"Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar (1963)

"It's a terrible job, splashing around in a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, to use the language of scholasticism. What is being searched for? What is being searched for? Repeat it fifteen thousand times, like hammer-blows on the wall. What is being searched for? What is that conciliation without which life doesn't go beyond an obscure joke? Not the conciliation of a saint, because if in the notion of going back to the dog, of starting over again from the dog or from the fish or from the ooze and the ugliness and the misery and any other disvaluation, there's always something like a nostalgia for sainthood, it would seem that one yearns for a non-religious sainthood (and here comes brainlessness), a state without differentiation, without saints (because a saint is always in some way a saint and those who are not saints, and that scandalizes a poor guy just like the one admiring the calf of the girl absorbed in adjusting her twisted stocking), that is to say that if there is conciliation it must be something besides a state of sainthood, an exclusive state from the word go. It has to be something immanent, with no sacrifice of lead for gold, cellophane from glass, the least for the most; on the contrary, brainlessness calls for lead to be worth us much as gold, for the most to be contained in the least. An alchemy, a non-Euclidean geometry, an up-to-date indetermination  for the operations of the spirit and its benefits. It's not a question of rising, an old mental image disproved by history, the old carrot that no longer fools the donkey. It's not a question of perfecting, of decanting, of redeeming, of choosing, of free-willing, of going from the alpha to the omega. One is already there. Anybody is already there. The shot is in the pistol; but a trigger has to be squeezed, and it so happens that the finger is making motions to stop a bus, or something similar.

How he talks, how he does go on, this smoking suburban tramp. The girl has already fixed her stocking, all set. You see? Forms of conciliation. Il mio supplizio... Everything is probably so simple, a pull on the mesh, a finger wet with saliva passing over the continuous part. It would probably be enough to grab one's nose and put it where one's ear is, upset circumstance a little. But no, that wouldn't do it either. Nothing easier than putting the blame on what's outside, as if one were sure that outside and inside are the two main beams of the house. But the fact is that everything is in bad shape, history tells you that, and the very fact that you're thinking about it instead of living it proves to you that it's bad, that we've stuck ourselves in a total disharmony that the sum of our resources disguises with social structure, with history, with Ionic style, with the joy of the Renaissance, with the superficial sadness of romanticism, and that's the way we go and they can turn the dogs on us."

- Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch, p486-7

Hopscotch is a novel. Most novels, it turns out, are not novels at all, not in the way Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was a novel. A novel disrupts as much as it reveals, and shows new realities that might have been imagined before, but had not entered into our cultural consciousness. As I wrote out this long quotation from Cortazar's simple yet complex novel I thought of Henry Miller darkening alleys and taking things as they came, and Charles Bukowski hurling bottles in bars at intellectuals and then insidiously walking with women back to apartments with ashtrays and cheap furniture, taking great pleasure in the frenzied moment. Cortazar described Hopscotch, saying that if he had not written it he would have thrown himself into the river Seine in Paris, a moment found somewhere in the labyrinthine text, in the midst of the ragged "clochardes" emerging in the night, after abandoning what might have been his only truly love, La Maga.

Cortazar's fragmented narrative weaves between the jazz-infused night-life of Paris, the unredeemed conversations and thoughts of unknown authors, the apartments of Buenos Aires. The life of one of the protagonists, Horacio Oliveira, goes between intellectual conversations to the sound of scratching records and neighbors complaining in heated French dialogue, to conversations with his friend Traveler in Buenos Aires; a man who has never traveled, and so can never quite understand Oliveira when he comes back to the other side. The novel intersperses newspaper clippings, quotations, small extracts of thoughts, memories conversations, and the novel stretches out further as though to stress the divide that always exists between Oliveira and his love La Maga in Paris, as both their thoughts create a divide that becomes inpenetrable. That earlier article Pebble and Star offered Marcel Proust's description of this distance, thought to be overcome through independence, through acceptance, but really inconsolably painful. A world where souls exist and see one another but cannot be penetrated except perhaps by forgetting time, seeing one another as timeless and with immeasurable depths within us. That malleability of time is sought not in the dialogue which at times becomes hysterical in its intellectual tone, that language that seeks mutual understanding but at the same time adds to this distance.

The ordinary narrative within Hopscotch ends at chapter 56 of a novel with 155 chapters. It is the typical narrative that does not give the reader something to clutch like the characters might, such as an incredible newspaper clipping from the time. It offers that transition between Paris and Buenos Aires; what might have been seen by those involved in those cafes, apartments, in the hospital with poor writer Morini who has been hit by a car in a street and barely recognised for his thoughts. Something symbolic: thought that cannot be seen, ideas and concepts that are beautiful yet invisible unless spoken or put on paper. Hopscotch is a novel about the importance of language, but not language as a tool for storytelling, rather language as an escape into the unknown, into places without time. I have already written somewhere that literature allows us to escape into someone else's mind like nothing else, except perhaps a meaningful conversations between two friends.

Cortazar finds his way into the reader by expanding and contracting the book before his very eyes; at once you are at the beginning of the novel and then you find yourself in a far away place, on the far side where thoughts appear yet remain separate from the ordinary narrative. The narrative would usually take the readers aside and inform them what certain characters were thinking, but this is an unlikely position to have. Rather find the thoughts have occurred in a far away place because La Maga does not understand Oliveira, who needs to find a mutual soul and not someone so easily overcome by involuntary passions. La Maga, so similar to Proust's Albertine, who is like that envelope that cannot be opened. That envelope that carries secret words that have not been expressed yet, that have not found their voice. And when Oliveira's less loving side emerges in the narrative his friends begin to grow distant; he is unthinking and cruel, without feeling. But Oliveira's feeling is in his language, in his soul. Even after departing from Paris after a depraved night in Paris, Oliveira cannot speak with his close friend Traveler, whose partner Talita reminds him of La Maga. The reader, if patient with Cortazar, begins to realize that Oliveira more than anything would like to close his hand over time and place his feelings inside words, inside some for of expression that would allow him to escape the muted love he had for La Maga.

It is a novel that is difficult to explain, that forces the reader to understand the complexities in the characters that would otherwise appear brilliant for their conversation, eccentric in their behavior, or even unjustified for falling in love. The causes of blame, of guilt, or regret in life relate to the unspoken, the unspeakable. The strange patterns that emerge that look like cause and effect in a narrative no longer look that way when the thoughts of our protagonists appear physically distant. The smallest revealings of context in the faraway daydreams of Oliveira, of Traveler, or their partners and companions. Cortazar's novel is partly about content but it would be difficult to make the claim that it was the content that mattered; it is the way that love emerges as a certain loneliness and voicelessness; perhaps it is an identification of certain feelings in another, but one is without words and the other has words, has that timelessness already in sight, that pebble has been kicked up in the air and has landed on the right spot at last, but the spot has become a black hole with no escape in sight. Cortazar's novel is tragic yet redeeming, and I believe that the style of writing that has emerged goes a long way to showing that narrative is farcical; that it occurs nowhere in life, yet trails through it instructing people of cause and effect and making characters appear less layered than they truly are. Memory is important here, and memory with a certain relief.