1966. Copies of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela begins to circulate…

Hopscotch receives critical and popular success for a literary work. Much attention relates to the book’s TABLE OF INSTRUCTIONS:

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. 

The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore all that follows with a clean conscience.

The second should be read by beginning with chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness one need only consult the following list:

(Hopscotch, TABLE OF INSTRUCTIONS)

The inclusion of THE TABLE OF INSTRUCTIONS is interesting, considering most books don’t need one. Usually when beginning a book, you read from left to right horizontally, down vertically, flip page and repeat until the back cover has been reached or the book is put down. Cortázar’s instructions, however, propose that multiple textual realities exist simultaneously within the same text, and the narrative trajectory can be materially altered by the reader’s choices. The first order is the traditional one, but instead of reading to the back cover, ‘the end’ occurs in chapter 56 (out of 155) on page 349 (out of 564). On the following page, another section begins, under the heading FROM DIVERSE SIDES: Expendable Chapters. Thus, Chapter 57 is the first Expendable Chapter. But Chapter 57 is serially listed as 57/155 and is also Chapter 84/155 in Cortázar’s second suggested order. Further,  Chapter 57 is variable X/155  in any other reader generated schema. Obviously each choice, order, and variation the reader makes creates a different text.

THE TABLE OF INSTRUCTIONS is also interesting because it negates the traditional TABLE OF CONTENTS. How can there be a table of fluctuating contents? How can there be a beginning, a primary referent, or a definitive end, if the narrative is being created by the reader’s decisions? At first glance, it seems that Hopscotch just privileges the reader’s subjectivity while negating the author’s authority. But if every reader’s subject position is materially privileged within their own re-constituted narrative, doesn’t that negate the interpretive significance of each individual reading? If all interpretive stances are explicitly subjective interpretations of different texts, can interpretative stances have relational validity?

Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to history is similar in that he seeks to destabilize the continuity of historical narratives by introducing series of relative beginnings.

Continuous history is the correlate of of consciousness: the guarantee that that what escapes from it can be restored to it; the promise that it will some day be able to appropriate outright all those things which surround it and weigh down to it, to restore its mastery over them, and to find in them what really must be called […] its home. The desire to make historical analysis the discourse of continuity, and make human consciousness the the originating subject of all knowledge and all practice, are two faces of one and the same system of thought. Time is conceived in terms of totalization, and revolution never as anything but a coming to consciousness. (AME 301)

History is an analog for consciousness in the sense that both are conceived of as being, potentially, a primary referent. Situated within a totalized temporality, continuous historical narratives are discovered by the enlightened human subject. But these two correlatives necessitate reciprocal support. If “discontinuity was that stigma of temporal dispersion which it was the historian’s duty to suppress from history”  (AME 299), “history had to be continuous in order for the sovereignty of the subject to be safeguarded” (AME 333). Further, any conception of historical continuity that piggy-backs while championing the cognizant human subject, Gumbrecht points out, can only exist within a specific notion of temporality: “As long as we imagine time as a sequence of moments that link the past with the present, we presuppose that the observations, actions, and events attributed to subsequent moments on this continuum are connected by a principle of (however “soft”) causality” (Gumbrecht 401).

What Foucault, Cortázar, and Gumbrecht do, is break up the  subject oriented line of causally based historical continuity. Foucault, for his part, creates an archaeological model that “allows us to treat history as a set of actually articulated statements, and language as an act of description and an ensemble of relations linked to discourse. (AME 287) Cortázar, for his part, disperses his own subjective punctuation throughout the text(s), forcing readers to determine their own path, acting upon their their own textual gestures. Of course, the book’s multi-dimentional structure assures that the text has no finality. It can be continually revised, revamped, reassessed, and reinterpreted. But can we really attempt to relate our interpretation of the text if were all reading different texts (which of course, we are all always doing, even if its not normally so obvious)? Cortázar seems to eliminate his own subjectivity and diminish the the reader’s perspective within the mummers of discourse, to a point where we can talk about the underlying structures or the materiality of the text, but not so much about the narratives themselves. Perhaps Cortázar and his readers enact the anonymous murmuring Foucault seems to desire.

This is not to say that Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge are directly related, but rather that each text represents a statement or node within a single discourse network, or, actually, a plethora of relative discourse networks. In these discourse networks, Deluze might point out, “science and poetry are equal forms of knowledge” (Deluze 15).  Rayuela is published the same year as Burroughs’s The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Thomas Pynchon’s V (1962), two texts described  as anti-novels. All of these texts share with Foucault the desire to displace subjectivity within a textual murmur. Try to find the authorial subject in The Ticket that Exploded, a novel where parts are created by Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up technique, in which the author cuts up sections of text, re-arranges them with other cut up sections of text.  This technique literally disassembles the authorial subject by re-ordering linear text fragments. It is similar to Cortázar’s suggested sequential cut ups, except, instead of the reader choosing intervals of chapters, Burroughs is cutting up sentences, or words, and re-arranging them himself, often at random, or to a predetermined structure.

We also find Borges’s texts within this discursive network. In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault quotes Borges’s Chinese Encyclopedia. In Hopscotch, a book heavily indebted to Borges, Olivera (the protagonist) says to himself, “the theory of communication, one of those fascinating themes that literature had not gone into much until the Huxley’s and the Borgeses of the new generation came along” (Hopscotch 152). Borges texts, like Hopscotch, create play as readers work through a series of narrative levels . Often, perhaps in mockery of real historical works, Borges conjures up fictional source texts that inspire his narrator’s or his own discussions of literature. Such is the case in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, where the fictional narrator has found an encyclopaedia of a fictional planet. Attempting to work through the meta levels, false starts, and non-endings within the text, I am often reminded that I feel almost exactly the same way when I read real texts about real historical narratives. Foucault, as well, draws inspiration from Borges’s labyrinthian relationships between history and narration.

Borges also breaks up Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius with fictional footnotes, a strategy used by many, but perhaps nowhere as recently and notoriously than in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Infinite Jest is published two years before Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives Salvajes (1998). These books are directly influenced by Cortázar and Burroughs’s multi-sectional narrative techniques, reverence (or irreverence) for meditations on mediations, yet also, I would argue, embody a late 1990’s aesthetic explicated in Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998), which, not coincidentally, begins circulation at roughly the same time.  While Bolaño, Bourriaud and Wallace certainly read Borges, Cortázar and Foucault, it is uncertain whether of not they read each other’s work before their own major works were published. This suggests that the discourse network I consider them to be apart of assimilated similar texts and ideas, which were reformulated into three different texts in three different languages in three different countries. The near simultaneous circulation of these seemingly unrelated texts emphasize Foucault’s concept that the discourse networks we are apart of allows and limits the discursive practices we pursue. As Foucault suggests: “No book exists by itself. it is always in a relation of support and dependance vis-à-vis other books; it is a point in a network–it contains a system of indications that point, explicitly or implicitly, to other books, other texts, or other sentences (AME 304).

Finally, I would like to point out something totally obvious. The theoretical dismantling of historical narratives, primary referents, and cognizant subjects, did not remain solely within the realm of abstruse theories and destabilized aesthetic experiments. The two most common forms influenced by Foucault’s relative beginnings and Cortázar’s multi-narrative technique are probably the Choose Your Own Adventure Novels, and more recently, video game culture. While children reading Choose your Own Adventure Novels probably weren’t moonlighting The Archeology of Knowledge on the sly, they were still working through some of the same ideas. And people playing video games, who have never read Cortázar, are enacting similar narratorial transgressions, which makes gamers, children of the eighties, Foucault, Cortázar, Borges, Bolaño, Wallace, Bourriaud, and us, all relational members of a discourse network concerning relative beginnings and multiple endings.

Works Cited:

Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. Trans. Rabassa, Gregory. New York: Random House, 1966. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Hand, Sean. London: Athlone, 1988. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol. 2. New York: New Press, 1998. Print.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. “A Farewell to Interpretation.” Materialities of Communication. Writing Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. 389-402. Print.