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Hopscotch - Spine 2012
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Discussion - Week Three - Hopscotch - Chapter 28 - 36
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Chapter 28 certainly puts a sinister spin on "The Serpent Club." Discussing the absurdity of reality while the mother lives in a Schrodinger state of paradox? I can't laugh or cry, depending.....
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The sadistic tension of watching her serve coffee while Rocamadour laid there getting cold was just too much. Those slimy Serpents had little respect for her in general and instead of trusting her enough to tell her what happened, they let her carry a spoon of medicine to her child's corpse. Nasty shit!
Sidebar: Rocamadour is a Christian pilgrimage site in the Southwest of France, not far from where I live. It is named after a Christian mystic and saint, Amadour, who came to the rock cliff, hence "Roc - Amadour". I haven't figured out a connection to LaMaga's child yet. Maybe there is none.
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aPriL does feral sometimes
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Maybe the name Rocamadour is not about the child, but about La Maga's quest for intellectual wisdom? She journeyed to Paris with the expectation of becoming more wise through osmosis and conversation? And instead hit a rock wall she could not surmount (lack of brain power and/or educational background, at least by the pseudo-standards of the disgusting and morally bankrupt Serpents Club). Her child's life (La Maga's hopes for the future) abruptly cut short, without empathy or help from La Maga's so-called intellectual superiors. La Maga's mistaken quest an impulse of faith, a true believer in the unseen, invisible, except to the mind, world of thinking, believing in the sustenance of the unreal (in every sense) intellectualism to feed the body?(I edited this today,Sept.2 because I used 'its' instead of Rocamadour, making my musings unclear. I'm not sure I fixed being unclear though. Oh well.)
Chapter 34 almost led me to give up on this thing. Reading twice to get the interwoven text just didn't work comfortably at all for me, in fact, my reaction was downright irritation.Yes, the story itself is sad, pathetic (dysfunctional?), to an extreme in this section. (Is the chapter supposed to reflect that. Such never occurred to me until I wrote these words. Not sure at all the "why" of C34.)
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Yes, the sto..."
It is kind of unpleasant. I tried to read simultaneously, but that goes nowhere. Instead, I read them separately. I suppose it's just the conceit of the post-modern era, aka "weird for weird's sake"
By the time we get to the end of the Paris section, it seems inevitable that Oliveira is headed for some kind of psychic collapse.
Jim wrote: "It is kind of unpleasant. I tried to read simultaneously, but that goes nowhere. Instead, I read them separately. I suppose it's just the conceit of the post-modern era, aka "weird for weird's sake"..."It certainly lends credence to the possibility that when things are far enough out of whack from "normal" and from the ways of doing/being to which accustomed (like reading each line of a book sequentially), the situation is "felt" even before the rational reasons are processed.
When I was teaching myself about music, I bought a CD that was mentioned as a post-modern 'classic'. The first 'song' was 20 minutes of one single note playing continuously. Stunned, I went to Amazon, which at the time had a teach-you-the-essentials program going in their first year on the web. It said the audience's reaction to the music was the point of the 'music'. The artist wanted the listener to experience and explore her own personal reactions to what she heard. Typical reactions were rage, boredom, confusion (tickets to the concert originally were $60). It was a post-modern thing - your internal processing as the real reality, which should be examined for a more real authentic life. Also, I guess, it was the question, 'what is music?' I think the answer was whatever the listener expected or made of it. To get at how your brain automatically processes and expects without thinking about it, it was necessary to cut up a whole thing, in time, by stopping time and doing a single element, forcing your brain to flop around trying to bring context and meaning, allowing you to observed yourself observing. Did any post-modernists love their life?
aPriL MEOWS often with scratching wrote: "Did any post-modernists love their life? ..."Are you implying they don't exist any more? Maybe have all committed hari-kiri? (Grin -- yes, bad joke.)
Thx for your post, April! Good stuff!
(Haven't said yet that enjoyed Jim's sidebar on Rocamadour, too -- and also haven't found or created a connection.)
Mod
One of the formal elements of 20th century art - especially post-WWII - was to engage the viewer/audience in new ways. Instead of being passive receivers of "finished" art pieces, artists began creating work that the audience would complete by their participation/response/active engagement with the work. An interesting example was Yoko Ono's early performance art 'Cut piece' from 1965:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB--DX...
The artist conceived the performance, but instead of simply watching comfortably from their seats, the audience completed the work by cutting away her garments.
In a similar way, Cortazar interacts with the reader by forcing us to "hopscotch" around the chapters, flipping back and forth, having to confront the physical reality of the pages, occasionally cursing him for interfering with the easy flow of sequential, beginning-middle-end novels that we can lose ourselves in without the sometimes jarring interjection of author/paper/hunting for section 117, and so on.
@Lily - I think that post-modernism is still being used mostly because a clear alternative to that critical moniker hasn't become dominant yet. Many just use "contemporary" for now. Po-mo is definitely of a time that has passed.
Thoughts on Chapter 34:"Did any postmodernists love their life?"
I think some of them did, but they certainly knew how to feel pain, and sometimes I think their fiction is sort of a reflection of that. (Their? whose? I might not think that matters, actually, we might just be talking about writers in general)
I remember reading this, on a morning where I had just gotten up, and thinking to myself I'm going to jump into Hopscotch! its certainly taking its sweet siesta like time.....I love it on the surface, I love it! But it takes so much time to read! And all that time it takes to read in my slim Bard paperback (a fat tattered paperback sized paperback when they were small and condensed, its peeling white reminding me of some imaginary (real in another universe) lost Choose Your Own Adventure Novel detected and rejected upon receipt.....
And then I read Chapter 34...... and the second time reading it wasn't nearly as bad...but I can't view that first time as nothing less then a violation. hoewever, I think thats the point. I think cortazar is being breezy and surface level to tease us with the slap in the face later, mainly to feel it.....because we have to feel it to understand the pain.
it kind of reminds me of trauma, when you feel so much pain that you turn it off, but then you revisit it because you can't turn it off. that's what I think about this type of writing. and sometimes as a writer you're going to want to show not just the emotional of all this as much as the emptiness that comes with that.
this may be a bit late in the conversation but...
*sips coffee* I realized that this book is one that refuses to let you look at it the way you want to, it makes you see it its way....how slippery a book.....
however, there's a Lot going on here that people aren't even bringing to the table.....there's the transition to America, but others happen too......America still, even if its South....and yet its also a transition to another culture....another America that is much older...
(making coffee)
now there are many ways of looking at these sorts of things but the multiplicity of it all is dizzying, but aren't we always that way these days? so many frames to watch hearing tv, listening to your partner, satisfying your lover, playing your game, working your job, texting your friends, that reading about two at the same time isn't nearly as dizzying as it once was...
I may pause to read a few things between this book and this book. But I don't mind reading and writing on my own schedule at this point, I just ran into a lot of PTO, too bad it feels like a brick wall at times, when I didn't realize there was an open window too....
Also, am greatly admiring the French influences in Cortazar's novel, oddly (or not so much) pointing out now in the American section.
I've read and taken classes on postmodernism April, and I'm very frustrated with the title because I feel that its "shiny newness" deameanor tends to obfuscate its actual usefullness. I think its the ancient stuff that pomo brings to the table that deserves to be studied. seriously. Been reading some John Barth lately and that's been helpful....
But Bataille is a big influence here, given all these Transgressive elements, and not coincidental that the 116th chapter, the third chapter?, (i had to double-check I was looking in the correct book)....
loving a life and recording a life is nearly as hard as writing a life or reading a life, I'm beginning to understand why my father never made it through the tattered Penguin Trollope I saw him reading when I grew up. I see signs of his intelligence I never saw before.....
Matthew wrote: "I just ran into a lot of PTO, too bad it feels like a brick wall at times, when I didn't realize there was an open window too...."http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com... ?
Within distance of the sound of whistling?
there's a Lot going on here that people aren't even bringing to the table.
Within Hopscotch or here in this discussion or both?
And maybe with the character circling his finger around the temple of his head..@Lily, I think that there is a lot going on in the novel. But also a lot to discuss. For example, it seems Cortazar plays a bit with naming conventions, and I think a lot of that has to do with identity, and keeping some of his characters hidden, or maybe even more mysterious. I also think that is a separate comment on how names are used in English vs. Spanish, although I could be wrong, just kind of feels that way.
A good example of this is sometimes Horacio is Horacio, sometimes he is referred to Oliviera. Somtimes La Maga is La Maga, sometimes she is Lucia. And La Maga is a thing, that Cortazar also seems to refer to as another kind of thing that it could be:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majo
It would seem that Cortazar seems to be malking an ironic comment about the stereotype of La Maja (the idea) and placing it next to, or on top of, a real person. Hard to say if any racial/cultural perspective on Cortazar's part is unconscious or not, but I certainly think he wants us to look at La Maja as much as a role played by a person as it is a flesh and blood person. However, it would be fair to point out that even the original La Maja role as this Wikipedia says anyways seems a reaction of French influence on Spanish culture. And I am certain that Cortazar was aware of.
I'm sure someone else can go to work on the Goya connection, I just wanted to clear up some of the confusion of the last post.
In terms of chapter 34, it would seem that Cortazar wants us to loom at the possibility of reading it one way, the other way, and quite possibly both ways at the same time. That itself suggests looking at all of the characters as more then one thing, if he devotes an entire chapter to that it would seem that Cortazar wants us to do the work, but with the spirit of play he suggested in his Paris Review interview.
-Matt
Mod
@Lily, I think that there is a lot going on in the novel. But also a lot to discuss. For example, it seems Cortazar..."
I thought of la maja too, but I don't think it fits the character. Instead, the literal translation of LaMaga - magician or sorceress - seems to fit her better.
Okay, chapter 28… poor little Rocamadour. A dense, heavy scene as a seemingly quiet evening becomes peopled, first by the insanity of the crazy floor banger upstairs, then the arrival of Horacio, followed later by the other members of The Serpent Club, bearing the news of Guy’s unsuccessful suicide attempt. One-by-one, the news about Rocamadour passes between them and they watch LaMaga bring medicine to her dead baby. WTF!?!??
Oliveira finds Gregorovious squatting in LaMaga’s abandoned apartment and they make an uneasy peace. Oliveira finds a letter and does a mash-up read of LaMaga’s abandoned novel. As Babs leads a weeping trial of Oliveira, The Serpent Club dissolves and slithers into oblivion. Unable to locate LaMaga, Oliveira has an early morning wine binge with a clocharde that has a happy ending followed by a ride to the gendarmerie.
To avoid spoilers, please restrict your comments to Chapters 28 – 36, pp. 139 – 216 and the earlier chapters.