover.
  • Gekrepten: Argentine woman, Oliveira's girlfriend. She lives in Argentina.
  • Traveler: Argentine, friend of the protagonist in his youth. He lives in Argentina and is married to Talita.
  • Talita: Traveler's wife.

Best phrases of Hopscotch

By then I had realized that searching was my sign, emblem of those who go out at night without a fixed purpose, reason for the killers of compass.

We walked without looking for us but knowing that we were to meet.

What many people call loving is choosing a woman and marrying her. They choose her, I swear, I've seen them. As if she could choose in love, as if she were not a bolt of lightning that breaks your bones and leaves you stuck in the middle of the yard. You will say that they choose her because they love her, I think she is the other way around. Beatriz is not chosen, Julieta is not chosen. You do not choose the rain that will soak you to the bone when you leave a concert.

Behind all action there is a protest, because all doing means leaving to get to, or moving something so that it is here and not there,... , that is to say that in every act there is the admission of a lack, of something not done yet and that it is possible do, the tacit protest against the continuous evidence of the lack, the decline, the paucity of the Present.

What happens is that I persist in the unprecedented idea that man has been created for something else.

What did Christ think in bed before going to sleep, che? Suddenly, in the middle of a smile, your mouth turns into a hairy spider.

You are like a queen of cards to me, all in front but without volume.

For me, then it is not long ago. So it is far, far away, but not long ago.

It is strange how you can suddenly lose your innocence, without even knowing that you have entered another life.

But in jazz as in any art there are always a lot of blackmailers. One thing is the music that can be translated into emotion and another is the emotion that pretends to pass as music.

Our possible truth has to be an invention, that is to say, writing, literature, painting, sculpture, agriculture, fish farming, all the things in this world. Values, tures, holiness, a ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, ture of tures.

It is fair for one to tell a man how he has lived, if he wants it. I'm talking about you, not Ossip. You could tell me or not about your friends, but I had to tell you everything. You know, it's the only way to make them leave before they start to want another man, the only way to get them to the other side of the door and leave the two of us alone in the room.

... after forty years we have the true face on the back of our neck, looking desperately back.

I touch your mouth, with a finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I draw it as if it were coming out of my hand, as if for the first time your mouth were ajar, and it was enough for me to close my eyes To undo everything and start over, I give birth each time the mouth I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws on your face, a mouth chosen among all, with sovereign freedom chosen by me to draw it with my hand on your face, and that by a chance that I do not try to understand exactly matches your mouth that smiles below the one that my hand shows you. draw. (Excerpt from chapter 7)

As soon as he loved her noema, she was overwhelmed by the clémiso and they fell into hydromuria, into wild ambonia, into his exasperating petals. Every time he tried to lick the incopelusas, she became entangled in a plaintive cry and had to wrap herself facing the fledgling, feeling how little by little the The rings were mirrored, they were collapsing, reducing, until they were lying like the trimalciate of ergomanine to which some films of cariaconcia. And yet it was just the beginning, because at one point she twisted her hurgalios, consenting to him gently approaching her orphans. As soon as they were interspersed, something like an ulucord curled them, extrajoined them and stopped moving, suddenly it was the clinon, the convulsive esterfurous of the matric, the jade-sweat mouth of the orgumium, the sproems of the merpasm in an overhumitic agopause. Evohé! Evohé! Volposados ​​on the crest of the murelio, he felt balparamar, pearly and marulos. The troc trembled, the butterfly feathers were defeated, and everything was resolved in a deep pinx, in niolamas of alleged gauze, in almost cruel carinias that ordopenated them to the limit of gunfias. (CHAPTER 68)

Jazzuela

In the following link you will find a playlist that includes the great jazz songs mentioned in Hopscotch.

Jazzuela: Selection of Jazz by Hopscotch

Biography of Julio Cortázar

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Julio Cortázar is an Argentine writer born in Brussels on August 26, 1914. He stood out as one of the figures of the so-called boom of Latin American literature. He was the son of María Herminia Descotte and Julio José Cortázar.

At the time of his birth, the family was in Belgium, where his father was serving diplomatic functions as a commercial attaché to the embassy. They returned to Argentina in 1918. There, Cortázar completed his initial education, attended the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a rural teacher.

In 1951 Cortázar obtained a scholarship to study in Paris and obtained a position as a translator at UNESCO. In the 1950s, Cortázar won a place of honor as a short story writer thanks to books such as End of game, Secret weapons and Chronopios and fame stories, just to name a few. His novel Hopscotch, published in 1963, was a milestone in his journey as a storyteller.

He sympathized with the revolutionary movements of the left, especially the Cuban Revolution. He became a human rights activist, a cause to which he dedicated essays and opinion pieces.

Julio Cortázar received the Médicis Etranger Prize (1974) and the Konex de Honor Prize (1984). He passed away on February 12, 1984 in Paris from leukemia.

Works by Julio Cortázar

  • 1938. Presence
  • 1945. The other side
  • 1951. Bestiary
  • 1956. Game over
  • 1959. Secret weapons
  • 1960. The awards
  • 1962. Chronopios and fame stories
  • 1966. All fires the fire
  • 1968. 62, buildable model
  • 1963. Hopscotch
  • 1967. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
  • 1968. Last round
  • 1971. Pameos and meopas
  • 1972. Prose of the observatory
  • 1973. Manuel's book
  • 1974. Octahedron
  • 1975. Silvalandia
  • 1977. Someone who is out there
  • 1979. A certain Lucas
  • 1980. We love Glenda so much
  • 1982. Hours
  • 1983. The Autonauts of the Cosmopath
  • 1984. Except twilight
  • 1984. Argentina, years of cultural fences
  • 1986. Divertimento (posthumous)
  • 1986. The exam (posthumous)
  • 1996. Image by John Keats (posthumous)
  • 2009. Unexpected papers (posthumous)

References

  • Cortázar, Julio: Hopscotch, Commemorative edition. Spain: Royal Spanish Academy / Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. Recovered at read.amazon.com
  • García Márquez, Gabriel: The Argentine who was loved by everyone. On Hopscotch, Commemorative edition. Spain: Royal Spanish Academy / Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. Recovered at read.amazon.com
  • Vargas Llosa, Mario: Deyá's trumpet. On Hopscotch, Commemorative edition. Spain: Royal Spanish Academy / Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. Recovered at read.amazon.com

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