Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, Chapter 34
In case you need help parsing the text.
Chapter 34 of Hopscotch (Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar is an extraordinarily clever representation of what it feels like to read a book when you’re thinking about something else. Every odd line, starting with the first one, is the text of the novel that protagonist Horacio Oliveira is reading, and every even line is his train of thought as he reads — except for the last five lines, which are all Oliveira in my edition.
An extraordinarily clever literary device, certainly, but it’s also a bitch to read. Here’s the chapter transcribed with Oliveira’s thoughts separated from the text of the novel. (English translation by Gregory Rabassa.)
The novel (lines 1, 3, 5, etc.):
In September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent as that of my own; I liquidated all the credits I could, rented out the properties, transferred my holdings and inventories, and moved to Madrid to take up residence there. My uncle (in truth my father’s first cousin), Don Rafael Bueno de Guzmán y Ataide, wanted to put me up in his home; but I demurred for fear of losing my independence. I was finally able to effect a compromise between my comfortable freedom and my uncle’s gracious offer; and renting a flat in his building, I arranged matters so that I could be alone when I wished or I could enjoy family warmth when that became essential. The good gentleman lived, I should say we lived, in a section that had been built up on a site where the charity warehouse had once been. My uncle’s flat was the main one, 18,000 reales he paid, handsome and happy, even though it was not adequate for such a large family. I took the ground-floor apartment, a little less spacious than the main one, but marvelously extensive for me alone, and I decorated it luxuriously and put in all the comforts to which I had become accustomed. My income, thank God, allowed me to do all of this and more.
My first impressions of Madrid were surprisingly pleasant, since I had not been there since the days of González Brabo. I was flabbergasted by the beauty and expanse of the newer sections, the efficient system of communications, the obvious improvement in the appearance of the buildings, the streets, and even the people; the pretty little gardens now planted where once there had been dusty old squares, the magnificent homes of the rich, the varied and well-stocked shops, inferior in no way, as was evident from the street, to those of Paris or London, and lastly, the many elegant theaters for all classes, tastes, and incomes. These and other things that I later observed in my social contacts made me understand the rapid advances that our capital had made since 1868, advances more in the manner of whimsical leaps than in that of the solid, progressive movement forward of people who know where they are headed; but it was no less real because of all this. In a word, my nose had got the scent of some European culture, of well-being, and even riches and hard work.
My uncle is a well-known businessman in Madrid. In years past he had held important positions in the government: he had been a consul general; then he had been an attaché in an embassy; subsequently his marriage demanded his presence in the capital; he was with the Treasury for a while, under the protection and power of Bravo Murillo, and finally his family responsibilities made it necessary for him to exchange the vile security of a salary for the adventures and hopes of work on his own. He was possessed of a fair amount of ambition, uprightness, activity, intelligence, good connections; he began to work as the agent in diverse commercial matters, and after running about a bit in pursuit of all this he ended up in command of everything and was able to tuck all of the accounts away in his files. He lived off them, however, stirring up those that were dozing in his cabinet, moving along those that had come to rest on his desk, keeping on the right track, as best he could, a few that were in danger of going astray. His friendships with members of both parties were helpful to him, as was the high regard in which he was held in all branches of the government. No door remained closed to him. One might even think that the doormen of the various ministries owed their existence to him, for they showed deep filial respect and opened doors wide for him as if they were the doors of his very own house. I had heard tell that in certain periods he had made a good deal of money by putting his active hands on some well-known mining and railroad stocks; but that in other cases his timid honesty had not been favorable for him. When I settled in Madrid, his situation, as far as could be seen, must have been comfortable but not lavish. He had everything he needed, but he had no savings, really not a praiseworthy situation for a man who had worked so hard and who was now coming to the end of his days with barely enough time in which to recoup his losses.
He was at that time a man who looked older than he really was, always immaculately dressed in the style of the elegant young men of the time, and with a very distinguished air. He was completely clean-shaven, this being a token of loyalty to the previous generation to which he belonged. His charm and his joviality, always kept in delicate balance, never fell into impertinent familiarity or petulance. His best would come out in his conversation, as well as his worst, for knowing how good he was at speaking, he would let himself be led into the habit of describing every detail and his accounts would be lengthened to a tedious degree. Sometimes he would do this right at the very beginning and would adorn his stories with childish minutiae to such a degree that one would find it necessary to beg him, for heaven’s sake, to be brief. When he would be speaking about something that had happened at home (an exercise he was passionately fond of), so much time would elapse between the exordium and the firing of the shot, that the listener would have let his mind wander so far off the subject that the boom would give him a bit of a start. I am not sure whether I should classify as a physical ailment the chronic irritation of his tear-producing apparatus, which at times, mostly in winter, would make his eyes water so that one would think that he had been weeping until his nose had begun to run. I do not know of any other man with a more extensive collection of linen handkerchiefs. Because of that and because of his habit of always holding the white fabric in his right hand or in both hands, a friend of mine, an Andalusian, a wag and a good fellow, of whom I shall speak later on, used to call my uncle la Verónica.
He showed me real affection, and during the early days of my residence in Madrid he was continually at my side, so that he could see to it that I was getting installed without difficulties and so that he could be of help in a hundred little ways. When we would talk about the family and I would reminisce about my childhood or tell anecdotes about my father, a nervous discomfort would come over my uncle, a feverish enthusiasm for all the great figures who had made the name of Bueno de Guzmán renowned, and taking out his handkerchief he would tell me stories that were interminable. He looked upon me as the last male representative of a stock rich in great figures, and he would comfort and spoil me as if I were a child, in spite of my thirty-six years. Poor uncle. In these shows of affection, which would cause a considerable increase in the outflow from his eyes, I found a secret and most painful sorrow, a thorn driven deep into the heart of that excellent man. I do not really know exactly how I came to make that discovery; but I was as certain that there was a wound he was covering up as if I had seen it with my own two eyes and touched it with my own two hands. It was a deep grief, overwhelming, the sorrow of not seeing me married to one of his three daughters; an irremediable annoyance, because his three daughters, alas!, were already married.
Oliveira’s thoughts (lines 2, 4, 6, etc.):
And the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things like this. To think that she’s spent hours on end reading tasteless stuff like this and plenty of other incredible things, Elle and France Soir, those sad magazines Babs lends her. And moved to Madrid to take up residence there, I can see how after you swallow four or five pages you get in the groove and can’t stop reading, a little like the way you can’t help sleeping or pissing, slavery or whipping or drooling. I was finally able to effect a compromise, a style that uses prefabricated words to transmit superannuated ideas, coins that go from hand to hand, from generation to generation, te voila en pleine echolalie. Enjoy family warmth, that’s good, shit if that isn’t good. Oh, Maga, how could you swallow this stuff, and what the hell is the charity warehouse, for God’s sake. I wonder how much time she spent reading this stuff, probably convinced that this was life, and you were right, it is life, that’s why we’ve got to get rid of it. (The main one, what’s that.) And on some afternoons when I’d got the bug to cover the whole Egyptian section of the Louvre, case by case, and I would come home with a taste for mate and bread and jam, I’d find you stuck by the window with one of these fat novels in your hand and sometimes you’d even be crying, yes, don’t deny it, you’d be crying because they’d just cut somebody’s head off, and you’d hug me as hard as you could and want to know where I’d been, but I wouldn’t tell you because you’re a burden in the Louvre, it’s impossible to walk around there with you alongside, your ignorance is the kind that destroys all pleasure, poor girl, and it’s really my fault that you read potboilers because I’m selfish (dusty old squares, that’s all right, it reminds me of the squares in provincial towns, or the streets of La Rioja in 1942, the purple mountains at sunset, that feeling of happiness that comes with being alone in a particular spot in the world, and elegant theaters. What the hell is the guy talking about? He’s just mentioned Paris and London somewhere there, he talks about tastes and incomes), you see, Maga, you see how these eyes of mine are being pulled along with irony through the lines you read with great emotion, convinced of the fact that you were getting all kinds of culture because you were reading a Spanish novelist whose picture is on the fly-leaf, but right now the guy is talking about a scent of European culture, you’d convinced yourself that all this reading would help you understand the micro- and the macrocosm, and about all that was ever necessary was for me to come home for you to take out of the drawer of your desk — because you did have a desk, you always had to have one around even though I never found out what kind of work you were doing on it — yes, you would take out a folio with poems by Tristan L’Hermite, for example, or a study by Boris de Schloezer, and you would show them to me with the uncertain and at the same time proud air of someone who has just bought some great things and is going to read them right now. There was no way to make you understand that you wouldn’t ever get anywhere like that, that there were some things that were too late and others that were too soon, and you were always so close to the brink of despair in the very center of joy and relaxation, your baffled heart was always so full of fog. Moving along those that had come to rest on his desk, no, you couldn’t count on me for that, your desk was your desk and I didn’t put you behind it or take you away from it, I simply watched you as you read your novels and looked at the jackets and the pictures in your folios, and you were hoping that I would sit down next to you and explain it to you, relieve your mind, do what every woman hopes a man will do with her, sneak his arm around her waist a little and now he makes her snuggle closer, he gives her the urge to drop her tendency to knit sweaters or talk, talk, talk on endlessly about everything that doesn’t mean anything. I’m a real beast, what have I got to be proud about, I don’t even have you any more because you were so set on losing yourself (not even losing yourself, because first you would have had to find yourself), really not a praiseworthy situation for a man who . . . Praiseworthy, how long has it been since I heard that word, we’re really losing our language in Argentina; when I was a boy I was aware of a lot more words than I am now, I used to read these same novels, I built up a huge vocabulary that was perfectly useless for anything else, immaculately, very distinguished, yes indeed. I wonder if you really got into the plot of this novel, or whether you used it as a jumping-off point for those mysterious countries of yours that I used to envy while you used to envy me my visits to the Louvre, that you must have suspected even though you didn’t say anything. And there we were getting closer and closer to what had to happen someday when you would understand fully that I was only going to give you part of my time and my life, and his accounts would be lengthened to a tedious degree, that’s it exactly, I get boring even when I reminisce. But how pretty you used to look at the window, with the gray of the sky hovering over your cheek, a book in your hands, your mouth always a little intense, doubt in your eyes. There was so much lost time in you, you were so much the shape of what you might have been under different constellations, that taking you in my arms and making love to you became a job that was much too tender, that bordered too much on charity, and that’s where I used to fool myself, let myself fall into the stupid pride of an intellectual who thinks he’s capable of understanding (weeping until his nose had begun to run?, but that’s really too repulsive). Capable of understanding, it makes you want to laugh, Maga. Listen, this is just for you, don’t mention it to anyone else. Maga, I was the hollow shape, you used to tremble, pure and free as a flame, a stream of quicksilver, like the first notes of a bird when dawn is breaking, and it’s nice to tell you all this in words that used to fascinate you because you had thought they didn’t exist outside of poetry, and that we had every right to use them. Where are you now, where will we be from today on, two points in an inexplicable universe, near or far, two points that make a line, two points that drift apart and come close together arbitrarily (great figures who had made the name of Bueno de Guzmán renowned, but how corny can the guy get, Maga, how did you ever get beyond page five . . . ), but I won’t explain to you the things they call Brownian movements, of course I won’t explain them to you and still both of us, Maga, form a pattern, you a point somewhere, me somewhere else, displacing each other, you probably now in the Rue de la Huchette, while I’m discovering this novel in your empty apartment, tomorrow you in the Gare de Lyon (if you’re going to Lucca, my love), and me on the Rue de Chemin Vert, where I’ve discovered a wonderful little wine, and little by little, Maga, we go along forming an absurd pattern, with our movements we can sketch out a pattern just like the ones flies make when they fly around a room, from here to there, suddenly in mid-flight, from there to here, that’s what they call Brownian movement, now do you understand? a right angle, an ascending line, from here to there, from back to front, up, down, spasmodically, slamming on the brakes and starting right up in another direction, and all of this is drawing a picture, a pattern, something nonexistent like you and me, like two points lost in Paris that go from here to there, from there to here, drawing their picture, putting on a dance for nobody, not even for themselves, an interminable pattern without any meaning.
My observations:
This was an interesting exercise (that probably violates the spirit of Cortázar’s work). One thing I noticed in carrying it out was just how bad the novel Oliveira is reading really is. On first reading I thought Oliveira was just being snobbish about it, but when I started to type it out, I noticed the prose really was mostly just tedious lists of facts. It’s the definition of telling and not showing.
Because Cortázar is a genius, this is referenced within the story itself in an ostensible description of the narrator’s uncle: “…he would let himself be led into the habit of describing every detail and his accounts would be lengthened to a tedious degree. Sometimes he would do this right at the very beginning and would adorn his stories with childish minutiae…”
Another thing I noticed is that while the prose is easier to read separated out like this, it’s harder to keep track of where Oliveira is in his reading of the novel, and which lines he’s referencing within his own thoughts.
Finally, the poetic, borderline beautiful, quality of Cortázar’s stream-of-consciousness account of Oliveira’s thoughts really becomes apparent towards the end. The giant wall of text is intimidating, but it’s worth making it through for lines like “There was so much lost time in you, you were so much the shape of what you might have been under different constellations,” or “Maga, I was the hollow shape, you used to tremble, pure and free as a flame, a stream of quicksilver, like the first notes of a bird when dawn is breaking.” Not bad. Cortázar is a boss.
