Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  (–40)

  79

  An exceedingly pedantic note by Morelli: “To attempt the roman comique in the sense in which a text manages to hint at other values and thus collaborates in that anthropophany that we still consider possible. It would seem that the usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought to be. An unavoidable detention in the varying degrees of the dramatic, the psychological, the tragic, the satirical, or the political. To attempt on the other hand a text that would not clutch the reader but which would oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers to him underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric directions. Demotic writing for the female-reader (who otherwise will not get beyond the first few pages, rudely lost and scandalized, cursing at what he paid for the book), with a vague reverse side of hieratic writing.

  “To provoke, assume a text that is out of line, untied, incongruous, minutely antinovelistic (although not antinovelish). Without prohibiting the genre’s great effects if the situation should require it, but keeping in mind the Gidean advice, ne jamais profiter de l’élan acquis. Like all creatures of choice in the Western world, the novel is content in a closed order. Resolutely opposed to this, we should search here for an opening and therefore cut the roots of all systematic construction of characters and situations. Method: irony, ceaseless self-criticism, incongruity, imagination in the service of no one.

  “An attempt of this type comes from a rejection of literature; a partial rejection since it does depend on words, but one which must oversee every operation undertaken by author and reader. To use the novel in that way, just as one uses a revolver to keep the peace, changing its symbol. To take from literature that part which is a living bridge from man to man, and which the treatise or the essay will permit only among specialists. A narrative that will not be a pretext for the transmission of a ‘message’ (there is no message, only messengers, and that is the message, just as love is the one who loves); a narrative that will act as a coagulant of experiences, as a catalyst of confused and badly understood notions, which first off will cut into the one who is writing it, for which reason it will have to be written as an antinovel, because every closed order will systematically leave outside those announcements that can make messengers out of us, bring us to our own limits from which we are so far removed, while being face to face with them.

  “The strange self-creation of the author through his work. If out of that magma that is a day, the submersion in existence, we wish to raise the power of values that announce anthropophany as their end, what can be done then with pure understanding, with haughty reasoning reason? From the time of the Eleatics until today dialectical thought has had more than enough time to give us its fruits. We are eating them, they are delicious, they are seething with radioactivity. And when the feast is over, why are we so sad, brothers of nineteen hundred and fifty something?”

  Another apparently complementary note:

  “Situation of the reader. In general every novelist hopes his reader will understand him, by participating in his own experience, or that he will pick up a determined message and incorporate it. The romantic novelist wants to be understood for his own sake or for that of his heroes; the classical novelist wants to teach, leave his trace on the path of history.

  “A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader’s time and substitute author’s time. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and in the same form. All artistic tricks are of no use in obtaining it: the only thing worth anything is the material in gestation, the experiential immediacy (transmitted through words, of course, but the least aesthetic words possible; this is where we get the ‘comic’ novel, anticlimaxes, irony, so many other directional arrows pointing towards the other thing).

  “For that reader, mon semblable, mon frère, the comic novel (and what is Ulysses?) will have to take place like those dreams where in the margin of some trivial happening we have a presentiment of a more serious anxiety that we do not always manage to decipher. In this sense the comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount him astride any emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype, with traces of something that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual. Better yet, give him something like a façade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the cosuffering). What the author of this novel might have succeeded in for himself, will be repeated (becoming gigantic, perhaps, and that would be marvelous) in the reader-accomplice. As for the female-reader, he will remain with the façade and we already know that there are very pretty ones among them, very much trompe l’oeil, and that in front of them one can keep putting on in a satisfactory way the comedies and the tragedies of the honnête homme. With which everything turns out happily, and as for those who protest, they can go soak their heads.”

  (–22)

  80

  WHEN I have just finished cutting my nails or washing my hair, or simply now, while I’m writing, I can hear a gurgling in my stomach,

  the feeling that I’ve left my body behind comes back (I don’t retreat into dualisms but I can distinguish between myself and my nails)

  and that our bodies are starting to go bad on us, that they need us or they have too much of us (it depends).

  Otherwise: at this stage we ought to deserve a better machine. Psychoanalysis shows how the contemplation of the body can bring on early complexes. (And Sartre, who sees in the fact that woman has been “perforated” existentialist implications that can compromise her all her life.) It’s painful to think that we’re traveling ahead of this body, but that what goes before is error and obstacle and probable uselessness, because these nails, this navel,

  I mean something else, almost impossible to grasp: that the “soul” (my me-not-nails) is the soul of a body that does not exist. The soul gave man a push in his corporeal evolution, perhaps, but it’s tired of shoving and goes on ahead by itself. It barely takes two steps

  the soul breaks up oh because its real body does not exist and lets it fall down plop.

  The poor thing goes back home, etc., but that’s not what I After all.

  A long talk with Traveler about madness. Talking about dreams, we realized almost at the same time that certain structures we dream could be current forms of madness if they could just continue for a while when we’re awake. When we dream we give free rein to our aptitude for madness. At the same time we suspect that all madness is a dream that has taken root.

  Popular wisdom: “The poor guy’s crazy, a dreamer …”

  (–46)

  81

  THE business of the sophist, according to Aristophanes, is to invent new reasons.

  Let us try to invent new passions, or to reproduce the old ones with a like intensity.

  I shall analyze this conclusion once more, from a Pascalian point of view: true belief is somewhere in between superstition and libertinism.

  JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA, Tratados en La Habana

  (–74)

  82

  MORELLIANA

  Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you. First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused m
aterial and the one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book. This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes about taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity, because no sooner does it stop than I understand that I no longer have anything to say. And it is also the only reward for my work: to feel that what I have written is like the back of a cat as it is being petted, with sparks and an arching in cadence. In that way by writing I go down into the volcano, I approach the Mothers, I connect with the Center—whatever it may be. Writing is sketching my mandala and at the same time going through it, inventing purification by purifying one’s self; the task of a poor white shaman in nylon socks.

  (–99)

  83

  THE invention of the soul by man is hinted at every time the feeling appears that the body is a parasite, something like a worm adhering to the ego. It’s enough to feel that one lives (and not only life as an acceptance, as something-that-is-good-that-it-happened) for what is even closest and most loved by the body, the right hand, for example, suddenly to be an object that participates with repugnance in the double condition of not being me and of clinging to me.

  I swallow my soup. Then in the midst of what I am reading, I think: “The soup is in me, I have it in this pouch which I will never see, my stomach.” I feel with two fingers and I touch the mass, the motion of the food there inside. And I am this, a bag with food inside of it.

  Then the soul is born: “No, I am not that.”

  Now that (let’s be honest for once)

  yes, I am that. With a very pretty means of escape for the use of the finicky: “I am also that.” Or just a step up: “I am in that.”

  I am reading The Waves, that cinerary piece of lace, a fable of froth. A foot below my eyes some soup is slowly moving about in my stomachic pouch, a hair is growing on my thigh, an imperceptible sebaceous cyst is coming out on my shoulder.

  At the end of what Balzac might have called an orgy, a certain individual who was not at all metaphysical said to me, thinking he was making a joke, that defecation gave him an impression of unreality. I remember his words: “You get up, you turn around and look, and then you say: But did I do that?”

  (Like the line from Lorca: “Sin remedio, hijo mío, ¡vomita! No hay remedio.” And crazy Swift too, I think: “But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.”

  On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds. All pain attacks me with a double-edged sword: it makes me aware as never before of the divorce between my ego and my body (and its falseness, its consoling invention) and at the same time it brings my body close to me, dresses me in it as pain. I feel it to be more mine than pleasure or mere coenesthesis. It is really a bond. If I could sketch I would gladly show pain chasing the soul out of the body, but at the same time I would give the impression that it’s all untrue: mere characteristics of a complex whose unity lies in not having any.

  (–142)

  84

  WANDERING along the Quai des Célestins I step on some dry leaves and when I pick one up and look at it closely I see that it is full of old-gold dust, and underneath some earth profound as musty perfume that sticks to my hand. For all those reasons I bring the dry leaves back to my flat and paste them on a lampshade. Ossip comes, he stays two hours and doesn’t even look at the lamp. Another day Étienne comes by, and with his beret still in his hand, Dis donc, c’est épatant, ça! and he picks up the lamp, studies the leaves, becomes enthusiastic. Dürer, the veins, and so forth.

  A single situation and two versions … I keep on thinking about all the leaves I will not see, the gatherer of dry leaves, about so many things that there must be in the air and which these eyes will not see, poor bats out of novels and movies and dried flowers. There must be lamps everywhere, there must be leaves that I will never see.

  And so, de feuille en aiguille, I think about those exceptional states in which for one instant leaves and invisible lamps are imagined, are felt in an air outside of space. It’s very simple, every exaltation or depression pushes me towards a state suitable for

  I will call them paravisions

  That is to say (that’s the worst of it, saying it)

  an instantaneous aptitude for going out, so that suddenly I can grasp myself from outside, or from inside but on a different plane,

  as if I were somebody who was looking at me

  (better still—because in reality I cannot see myself—: like someone who is living me).

  It doesn’t last, two steps along the street, the time needed for taking a deep breath (sometimes when I wake up it lasts a little longer, and then it’s fabulous)

  and in that instant I know what I am because I know exactly what I am not (what I thereupon ignore astutely). But there are no words for a material in between word and pure vision, like a block of evidence. Impossible to objectivize, make precise that defectiveness that I caught during the instant and which was clear absence or clear error or clear insufficiency, but

  without knowing of what, what.

  Another way of trying to say it: When it’s that, I’m no longer looking towards the world, from me towards the other thing, but for a second I am the world, the outside plane, the rest looking at me. I see myself as the others can see me. It’s so good it can’t be sensed: that’s why it scarcely lasts. I measure my defectiveness, I notice everything which through absence or defect we never see in ourselves. I see what I am not. For example (I’m picking this up on the rebound, but it comes from over there): there are enormous regions where I have never been, and what one has not known is what one has not been. An anxiety to start running, go into a house, into that store, jump on a train, devour all of Jouhandeau, know German, know Aurangabad … Localized and lamentable examples but ones which can give an idea (an idea?).

  Another way of wanting to say it: What is defective is felt more as an intuitive poverty than as a mere lack of experience. It really doesn’t afflict me not having read all of Jouhandeau, at most the melancholy feeling of too short a life for so many libraries, etc. The lack of experience is inevitable, if I read Joyce I am automatically sacrificing another book and vice versa, etc. The feeling of lack is sharper in

  It’s a little like this: there are lines in the air next to your head, next to your glance

  zones for the detention of your eyes, your smell, your taste,

  that is to say you’re going around with your limits outside

  and you can’t get beyond that limit when you think you’ve caught anything fully, just like an iceberg the thing has a small piece outside and shows it to you, and the enormous rest of it is beyond your limits and that’s why the Titanic went down. Wholiveira whith whis whexamples.

  Let’s be serious. Ossip did not see the dry leaves on the lamp simply because his limits are this side of what the lamp meant. Étienne saw them perfectly, but on the other hand his limits would not let him see that I was bitter and did know what to do about Pola. Ossip realized it at once, and made me see it. That’s the way we all go.

  I think of man as an amoeba who sticks out pseudopods to catch and envelop his food. There are long and short pseudopods, movements, turnings. One day this all becomes fixed (what we call maturity, a full-grown man). On the one side he can go farther, on the other he can’t see a lamp two steps away. In this way a guy goes on living fairly well convinced that nothing interesting will escape him, until an instantaneous landslide shows him for a second, unfortunately without giving him time to know what,

  shows him his divided being, his irregular pseudopods,

  the suspicion that farther on, where now I can see clear air,

  or in this indecision, at the crossroads of choice,

  I myself, in the rest of reality that I don’t know,

  I’m waiting uselessly for myself.

  (Suite)

  Individuals like Goethe must not have abounded in experiences of this kind. By aptitude or decision (genius lies in choosing to be a genius and in being ri
ght) they have their pseudopods stuck out as far as they will go in all directions. They encircle with a uniform diameter, their limit is their skin projected spiritually to great distances. It does not seem that they have need to desire what begins (or continues) beyond their enormous spheres. That’s why they’re classics, hey.

  The unknown approaches the amoeba uso nostro from all sides. I can know a lot or live a lot in a given sense, but then the other thing moves up on the side where I have my lacks and scratches my head with its cold nail. The worst is that it scratches me when there is no itching, while just when it does itch—when I ought to want to know—everything surrounding me is so set, so located, so complete and solid and labeled, that I begin to think that I was dreaming, that I’m fine this way, that I can take care of myself all right and that I shouldn’t let myself be carried away by my imagination.