SOURCE: "'The Infinite Game': Cortázar's Hopscotch," in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 61-74.

[In the following essay, Simpkins discusses reader participation and authorial control in Hopscotch.]

Every text can be played according to the reader's desires, but Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch specifically invites reader participation in its production. Intensely preoccupied with the reader's role in the text's creation, Cortázar offers an alternative plan, a "Table of Instructions," at the onset of the novel to encourage the development of multiple interpretations—the "many books" he ostensibly hopes the reader will find. The reader is urged to either follow the book as it is laid out, or to pursue the "second" book, the one suggested by Cortázar's alternative chapter arrangement. While readers can choose to deal with the novel in other ways as well, their inclusion in the assembly of the novel undeniably reveals a gaming instinct, an attempt to engage them in textual play which takes full advantage of "misreadings" usually discouraged by authors. Moreover, comments on the aesthetics of the multiple found in Hopscotch itself—especially those by an author named Morelli who argues for the reader's participation as the author's "accomplice"—reinforce this sentiment.

The reader is essential for such gaming and Hopscotch is an especially good example of textual play as it so clearly illustrates the concepts of "writerly" [see Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, 1974] or "open" [see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader, 1984] texts in which the reader, in effect, is acknowledged as the text's final author. Yet, while seeming to encourage us to read the novel in more than one way (through his "Table of Instructions"), Cortázar actually attempts to guide the reader's "writing" of his text, perhaps inadvertently drawing our attention to his uneasiness with this appropriation of his role as textual director.

Cortázar even provides critical terms for the issue of reader participation in the novel. His differentiation between the "female-reader" and the "male-reader," for instance, serves as a useful beginning for such discussion despite the unfortunate sexist designations of his terms. [In an endnote, Simpkins notes that in an interview with Evelyn Picon Garfield, Cortázar remarked that "I ask pardon of the women of the world for the fact that I used such a 'machista' expression so typical of Latin American underdevelopment … I did it innocently and I have no excuse. But when I began to hear the opinions of my friends, women readers who heartily insulted me, I realized that I had done something foolish. I should have put 'passive reader' and not 'female reader' because there's no reason for believing that females are continually passive. They are in certain circumstances and are not in others, the same as males."]

The female-reader desires an already finished text that requires no participation in its production. This reader, in effect, acquiesces when confronted with the task of reading, desiring instead the convenient commodity of a completed text. There is no gaming for this reader; indeed, the author has won even before the game begins.

But the male-reader faces the text head on, eager for an energetic encounter whose outcome is by no means forgone in the author's favor. In fact, authors can never win this game against male-readers; they are given only one move—the "initial" text—while the male-readers have a limitless number of moves to play what one of Cortázar's characters, in a slightly different context, refers to as "the infinite game."

Certainly, authors can employ strategies that attempt to wrest this control from the male-readers, but the success of such ploys is never more than illusory because these readers always have the final word, so to speak. Accordingly, notes to the reader, prefaces, introductions, a "Table of Instructions" in Cortázar's case—all attempts to control the male-reader's power, fail inevitably in the same manner that the initial control of the reader—the "main" text—fails. For the author remains perpetually unable to exert any final, authoritative power. That power rests in the hands of the male-reader.

And that is where the real game begins.

Faced with this dilemma, and undeniably placed on the losing side, authors such as Cortázar offer new projects for possibly gaining a stronger position in this field. A conscious gaming of the text, a plan to guide the male-reader's activities, offers a potential solution in this vein. Consider Cortázar's "Table of Instructions," a veritable key to such a plan. As part of a "cooperative game theory" based on the "formation of coalitions," to borrow Herbert De Ley's terms [in "The Name of the Game," Substance 55 (1988)], the Table is designed to initiate the play of the novel with a step toward balancing the impact of both the author's and the reader's moves.

In the authorial voice, with all the attendant reverberations of power, he begins by constructing a facade of textual possession. "In its own way, this book consists of many books," he writes, "but two books above all." Note that Cortázar initiates the persona of literary novelty here, positing a type of text which invites play rather than shunning the reader's ruinous (mis)interpretations. Unlike other books, he says, this one tries to be more than one—as though any other outcome were possible. Cortázar endeavors to make the inherent seem as though it were an elected choice. Because male-readers wreak havoc with texts, why not project a stance which appears to construct and invite this event? This is a crafty move by Cortázar. Without it, the text (which can never be entirely "his" text anyway) would be vulnerable to innumerable misreadings that would dilute the authorial presence, a form of possession that is always at stake during such undertakings. But with the gesture of the "Table of Instructions," Cortázar guides the male-reader's free generation of the text. Or, rather, he creates the illusion of being able to do so, since it is a naive act of faith to believe that the author can wield any calculable influence on readers once the text is in their hands. This illusion, however, is a shrewd "strategy," in A. J. Greimas's use of the concepts as "a competence in interpreting the opponent's performance so that the subject may relate the acts and intentions of his adversary and assume a global representation of his knowledge, will, and power to act" ["About Games," Substance 25 (1979)]. In this regard, Cortázar is creating a ploy to dupe the reader into believing that the two together will create their novel, not the author's novel.

Strategy is also competence at manipulation. Programs constructed by the subject are not all destined to lead straight to the goal. They often consist in "making believe" that one desires a certain objective and in making the opponent act accordingly. The opponent is then forced to act within and to the benefit of his enemy's more general program. [A] game of chess then becomes only a pretext. It forms the referential level on which there develops a cognitive activity of the second degree: a game of cunning and deceit.

Therefore, as Greimas concludes, "The efficacy of the player's programming depends, in final analysis, as much on the manipulations of his opponent's knowledge as on the actual moves which he constructs."

Cortázar continues his directive ploy by decreeing that "The first" of the books "can be read in a normal fashion," and "The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter." Not willing to abandon the reader in the event of "confusion or forgetfulness," he provides a list of chapter numbers outlining the second arrangement and points out that "Each chapter has its number at the top of every right-hand page to facilitate the search." Under the guise of encouraging a free reading of the text, he clearly tries to program the multiple readings, effectively maintaining a semblance of control over the male-reader's practice. If he is gaming, he certainly is stacking the deck in his favor.

Yet, can it be that Cortázar is playing a different kind of game with the reader here? Considering what his characters say in the novel, it appears that this is exactly what is happening. From the first page to the last (if these terms still apply in this case), he promotes a literary enterprise that runs counter to the reader manipulation that most authors can only hope for.

Evidently the reader is the sole agent for authors who want to make the most of a bad situation, namely, the myriad problems that accompany inherently polysemous texts. By shifting the arena of textual generation to include the reader as part of the authorial entity, Cortázar tries to turn this no-win situation into an acceptable equilibrium of a "saddle point." Obviously, the best example of this is Morelli's comments on the "reader-accomplice," even though similar statements appear earlier in the novel (earlier, that is, depending upon the order in which the reader deals with the text). In chapter 9, Oliveira praises Paul Klee for being "modest" about artistic possession of his paintings "since he asks for the cooperation of the viewer and is not sufficient unto himself." Once more, however, the reference to autotelic (or authortelic) texts offers the possibility that this situation can exist, in the same way that the "Table of Instructions" implies that the author can viably instruct the reader.

At the close of the shorter version of Hopscotch, Oliveira builds a web of string and thread in a room because it "made him happy," he says, and

nothing seemed more instructive to him than to construct for example a huge transparent dodecahedron, the work of many hours and much complication, [and] to bring a match close to it later on and watch how a little nothing of a flame would come and while Gekrepten wr-ung-her-hands and said that it was a shame to burn something so pretty.

He found it "difficult to explain to her that the more fragile and perishable the structure, the greater the freedom to make and unmake it…. He liked everything he made as full of free space as possible, the air able to enter and leave, especially leave; things like that occurred to him with books, women, obligations…."

Ostensibly, Oliveira offers a paradigm for approaching Hopscotch with this observation, nothing the pleasure that accompanies intentional outside influences on the text. This becomes more apparent when the comments by Morelli among the "Expendable Chapters" are taken into account. [In an endnote, Simpkins adds that in The Novels of Julio Cortázar, 1980, Steven Boldly "notes that Oliveira's 'strings, the same that he uses in his mobiles, are an image of the open logic of the novel, of the mysterious relations between disparate objects and people.'"]

In chapter 62, the narrator notes that "At one time Morelli had been planning a book that never got beyond a few scattered notes" and offers an overview, apparently by Morelli, on this book which would be like

"a billiard game that certain individuals play or are played at, a drama with no Oedipuses, no Rastignacs, no Phaedras, an impersonal drama to the extent that the consciences and the passions of the characters cannot be seen as having been compromised except a posteriori. As if the subliminal levels were those that wind and unravel the ball of yarn which is the group that has been compromised in the play … as if certain individuals had cut into the deep chemistry of others without having meant to and vice versa, so that the most curious and interesting chain reactions, fissions, and transmutations would result."

This would yield a novel in which "'standard behavior (including the most unusual, its deluxe category) would be inexplicable by means of current instrumental psychology'." "'Everything would be a kind of disquiet,'" he concludes, "'a continuous uprooting, a territory where psychological causality would yield disconcertedly….'" Morelli's comments on this antiliterature aesthetic prompt much of the discussion about the reader's participation in the final construction of this type of novel. Moreover, this attitude is also expressed by characters who discuss Morelli's viewpoints. "'What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature?,'" Oliveira says. "'And us, we don't want to be female-readers, what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?'"

In a statement on the roman comique, Morelli argues that "'the usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought to be.'" He contrasts this with "'a text that would not clutch the reader but which would oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers to him underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric directions.'" It is at this point that Cortázar's directions at the beginning of Hopscotch assume a new significance. They are, it now seems clear, such whispers, esoteric directions for constrained—but not constraining—productions by the male-reader. Morelli continues: his novel would contain "'Demotic writing for the female-reader (who otherwise will not get beyond the first few pages, rudely lost and scandalized, cursing at what he paid for the book), with a vague reverse side of hieratic writing.'" This confirms Cortázar's surreptitious plan to maintain a position of advantage over the reader in this textual game in which the text is "'out of line, untied, incongruous, minutely antinovelistic (although not antinovelish)'." He attempts to wrest control from the reader under a guise which promotes exactly the opposite activity.

Accordingly, even though novels such as Hopscotch are usually viewed as exemplary open works designed to engage the reader in the endless play of signification, in this case it appears that Cortázar is merely erecting a facade, a textual ploy utilized to lull the reader into a false sense of equal participation. If readers traditionally read a text any way they want to, Cortázar has beat them at their own game by making them produce the text the way he wants them to even though they remain unaware of this. He implies, for instance, that Morelli's novel would challenge the Western premises of reader subservience. In contrast to the romantic or classic novel, Morelli proposes to elevate the reader as an "'accomplice,'" "'a traveling companion'" so that "'the reader would be able to become a co-participant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing at the same moment and in the same form'." In this situation, the reader will be provided with

"something like a facade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader-accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the cosuffering). What the author of this novel might have succeeded in for himself, will be repeated (becoming gigantic, perhaps, and that would be marvelous) in the reader-accomplice. As for the female-reader, he will remain with the facade and we already know that there are very pretty ones among them…."

It seems that Morelli—and apparently by extension, Cortázar—favors active readers because they can boost the signifying potential of a text by contributing forceful reconstructions to it. The author's influence upon the reader is a substantial portion of this activity, too, as the text serves to bridge thought between them. Morelli observes that "'the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation'." This is the stance Morelli offers—"'to break the reader's mental habits,'" as one character describes it.

Regardless of the way Hopscotch is read, it is obvious that Morelli's game is essentially Cortázar's game, despite the distinct shortcoming that such a stance presupposes. When Morelli is instructing Oliveira on collating the notes for Morelli's novel before depositing it at his publishers, for instance. Oliveira is reluctant to undertake the task. "'What if we should make a mistake … and get things all mixed up,'" he asks Morelli. "'Who cares,'" Morelli replies. "'You can read my book any way you want to'." Clearly this is one of those "'winks at the reader'" that Morelli says are essential for good storytelling. And, even more clearly, we see Cortázar engaging in those same kinds of winks.

Yet the motivation for this seemingly good-natured abdication of authorial power needs to be more closely examined. Cortázar's extensive protests regarding his lack of desire for controlling the reader assume a suspicious hollowness after awhile, perhaps betraying his actual desire to remain the "leader" in the game of Hopscotch. [In an endnote, Simpkins adds: "I am using the term 'leader' in Martin Capell's sense as a designated captain for the overall game. However, Capell comments that 'Group formation is ordinarily characterized by a leader to whom more or less power over the members is given; in return, he is bound to treat them all with impartial or equal care.' Obviously, this is not the case with Cortázar's manipulation of the reader in Hopscotch." See Martin Capell's "Games and the Mastery of Helplessness" in Motivations in Play, Games and Sports, edited by Ralph Slovenko and James Knight, 1967.] The text, in this sense, initiates an agon between the readers and Cortázar (through his characters and directions) while simultaneously serving as a site for disavowing this same activity. In other words, by pretending to waive his control over the reader, Cortázar tries to deceive the reader into following his guidance to the text. Thus, if the reader is an accomplice with the author (to incorporate Cortázar's term), the author nonetheless remains the leader of the group. "Accomplice," therefore, suggests the connotation of "accessory" rather than a participant of status equal to (or greater than) the author. In effect, those who adhere to Cortázar's purported plan of open interpretation are actually involved in a game of follow the leader. And Cortázar cannot conceal, despite his numerous efforts to do just that, who that leader is. For he is practicing the same form of reader guidance that essentially all authors practice: the attempt to establish a heavily orchestrated linkage between the author and the reader via the text.

Many readers apparently fail to recognize Cortázar's maneuver here, which attests to its success. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, for instance, remark [in their Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, 1967] that "There is something healthy, in a communal art, about the novel that establishes its own premises." "Like the French anti-novelists," James Irby remarks [in "Cortázar's Hopscotch and Other Games," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 1, No. 1 (1967)], "Cortázar wants to involve his readers creatively in [the combination and rearrangement of its parts] so as to renew fiction as an instrument of perception." Some readers even accept his machinations as a necessary condition. While acknowledging that Cortázar creates an "overt, challenging and even cruel relationship to his reader," Sara Castro-Klarén argues [in "Ontological Fabulation: Toward Cortázar's Theory of Literature," in The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar, edited by Jaime Alazraki and Ivar Ivask, 1978] that he is attempting to force his readers to contend with the recognition that our "being is inescapably invention." After providing a list of the game elements in the novel, Saúl Yurkievich asserts [in "Eros ludens: Games, Love and Humor in Hopscotch" in The Final Island] that "all are effects of … the playful attitude of the author, who wants to overwhelm his reader so that the latter undertakes Hopscotch playfully, so that he reproduces it by playing" (emphasis added). The healthiness, the discovery of self-identity, the "reproduction" of the author's imaginative construct—all of these elements point to an underlying game of manipulation which, through Cortázar's facade of equanimity, has gone largely unnoticed.

The portrayal of maladroit readers in the novel further reinforces Cortázar's uneasiness as he endeavours to coerce the reader into playing his game. [In an endnote, Simpkins adds: "Although this would obviously have no affect upon an ignorant reader, Cortázar remarked during an interview that in his reading of the novel, Oliveira does not commit suicide. (The issue is left undecided at the end.)… Cortázar explicitly portrays the reader who disagrees with the author's interpretation as someone to be pitied, perhaps implicitly revealing the desire for authorial control discussed in this essay."] After finishing this novel, nobody wants to be a female-reader, and once again this is a crucial point of Cortázar's plan. Cortázar is operating very much like Wordsworth who, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, claims that he is urging his readers to approach the poems on their own terms while he surreptitiously presents his own guide to the appropriate reading of them.

In an intriguing essay on chapter 34 of Hopscotch ["Rayuela, Chapter 34: A Structural Reading," Hispanofila 52 (September 1974)] J. S. Bernstein notes that the substance of its interlinear arrangement is essentially that of a reader commenting rather derisively upon an author's text (in this case, a section from Galdos's novel, Lo prohibido).

It is a commentary … which, by denigrating its Galdosian source, calls the reader's attention conspicuously to itself. The commentary is hostile and the interlineated text hardly reverential at all. Only to the extent that Cortázar chose Galdos, and not some other writer, can we say that he pays homage. But it is a homage paid to a sacrificial victim, a homage which exalts the victim only in order to heighten the majesty of the act of slaying him.

It seems unlikely that Cortázar would introduce this portrayal of an inconsiderate reader without some purpose in mind. Considering his valorization (through his characters and his Table) of the aggressive reader, it may seem at first that he is demonstrating the liveliness with which a reader may approach the text. Yet, the inherent viciousness, combined with the evidence of anxiety regarding the author's lack of reader control, suggest that Cortázar may well be attempting to illustrate the danger of taking this active form of reading too far. Those who fail to show reverent consideration for the author's project (i.e., the finished text) are viewed as cruel parasites who mangle the text and drain off its vital fluids, casting aside its desiccated husk once the gorging is over.

It is this sense that role of the "Table of Instructions," as a heuristic for reading the overall text, becomes evident. In game theory terms, it functions as a "bargaining" device for Cortázar, a "negotiation" which mediates between reader-response anarchy and the dictatorial author (not Cortázar!) who desires ultimate control over the final production of the text. The "pay-offs" for a game of this nature would result from a correlation between the relatively flexible guidance provided by Cortázar and an empathetic construction of the text by the reader. [In an endnote, Simpkins notes: "These game theory terms are taken from L. C. Thomas, Games, Theory and Applications, 1984."] To further employ gaming nomenclature, the Table serves as a type of "preplay jockeying" which gains its strength from the "power of disclosing one's strategy" [R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey, 1957].

But if the reader wants to engage Hopscotch at a high level of gaming, this Table has to be approached warily because it is possible that Cortázar is, in reality, providing a false disclosure with this directive, thereby attempting to mislead the reader who then plays into his hands unwittingly. It serves as a move by Cortázar which assumes the equivalence of placing a chess opponent in "check." If the reader acquiesces—even aggressively, then this move becomes "checkmate" and Cortázar wins. ("Aggressive acquiescence" describes reading the novel actively, yet according to Cortázar's rules.) If, however, the reader can deliver a counter-move to the move of the Table, then play continues. With such a move, the infinite, or non-zero-sum, component of the game is activated.

In fact, Cortázar has engendered this situation himself simply by promoting the myth that authors can effect significant control over their readers—even if this control is the type of passive (in)direction offered in the Table. As Alfred MacAdam notes [in Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason, 1977], regardless of the directions for decoding the text, the reader still makes the final decision. Once the author has assembled the "materials" of the novel, "They are now in the hands of the reader, whose reading will connect the pieces." Of course, it is this connection of the chapters—in whatever manner the reader chooses—that removes the possession of the text from the author and places it firmly in the grasp of the reader. "Cortázar seems to have overlooked this aspect of reading in his desire to work some sort of disordering magic on the reader's sensibility," MacAdam contends. "He forgets that interpretation is a weapon which turns the text against its creator."

the work, once in the world, acquires characteristics unimagined by the creator. It may horrify or delight him, but it will no longer be his property. What Cortázar wishes, therefore, is not something an artifact can give: he wants to change his reader, but he uses a tool that the reader will twist into something different. Whatever changes occur in the reader as he reads will be modified when the work is re-constructed in memory. There it will be organized and transformed, turned into an image of the reader's, not the artist's, mind. (emphasis added)

Although MacAdam fails to discuss the significance of the various reading strategies that can be applied to Hopscotch, he clearly identifies the powerlessness that authors both anguish over and somehow find delightful. In effect, Cortázar's stress on the benefits of the reader's version of the novel draws attention away from the negative side of this situation. This is one of his most cunning moves because, by not mentioning the anguish which attends a feeling of helplessness, he diverts the reader's focus instead onto the author's purported generosity (his encouragement of the reader's individual approach to the work). Since he has no real impact on the ways that readers interpret his novel, his gesture becomes transparent if viewed in this manner. To engage a metaphor from Martin Capell, Cortázar is playing a game in which mastery of helplessness is at stake. By successfully overriding the reader's usual misreadings of his text, he is able to remain in charge of the process of interpretation to the extent that the novel does, in fact, become his novel. Again, this intention betrays the inherent falsity of a stance offered under the guise of encouraging free readings of a work.

Cortázar attempts to remain in charge of the play of Hopscotch through the edict of the Table. To discourage the reader from settling for the shorter version, he leads us to conclude that the longer, interspersed version is the only entire one (even though chapter 55 is omitted from it). As a challenge to the reader's ego, moreover, he implies that only lazy, unimaginative readers will take the short route. (This is reinforced in the novel by the denigration of female-readers who would be satisfied with such a decision.) When Cortázar labels the extra chapters as "expendable," he ironizes this situation by indicating that for the female-reader, these chapters will indeed be of no use; but, for the aggressive, nonconformist reader, they will be crucial for a full production of the novel.

Yet some readers resist playing an assertive game with the novel, opting instead for the game established according to Cortázar's dictates (what Evelyn Picon Garfield calls [in Julio Cortázar, 1975] "the rules of the game that is the novel" [emphasis added]). [In Julio Cortázar, 1976] Robert Brody protests, for instance, the "disappointing element" of encouraging the activity of the male-reader, finding it a dereliction of responsibility by Cortázar. Brody, however, does not consider the participatory aspect of the accomplice's role in this contention, for the cooperation by the reader is actually a form of "passive mastery" by Cortázar in which the individual reader is subsumed into a larger body of readers, with the author controlling the game. "Invention or fabulation should not be equated with the unbridled or forgetful babbling of free association," Castro-Klarén contends. "Invention … is not a simple capricious denial of the known and a displacement toward any new image whatsoever, because as it moves from the form to the 'anti-form' or to the unknown, it is critically thoughtful of the form it parallels and transforms" (emphasis added). "If it is accepted," Yurkievich asserts, "the game acquires a positive character, instigating a code whose violation can entail unforseeable damage." Steven Boldy remarks similarly that the novel

is not a totally open, aleatory novel, nor, as many detractors and enthusers agree, is everything left to the reader…. The reader is drawn into bewildered but deep and critical commitment to his reading and involvement in the novel, by sometimes unconventional, but often conventional means, by the "aesthetic ruses" …, the misuse of which is decried by Morelli. [In an endnote, Simpkins states: "That Boldy uses a comment by Morelli to support his contention demonstrates the success of Cortázar's game plan. By creating characters who promote a playing of novels consonant with his apparent intentions, Cortázar uses these characters as members of his own team which then overwhelms the individual reader who is faced with more than one opponent. This is hardly 'fair play.'"]

And Bruce Morrissette concludes [in "Games and Game Structures in Robbe-Grillet," Yale French Studies 41 (1968)] that it is the influence of the "'metaphysical' aspect of general game structure" which "protects the work from falling into the gratuity of a neo-Kantian 'free play of the faculties' conception of fictional art which might, if pushed to the limit, reduce the creative process to a kind of esthetic billiard game or acrobatic display" (emphasis added). All of these readers, however, resist the vast potential offered by textual direction beyond the author's control, relying instead upon the intervention of the author to tell them how to read. By accepting the author's dictum they have given up on the game of the text, engaging in a form of slavish subservience which leads to little more than sterile conformity.

This politeness or adherence to an author's project is by no means a full-fledged engagement of gaming. To play by Cortázar's rules is to play Cortázar's game—clearly not a game in which the players are equals. This sentiment is often supported by the notion of "fair play" (even though Cortázar himself fails to grant the reader this consideration, if the coercive elements of the Table are taken into account). Greimas observes that

A game appears both as a system of constraints, reducible to rules, and as an exercise in freedom, a distraction. Our first impression is that this freedom is limited to the single act of entering the game. At that point the constraining rules are voluntarily accepted. One is free to enter, but not to exit. The player can neither quit the game—he would be a coward—nor cease to obey the rules—he would be a cheater. The code of fair play is in its way as rigorous as the code of honor.

In fact, Cortázar has expressed dismay with those who do not play his game in exactly this manner. In an interview he noted: "In recent years,… reading the studies [on my works] has ended up by depressing me, since, in the last analysis, they establish the total negation of the author's invention and freedom" [Lucille Kerr, "Interview / Julio Cortázar," Diacritics (Winter 1974)]. Accordingly, the player who cooperates with Cortázar in his game of control is essentially handing him a trophy: his own novel (or rather, the ownership of the novel). This is an emblem of victory in gaming, one which denies the possibility of the reader's chance to snatch the trophy away from the author. As Greimas notes, "Victory is complete only if it is acknowledged by the opponent. In a game, it is not just a question of conquering [vaincre] but of convincing [convaincre], of obliging the opponent to share one's triumph."

How, then, is the reader to beat Cortázar at his own game? One of the most effective ways would seem to be to circumvent his directions in the Table and assemble the novel in a manner which leads to the most satisfying play of the text. This may involve deleting some chapters, for example, or arranging them in an order not readily apparent from an initial reading of it. J. S. Bernstein notes that, in a classroom reading situation, some students fail to initially decode the logic of the interlinear lines of chapter 34 and simply read the chapter in the usual progressive fashion. Even though this would appear to be a chaotic and useless undertaking, it can produce some surprisingly pleasant results for those students who read it "incorrectly" in this manner:

they will encounter a text which seems totally obscure, except for some few phrases … which will appear as small breaks in the otherwise completely cloudy atmosphere of the chapter. They will be brought up sharply, both in surprise at finding some phrases which make coherent sense, and out of relief from the tedium of reading seven straight pages uncomprehendingly.

Another approach Bernstein discusses is reading the novel straight through from chapter 1 to 155. Without saying why, Bernstein feels "confident" that this form of the novel is "the one read by the majority of readers, particularly by those who believe that the intelligent reading of a novel demands the reading of every page of every chapter of the novel." One obvious explanation of this approach to the novel is that it is the conventional method of reading books in our culture, and many readers will inevitably resist playing a game of hopscotch with the book which involves jumping back and forth from one part to another. Cortázar's instructions explicitly discourage the 1-155 method, but readers who want to outwit the author could take this path as a means for securing victory through the possession of their own "trophy." [In an endnote, Simpkins states: "In a revealing footnote, Brody points out that Cortázar reinforced the directions for the two-option reading in the Table after the first Spanish edition appeared by adding a sentence to subsequent editions.

In the first edition we read, 'A su manera este libro es muchos libros, pero sobre todo es dos libros' ['In its way this book is many books, but above all it is two books']…. In the second and subsequent editions, one observes the additional: 'El lector queda invitado a elegir una de las dos posibilidades siguientes' ['The reader is invited to choose one of the two following possibilities'].

Clearly Cortázar tried to further restrict—and thereby manipulate—the production of his novel through this note on the reader's choices. However, Brody argues that this second sentence was introduced to assure readers that the plan announced in the Table was not 'a mere guise to fool the reader into reading Chapters 1-56 for a second time.' He concludes that 'By adding the new sentence, Cortázar implies that no such trick was intended, and that he was sincere in suggesting two books or two different ways of reading his book.'

Gregory Rabassa, who translated Hopscotch, noted that this new sentence does not appear in the English translation (which he based on the first Spanish edition) because Cortázar

evidently didn't see fit to add what he had already added to the next Spanish edition. Therefore I am not sure what his purpose in putting in the specific instruction might have been, perhaps he meant to dumb it down to reach more readers. I do know that he was quite taken aback when he was scolded by an American reviewer … for making a reader go through the book twice. Julio said something to the effect that he would never ask anyone to read a book twice, much less this one. Like Borges, Julio liked to play games both with and on his readers, and it is difficult to tell what he is up to all the time (Letter to author, 21 September 1988)."]

Scrambling the arrangement of the novel would also yield an invigorating result. "Once all the fragments are known, they can and should be reviewed in any variety of combinations, revealing in a more and more organic way their implicit network of parallelisms, echoes, contrasts," James Irby observes. "In the realm of 'pure coordinates' there are no piecemeal progressions." This variation leads to the most rigorous manifestation of the "infinite game" Cortázar offers. Even though it may not (or even may) be the game he had in mind, it certainly engages in the type of play which the novel so clearly encourages. This play would generate endless chains of readings, with each gathering reverberations from all of the previous readings, thereby resulting in a lush web of interpretations far beyond the limited, superficial reading enforced by a designated plan of arranged chapters.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that suggests Cortázar himself hoped for a response of this nature can be found by turning once more to the "Table of Instructions." For there, at the end of his alternative chapter arrangement list, is a hyphen, implying that the reader's options are now open. At this point, the reader who is eager for a lively round of the "infinite game" can find authorial approval (if such reinforcement is needed). "Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself," James Carse asserts, [in Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, 1986], adding that "The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others." [In an endnote, Simpkins adds: "Carse observes, in a statement which sums up Cortázar's strategy perfectly, that 'Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.' Moreover, the endless circularity of the final three chapters given in the list (-131-58-131-) further suggests that Cortázar is trying to prod readers to produce their own version of the novel beyond those he has suggested. A reader would not have to read these chapters over and over again for long without sensing that Cortázar is prompting a break away from his directions."] This is certainly true of Hopscotch, since Cortázar's directions in the Table are subverted by that final open hyphen, as if to imply that these are the rules—which, as we all know, are made to be broken.