New Forms of Perception

...Horacio is a fortyish Argentine living in Paris who has no responsibilities and earns only enough to keep from starving and to buy books and records...

...His fascination with old age shows his consciousness of the game's time limits...

...He wants both views at the same time...

...Cortázar's work, from Bestiario to Hopscotch, shows the perfecting of a new literary language based on a stylization of Argentine idiomatic speech...

...The structural limitations of the novel form are overcome by making the story two separate encounters with the same events...

...Horacio's life had always been a search for new perceptions of the world, the steady elimination of possibilities...

...Brutal, arbitrary authority thwarts their action and "justice" is administered by an impersonal "inspector" who suspends the voyage and returns the bewildered, angry passengers to Buenos Aires...

...At the climax of this part, La Maga's child dies and Horatio detachedly allows her to discover the body for herself in a room filled with their friends discussing philosophy...

...Horacio does not merely theorize this vision, he wishes to experience it...

...When Traveler opens the door to Horacio's room he finds him lounging in the window inches from falling...

...And once the recognition is established there remains nothing more for Horacio to do but end the experiment at its sweetest moment...

...The first two parts are read consecutively, but in order to understand the novel, the reader must then follow Cortâzar's instructions and reread the first two books with the third mixed in with them...

...The book is divided into three parts: "From the other side," "From this side,' and "From diverse sides...

...And so the novel ends...

...While describing a man's personal attempt to see his life from another point of view, Hopscotch attacks the traditional separation of novel and reader...

...He does this one night by luring Traveler into his room on the third floor of the sanatorium through a labyrinth of booby traps, strung up threads, basins of water and scattered ballbearings...

...He moves in with a nondescript but devoted girl named Gekrepten and through his friends Traveler and Talita gets a job in a circus...

...It must be read twice to be read once, for a second reading forces the reader to enter into the novel, makes him a character, an insider who, already familiar with the scenes, encounters them again under modifying circumstances...

...His wish to reject and be rejected by this Parisian life materializes in the last scene of this part when he is arrested, drunk with an old beggar woman under the arcade along the Rue de l'Hirondelle...

...Uninformed of their destination, the passengers begin to worry and finally some band together to stage a revolution against the inertia which motivates them...

...He informs them of what has happened but deliberately keeps La Maga in ignorance as if by purging himself of sentimental ties to her, he could complete his isolation...

...To understand what is happening the reader must skip lines and read pages twice, thus discovering that Galdós' prose is dead oratory while Cortâzar's hero is alive and real...

...Horacio refuses to come down...

...The third part, made up of new chapters, poetry and newspaper clippings, develops the plot in depth and provides a series of possibilities for the novel's enigmatic ending, enabling the reader to see the whole work in a different way...

...The second part, which takes place in Buenos Aires, reverses Horacio's isolation process...

...Hopscotch is the story of Horacio Oliveira's search, physical and mental, for a place from which he can see himself within the world, see what he is and what he is not...

...Horacio does not describe this as a hierarchy of perception but shows that everyone has limits beyond which he cannot develop, and what Horacio hopes to discover is a tangent which will allow him to divide in half so- that he may see his life from another point of view...

...Horacio is mad, perched on the window, but Traveller understands what he has done and the communication Horacio hoped for does take place...

...Cortâzar invented the Cronopios, poetic, pleasantly mad beings, to fight against discipline and routine, while the Famas register his protest against the age by an affirmation of folly...

...This is no Proustian re-creation of an experience in memory, but a desire to make a new experience out of old material using a new perception of events...

...A ship, supposed to carry a group of prize winners on a free cruise, is barely able to leave Buenos Aires, and it is announced that the captain and members of the crew are suffering from typhus...

...Although it is only Cortázar's second novel, Hopscotch is the product of a mature talent which first expressed itself successfully in 1951, when the author, then 37 years old, published a collection of eight short stories entitled Bestiario (Bestiary...

...While it is essentially a serious exposition of a search for identity, Hopscotch is filled with absolutely comic scenes, many of which derive their humor from Cortázar's innovations in literary Spanish...

...Historias is a mixture of poetry, vignettes and gnomic statements on personal ways of fighting the everyday world...

...Reviewed by ALFRED J. MacADAM Department of Romance Languages, Princeton University Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch is a revolutionary novel, long and very complex, as much the author's search for a new novelistic reality as it is his hero's search for a metaphysical view of himself...

...In Final del Juego as in his other prenovelistic works, Cortázar frequently writes of an exchange of identity or inner knowledge between two characters, a theme which links him with other writers of the Rio de la Plata region such as Jorge Luis Borges...

...Three years later, Las Annas Sécrétas (Secret Weapons) revealed Cortâzar's increasing interest in longer prose forms...

...After this scene La Maga disappears and Horacio breaks off relations with his friends when, at a meeting of the Club, someone calls him an inquisitor...

...The circus manager then buys an insane asylum and all three go to work in it...

...He has friends and lives with a woman, but these relationships never distract him from his search and self-examination...

...In Hopscotch, he shows the difference between his linguistic technique and traditional Spanish style by having his protagonist read a novel by Perez Galdós, the 19th century Spanish novelist...

...The stories' narrators or protagonists are often children or naive adults who report incidents without understanding them...

...Gregory Rabassa's translation conveys this sprightliness perfectly...

...This would mean a return to order, to the same limits and possibilities as before, which is exactly what he wishes to end...

...Horacio conceives of man as a solidified amoeba...

...His second book of short stories, Final del Juego (End of the Game) published in 1956, showed a greater concentration on recording personal experience than Bestiario did...

...Stylistically, Cortâzar, like Borges, has attempted to free his prose of the empty rhetoric which has stifled literature in Spanish since the Siglo de Oro and to replace it with a language in which every word is original...

...Unfortunately, however, it is marred by occasional lapses: "Paulatina" in Spanish means "gradual" and it appears twice as "rapid,' and Horacio complains in chapter two of "mis enfermedades morales y otras piorreas" which Rabassa translates as "my moral sickness and other worse ones,' confusing "piorrea" (pyorrhea) with "peor" (worse...

...In 1960, Cortâzar published Los Premios (The Winners), a novel in which he abandons the supernatural devices of the Bestiario stories and presents a cross section of the Argentine middle classes in the late 1950s...

...A novel of Hopscotch's importance certainly calls for careful correction and it is to be hoped that future editions will be emended...

...He is aware that by reading Joyce in a given moment he is denying himself some other experience, and that his life is like looking at a painting from across a hall while someone else is seeing it differently from above...

...At such a moment, he will at last be able to observe himself in his human state from the threshold of a non-human condition...

...The action of the first part takes place in Paris and deals with Horacio's breaking all ties with his mistress, La Maga, and his group of friends, the Serpent Club...

...Cortâzar arranges the pages so that a line from Galdós alternates with a line of the character's thoughts as he reads...

...while in others, where the pseudopods are small, he is always insensitive...

...There Horacio realizes that Traveler is the spiritual double he had been searching for and concentrates on precipitating a climactic moment in which each will recognize himself in the other...

...The humor which pervades all his writing is most elaborately presented in Historias de Cronopios y Famas (Stories about Cronopios and Famas) written between 1952 and 1959 and published in 1962...

...In the section "Marvelous Pursuits," Cortázar proposes: "What a marvelous pursuit, cut off a spider's leg, put it in an envelope, write 'Minister of Foreign Affairs,' add the address, jump downstairs, mail the letter in the post office on the corner...

...He has had moments of insight in which he felt he was watching himself, and is embittered because in normal life he is forced to choose between mutually excluding actions...

...In certain areas, where the pseudopods are longest, man's sensitivity to experience is great...

...He describes it as if it were a game of hopscotch in which each square represents a new level of understanding, a new challenge which becomes unimportant once attained, and the final goal, the "kibbutz of desire" or metaphysical ledge from which he hopes to survey his life becomes the only thing left for him to attain before he dies...