Novels, Deep-Read · Julio Cortázar · No.52
Rayuela · Julio Cortázar · 1963
In the back courtyard of an asylum in Buenos Aires, a hopscotch grid is chalked onto the concrete: Earth at one end, Heaven at the other, square by square, drawn that afternoon by one of the patients. On the third floor a window stands open and a man sits on the sill with his legs hanging out. Behind him the room has been turned into a trap of his own devising — basins of water at the door, threads strung crosswise over the floor, ball bearings hung on the threads so that anyone stepping in will rattle and skid. He is certain someone is coming up to kill him.
Down in the courtyard that someone is looking up at him, with his wife beside him. The two of them happen to be standing inside the chalked squares.
He looks down. Here the novel prints three stars, which is to say The End. Whether he jumps, the book has no intention of telling you.
An Argentine in his forties, living in Paris on money from home and hunting for the absolute in all-night talk and jazz records, loses the Uruguayan woman who has never finished a book and is nonetheless right about almost everything; back in Buenos Aires he keeps mistaking his friend's wife for her, and ends up sitting on the windowsill of an asylum. And the novel, cut into 155 chapters, tells the reader before the story even starts: you may read straight through to chapter 56 and stop, or begin at chapter 73 and hop along the route it supplies — and the two paths give you two different books.
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) was an Argentine born in Brussels who left Argentina for Paris in 1951 and stayed there for the rest of his life, earning his living as a translator for UNESCO and rendering the whole of Poe's fiction into Spanish on the side. He took French citizenship in 1981 and died in Paris in 1984. Rayuela — Hopscotch in English — appeared in Buenos Aires in 1963. It was his second novel and the only one of his books that arrived as an event rather than as a publication.
Its place in literary history is easy to fix. The Latin American Boom is usually built on four titles — Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero (1963), Hopscotch (1963), and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) — and Hopscotch is the one that least resembles a novel. It belongs to the line that writes the act of reading into the book itself: upstream sits Tristram Shandy, downstream Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. The difference is that Calvino makes an exquisite game of it and Cortázar means it — he genuinely believed that changing how you read could change how you live. Gregory Rabassa's 1966 translation won the first U.S. National Book Award given for translation; García Márquez later delayed the English One Hundred Years of Solitude by three years to wait for Rabassa's schedule.
Before the story begins, the book hands you a table. The page at the front, the "Table of Instructions," says:
"In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all."— Hopscotch, Table of Instructions (opening page)
The first book: chapters 1 through 56 in order, at the end of which three stars stand in for The End, and everything after may be skipped with a clear conscience. The second: start at chapter 73 and follow the number printed at the foot of each chapter, weaving in the block the author himself labels "expendable chapters," numbers 57 through 155. Seed ① Hold on to that; it goes off again at the very end.
Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine somewhere around forty, has no proper job in Paris and lives on money sent from home. He reads, smokes, walks, thinks. What he is looking for he cannot name, though the book offers a few labels: the centre, the absolute, the kibbutz of desire — some place where a person could stop being divided against himself.
The first sentence of the novel is a question: "Would I find la Maga?" La Maga — the word means something like sorceress, woman of magic — is a Uruguayan from Montevideo who has come to Paris with a baby, has finished nothing she has started reading, mispronounces the names of philosophers and is treated by a whole roomful of people as a joke. Between her and Oliveira there is one rule: no times, no places, no arrangements. Seed ② They meet by luck on the bridges over the Seine, beside the bookstalls in the rain; if they meet it is fate, and if they don't they go their separate ways. For Oliveira the rule is an article of faith — he refuses to let love degrade into a line in a diary.
She has a son, Rocamadour, boarded out with a woman in the countryside. For a long stretch of the book the child is nothing but a name, a few letters, and a fee that never quite gets paid. Seed ③
Their circle calls itself the Serpent Club: Étienne the painter, the Americans Ronald and Babs, Ossip Gregorovius (a Central European scholar of untraceable origins), Perico the Spaniard, Wong. They pack into unheated rooms, play jazz records all night — Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong — drink bad wine, and argue their way from metaphysics through Eastern mysticism to the recording date of a particular side. La Maga sits among them like a tolerated child; when she interrupts, everyone laughs, and then fairly often discovers that what she said was right.
Two Paris afternoons deserve separating out. One is chapter 22: an old man is hit by a car in the street, Oliveira watches from the crowd, the ambulance comes, the thing passes. Seed ④ The other is chapter 23: on some obscure impulse he buys a ticket to a recital in a small hall, given by an elderly woman named Berthe Trépat. The programme is avant-garde and the playing falls apart. The audience leaves one by one until he is the only person who has not walked out. Afterwards he escorts her home through the rain, listening to thirty years of grievance, and is publicly abused on her own doorstep for his trouble.
The child has been brought back to Paris, into la Maga's rented room, and he is ill. That evening the Club turns up as usual, a record is playing, Ossip is murmuring to la Maga, the others are arguing about art and death. At some point Oliveira crosses the room and puts his hand on the child in the bed.
He knows. He goes back to his chair and says nothing.
What follows is the passage nobody forgets. Everyone keeps talking, and talks well, and talks for a long time; the old man upstairs bangs on the ceiling about the noise; a candle is lit; somebody turns the record over. The smallest person in the room is the only one who is quiet. Payoff ③ ↑ Cortázar spent all those earlier pages keeping Rocamadour in the condition of a name — off in the countryside, present only in letters, discussed the way an unpaid bill is discussed — precisely so that tonight he could become a body for the first time: the one person in the room not taking part in the conversation, and the only truth in it.
Eventually it is said out loud. Afterwards la Maga vanishes. She leaves no address, because there never was one — the romantic rule about never making arrangements reveals what it actually was the moment someone needs to be found: they had built nothing that could bring either of them back. Payoff ② ↑ Oliveira walks Paris. One rumour has her back in Montevideo, another has her drowned. The book gives no answer then and gives none later.
Having lost her, Oliveira starts deliberately going downward. His reasoning: if the centre cannot be reached from above, perhaps the way in is at the very bottom. Around this time the Club visits an old writer in hospital — the same old man who was knocked down in the street — Morelli. Payoff ④ ↑ It is the wittiest piece of engineering in the book: the highest theoretical authority these people have, first appears as an unidentified body on the pavement, gawped at by his own ideal readers, none of whom know who he is. He hands them the key to his flat and asks them to sort his notebooks — and those notebooks are a large share of what the novel calls its expendable chapters.
Then comes the last chapter of the Paris half. Late at night under a bridge on the Seine, Oliveira drinks with a homeless woman called Emmanuèle, both of them shaking with cold, and what passes between them is neither erotic nor tender; a police patrol picks them up and drives them off. He does it not out of desire, and not entirely out of self-disgust, but as a test of a proposition: if every form of decency is a costume, then perhaps filth is a door. The door does not open. He is shipped back to Argentina.
Waiting for him in Buenos Aires is Gekrepten, a girl who loves him without reservation, knits him sweaters, brews his maté and asks no questions. He moves in with her and is offhand, absent, occasionally cruel.
Then there are Traveler and Talita. Traveler is a friend from his youth, nicknamed for travelling, and the man has never once left Buenos Aires — the joke is made explicit in the text. Seed ⑤ Talita, his wife, is a qualified pharmacist. The couple work for a circus and get Oliveira taken on there too.
Chapter 41 is the centre of this half. On an afternoon hot enough to melt a person, Oliveira is in his room straightening a heap of bent nails one at a time. He shouts across the street to Traveler's window for a little maté and some nails. Rather than go downstairs, the two men run planks out of their facing windows, lash them together, and build a bridge several storeys above the street. And then the one who comes across with the delivery is not Traveler but Talita — straddling the plank, one hand on the rope, the other holding the kettle and the packet of nails, suspended over the traffic with a man who loves her at each end of the board. Seed ⑥ At no point in the scene does anyone say what is actually being contested.
Later the circus is sold, the owner buys an asylum, and the three of them move there as keepers. Oliveira begins to see la Maga in Talita — first as a lapse, then as a decision. Traveler sees it perfectly clearly. The sharpest moment comes in the basement morgue: beside the cold chamber, Oliveira kisses Talita and uses la Maga's name, with Traveler just above them.
That night Oliveira goes back to his third-floor room, sets basins of water at the door, strings threads across the floor and hangs ball bearings on them — an alarm system only he understands. He is certain Traveler is coming up to kill him.
Traveler does come up, and he has not come to kill him. He picks his way carefully between the threads and tries to talk him down, with the excruciating patience that exists only between old friends. This is where the two men finally stand revealed: Traveler is the road Oliveira didn't take. Payoff ⑤ ↑ The man called Traveler went nowhere and has a wife, a job, a city; the man who actually crossed an ocean in pursuit of the absolute has brought back nothing at all. The joke in the name closes here — the book has spent its whole length transferring ownership of that word.
Oliveira climbs onto the sill and sits with his legs outside. Down in the courtyard is the hopscotch the patients have drawn, and Traveler and Talita step into the squares and look up at him. Payoff ⑥ ↑ This is the plank of chapter 41 appearing a second time, except that what hangs over the drop now is him: the first time he stood at a window holding the board while a woman hung in mid-air on his behalf; this time nobody is holding anything, there is no board, and under his feet there is only a chalked ladder to heaven. Chapter 56 ends there. Three stars.
If you are reading the first book, the story stops. If you are reading the second, the route continues past chapter 56 and eventually delivers you to chapters 58 and 131 — which point at each other: 58 sends you to 131, 131 sends you back to 58. Payoff ① ↑ The Table of Instructions promised you a second book and it delivers one, and the way it delivers is to shut you inside a ring with no exit. In both chapters he is lying in bed being looked after, which seems to suggest he did not die — except that the loop itself strips that suggestion of any authority. The only decision left to you is when to stand up and close the book.
Laid end to end, the six acts hang from the first sentence rather than from any event. "Would I find la Maga?" — it is not her disappearance that destroys him; it is that from the beginning he handed the meeting over to chance and made searching itself his way of living. A man whose religion is coincidence is guaranteed to break on the day coincidence takes its gift back. The night of Rocamadour is only the bill falling due. Emmanuèle under the bridge, Talita out on the plank, the wrong name in the morgue, the pair of legs on the windowsill — all of it is the same question asked again in another city, of another person. And what the Table of Instructions does is throw that question out of the book and at you: will you walk one path to its end, or will you hop?
The technical core of this chapter is the direction of the information gap. A novel normally hides a death and saves it for a moment of revelation; Cortázar inverts it, letting the reader and Oliveira know early and leaving the one person entitled to know until last. Every clever remark after that, every side turned over on the record player, every brilliant metaphysical exchange, becomes a small crime in the reader's eyes.
What he packs in alongside is crueller still. The old man upstairs keeps hammering on the ceiling about the noise — the most banal neighbour dispute imaginable, dropped into the least bearable hour of these people's lives. That is not comic relief, it is accuracy: reality never clears a space for tragedy. It goes on being noisy, expensive, and full of people complaining about your records.
Then there is Oliveira's silence. The book never says he could not bring himself to tell her, and never says he was cruelly savouring it. The interpretation is handed to the reader whole, and the blank is harder to sit with than any explanation would be: you have to decide for yourself whether those minutes were cowardice, pity, or a curiosity he would not dare name — wanting to see how long a room full of people can discuss art beside the truth.
This chapter is almost uncut — one long, hot, real-time shot. The heat is the real protagonist: asphalt going soft, shirts stuck to backs, patience baked down to a single layer. And the whole thing is set off by an errand of magnificent absurdity — a little maté, and some nails.
The craft is in the conversion: an emotional triangle restated as a problem in mechanics. Two men each hold one end of a board with a woman suspended between them; whoever lets go drops her. Nobody says "do you still love her" or "are you thinking about the Uruguayan woman." They discuss whether the plank is long enough, whether the rope will hold, whether to shim it. The strongest dialogue in fiction is usually about something else.
And there is a piece of staging worthy of the theatre: in this scene Talita has nowhere to stand. Neither side is hers, she is slung between two men's worlds, and everyone involved pretends this is a delivery. She is still holding the packet of bent nails — one man in a room straightening what has been bent, another at the opposite window steadying the board, and neither of them asks whether her arms are tired.
This is the book's most merciless verdict on Oliveira, and it is delivered as comedy. The timing is exact: first the absurdity is stacked up (the titles get more portentous, the playing more ruinous, the audience drains away while the author all but counts heads for you), and then, at the instant you laugh, it turns over — the hall is empty except for one man who hasn't left, and the man is him.
The point is that Cortázar refuses to give him credit for it. Oliveira stays behind, but not out of kindness. It is a compound: some pity, some spectating, some wish to test his private theories about failure on somebody else's, and a fair amount of having nowhere to go. Which is why the escort through the rain is so ugly to watch — his performance of a good deed cannot survive contact with real humiliation, and when the old woman finally drives him off her doorstep, the reader has to admit she is not wrong.
Placing this chapter before the death of Rocamadour is the finest piece of arrangement in the novel: you have to see that this man can counterfeit tenderness for a stranger before you can understand what his silence in that room, fifty pages later, actually is.
The rule is simple. The book has three parts: "From the Other Side" (Paris, 1–36), "From This Side" (Buenos Aires, 37–56), and "From Diverse Sides: Expendable Chapters" (57–155). Book One is the first two parts, linear, with an ending. Book Two starts at 73 and follows the number at the foot of each chapter, braiding in the third part; that route ends in the mutual pointing of 58 and 131 and therefore never ends at all.
Honestly: this is not freedom, it is two paths the author has already laid. You may choose A or B, not N. And what changes is not the plot — the hopping version contains not one extra event — but tempo and signal-to-noise: every chapter or two of story is interrupted by a page of Morelli's theory, a newspaper clipping, a quotation from someone else. So the first pass gives you the record of one man's failure, and the second gives you a book arguing in your ear, continuously, about how it ought to be written. Same words, different rhythm; the protagonist changes from Oliveira to the craft of fiction itself.
The loop isn't an easter egg either; it is the thesis. The book refuses to have an end, which transfers the question of when to stop to you. It is also laughing at itself — the freedom on offer turns out to be a closed circuit you can only leave under your own power. And the label "expendable" is both sincere and a trap: you really are permitted to skip them, and at the same time the choice of whether to do extra work for this book is put right there on the front page. Plenty of readers take only the first book, which is entirely legitimate — but legitimate is not the same as never having been asked.
Morelli is the old writer the Serpent Club reveres, and his notebooks make up the bulk of the expendable chapters. The novel he wants would throw out beautiful prose, throw out psychology, throw out the plot curve that slides a reader comfortably to the last page. What he wants is not a reader to be waited on but an accomplice reader (lector cómplice) — someone who works alongside the author and helps finish the book. Against that he sets the passive consumer, whom he calls the lector hembra, literally "female reader." That phrase is the hardest stain on this book to wash out; see the criticism section.
What makes the theory interesting is not whether it is right but the way it has been installed: the whole novel is the building site for it, and the reader does the inspection. It even writes its own critics in — the Club carry Morelli's notebooks around while mocking them for being incomprehensible.
Chapter 34 is the famous typographic experiment: the odd-numbered lines are from a nineteenth-century Spanish novel by Galdós that la Maga is reading, the even-numbered lines are Oliveira's interior monologue. You have to learn to read every other line and go through the page twice. What the device says is plain enough: two people in one room, looking at the same page, running two lines of thought that will never intersect.
Chapter 68 is written entirely in glíglico, an invented language — Spanish grammar, made-up content words (it opens "Apenas él le amalaba el noema…"). It describes lovemaking, and the reader, unable to look up a single term, follows the rhythm, the force and the outcome exactly. It is the book's sharpest argument about language: meaning does not necessarily live in the dictionary. It is also a verdict reversed in la Maga's favour — the woman a roomful of erudite people laugh at for being uncultured is the only character in the novel who owns a language.
Worth saying plainly: these are literary devices, not findings about language. Glíglico does not prove that semantics can float free of vocabulary; it demonstrates how much context, syntax and bodily rhythm can carry — a victory of rhetoric, not a discovery in linguistics.
Take Cortázar's side at full strength first. Passive reading is a kind of half-sleep: the plot carries you, you finish, you were moved, and a month later nothing remains. The things that have genuinely altered you — an instrument, a second language, a relationship that had to be worked at — every one of them demanded disproportionate labour from you, and it was the labour that welded them on. To make "readable" your only criterion is to concede in advance that you want to be soothed. The accomplice reader isn't being tormented; he is being given a place — half this book is empty, and it's yours.
Now the other side at full strength. Difficulty is not depth. Asking a reader to complete work the author left undone is very often failure of structure dressed up as invitation — the handiest defence of a book that cannot stand by itself is that you read it wrong. Worse is the threshold: hopping, flipping back, taking notes, all of it demands leisure, a quiet room, a trained set of reading muscles. Using workload as a filter tends to screen out not the lazy but the unprovisioned. And a novel that ships with instructions has arguably conceded something already.
Bring it to now: what is scarce is not content but friction. Algorithms plane everything into a slide, you go down it, nothing stays in your hand. But don't make strenuousness a virtue in itself either — some people at the gym are training and some are taking photographs. The question worth asking is never "is this hard," it is "is the hardness necessary, or is it something the author couldn't bear to cut."
Oliveira's side has real weight. What he rejects is cheap consolation: he will not say the word love easily, because he has watched too many people use it to smuggle a whole life past themselves; he will not take the job, the furniture, the arranged weekend, because he can see how that set of things slowly stops a person asking anything. This is a serious virtue, and it is the one everybody who has ever refused to compromise has run on. The tender life Gekrepten offers does have a price, and the price is that you stop asking what you are doing.
But he is not the one paying. La Maga is nursing a sick child, working out the boarding fee, being laughed at by a room full of people, while he thinks. On the night the child dies in that room, he elects not to speak. And the humiliating part: all that metaphysics never once cost him a cigarette, or a peso of the money from home. Evading a concrete responsibility for an exalted reason is the least puncturable excuse there is, because it looks exactly like courage. The last image the novel gives him is a man on a windowsill with two people standing below who are still living their lives — and those two have read the same books; they just didn't bill anyone else for it.
No aliens required; this happens weekly. Who is covering your refusal to settle — your partner, your parents, your body? "I just don't want to live numbly" is sincere, and between that and "therefore other people should put up with me" there is a stretch of road nobody wants to name.
The strongest case for it: all that erudition in the Club never once made contact with anything that mattered. They could give you three philosophical definitions of death and not one of them noticed the child in the bed. La Maga hasn't read Kant and knows when a person is lying, knows how to hold a baby, knows when to get up and leave. The novel takes her side and turns the failure of the whole intellectual apparatus into a public joke — which is a harder blow than any anti-intellectual slogan, because it is struck from inside.
The strongest case against: the natural woman is a formula a thousand years old and it has almost always been written by men. La Maga has no viewpoint of her own, no chapter of her own, no theory and no defence; she is an instrument for measuring the protagonist — beside her he looks like a fraud, so she is praised; after losing her he suffers, so she is sanctified. She doesn't even require an ending, only a disappearance, because her function is complete. Writing a person as a mystery and writing her as a tool are frequently separated by nothing but a layer of rhetoric.
It holds outside the book too. Most of us know someone praised for being simple, intuitive, uncomplicated, and the praise is usually sincere. But compliments of that family share one property: they release the person paying them from any obligation to actually find out who she is. File someone under intuition and you never have to ask again what she was thinking today.
For the refusal: any answer would convert the book into the thing it opposes. Say he jumped and you have a moral tale about despair that a reader may safely regret; say he didn't and you have a sentimental tale about recovery that a reader may safely be relieved by. Leave him suspended and the reader has to take a side, and which side you take exposes what you yourself believe about whether there is a way out. That is the design, in force from page one: the decision keeps being pushed into your hands.
Against it: ambiguity is the cheapest posture available. Six hundred pages to drive a man onto a windowsill, and then the pen is set down precisely where the risk is — "openness" collects all the credit and carries none of the liability. The 58–131 loop goes further and institutionalises endlessness as a device. You can call it brave; you can just as fairly call it a beautifully executed disclaimer.
The one clue the book offers: the hopping route takes you past 56 to chapters 58 and 131, in both of which he is in bed being cared for, apparently alive. But the loop cancels that clue's authority — you read it, you are returned to the start, you read it again, nothing is settled. In the end you decide when to stand up and shut the book. That is the one commitment this novel keeps.
Lay his work side by side and the same obsession recurs: ordinary reality has a seam in it, and a person can go through.
In "House Taken Over," a brother and sister watch the rooms of their home being occupied one by one by something never named, and end by locking the front door and throwing the key down a drain. In "Axolotl," a man visits the aquarium daily to look at those salamanders with their fixed smiles, until the moment he becomes one of them and watches his former self through the glass. "Continuity of Parks" runs two pages: a man reads a novel in an armchair while the murderer in the novel walks step by step toward a man reading a novel in an armchair. In "The Pursuer," a jazz saxophonist lives fifteen minutes inside two and a half minutes of underground travel — time is not a line. In "The Southern Thruway," a traffic jam lasts long enough to become a society.
The constant is that the passage is a game. Not violence, not revelation — the instant the rules get swapped. Hopscotch is a game: Earth to Heaven, square by square, the rules set by children, and only children and madmen still land in Heaven. Rayuela is the largest version of the obsession he ever built: he does not send a character through the seam, he sends the reader. As for rhythm, the whole book grows the way jazz does — statement, digression, further digression, and a return to the theme just as you were giving up on it. His real wager is that a book which changes how you read might change how you live. Whether he won is still being argued, sixty years on.
Without flattery, the book has hard flaws, and the criticism holds up:
1. The first sentence is a question, and the six hundred pages that follow are its variant answers: will I find her.
2. "No times, no places" is the most romantic rule there is, right up until you actually need to find someone.
3. What chapter 28 teaches: reality never clears a space for tragedy — the child is dead and the old man upstairs is still banging about the noise.
4. One man straightening bent nails, another steadying a plank from the opposite window, a woman suspended between them: that is the entire Buenos Aires half.
5. The man called Traveler never went anywhere; the one who went brought nothing back. The book spends its whole length transferring ownership of the word.
6. The "two books" are not freedom but two prepared paths; what changes is not the plot, it is the tempo.
7. 58 and 131 point at each other, so the only person who can end this book is you. That is not an easter egg, it is the argument.
8. Glíglico proves not that meaning floats free of words, but that the one mocked for having no culture is the only character with a language.
9. Dodging a concrete responsibility for an exalted reason is the least puncturable excuse there is — it looks exactly like courage.
10. Whether he jumped, the book won't say. What you think he did is a statement about whether you believe there is a way out.