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Hopscotch
Hopscotch - Spine 2012
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Discussion - Week Four - Hopscotch - Chapter 37 - 56
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I thought I'd help get us in the mood with this little video I found on YouTube:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7ibPk37_U
Mod
Oliveira – An older expatriate, living in Paris, chasing after some sort of synthesis of meaning to help him understand what, if anything, life is about. Only vaguely able to comprehend himself, he tries to understand LaMaga, but with his theoretical, cerebral approach to life, he doesn’t seem to get beyond the surface of LaMaga. Oliveira’s obsessions, quirky behaviors, and endless wrestling with the “big ideas” have destabilized his sanity, and once among his people in the pink pajamas, he just lets himself fall through the window he’s been dancing around for years.
LaMaga – A woman on the run from (or maybe walking away from) past abuses by men. For some romantic reason, she chose to not abort Rocamadour, but now realizes this was not the best plan. She seems to be more interested in the random scraps she picks up on the street than in her child. She gives her maternal affection to Oliveira rather than Rocamadour. She, too, may need some psychiatric help. Reminds me of Esme from The Recognitions, but without the heroin addiction.
Gregorovious – A horny orphan who everyone can see coming from a mile away, but who cannot see himself. Or perhaps, does not wish to acknowledge his base desires.
The Serpent Club – In general, they seem to be intellectual furniture in the room to give the primary characters things to respond to. They are reminiscent of the Greenwich Village crowd from Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and also ‘The Whole Sick Crew’ from Pynchon’s V..
Traveler and Talita – A match made, not in heaven, but in the earthly paradise of a pharmacy counter-top. They are two average people, living a pedestrian life, and who will die with little remark from the world, and though they may have unfulfilled desires for travel and adventure, they are essentially content with their life.
Mod
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7ibPk37_U"
I think Henri was Meursault's cat...
:D
Jim wrote: "Here are a few of my impressions after finishing version one:..."Hmmm... I read your comments with interest and pondered on them a bit. Now, a few hours later, I have come across this reader review and my thoughts jumped back to Cortázar and his Hopscotch and its characters:
"I loved this book. Can't believe I had never heard of Trollope before.
"It took me a long time to put my finger on what it was that drew me in so much about his stories, and in the end I think one scholar put it best when they said that Trollope views his characters very neutrally. He paints their qualities and their faults with the same brush, and while he might say 'Oh, Johnny!' at them, his narrator doesn't judge them without also pointing out other possible outcomes. And Trollope himself didn't like the words 'hero' and 'heroine', because they implied that the characters must do something heroic, while his characters simply live.
"No great, over-arching passions, no lack of sense. Very down to earth, very human. Despite the passage of nearly two centuries the people are easy to relate to.(" Jen.
I agree with your observations, too, Jim. I think of Trollope as a great writer, too, Lily, but his characters are more likable than those in Hopscotch. The only characters I have liked in Hopscotch are Traveler and Talita. They appear to have more Perspective (pun intended totally).
aPriL MEOWS often with scratching wrote: "I agree with your observations, too, Jim. I think of Trollope as a great writer, too, Lily, but his characters are more likable than those in Hopscotch..."D... system swallowed a post! And I think I had said what I wanted to say the way I wanted to say it. I'm not able to reconstruct, but roughly:
April -- I think what I am struggling with is how neutrally does Cortázar regard his characters. Right now (I haven't read this last section), my sense is that his narrator is markedly nonjudgmental, without whitewashing reality.
The author may be neutral in language, but I think he is judging this group of philosophers negatively by the choice of incidents he relates. Oliveira is undecided whether he loves La Maga for some time, although he uses her body and apartment to sleep, but he allowed her to think her baby alive while telling everyone else in the room that the baby had died. Instead of objecting to this morally corrupt behavior (at least, to non-post-modernist thinkers) the entire group continues the conversation about the nature of reality for at least an hour beyond their awareness of the dead baby lying on the bed, cooling. I read this as explaining these idiots very judgementally by the author's voice through the relating of the story at all in the book. Taken by itself, the incident could simply be a non-judging explanation of how post-modern philosophy works, but the author includes aftermath incidents which show the damage on the emotional level the incident caused, rippling through the individuals involved. La Maga is considered an intellectual inferior that somehow has proved to be some sort of catalyst for thinkers around her. The Club overtly has sympathy for her loss, and condemn Oliveira for having no heart because he did not attend the funeral. He actually was truer to their philosophy by not going, I think, but the real reason he didn't was not their philosophy, but guilt at his lack of support for La Maga. It shows, one, what poseurs the Club members are (they shouldn't have gone to the funeral, if I understand their philosophy) and two, how these philosophies fail. The incidents are not neutral, although the descriptions were neutral.
Plus, the author has explained everything about how Oliveira thinks, and while he did so with neutrality, by having Oliveira be so unhappy and without the mental resources to be happy, through incidents and actions the author is making a judgement, neutral as his language might be.
In my opinion, author was:
1. Describing neutrally the post-modern scene in Paris if you were a fanboy, and not a brilliant innovator/artist;
2. By the characters' omissions of decent (I'm not referring to sex, ok?) behavior and their other actions, showing the social and emotional deficiencies of these intellectuals living their lives philosophically, per their beliefs, even though he used neutral language, he did not choose neutral incidents, I think. Except for T&T, were any of them at all well-rounded or happy? T&T kept the philosophy for brain candy discussions, but lived and accepted sweaty reality with gusto.
3. Writing the book per post-modern theories, seeing for himself how it might work, and giving the reader an experience of post-modern theory in the writing Art and in the physical Art (using the act of handling the book, flipping pages, rearranging chapters to tell a differently ordered story, remembering, how we feel given the different ending).
It's really really really neat to think about this book!
aPriL MEOWS often with scratching wrote: " The incidents are not neutral, although the descriptions were neutral...."I quite agree with the above! Thx, too, for all your comments.
My one comment here would be that, although the events aren't neutral, I don't hear "Tut, tut" so much as, if this is the pickle you choose to get yourself into, and you do such and such, the following is what that is likely to look like.
It's really really really neat to think about this book!
Hmmm?
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aPriL does feral sometimes
(last edited Sep 03, 2012 05:13PM)
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rated it 4 stars
Brain exercise is good. (sheepish nerd squirming)
Mod
No brain pain, no brain gain...
Mod
This might be a good time to deflate the term 'post-modern' a little bit. Post-modernism is more of a critical catch-all for works of art and literature than a discrete philosophy unto itself. WW2 is a historical marker, quite literally for the whole world. The modernism of pre-WW2 did extend slightly into the 40's, but the devastation of the war changed everything. What emerged was something different, and one way of defining that aesthetic difference was to simply call it 'post-modern'.
For Hopscotch, it might be better to think of The Serpent Club as exploring the ideas of post-WW2 existentialism à la Camus and Sartre. Many times, I thought of Camus' character Meursault when reading Oliveira's musings. An interesting contrast is between the pre-war jazz/blues versus the post-war free-form jazz of Sonny Rollins that Etienne draws our attention to in chapter 17.
Cortazar was also interested in the proto-surrealists, Alfred Jarry and Le Comte de Lautreamont, as well as the 1920's and 30's Surrealists centered around André Breton. Camus had been a part of the movement but broke with the group pre-WW2. Oliveira's evening with Berthe Trépat came across as a bit on the surrealist side.
So, even though Hopscotch can be included under the umbrella of post-modernism, the characters themselves didn't know bupkiss about post-modernism.
Brain Pain
Books mentioned in this topic
The Recognitions (other topics)V. (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Alfred Jarry (other topics)Comte de Lautréamont (other topics)
André Breton (other topics)
FROM THIS SIDE
Il faut voyager loin en aimant sa maison,
Apollinaire, Les mamelles de Tirésias
And so we arrive at This Side of the pond and meet the unfortunately mis-named Traveler and his suppository-dispensing wife, Talita. I suppose if your first conversation is as intimate as that, she had him pegged for life.
Oliveira arrives back in Buenos Aires and spends his time being coddled by Gekrepten and boring T&T with his disparaging remarks about B.A. Traveler and Oliveira build a bridge for Talita, but when Oliveira reaches out to her, she falls back into Traveler’s arms.
The circus owner sells the show and re-invests in an insane asylum. T,T,&O join the new concern, but sooner than anyone suspected, Oliveira leans out the window and we’re left wondering, “did he or didn’t he?”
Having finished the first version, now is a good moment to collect our collective thoughts and impressions of the characters and their adventures before we move on to version two.