My Sabbatical With Julio Cortázar
Through the labyrinth of beginning he carried me, 'poor white shaman in nylon socks.'
The following excerpts are taken from an essay published in August in the Latin American literary magazine, Boom. I wrote this at the invitation of the distinguished Venezuelan journalist and editor Boris Munoz. It documents the pull and influence that Cortázar’s 1963 novel “Hopscotch” exerted on my writing. Bonus music track of my own creation at the end.
In late June 1963, Julio Cortázar’s kaleidoscopic novel “Hopscotch” was published in Argentina to some acclaim. About six months later, I was born in Brooklyn, New York, to considerably less fanfare. It would be another 25 years before the book and I crossed paths, and I had the maddening, ecstatic and puzzling experience of reading it. Last year, both “Hopscotch” and I turned 60.
I use the word puzzling here quite intentionally. Chief among the attributes of “Hopscotch” is the jigsaw game Cortázar builds into the experience with his “table of instructions” prefacing it, suggesting to the reader at least two orders in which to read the chapters: one linear (and truncated: it ends at Chapter 56, and advises leaving the remaining 99 chapters unread) and the other a proscribed order that blows up the numeric sequence of the entire work into a seemingly haphazard jumble that leaps back and forth until all 155 chapters are read. Traditional linear order is deconstructed, shaken and stirred even before the book begins. And the seeming disorder expressed in Cortázar’s instructions hints at a distinctly obscure logic of its own. But also, a mystery.
On Rereading
When we reread the books we loved when we were young years later we often find both the book and the reader changed. This was true of me, too. As a young man who had barely lived, I was transfixed by the Serpent Club, the wild and seemingly exotic cast of characters haunting the streets and apartments of Horacio Oliveira’s Paris. This time, some three decades later, it was not so much the content of the book, but its origins, the raucous and improvisational process of its creation, that made this reunion between me and Cortázar’s masterpiece so meaningful and sweet.
On Writing Without Knowing
It seemed that knowing beforehand what I was going to write took the wind out of me; I lost interest in writing it before I even got on to the page. I churned out some pages this way but they were dull. The words were not notes flowing out melodically but stones being pushed uphill. The drudgery of obligation, of intention, had weighed down the process, and the product, too. There was apparently a poet hiding beneath the editor who was now demanding spontaneity, curiosity, mystery. ….
Without parameters, the writing flowed more naturally, letting the hand follow the mind as it woke in the morning and noticed small things like the temperature and quality of the air coming in through the window, the morning light gradually making itself known on the red brick face of the buildings across the courtyard. Rather than program my output, I allowed what the poet William Stafford called the "coherence of my self" to emerge, until something containing life or motion or light appeared on the page and called me to it.
Ideas Are for Other People
In “Hopscotch,” Cortázar’s inclusion of notes, philosophical reflections and ephemera as chapters — especially the Morelliana, the musings ascribed to Morelli, Cortázar's novelistic or compositional phantom — forced me to consider writing not just as communication to others, which demands coherence and clarity, but as that which precedes it — communication with oneself, born in intuition, the primordial soup of creation, the sensations and impulses that move the author in the direction of expression. In one of the Morelliana chapters, 82, Cortázar captures this perfectly:
Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas. I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulse, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and turns out prose, literature or what have you. .. In that way by writing I go down into the volcano, I approach the Mothers, I connect with the Center — whatever it may be. Writing is sketching my mandala and at the same time going through it, inventing purification by purifying oneself; the task of a poor white shaman in nylon socks. ….
Cortázar on Hopscotch
Cortázar has said that he wrote “Hopscotch” not with a plan or a map but "an obligation of starting." That he was after in some sense an erasure of himself as the writer, seeking to allow the expression of the self before the self. In one interview he identifies this creature as a "pre-Adamite" version of himself, which I suppose means unformed, unmade and so unspoiled, all the better to make way for the spontaneous utterances being accessed in his wanderings. He says: "How does one write a novel when one must first unwrite oneself, unlearn oneself, begin anew, from scratch, in a pre-Adamite condition?" That it was a work whose meaning would be discoverable only after it was done.
On Faith
Having met with Cortázar again, I realized a natural affinity with the seer, the impractical, the holy fool. The one who has embraced the inability to express yet still moves to express.
The one who begins each day with his or her faith planted in the act of searching, the act that possesses inherent value, that justifies itself in the doing, that lifts the specter of success or failure and permits the experience of being alive and conscious to unfold in time organically. …
In one interview Cortázar said: "Each day I lose more confidence in myself, and I am happy …"
Not an evolution, but an undoing.
I urge you to visit Boom directly where you can read the entire essay. It will appear in Spanish and there is a button to the left of my bio to translate it into English. It’s a gorgeously designed publication with some translated articles and a true entrenched, commitment to covering the news in Latin America that most US publications overlook or ignore.
BONUS MUSIC TRACK
“Mystery Bay,” composed and created by yours truly, Peter Catapano