NABOKV-L post 0013077, Sun, 13 Aug 2006 12:44:21 -0300

Dear List,

While I was shuttling from one chapter to another while following Kinbote's lead, I was reminded of a book I'd read in the seventies, by Argentine author Julio Florencio Cortázar with the title "Rayuela" ( Hopscotch). When I decided to check and compare publishing dates ( JC/1963, VN/1962) I came accross a text that mentions Nabokov in connection to Cortázar. I copied the first part of the text below. It may be found at: art3idea.psu.edu/hopscotch/main.html -

Here comes the text:
There are two books entitled Hopscotch. One is a straightforward collection of lore about the well known children's game by Patricia Healy Evans, published in an edition of 150 copies by the Porpoise Bookshop in San Francisco in 1955, one year after the release of Hitchcock's famous film, Rear Window, a film that translated the literary anthology-form into an urban interior courtyard whose windows told stories collated by an convalescing photographer with an Arielle window. The more contemporary example was originally published as Rayuela ("hopscotch") in 1963. This novel by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa in 1965 and enjoyed considerable popularity. Readers were invited to re-read the text following a re-ordering schema that skipped around the main structure of chapters. Cortázar's method had been tried in miniature by Vladimir Nabokov, whose experimental novel Pale Fire included an internally self-referencing index - a procedure that Nabokov called "word golf."






The game itself is ancient and widespread. Pliny describes children playing it in Rome, and some chalk diagrams remain on ruined pavements. There are variations played in Burma, India, and Japan. The Norwegian version is called "Hop in Paradise." An interesting series of connections comes from the word "scotch," which was, originally, "scorch," to injure or obstruct so as to make harmless for a time. A scorch was, literally, an incision. Drawing a circle or diagram has long been a standard practice in the magical control of space. Circles are drawn around vampires, new city sites, and fallen victims. The highland fling is said to have developed as a dance performed by a warrior over the spread limbs of his slain victim, to "lay the soul" and thus avoid haunting. Chalk lines drawn around crime victims emphasizing position and location as key forensic clues is a modern variation, if "laying the soul" can be understood in terms of legal retribution.



The French word for hopscotch, marelle, which emphasizes the role of the stone, contains some interesting accidents (?) of etymology. Merels was an English board game played by two players using a stone counter, the merel, from the Old French word. The Latin word for pebbles, mara, was used to describe heaps of stones. Such were also used as counters at crossroads to establish points of "silent trade," governed by the gods Cardea, Janus/Dianus, or Hermes (Mercury), whose regulative roles were behind the relations among the market and portals, doors, and festivals celebrating the pivots of the annual year.
Coincidentally, Cortázar's novel includes a character named "Morelli" as a clue to its logic of assembling texts; as the novel suggests, the issue is "the self as fiction." Morelli is the "stone" Cortázar uses to "toss" into the plot, creating new designs and connections.





Morelli was the also the real name of the author Ivan Lermolief, who advanced the theory that the authenticity of paintings could be verified by looking at details, such as ear-lobes, cuticles, or aureoles, that were regarded as "unimportant" by painters and viewers alike. Morelli's thesis was read with keen interest by Sigmund Freud, who shortly thereafter developed a theory of the unconscious that relied in discarded detail.


Another master of both the hopscotch editing technique and the use of discarded detail was the French film producer, Jacques Tati. In the much-reviewed "commentary on modern architecture," Playtime, Tati shows that the disjunctions of space and time created by reductive technology are a precondition for the rebirth of imagination through material detail.





Is hopscotch a thing of the past or a means of making a future? According to Evans, even the rituals of the Cretan labyrinth can be seen to linger in modern practice, especially in one of the spiraled variations of the hopscotch diagram. Names for the diagram are suggestive: "swamp," "village," "dragons," "tower," and "bed." The name for the half-round goal of the diagram, "paradise," connects to the role of Hermes to the realm of death. But, Cortázar's novel suggests the opposite, a forward direction - a projection of hopscotch as a method of thought, investigation, and experiment. This procedure uses a "knight's move logic," which goes towards some goal in a justifiable way but really seeks out "adjacencies" that are circumstantially available. The method is not as irrational at it may at first seem. The aim is the repetition of patterns that maintain a structural relationship to pleasure in the midst of variable context and content.



Lacan coined a name for this pattern, the "sinthom," or symptom-bent-on-pleasure. The center of a sinthom is permanently empty - that is, it is not filled with interpretable meanings or symbolic contents. The circular or, rather, chiastic sinthom is metonymic, highly ordered, and intensively material. In architecture, such hollow buildings abound and, in fact, constitute an Ur-collection of foundational forms: the labyrinth, the Tower of Babel, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. Interestingly, the topology of these primaries can be adopted easily to many popular culture applications, such as the urban courtyard of Hitchcock's Rear Window, where the theme of hopscotch returns as a strategy and structuring motif aided by the "acousmatic" role of background music and noise.







I propose treating hopscotch's web-like associations as a program for the imagination. Using "knight's move" thinking rather than the successive enchainments of historical method, I will de-scribe an experiment composed of real and imaginary parts that include architecture, archaeology, literature, painting, and etymology as components for a matrix-like procedure that draws from Cortázar, Nabokov, Hitchcock, Tati, Harriman, and other hippity-hoppers.









Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm