Referring to the character Horacio Oliveira in Julio Cortizar’s masterpiece novel Hopscotch, one reviewer wrote:
He often asks himself how it is possible that humans as a genus, as a species, as an ensemble of civilizations, have arrived at the present day by following a path that in no way guarantees that they will achieve any kind of definitive peace, justice, or happiness, a path filled with mishaps, injustices, catastrophes, where man is wolf to man, where people attack and destroy each other, and justice and injustice are often dealt out like cards in a game of poker. (source untraced)
I made a note of this comment several years ago. It induced me to read Hopscotch which I’m reading again during this dark time in the world. In Chapter 17 of Hopscotch Cortizar writes: “a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.”
Today we are on that chessboard again making a sterile game out of the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with which we were endowed. Cortizar treats jazz almost as a metaphor for the best version of human existence. Jazz represents improvisation, freedom within structure, listening and responding to others, creativity in the present moment, individuality inside a collective rhythm. In jazz, musicians are free but not isolated. They constantly react to one another, transforming the music together. It is a form that emerges organically rather than being imposed.
War reverses almost every one of those qualities. Instead of improvisation, war demands rigid hierarchy, obedience to command, suppression of individual initiative, destruction rather than creation. The soldier does not improvise freely the way a jazz musician does. He follows orders. Instead of listening to one another creatively, armies move according to centralized control. In that sense, war resembles the opposite of jazz.
Cortizar in an interview: That is to say that humanity took the wrong path. I’m speaking, above all, of Western man because I know little about the Orient. We have taken an historically false road that is carrying us directly into a definite catastrophe, annihilation by whatever means—war, air pollution, contamination, fatigue, universal suicide, whatever you please.
And:
There have been critics who have thought Rayuela [Hopscotch] to be a profoundly pessimistic book in the sense that it only laments the state of affairs. I believe it is a profoundly optimistic book because Oliveira, despite his quarrelsome nature, as we Argentinians say, his fits of anger, his mental mediocrity, his incapacity to reach beyond certain limits, is a man who knocks himself against the wall, the wall of love, of daily life, of philosophical systems, of politics. He hits his head against all that because he is essentially an optimist, because he believes that one day, not for him but for others, that wall will fall and on the other side will be the kibbutz of desire, the millennium, authentic man, the humanity he’s dreamt of but which had not been a reality until that moment.
At its core, Hopscotch is about the human search for a deeper reality beyond the routines of ordinary life. The novel follows Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual wandering through Paris and later Buenos Aires, who believes that everyday existence is incomplete or false. He feels that somewhere beyond conventional logic, culture, and social roles there must be a more authentic level of being, a kind of metaphysical “center.” The novel is less a story about events than about this restless search for meaning.
A major tension in the book lies between thinking and living. Oliveira is brilliant, analytical, and endlessly reflective, but this very intelligence separates him from immediate experience. He spends endless nights discussing jazz, literature, philosophy, and politics, yet the conversations often substitute for life rather than deepen it. The character who challenges Oliveira most profoundly is La Maga, his muse and lover. She lacks the intellectual sophistication of the others but possesses an intuitive openness to experience. Oliveira senses that she may already have the kind of connection to life he is searching for, yet he cannot accept or fully understand it.
Another key idea in the novel is freedom and possibility. Cortázar structures the book itself like a game of hopscotch: readers can follow the chapters in a conventional order or jump through them according to an alternative sequence. This structure reflects the novel’s deeper claim that reality and meaning are not fixed systems but fields of possibility. The discussions of jazz throughout the Paris chapters illustrate the same idea. Jazz improvisation represents the kind of spontaneous, creative freedom human beings are capable of, but which society often reduces to rigid roles and intellectual categories.
Ultimately, Hopscotch suggests that human beings are caught between two states. We are greater than our everyday lives, because we contain immense imaginative and spiritual potential. Yet we are also less than we could be, because we trap ourselves in habits of thought, language, and social structure. Oliveira’s tragedy is that he sees this problem clearly but cannot escape it. The novel therefore becomes not only a story about one man’s search, but also an invitation for the reader to question their own ways of thinking, perceiving, and living.
What I have learned to live with is that there may well be no ultimate answers and that the deeper reality that Cortizar’s protagonist seeks may be forever illusive. That does not mean the search is useless. It is the search which makes us human and ultimately happy as Camus taught us in The Myth of Sisyphus or as Richard Feynman explains HERE (The Universe Did Not Start With The Big Bang).
If Cortázar described today’s war, he would probably treat it not only as a political event but as a symptom of a deeper civilizational mistake, the same mistake Hopscotch keeps circling around: humanity has immense creative possibilities, yet it repeatedly traps itself in systems that lead to destruction. “There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief. Unfortunately not, I’m afraid.
(scroll down to listen to both versions)
The Chords versus the Crewcuts
COPING; Doo-wop Memories: The Chords’ Moment
By David Gonzalez, Jan. 15, 1995, The New York Times
The corner critics were proved right in 1954 when “Sh-boom” became a hit. Despite their breakthrough, the Chords never had a hit like it again, although Jimmy and a successor group did win a talent contest whose prize was a contract to record a beer jingle.There’s no gold record to show for their success. Jimmy said that trophy went to the Crewcuts, the white group that covered “Sh-boom,” as was the practice then.
“That gets into the white-black thing,” he said quietly.
Of course it could also be the green thing — with two groups recording the song, the record companies could reach more radio stations and make more money.
“When we first heard the Crewcuts we felt then a lot of racial stuff. But I don’t believe that was the reason. I think they got it to double their money as publishers.”
Skip down to listen to the two versions below.