Rayuela (Julio Cortázar, 1963)

ONGOING

I'm writing (or, more accurately, attempting to write) about Julio Cortázar's 1963 novel Rayuela (Hopscotch is the English title) for the final essay of my literature class. I'm only twelve chapters in so far, each being only a few pages long, and I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts I was having about it before I forget them.

First of all, Cortázar gives his readers two options for reading his book: they can either read the first fifty-six chapters in order and leave the remaining ninety-nine alone or go through it in the order he suggests, which jumps back-and-forth between different parts of the novel. Right now I'm taking the first route--and these fifty-six chapters are themselves divided into two sections, "Del lado de allá" and "Del lado de acá"--and more than likely I will read through the parts of the third section ("De otros lados") in the same manner. Second, the two epigraphs deal with the idea of imparting a lesson before it's too late for it to mean anything, which ties in with Cortázar's temporal preoccupations and rather specific ideas about the nature of time. The first twelve chapters themselves are quite enjoyable, some of them narrated in the first person by, presumably, Oliveira, an Argentine expatriate living in Paris in the late-1950s (Cortázar himself having made the same trip in 1951); others are told by a more detached nameless narrator who recounts the activities of Oliveira, La Maga, the Uruguayan girl he's involved with, and his group of friends that call themselves el Club de la Serpiente. Traces of the fantastic abound in certain chapters of Rayuela, as in the part that seems to equate Oliveira and La Maga's lovemaking with something like W. B. Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" (1928).

Terribly intriguing stuff, I'd say.

An excerpt:

(p. 51)

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.