Michael Hardin, University of Houston
As one of the seminal novels of the Latin American literary “boom,” Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; translated into English as Hopscotch in 1966) has been analyzed and discussed from countless angles, yet most of these readings do not examine the novel beyond that tradition.[1] If we examine Hopscotch as part of a self-reflexive and ludic tradition which includes such works as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,[2] we can see two reasons for the novel’s openness to readings: the first is the various orders in which the chapters can be read; the second is the continually changing relationship between the narrator and its readers. The openness of the text contributes to its seductiveness; the reader is drawn into the text through an erotics that focuses not on the primary sex organs, but on language. Through this shift, Cortázar provides us with an opportunity to read the text itself as a seduction of the reader; the hands and the mouth are centers of language, the written and the spoken. The entire novel can thus be seen as the erotic relationship between narrator and constructed reader, both of whom are gendered male; however, this type of “love” relationship is an ingenious game in which experiencing the bliss of the text involves losing and being led around the novel at the author’s whim.
The structure of the novel is rather straightforward; Hopscotch is composed of three sections. The first is titled “From the Other Side” and follows the writer Horacio Oliveira around Paris as he interacts with La Maga and the members of the Serpent Club. The second section, “From This Side,” takes place in Buenos Aires, where Oliveira meets up with Traveler and Talita, and where he finally descends into the asylum. The “plot” sections of the novel follow Oliveira’s quest for the “kibbutz of desire,” which is never defined and which he supposedly never finds.[3] The third section, “From Diverse Sides: Expendable Chapters,” includes “plot” chapters, newspaper clippings, notes, quotations, and Morelli’s literary philosophy. “From Diverse Sides” functions as the commentary on the first fifty-six chapters; the noticeable absence of Morelli in the first fifty-six chapters and his constant presence in the others make him the sign of this commentary.[4]
One of the two points upon which the critics of Hopscotch generally agree is that the novel is a game. The other point of agreement is one of omission: the fact that there has not been a serious investigation of the complex erotics of the novel’s form.[5] The ludic critics differ greatly on how to win, if winning is even possible; on what constitutes victory or the end of the game; and on why the other strategies result in failure. The only reading that contains a potential winning move is that of the female-reader.[6] If one takes the novel seriously as a game—and the switch in title from Mandala to Rayuela suggests that we should—then the female-reading is the only one which provides a possible winning move; it allows the actual reader to exit, which in this novel constitutes victory at the simplest level of playing. The extent to which gaming plays a part in Hopscotch suggests an intense relationship between narrator and constructed reader. Despite Cortázar’s own request for passionate readers, critics generally present the relationship between the narrator and the constructed reader in formal terms, namely as a coproduction, not as a seduction or romance; however, unless we play desperately and passionately, even though we lose, we cannot experience the bliss of the text.
It is within the “Expendable Chapters” that the constructed readers of the novel are formally named, although they are outlined in the “Table of Instructions.” According to the “Table of Instructions,” the first reader is the one who reads “in a normal fashion and … ends with Chapter 56 … the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience” (iii). In chapter seventy-nine, Morelli defines one who reads this way as the female-reader (el lector-hembra).[7] The other reader of the “Table of Instructions” begins with chapter seventy-three and proceeds to skip around, landing at all chapters (except fifty-five) at least once.[8] Morelli calls this reader el lector cómplice, but given the desire for binaries or the model readers within the novel, this reader has been termed by the majority of critics as the “male-reader.”[9] Midway through the male-reading, we are introduced to a second male-reading, Morelli’s reader. Morelli has asked Oliveira and Étienne to send his manuscript to the publishers, but Oliveira is worried that they may get the order messed up, to which Morelli replies: “Who cares.… You can read my book any way you want to.… The most I do is set it up the way I would like to reread it. And in the worst of cases, if they do make a mistake, it might just turn out perfect” (556). Thus, Cortázar provides what seems to be the secret to winning the novel: Morelli’s reader, the reading in which one reads however one desires. By adding that if the order is jumbled the novel might turn out perfect, Morelli is implying that, potentially, there is a perfect or desired order.
Morelli’s reader is Oliveira, who is the key to understanding why we as critical readers cannot win the game of the novel. Oliveira (the male-reader) is one of the two paradigmatic readers within the text; the other is La Maga (the female-reader). Regardless of how we read, we follow Oliveira through the novel; in this way, we share his fate.[10] Most critics accept one of the two outcomes, attempted suicide or madness,[11] but differ widely concerning whether or not the outcome is one of failure or one of resurrection. Is Oliveira’s attempted suicide and/or madness symbolic of his resurrection? Since he goes mad and/or tries to kill himself, does he not fail? The ending is problematic, but Ortega provides a clue in his book, Poetics of Change. In an insightful look at the end of chapter fifty-six, Ortega notes that the window in which Oliveira is sitting is a square in the game of hopscotch.[12] Ortega uses this point to argue that the asylum window is the winning square, but instead, it should be seen as evidence that Oliveira, just as we, the readers, cannot exit the game. Oliveira is sitting in the window, a square in the game of hopscotch; he is above a courtyard in which there is a hopscotch game, at which he has been throwing cigarette butts (none of which land in the “heaven” or “home” square); and in his room is a trap or web[13] or a labyrinth which he himself has created. Therefore, any move he makes leaves him in the game: if he does nothing, he is still in the hopscotch square of the window; if he jumps, he is in the hopscotch game in the courtyard; and if he goes back into his room, he is trapped in his own labyrinth. Oliveira, like the male-reader, is trapped within the game. Furthermore, the page of the book is itself a square of the game in which the male-reader is trapped along with Oliveira, especially if s/he is hopping back and forth between chapters fifty-eight and one hundred thirty-one (neither of which is part of the female-reading).
In the expendable chapters which follow fifty-six, Oliveira has his eyes bandaged and remarks that “it’s like a kaleidoscope” (412).[14] This reference to a child’s toy, the infinite alternation of chapters fifty-eight and one hundred thirty-one in which Oliveira seems to go back and forth from the asylum to his room,[15] Oliveira’s lack of coherent thought and speech and also his lack of progression in the final chapters, all suggest that he is still playing the game and cannot stop, or is stuck within it and cannot get out. Francine Masiello writes that Oliveira and some of the other characters are trapped in an intellectual game, because of “their own ritualized brutality.”[16] She uses an episode with Berthe Trépat to explain that the grotesque lies in the “game of viewing and trying to make sense of what is seen.”[17] What does a critic or male-reader do if not view and try to make sense of what is read? This game, which Masiello states has trapped Oliveira, has also trapped the readers who read as he would read, namely, the male-readers. Christopher Nash agrees with the idea that the novel is a trap; he mentions that the game is a “death-trap,” a “prison,” and a “tomb.”[18] Therefore, Oliveira becomes a masochistic guide, one who punishes us in much the same way as the text punishes him. Following him does not lead us out of the maze; it entraps us further.
La Maga, the female-reader, is the guide who will lead the reader out of the labyrinth, but in doing so allows the reader neither pleasure nor pain. Martha Paley Francescato writes that La Maga and Talita act as Oliveira’s Virgil.[19] She adds that “La Maga, without knowing it, already has it. She has already found it.”[20] The “it” seems to suggest “the answer” or “the solution,” but if we take her solution, then we simultaneously remove the text’s potential to produce bliss. E. D. Carter agrees with Francescato: “Within the novel’s context, ‘Maga’ means freedom, and La Maga herself is the roadway to that freedom.”[21] There is no freedom in a labyrinth; therefore, to free ourselves, we must follow La Maga to the exit. If we desire freedom from the labyrinth, we must follow the path of the female-readers. But again, freeing oneself from the text prevents access to textual pleasure. Furthermore, La Maga’s other name, Lucía (76), means “light”; at a very basic level, she is the one who can see, is enlightened, and who provides “light” for us. Oliveira tells us how to escape the labyrinth by telling us how Talita and La Maga play hopscotch: “You [Talita] lost on the third square. The same thing would have happened to La Maga, she’s incapable of keeping things up … she goes around bumping into everyone … she is absolutely perfect in her way of denouncing everybody else’s perfection” (317). We see Oliveira deride Talita and La Maga because they refuse to play to the tenth square; they exit the game after square three. La Maga ends the game seemingly before it is over. Cortázar has contrived a game in which winning deprives the player of the knowledge that s/he has won and in which experiencing the bliss of the text entails losing and being bounced around the novel ad infinitum.
Cortázar is a master at keeping players in the game; for the male-readers who insist on reading and rereading every chapter, he adds to the entrapment by continually returning to and adding to Hopscotch. His next novel, 62: A Model Kit (1976),[22] admits to being the novel Morelli outlines in chapter sixty-two of Hopscotch: “For those who might possibly be startled, I point out that in the territory where this tale takes place the transgressions cease to be such …: aggression, regression, and progression are also connatural to the intentions sketched out one day past in the final paragraphs of Chapter 62 of Hopscotch, which explains the title of the book.”[23] If 62 is the novel Morelli is outlining, then the Spanish subtitle, modelo para armar, furthers the idea that Morelli wants a text that fully engages the reader: armar means “to arm,” as with weaponry, but also contains within it amar, “to love.” For the male-reader, 62: A Model Kit becomes an extension of Hopscotch, yet another chapter which must be read and incorporated. Similarly, in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1986),[24] Cortázar includes chapters in which he “explains” his intentions in writing Hopscotch; a chapter detailing a machine, the “Hopscotch-o-matic,” which randomly puts different chapters in front of the reclining reader; a chapter entitled “Morelliana Forever”;[25] and other chapters describing the shortcomings of the female-reader. If this were not enough, he also published, after Hopscotch, a story entitled “A Rejected Chapter from Hopscotch.” In the introduction, Cortázar states that this is “the title chapter” (number forty-one in Hopscotch) but that it had to be taken out because he felt that it was “superfluous.”[26] Cortázar knows that by introducing the story by stating that it was the origin and “cornerstone” of Hopscotch, he is assuring that it is being read (42). This original chapter is yet another clue to the enigma of the novel, and yet, when one reads the story, it is terribly disappointing: the story is a brief episode between Talita and Traveler which parallels Oliveira’s night in the asylum. When does the game of Hopscotch end? At the conclusion of chapter fifty-six? At the end of chapter one hundred fifty-five? In another novel or story? Never? The most difficult labyrinth from which to escape would be one in which the exit appears to be merely another room or corridor. We can only speculate why Cortázar gives us so much and encourages us to continue playing past the end of the novel. Pale Fire (1962), written by Vladimir Nabokov and published the year before Rayuela,[27] is, in part, a blatant parody of literary critics; what better game could there be than to encourage the critics to read an extra ninety-nine chapters, or more if the reading entails rereading, or reading Cortázar’s other texts which reference Hopscotch?
The extensive role of play in Hopscotch creates an intimacy between the narrator and constructed reader, which, as close analysis reveals, is highly eroticized. Since the only real player within the novel is the male-reader (the female-reader is not really a player because she is not conscious of being in the game), the erotics are performed between men. In Hopscotch, the “readers”—Oliveira, Étienne, Gregorovius, Perico, Ronald, Wong—are all men, and all are members of the Serpent Club. They meet to discuss literature written almost exclusively by men. They are us, the “critical readers.” The name of the club is itself a sign for the critical reader, with many potential referents. Besides being an obvious phallic image, the serpent is also a reference to Honoré de Balzac, who is mentioned twice in the novel (403, 435).[28] The epigraph to Balzac’s novel The Magic Skin (1831) is Corporal Trim’s cane flourish from Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which Balzac describes as serpentine. Thus, through Balzac, the serpent ultimately refers back to Tristram Shandy, whose title character is also mentioned in Hopscotch. The Serpent Club is a group of male readers, joined under a phallic symbol, reading books generally by men, and, in the case of Tristram Shandy, one which focuses on the playful and flirtatious relationship between narrator and constructed male-reader.
The role of Tristram Shandy extends beyond the Serpent Club. Through Morelli, his author-within-the-text, Cortázar states that Tristram is still being manifested in the contemporary novel: “The outer forms of the novel have changed, but their heroes are still the avatars of Tristram, Jane Eyre, Lafcadio, Leopold Bloom” (437).[29] By citing Tristram as avatar, Cortázar encourages the reader to read Tristram into Hopscotch, and in the process introduce all of Tristram’s sexual desires and dysfunction. Tristram’s unfortunate accident is subtly alluded to in one of the “Expendable Chapters,” entitled “Perils of the Zipper”: “THE British Medical Journal speaks of a new type of accident that can befall boys. This accident is caused by the use of a zipper in place of buttons in trouser flies (our medical correspondent informs us). The danger lies in the prepuce’s being caught in the fastener. Two cases have already been reported. In both of them circumcision had to be resorted to in order to free the child. The accident is more likely to occur when the child goes to the bathroom unaccompanied” (508). A number of things about this “clipping” suggest that it is a reference to the episode where the window falls on Tristram Shandy’s penis while he is urinating out of it: it is from a British journal, it is an accident, it befalls boys, and it entails being caught, an act which is most likely to occur when the boy is going to the bathroom. In this reference to Tristram, Cortázar is drawing special attention to the impetus behind Tristram’s narrative, his inability to find sexual satisfaction.
The similarity in philosophies of writing between Morelli and Tristram is further evidence of the role of Tristram Shandy in Hopscotch. A woman has inadvertently taken Tristram’s manuscript and used it as hair papers, and when they are removed, “one was twisted this way—another twisted that—ay! by my faith; and when they are published, quoth I,—They will be worse twisted still.”[30] Tristram is bothered that his narrative will be scrambled, but does not seem so bothered as to make sure they are in the original order; Cortázar changes this scene by having Morelli secretly want the disorder.
A final allusion to Tristram Shandy is Oliveira’s fixation with whistling: “There weren’t many authors who made their characters whistle. Practically none of them did” (233). Cortázar could not have forgotten the role played by whistling in Tristram Shandy. Uncle Toby—whose name is a play on “Tickletoby,” an eighteenth-century slang term for “penis,”[31] who was wounded in the groin at Namur, and who reenacts in miniature European battles with Trim—whistles “Lillabullero” when topics dealing with sex arise. By making the issue of whistling so pronounced, Cortázar is encouraging the reader to associate Oliveira’s whistling with Toby’s sexual frustration. By bringing Tristram and Toby into the novel, Cortázar encourages his reader to read Hopscotch as one would read Tristram Shandy, which is to read sex and sexuality into everything.[32]
Besides discussing literature, one of the Serpent Club’s other passions is jazz. While they are listening to Louis Armstrong, the narrator describes the music in sexual terms: “then the trumpet’s flaming up, the yellow phallus breaking the air and having fun, coming forward and drawing back … pure hypnotic gold, a perfect pause where all the swing of the world was beating in an intolerable instant, and then the supersharp ejaculation slipping and falling like a rocket in the sexual night” (51-52). The trumpet is described as a “phallus” and the music as “ejaculation.” Since it is Oliveira and the other male members of the Serpent Club who, within the novel, are los lectores cómplices (accomplice readers/male-readers), they are the ones who absorb the music. They are the ones who are being penetrated by Armstrong’s trumpet/phallus. This passage represents one of Cortázar’s theories of art: art acts upon its audience (which is not to say that the audience does not also cooperate in the text). The homoerotic passage also connects Hopscotch with Tropic of Cancer (1961);[33] Henry Miller is listening to a piece by Claude Debussy, which spurs him to contemplate what it would feel like to be a woman during sex: “I find myself wondering what it feels like, during intercourse, to be a woman—whether the pleasure is keener, etc. Try to imagine something penetrating my groin, but have only a vague sensation of pain.”[34] In both works, the music of a male composer or performer is described in terms of male sexuality and penetration by the hearer who is both a male and a male-reader.
As we examine Hopscotch closer, the role of Tropic of Cancer becomes more evident. Barbara Hussey cites the absence of chapter fifty-five in the male-reading as the presence of silence and the void, which are the death of literature: “Book one is the quantity from which book two ‘subtracts,’ as it pursues a process that adds to its volume while undermining the foundations of Art.”[35] Hussey’s comment about Cortázar’s desire to undermine art recalls Miller’s desire to “spit in the face of Art.”[36] Miller’s presence in the novel is subtle, but should not be dismissed. Even the name Morelli could be an anagrammatic pun on Miller.[37] Miller is mentioned twice in Hopscotch: Gregorovius likes the Serpent Club because the members are “given over to the reading of Carson McCullers, Miller, Raymond Queneau” (45); later, Oliveira makes a casual reference to American tourists, who have “their Sade, their Miller” (463). While his final reference may seem derogatory, in an essay of 1969 entitled “/que sepa abrir la puerta para ir a jugar” (“/who knows how to open the door and go out and play”), Cortázar describes at length the role of Miller in the construction of both the erotic and the Argentinean literary sensibilities.[38]
The next series of allusions may seem more unlikely, but crabs could be considered as a reference to Tropic of Cancer. While trying to imagine the poet Valentin, Oliveira can only picture him “red as a crab” (114); while listening to a lover, Pola, sleep, Oliveira puts his ear to her body and hears “a walking of crabs and slugs” (457). One other reference occurs during a meeting of the Serpent Club; ten lines after one of the only uses of the word “cancer” in the novel, the news that Oliveira passes on to Étienne is described as “crawling around in his insides like a crab” (158). Each of the references to crabs in the novel is in association with Oliveira, suggesting a conscious pairing of Oliveira with the narrator of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.
Besides the associations with crabs, Oliveira is also associated with the astrological sign Cancer, and thus the disease as well. Traveler states that “Horacio is Cancer, isn’t he?,” to which Talita answers, “If he isn’t, he deserves to be” (520).[39] Talita’s response that Oliveira “deserves” to be a Cancer does not make much sense when one looks at the attributes of the sign: nurturer, maternal, highly sensitive.[40] The only attributes of Cancer that fit Oliveira are “dreamy,” “artistic,” “imaginative,” “despondent,” and “self-indulgent.”[41] Considerably more significant, to both Oliveira and Tropic of Cancer, are the metaphorical associations of the disease. Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, describes cancer cells as “cells that have shed the mechanism which ‘restrains’ growth.… Cells without inhibitions.”[42] Oliveira’s encounter with the prostitute under the Paris bridge and his interest in anal eroticism[43] support the idea that he is a man “without inhibition,” and thus much like the protagonist of Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.
The importance of Miller in Hopscotch becomes more apparent when seen in conjunction with other episodes, namely those involving fantasies of returning to the womb. Morelli describes contemporary literature and society as being oriented on a return to an Edenic past: “Everything written these days and worth reading is oriented toward nostalgia. An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam.… In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground” (377). Morelli is equating great writing with nostalgia, but, more importantly, he is metaphorizing nostalgia as the “great uterus.” In this sense, he is aligning himself with Miller, who is also attempting to return to the “great uterus” in order to write: “When into the womb of time everything is withdrawn, chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.… It is why I sing.… I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.”[44] Later, Oliveira criticizes Morelli for his fixation on the lost or mythic past: “It’s Morelli’s fault, he’s like an obsession with you, his crazy experiment makes you catch a glimpse of the lost paradise, poor pre-Adamite, in a cellophane-wrapped golden age” (427). Again, Morelli is associated with the lost paradise, Eden, which has already been labeled as the “great uterus.” As in Tropic of Cancer, the female body is the object exchanged between men as artistic commodity; it is what gives their interactions meaning.
Hopscotch, like Tristram Shandy and Tropic of Cancer, moves well beyond the homosocial into the homoerotic. Although one could certainly call Hopscotch homosocial, the term as Eve Sedgwick defines it is too vague to suggest the degree of male-male interaction that I see in the interactions between the narrator and the male-reader.[45] In one of the few discussions concerning the erotics of Hopscotch, Margery A. Safir argues that “anal intercourse is an erotic act par excellence, for physiologically it has no possibility of resulting in conception. Anal intercourse is governed, moreover, by especially deep-seated taboos, since it suggests homosexual relations and since it also affirms a relationship which societal decorum prefers to ignore—the relationship between genitalia and excreta.”[46] Safir, unfortunately, avoids discussing what the consequences might be for the relationship between the male narrator and the male-reader. If nothing else, a focus on anal intercourse allows the text to be read bisexually. If the narrative is governed by an anal erotics, then either the male-reader or the female-reader could be the recipient of the narrator’s words (semes). It is only through the alienation of the female-reader, by not allowing her to be a “player,” that the male-reader is shown to be the desired reader.
The one chapter which truly addresses the reader as “you” appears early, before the designation of male- and female-readers: if one is reading as the female-reader, it is the seventh chapter and if one reads as the male reader it is the thirteenth. While we might at first be compelled to define the “you” as the female-reader, once we realize that the narrator is only concerned with his male-readers, we must reevaluate our definition and consider that the “you” may be the male-reader: “I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger … our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth.… And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful … and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water” (33). Chapter seven represents Cortázar at his most seductive; the reader is drawn into the text through an erotics that focuses not on the primary sex organs, but on the mouth and the hand. By shifting the focus of the seduction, Cortázar provides us with an opportunity to read the text itself as a seduction of the reader; the hands and the mouth are centers of language, the written and the spoken. Therefore, the entire novel can be seen as the “love” between narrator and reader. Furthermore, the chapter does not specify the sex of the reader; thus, at this point, the reader may be either male or female.[47]
The arguments against reading the previous passage as a heterosexual encounter lie in Cortázar’s refusal to invest in the female-reader any ability to engage the text. In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, which also includes an amorous chapter addressed to the reader, he discusses the female-reader (translated by Thomas Christensen as “Lady Reader”): “In Hopscotch I defined and attacked the Lady Reader who is incapable of waging true amorous battle against the book, a battle like that of Job [sic] with the angel” (91).[48] In the book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with the angel all night, and is only defeated when the angel touches his thigh. Cortázar constructs a reader who will wage an amorous battle with the text all night, a reader who can challenge him, if not win (the angel asks to be let go), even if the narrator dislocates his thigh. The only reader in Cortázar’s text who is capable of engaging the text is the male-reader; therefore, chapter seven requires a male-reader to engage in amorous battle with the narrator.
By alienating the female-reader from engagement with the text, Cortázar forces the reader to assume the position of the male-reader if s/he is to engage the text; furthermore, all metafictional moments should be read as interactions between the male narrator and the male-readers. Morelli assumes a flirtatious relationship with his audience: “How can one tell a story without cooking, without make-up, without winks at the reader?” (479). Since the female-reader (el lector-hembra) is the one who cannot pick up on the narrative subtleties, the narrator must be winking at the male-reader (el lector cómplice). In a discussion of art, Étienne describes the way one should view the Swiss painter, Piet Mondrian: “Stand naked in front of him and it’s one thing or the other: either you see or you don’t see” (37). The viewer must expose him-/herself to the work of art to understand it; like music, the painting projects itself onto the viewer and is described in physical and sexual terms. Morelli, in a question about the reader, suggests that the best reader would also be one who could stand naked in front of, or in, the text: “who is prepared to displace himself, remove himself, decenter himself, uncover himself?” (437). By uncovering oneself, by opening oneself up to the text, the male-reader can be coparticipant in the construction of the text. Morelli’s theory of writing requires participation on the part of the male-reader to such an extent that vital aspects of the text are omitted, to be filled in by the reader: “The bridges between one and another instant in those lives which were so vague and so little characterized would have to be presumed or invented by the reader.… But sometimes the missing lines were the most important ones, the only ones that really counted” (468-69). This type of writing admits to being coauthored; the male-reader inserts him-/herself into the text, which becomes the interaction between narrator and reader. The text is the expression of the erotic relationship. Each must be author and reader, winking and being winked at. Oliveira, in a conversation with the Serpent Club, conflates the categories of writer and male-reader: “What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature? And us, we don’t want to be female-readers, what good are we if we don’t help as much as we can in that destruction?” (442). The desire to be a male-reader is the desire to enter a text and destroy it. The male-reader, like Oliveira, Morelli, Cortázar, and Miller, is one who unsettles our conventional ideas of narrative. However, the male-reader is also a critic who values the philosophical discussions surrounding a text more than the aesthetics. It is the focus on aesthetics which Étienne says is characteristic of the female-reader: “Morelli understands that the mere writing of aesthetic is a fraud and a lie and ends up arousing the female-reader” (439). If aesthetic writing is that which arouses the female-reader, then more “literary,” philosophical, or unconventional writing must be that which arouses the male-reader. Since Hopscotch repeatedly proclaims itself to be unconventional and commentary-oriented, then it must be attempting to arouse the male-reader.
The erotics of the text go both ways, from narrator to male-reader, but also from male-reader to narrator. To construct a male-reader is to write from a position which posits a response that stimulates the writers. Oliveira notes that the text has the power to act upon its creator: “Man’s rape by word, the masterful vengeance of word upon its progenitor” (80). The fact that he uses the word “rape” sexualizes the interaction between writer and text; having the text rape the writer is in effect having the male-reader, the reader who inserts him-/herself into the text, rape the writer. The game of Hopscotch is no longer the child’s game in which one tries to maneuver from earth to heaven; it is now a game of seduction in which both players attempt to gain dominance over the other. As male-readers, we are locked in amorous combat with a narrator who desires us and wants to outwit us as the same time. While to win may be as simple as being a female-reader, we may, in the long run, decide that the pleasure received from playing the game is greater than that received from winning it. We must decide if we want to win the novel, or surrender to it. The bliss of the text cannot be experienced without becoming the male-reader; the male-reader and the narrator together create the text, but not cooperatively. Each attempts to seduce and entrap the other, to dominate and destroy the other. Bliss is the total immersion in the text, filling in the spaces with oneself, being filled with the text.
NOTES
[1] Ilan Stavans believes Hopscotch (Rayuela) to be one of South America’s
“two twentieth-century masterpieces” (the other is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). See
“Justice to Julio Cortázar,” Southwest
Review 81.2 (1996): 288.
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[2] Most critics place Cortzar in a Latin American
or Argentinean tradition because his parents were Argentinean and he lived in
Argentina for most of his first thirty-eight years. However, he was born in
Brussels, Belgium, and lived in Paris from the age of thirty-eight on. Although
Henry Miller is American, he too spent considerable time in Europe, and Tropic
of Cancer was written and first published in Paris.
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[3] By “plot” I mean chapters addressing the actions of Oliveira, the members of
the Serpent Club, La Maga, Talita, or Traveler (i.e., conventional narrative).
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[4] Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans.
Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966) 97. All subsequent references are to
this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Only in chapter
twenty-two do we see Morelli, but we are not given his name, only an account of
an “old man” who has been hit by a car and is also “a writer.” None of the
characters interacts with this man, although Oliveira recalls that he had delivered
a package to him once and had been invited in. However, if one reads the
chapters in numerical order (1-155), which is the order in which Morelli
intends to reread the novel, or if one reads according to the “Table of
Instructions” (73-1-2 …), Morelli appears by name in the first chapter that is
outside of the first fifty-six (fifty-seven according to the first reading and
seventy-three according to the second).
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[5] Margery Safir discusses the erotics within the narrative, but does not mention
the erotics of the form itself. Saúl Yurkievich discusses the interaction of
play and eroticism within the novel, but does not go beyond the heterosexual
relationships within the narrative (i.e., Oliveira-La Maga and Oliveira-Pola).
See “Eros Ludens: Games, Love and
Humor in Hopscotch,” The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio
Cortázar, ed. Jaime Alazraki and Ivar Ivask (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1978) 97-108.
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[6] Cf. Michael Hardin, “Non-Cooperative Game Theory and Female-Readers: How to Win
the Game of Hopscotch,” Hispanófila 37.3 (1994): 57-72.
“Female-reader” is a translation of Cortázar’s term el lectorhembra. The hyphenated terms, “female-reader” and
“male-reader,” refer to the constructed readers
within the novel, not to the biological sex of actual readers.
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[7] In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American
Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992),
Debra Castillo points out the tension in the term “el lector-hembra” (female-reader) between the masculine noun and
the following “female” adjective (48). Castillo does not argue against the inherent
sexism of the term, but shows instead that this term is actually applicable to
superficial readers of both sexes.
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[8] The open hyphen which occurs at the end of the second reader’s instructions
prevents closure, and thus one is forced to read further. In fact, chapter 131
is repeated—131-58-131—possibly indicating an infinite repetition between these
two chapters.
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[9] See Barbara L. Hussey, “Rayuela:
Chapter 55 as Take-(away),” International
Fiction Review 8.1 (1981): 53-60); Terry J. Peavler, Julio Cortázar (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990); Scott Simpkins, “The Infinite Game: Cortázar’s Hopscotch,” Journal of the Midwest MLA 23.1 (1990): 61-74; Saúl Sosnowski,
“Pursuers,” in Alazraki and Ivask, The
Final Island 159-67. Since the paradigmatic “lector-hembra,” la Maga, is female, and the paradigmatic “lector cómplice,” Oliveira, is male, and
since much of the critical discourse on this novel uses this “translation,” I
will use the hyphenated “male-reader” to designate the constructed reader “el lector cómplice” and the hyphenated
“female-reader” to designate the constructed reader “el lector-hembra.”
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[10] Sara Castro-Klarén even relates herself, as a reader, to Oliveira in her essay
“Desire, the Author and the Reader in Cortázar’s Narrative,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction3.3 (1983): 66.
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[11] Steven Boldy, in “The Final Chapters of Cortázar’s Rayuela: Madness, Suicide, Conformism?” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 57 (1980), proffers a third option:
Oliveira “forgets about his problems and quest and goes off to the pictures to
see a ‘musical en colores’ with his rather simple-minded girl-friend Gekrepken”
(233).
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[12] Julio Ortega, Poetics of Change: The New
Spanish-American Narrative, trans. Galen D. Greaser (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1984), 50.
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[13] Ana María Barrenchea, “Hopscotch and
Its Logbook,” Latin American Literature
and Arts Review (Sept.-Dec. 1981): passim.
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[14] To say that something “comes after” in this novel is impossible to do without
an explanation. In the male-reading of the Table of Instructions, chapter 135,
63, 88, 72, 77, 131, and 58 all follow 56. All of these chapters involve
Oliveira and Talita, Gekrepken, and/or Traveler, which places them in the
second half of the novel. Circumstances within the chapters would place them at
the end of the novel, chronologically.
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[15] Evelyn Picon Garfield, Julio Cortázar (New
York: Ungar, 1975) 94.
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[16] Francine Masiello, “Grotesques in Cortázar’s Fiction: Toward a Mode of
Signification,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly
29.1 (1982): 71.
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[17] Masiello 71.
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[18] Christopher Nash, World-Games: The Tradition
of the Anti-Realist Revolt (New York: Methuen 1987) 192.
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[19] Martha Paley Francescato, “The New Man (But Not the New Woman),” in Alazraki
and Ivask, The Final Island 134.
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[20] Francescato 135.
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[21] E. D. Carter, Jr., “The Double as Defense in Cortázar’s Hopscotch,” International
Fiction Review 15.2 (1988): 94.
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[22] 62: A Model Kit, trans. Gregory Rabassa
(London: Marion Boyars, 1976) was originally published as 62, modelo para
armar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968).
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[23] 62: A Model Kit 3.
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[24] Around the Day in Eighty Worlds is a
collection of short pieces taken from three of Cortázar’s works: La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos
(México: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 1967) and Último Round: Tomo I and Último
Round: Tomo II (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1969).
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[25] Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, trans.
Thomas Christensen (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986) 55, 142-43.
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[26] “A Rejected Chapter from Hopscotch,”
trans. Alberto Manguel, Grand Street 38
(1991): 41, 42. This story was previously published as “Un texto inédito de
Cortázar: un capítulo suprimido de Rayuela,”
Revista Iberoamericana 39 (1973):
387-98. According to both Jaime Alazraki and Ivar Ivask’s bibliography in The Final Island, and Sarah de Mundo
Lo’s Julio Cortázar: His Life and His
Works: A Bibliography (Urbana, IL: Albatross, 1985), the publication in Revista Iberoamericana was the story’s
first. However, Alberto Manguel has told me that it appeared during the 1960s
in a Cuban magazine, although he could tell me neither when nor where.
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[27] Cortázar mentions having read Pale Fire
in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
(205), although he does not state when (the essay in which Pale Fire was mentioned was published as “La muñeca bota” in Último Round: Tomo I). In Hopscotch, Nabokov is one of the writers
whom the Serpent Club discusses (92).
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[28] Cf. Castillo, Talking Back 276.
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[29] Cortázar also mentions Tristram Shandy
in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (92).
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[30] Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Howard Anderson (New York: Norton, 1980)
373.
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[31] See Howard Anderson, in Tristram Shandy
164, note 2.
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[32] One critic has said of Tristram Shandy
that all nouns take on a sexual connotation; cf. Jacques Berthoud, “Shandeism
and Sexuality,” Laurence Sterne: Riddles
and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision, 1984) 25.
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[33] Tropic of Cancer was first published
in France in 1934.
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[34] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New
York: Signet, 1995) 85-86.
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[35] Barbara L. Hussey, “Rayuela: Chapter
55 as Take-(away),” International Fiction
Review 8.1 (1981): 54, 60.
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[36] Miller, Tropic of Cancer 23.
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[37] Admittedly, Morelli from Miller is a stretch, but Lucille Kerr, in Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions
from Spanish America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), states that
one of the possible sources for the name is an art historian, Giovanni Morelli
(1816-1891), noted for his “Morelli-method.” Potentially helpful is the fact
that G. Morelli signed his first major work, which he claimed was “a German
translation of ‘original’ Russian writing,” Ivan Lermolieff, “a partial anagram
of Giovanni Morelli” (36-37). Other critics have attempted to connect the name
with Jorge Luis Borges’s character Lazarus Morell, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Morel,
H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella” (Kerr, 180n). Given
the extensive allusions in Hopscotch,
Morelli is quite likely a composite of all these figures.
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[38] Último Round: Tomo II. This chapter
was not included in the English compilation of Último Round (Tomo I and II) and La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, published as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds; in
fact, this chapter does not appear to have been published in English
translation.
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[39] Miller’s other “zodiac” novel, Tropic of
Capricorn (New York: Grove, 1961), is alluded to when Talita says to
Traveler: “And it’s too bad you weren’t born under the zodiacal sign of
Capricorn” (519-20).
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[40] James R. Lewis, The Astrology Encyclopedia
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1994) 106.
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[41] Lewis 107.
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[42] Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988) 63.
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[43] Cf. Margery A. Safir, “An Erotics of
Liberation: Notes on Transgressive Behavior in Hopscotch and Libro de Manuel,”
Alazraki and Ivask, The Final Island
91.
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[44] Miller, Tropic of Cancer 24.
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[45] Sedgwick’s definition is essentially “men promoting men’s interests.” See Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 3. Similarly,
Luce Irigaray’s term hom(m)o-sexual,
“The use of and traffic in women,” is applicable to some interactions within
the novel, but not all interactions involve the exchange of the female. See This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.
Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 172.
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[46] Safir, “An Erotics of Liberation” 91.
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[47] A bisexuality of the text fits with Cortázar’s own life. Stavans writes that
Cortázar had “been involved with a number of women and men, engaging in
bisexual affairs” (308).
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[48] It is not Job who wrestles with the angel but Jacob (Genesis 32:24-29); this
error ocurrs in Christensens’s translation. In the original Spanish, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, Tomo II
(Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 1972), it is written as Jacob.
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