Hopscotch 
by 

Julio Cortázar

 

Maga World

Trying to make a living by breaking through the barrier of language is called art. Hopscotch is about a community of such labourers. It’s not an easy job fighting against language but someone has to do it. The life-style is necessarily unconventional, but that’s an effect not a prior condition. 

The battle with language makes a person more than slightly mad. It requires seeing everything as if it were nothing. This, of course, is what God does. Making everything out of nothing is his specialité de la maison. And every true artist has divine ambitions. Artists are essentially Mormons: they create their own scriptures and then aspire to the scriptural ideals about becoming god-like. This is the only real way “To find out what’s behind something.” Define it yourself.

The circularity of language is the causus belli; artists hate the fact that words are defined in terms of other words endlessly. So they rebel against it, biting the hands that feeds them. “At some given point the callus, the sclerosis, the definition is born: black or white, radical or conservative, homo- or heterosexual, the San Lorenzo team or the Boca Juniors, meat or vegetables, business or poetry.” Language is a prison they want to escape.

It’s not just writers who want to push into that Neverland beyond language. Painters, film-makers, and musicians have the same obsession. They all want to find the new surrealism, the next jazz, that perfect story which undermines all stories or is more shocking than anything seen before. They won’t of course. But lost causes have their attractions. Failure is a foregone conclusion, and therefore technically impossible. This is the consolation of artistry.

What really fascinates an artist, and what they find infinitely annoying, is a person who already lives beyond language. They are attracted to these people as to strange scientific phenomena. But they despise them because they have what the artist wants but cannot value it. In Hopscotch La Maga is simultaneously adored and reviled, seduced and marginalised. She cannot be taught about art because, were she to learn, she would no longer exist beyond language. She would no longer be the work of art the artist craves.

For the writer “the great Logos is watching.” For him, words always precede things: “without the verba there isn’t any res.” La Maga on the other hand is “pneuma and not logos.” She is pure spirit. The writer treats“Life as a commentary of something else we cannot reach, which is there within reach of the leap we will not take.” La Maga has already leapt. Or rather she never really existed in the world of language. Although she can use language, she has no delusions about its reality... or lack of it. “[F]or people like her the mystery begins precisely with the explanation.” This is the result of inexpressible personal tragedy.

Naturally La Maga, that is to say, Reality, has to be abandoned. This is the inevitable fate of the artist as well as reality since La Maga-World is fundamentally uninhabitable.