Hopscotch: How to Read a Novel That Jumps Without Reducing It to a Trick

100 Works of World Literature · Article 83

# Hopscotch: How to Read a Novel That Jumps Without Reducing It to a Trick

Hopscotch begins with a “Table of Instructions”. Read chapters one to fifty-six in order and leave nearly a hundred others aside, or begin at seventy-three and follow a numbered itinerary backwards and forwards. The same book produces different rhythms, causes, and judgements.

Julio Cortázar does not scramble chapters merely to create a puzzle. He makes readers feel that apparently natural order is habit and that a coherent life may be one route selected from fragments. Yet beyond formal experiment, Hopscotch is a novel of failed relationship. Horacio Oliveira pursues a “centre” through knowledge and irony while turning living people into intellectual material. La Maga, her child Rocamadour, Traveler, and Talita bear the costs.

Good reading neither fears nor worships jumping. The central question is whether play makes people freer or becomes an elegant method for escaping responsibility.

From Mandala to Rayuela

• Author: Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Argentine writer.
• First publication: Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1963.
• Architecture: 155 chapters in “From the Other Side”, “From This Side”, and “From Diverse Sides”.
• Manuscript: Argentina’s National Library holds the handwritten logbook recording development; working titles included “The Games” and “Mandala”.
• Literary position: a defining work of the Latin American Boom that transformed expectations through open structure, wordplay, and reader participation.

The final title names a bodily children’s game of hopping through earthbound squares towards “Heaven”. The search for an absolute centre becomes a movement that can misstep, touch a line, and restart.

Two authorised readings, no official correct one

The first route proceeds from chapter one through fifty-six and ends. Chapters 57–155 are mischievously called “expendable”.

The second begins at seventy-three and follows numbers, weaving narrative with notes, quotations, and experiments. It concludes in a loop between chapters 58 and 131 rather than a conventional endpoint.

Expendable does not mean worthless. These chapters contain character echoes, Morelli’s theory, clippings, citations, and language play. The first path offers relative continuity; the second inserts commentary and fracture.

There is no need to prove avant-garde credentials by beginning with the harder route. Active readers may read straight and then jump, comparing effects rather than converting sequence into an intelligence test.

Why chapter 73 can begin

Oliveira suspects habit disguises reality as the only possibility and wonders about an “other hand” behind routine. It acts as a reading manifesto: disturb order to perceive order.

The route then jumps to the search for La Maga. Theory already surrounds romance, and readers notice how Oliveira turns her into an emblem of the “other side”.

In straight reading, ideas emerge from action. In jumping, theory arrives early and repeatedly comments. Premature explanation may make readers conceptualise life as Oliveira does.

Oliveira: intelligence without clarity

Argentine expatriate Horacio Oliveira lives in Paris, reads philosophy, hears jazz, and debates art with the Serpent Club. He distrusts received values without constructing a practical alternative.

His insight works through negation. Whenever emotion requires commitment, he can expose false language, suspect habit, or dismiss simplicity. Irony protects him from ideas and from positions.

His problem is not merely thinking too much. He treats thought as a height separate from action, scrutinising others more severely than his own cruelty.

La Maga beyond the intuitive woman

La Maga is Lucía, a Uruguayan in Paris with young son Rocamadour. Without systematic education, she misses references but enters experience through attention, feeling, and association.

Oliveira admires and objectifies her as a natural state that reaches what intellect seeks. She becomes a path for male development rather than a complex subject.

The novel sometimes exposes and sometimes reproduces this gaze. Distinguish her acts and words from what Oliveira needs “innocence”, “chaos”, or “gateway” to mean.

Chance encounter as relationship mythology

The opening asks whether Oliveira will find La Maga. He remembers unscheduled meetings on Paris streets and bridges, as though the city arranged love.

Chance enchants and avoids maintenance. Without appointments, there is no broken promise; with fate, neither person must perform the work of intimacy.

Oliveira prefers the woman who may appear around a corner to the partner with poverty, jealousy, a child, and material needs.

The Serpent Club’s commonwealth and barrier

Oliveira, La Maga, Ronald, Babs, Etienne, Gregorovius, and others drink, hear jazz, and debate art and existence.

These evenings form a cosmopolitan anti-academic community. Jazz improvisation supplies a model: theme, variation, break, and another instrument’s return.

Talk also becomes an educational gate. Allusion confirms insiders while La Maga’s direct questions appear naïve. Anti-traditional groups can create new rituals of exclusion.

Rocamadour interrupts abstraction

Rocamadour is ill and returns from foster care to a cramped room. La Maga must care for him while sustaining precarious work, relationship, and sociability. Friends care but keep organising nights as intellectual meetings.

The child presents bodily needs that cannot be postponed: fever, breath, crying, and death. He is not merely a symbol for adult growth but a person affected by their arrangements.

The scene judges them: intelligence about the human condition does not ensure response to one child’s condition.

The death beside conversation

During a long gathering, Rocamadour has died. Oliveira detects the cold body and does not immediately tell La Maga. Speech expands beside death.

Shock, cowardice, and uncertainty explain delay, but it repeats Oliveira’s habit: observation substitutes for action, as though awareness were responsibility.

La Maga discovers the death and disappears; the Club dissolves. Searching cannot rewrite withheld care.

Berthe Trépat and the judgement disguised as lucidity

The sick, lonely pianist Berthe Trépat wants someone to listen. La Maga offers presence; Oliveira meets emotional disclosure with disgust and sarcasm.

He considers himself resistant to false sentiment, but treats vulnerability as bad taste. La Maga cannot cure the woman but acknowledges a request.

Who knows more concepts is not necessarily more awake to reality.

Gregorovius and the woman as prize

Ossip Gregorovius desires La Maga and tells dubious stories of Eastern Europe. Oliveira hides jealousy behind detachment and superiority.

The men discuss her as an object for measuring spiritual power. Her desire shrinks inside competition.

Oliveira’s refusal to name attachment resembles freedom but still demands that nobody else fully possess her.

Jazz as emotional order without linearity

Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, and others fill the book. Jazz is structural thought, not soundtrack.

Improvisation is not randomness. Shared pulse, harmonic memory, and listening allow departure and reconnection. Jumping chapters similarly requires retained motifs and echoes.

Oliveira admires improvisational freedom but often lacks its ethics: hearing fellow players while speaking.

Chapter 68 and invented Gliglish

Chapter 68 uses invented language to narrate intimacy. Words do not exist, but Spanish syntax, sound, rhythm, and bodily implication remain.

Readers cannot translate word by word and still sense action and acceleration. Language communicates beyond dictionary reference.

Yet innovation does not erase power. New speech can escape cliché and convert a person into material for male aesthetic experiment.

Morelli and the novel theorising itself

Morelli is an elderly novelist who wants to break conventional narrative and passive reading. Club members encounter him after an accident and later organise his papers.

His notes in the expendable chapters act as internal theory. They explain the anti-novel and contradict themselves.

He is not simply Cortázar’s direct mouthpiece. If explanation controlled meaning, openness would become doctrine. Let theory argue with plot.

The accomplice reader and gendered avant-garde language

Cortázar asks readers to assemble rather than consume. Numbered jumps and gaps demand labour.

Yet the book’s dismissive phrase “female reader” for passive consumption genders inferiority. Avant-garde freedom can carry inherited prejudice.

An accomplice need not obey the author’s standard. Criticising male gaze, questioning the table, and refusing to equate difficulty with depth are active reading.

A Paris descent that does not equal solidarity

After La Maga disappears, Oliveira meets homeless Emmanuèle, drinks, enters confused intimacy, and is arrested.

He appears to fall out of intellectual respectability, but briefly sharing grime does not produce knowledge of chronic poverty. Another person’s condition can become his spiritual experiment.

Crossing class boundaries for self-shock consumes the marginalised again.

Returning to “this side”

Deported to Argentina, Oliveira reunites with old girlfriend Gekrepten and friends Manu Traveler and Talita. Paris yields to Buenos Aires.

Geography does not cure him. He imports Paris in his gaze and projects La Maga onto Talita.

The sides are Atlantic shores and manufactured binaries: thought/life, centre/margin, real/habit. He keeps jumping away from the present square.

Traveler, the man who has not travelled

Manu Traveler has scarcely travelled. The name is comic. He and Talita maintain practical life while participating in Oliveira’s ideas.

Oliveira depends on and envies the friend’s stability. Traveler becomes an alternate self whose boundaries he tests.

Not absolutising search does not make Traveler shallow. He joins thought to care, friendship, and judgement.

Talita is not La Maga’s substitute

Talita is witty, intelligent, and trained in pharmacy. Oliveira increasingly sees La Maga in her.

Similarity occurs mostly in his gaze. Talita maintains distinction, empathising without accepting renaming.

Memory becomes dangerous when it makes a living person carry the absent.

The plank bridge

Oliveira and Traveler occupy rooms across a street. To pass yerba mate and nails, boards extend from windows and Talita is asked to cross above the street.

Men give instructions and debate meaning while her body bears falling risk. The scene turns experimental form into ethics: game designer and required performer do not share cost.

Talita refuses to continue and returns to her side. Her no is more autonomous than Oliveira’s theories of freedom.

Circus, performance, and spectatorship

The three work at a circus, a place of organised transgression where danger is staged and oddity sold.

It mirrors the novel. Readers enjoy structural acrobatics and must ask whether suffering becomes spectacle.

When the circus is sold, they work at a psychiatric hospital. Normal entertainment and abnormal confinement stand beside each other.

The asylum and the authority to diagnose

Staff and patients exchange behaviours. Sleepless and paranoid, Oliveira fears Traveler and sees Talita entirely as La Maga.

He draws a hopscotch court, grounding the book’s game. “Heaven” lies below a window, and arrival may mean falling.

Mental crisis is not a romantic shortcut to truth. Friends must manage concrete danger of self-harm.

The window confrontation

Oliveira stands near the window with traps, ready to send himself or an intruder down. Traveler and Talita try to calm him. He casts friends as enemies and intermittently recognises care.

Traveler does not win through correct philosophy. He remains present, avoids forcing proximity, and rejects the enemy script.

Oliveira briefly senses that the three may form the centre he need not seek. Whether insight prevents a fall is not guaranteed.

Why straight reading stops at chapter 56

Looking down at Traveler and Talita, Oliveira may recognise paradise in friendship’s care.

The ending permits temporary rescue and possible breakdown. It suspends action rather than solving a riddle.

Closing here gives an arc from Parisian loss to a Buenos Aires threshold. Jumping onward destroys that relative completeness with echoes and theory.

The loop between 58 and 131

The table’s final movements create return between two chapters. Structure refuses to declare meaning closed.

The loop may embody Oliveira’s inability to leave thought or restore control to the reader, who must choose to stop.

Openness is not always freedom. Endless jumping can be refusal to end or commit.

Play, humour, and unequal rules

The book uses palindromes, altered spelling, visual experiment, invented citations, columns, and practical jokes. Philosophy refuses solemn essay form.

Humour dismantles authority and protects against despair.

Its ethics depend on conditions: who knows rules, can refuse, and becomes material? Breaking norms is not automatically progressive.

Gender and the persistence of old roles

Men treat La Maga and Talita as routes towards intuition, body, and life: male thought, female access to reality.

La Maga leaves Oliveira’s frame, and Talita explicitly refuses substitution and the plank game. Their inward development nevertheless receives less space than Oliveira’s.

Formal revolution does not guarantee gender revolution.

A three-pass reading method

First read chapters one to fifty-six for character and geography. Mark allusions without stopping for every search.

Then follow the table and record how insertions change adjacency, especially Morelli, jazz, Rocamadour, and the Buenos Aires ending.

Finally design a route around one theme: who describes La Maga, bridges and windows, rules of games, or bodies receiving care. Active reading is not passing the author’s examination but explaining a chosen path.

Why it remains worth reading

Hyperlinks and fragments make non-linearity ordinary today, but the question sharpens: does constant jumping increase understanding, and is participation merely a route designed by a platform?

Oliveira is recognisably modern: able to criticise every grand narrative, unable to care for the nearby person; keeping options open as freedom and non-commitment as lucidity.

Complexity must return to relational responsibility. Theory that hears others opens a square; theory that only proves independence may hop in place.

Conclusion: Heaven is not the final page

Neither route is uniquely correct. Each reaches important matter and omits relations. Readers must own the version produced by choice.

Oliveira seeks another side; La Maga and Talita show that the other side may be another person’s reality. Crossing requires consent, equal risk, and willingness to stop when somebody needs care.

The accomplice reader is not the best chapter-jumper but the person who still sees Rocamadour breathing, La Maga leaving, and Talita on the board. Narrative may lack a fixed endpoint; responsibility cannot always be postponed to another chapter.

Further reading and sources

• National Library of Argentina: Rayuela at sixty, manuscript and first edition
• National Library of Argentina: the Rayuela logbook
• National Library of Argentina: open form and the Latin American Boom
• Instituto Cervantes: Julio Cortázar works chronology
• Instituto Cervantes: fiftieth-anniversary edition