Interpreting Yonder

Reality as text

The first thing you will discover about Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch¹ is that it has a very unconventional structure. The book consists of a total of 155 chapters, but the back 99 of those are labeled “expendable.” Conveniently, though, the book begins with a set of instructions, which gives the reader two options: you can either read it like a normal book, starting with chapter 1 and then putting it away after chapter 56, ignoring the expendable chapters altogether; or, you can follow the little indications provided at the end of each chapter that take you between the main chapters and the expendable chapters, and read the book in its entirety.

The main story focuses on Horacio Oliveira, a displaced and unproductive writer, who is incessantly analyzing. He’s from Argentina, like Cortázar, but for most of the book he is in Paris, entangled with a carefree lover who goes by “La Maga” (“The Magician”) and a circle of friends-slash-amateur-philosophers that calls itself The Serpent Club.

The expendable chapters contain various divergences from this story. Some are nothing but quotes from (possibly fictional) plays, poems, novels, and works of philosophy. Others are truly strange: like one in which two stories are collated on the page, so that you have to read every other line of the chapter to get one story and then go back and read the other half of the lines to get the other story; and one in which half of the words are completely made up but sound like they could almost be real. And then there are the many “Morelliana,” the writings of a fictional writer named Morelli, who is the subject of many of the Serpent Club’s discussions. The writings of Morelli that we get to see are his reflections on the ambitious, highly experimental novel he is working on.² These reflections illuminate Cortázar’s aims, because, of course, Morelli is Cortazár³ and Morelli’s novel is Hopscotch⁴ (making the whole thing a snake eating its tail).

Morelli describes his project as a “Zen slap in the face”—an offensive break from rationality, of the kind used in Zen instruction to trigger a different kind of awareness. So the novel’s odd structure and prose is meant to wake you up to an awareness of the text that you are not normally willing or able to produce.

This goes hand in hand with one of Hopscotch’s central topics: the limits of explanation,⁵ whether it is rational or spiritual, for grasping reality and ultimately making sense of life. Cortázar and the Serpent Club discuss the efforts of a great many philosophers (many of them philosophers who went against the rationalist current in Western philosophy, like Heraclitus), including the mid-20th century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, mentioned by name in the second chapter. Ortega’s philosophy is, like the Stoics’, uncommon in the way it makes contact with actual life: he advocates for “vital reason”—reason with life as its foundation—and an awareness of the “radical reality” that is life.

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Ortega advanced a position regarding the nature of truth that was pioneered by Nietzsche (although it arguably originated much earlier, with Heraclitus or Protagoras) called perspectivism. Perspectivism stands in between epistemological realism and relativism, holding that objective truth exists, but that our grasp on it is always limited by a subjective perspective. It’s one step short of fictionalism, which says that there’s really no such thing as truth, only useful fictions—instead, in a similarly literary fashion, perspectivism says that reality is like a text, and any attempt to describe it or characterize it is more like a subjective interpretation of that text then an objective account. And because Hopscotch itself is of course a text, this manifests as an allegory in (as) the novel that has a tendency to break through its allegorical walls and invade reality.⁶

For example: Hopscotch sits on your nightstand. The text is there in the pages and it will remain whether you are reading it or not. But while you are reading, it becomes something else—you are now interacting with it, and the text is no longer black marks on a page, it is thought and it is you, to one extent or another.⁷ (You can put it down and continue to exist independent of the text, and certainly the text will exist independent of you, but what exactly is that thing that continues to exist independent of you, and would you really say that it’s the same thing as what you were reading? And how distinct are you, really, even after putting the book down, anyway?) The text in itself exists independent of the reader, but that thing,⁸ the text in itself, is imperceptible, ungraspable, meaningless, and even inconceivable. The text only has its meaning, its character, and its texture when it is apprehended by a reader—but this interaction necessarily introduces subjectivity.

And isn’t this true for all things—that all of reality⁹ is like this, like a text; only apprehensible through subjective interpretation? And therefore the actual objective reality, though it exists, can never be grasped? I’ve examined this idea previously as it was asserted by Werner Heisenberg: “A complete and exact depiction of reality can never be achieved,” and Cormac McCarthy:

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

It’s all the same thing, to some extent or another: subjective interpretation. There is no objective or ultimately correct interpretation of a text, and there is no objective or ultimate conception of reality.

But, I hear a certain group among you saying, of course an objective and correct interpretation of reality is possible: that’s what we call science. Thomas Nagel called it The View From Nowhere, claiming that humans have the unique ability to take an objective view of things. But this is not really true. We can’t actually transcend the limitations of our individuated and separated perspective, even with the help of instruments and methodologies. We can only pretend that we are being objective.

Fortunately, humans do have a remarkable aptitude for pretending. Anyway it is not true that just science is worthless just because it will never achieve a complete and objectively true conception of reality. Its value resides in its aim, not in the realization of that aim; the product of this aim is a basis for as much intersection of subjective interpretations as possible. Good literary interpretations are well supported by the text. So it is, too, with interpretations of reality—science serves to sort out what is supported by the text of reality and what is not. Furthermore, as it turns out, science actually provides evidence for perspectivism itself, if we reflect on the domain of quantum mechanics.

It’s important to understand that the layman’s understanding of quantum mechanics (including my own, of course) is very far removed from the actual theory. The layman’s understanding revolves around the remarkable weirdness of quantum mechanics, which only comes about in the various interpretations of the actual theory. This is the sort of thing a physicist will tell you if you start asking them about, say, whether it’s really true that Schrödinger’s cat is alive and dead at the same time: they will rush to point out that such curiosities only exist in certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and are not necessitated by the actual mechanics themselves.

But how does the word “interpretation” make its way into a hard science in the first place? Isn’t the whole point of science that it’s supposed to be the View From Nowhere, the perspective untainted by subjectivity?

The problem is that quantum mechanics marks the very limit of objective science; it is the point at which further objective inquiry begins to require objective inquiry of subjectivity itself, which is a paradox. This is the bottom of science—beyond the development of the mechanics themselves all that is left is metaphysics. The various interpretations of quantum mechanics are vulnerable only to philosophical debate, not math nor observation.

The prevailing interpretation, which is called the Copenhagen Interpretation (specifically, the interpretation that prevails today is Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen Interpretation), is basically the result of a concerted effort to preserve science’s exile of the observer, by 1) asserting fundamental randomness and 2) generalizing the idea of an “observer” to include any apparatus which can irreversibly register a waveform collapse. The “many worlds” hypothesis is another such interpretation of quantum mechanics, that keeps subjectivity out by denying that the waveform ever collapses; instead, parallel universes are endlessly spawning from possibility. Contrast these with QBism, a more avant-garde interpretation of quantum mechanics, that attempts to resolve some of the problems with other interpretations by taking the subjectivity red pill, privileging conscious experience and even free will.

The point is that all of these are only interpretations. We have no objective evidence for any of them, and we may never get any, because we’ve run into the limits of objective science and of observation. Interpretation is all we can do here, much like when we’re dealing with a complicated text. Even though there exists a factual reality we can gesture at—there is no doubt that there is a truth underlying quantum mechanics, a real reality and presumably a “correct” interpretation—any interpretation that we come up with, indeed, any meaning that we will be able to obtain as a result of that source of truth, will be inherently subjective. This fact is incontrovertible and applies to all attempts to develop understanding, from quantum mechanics to sociology to literary criticism to simple conversation. As in the case of a literal text, the actual objective reality of the world cannot be grasped. But it’s also inconceivable, meaningless and worthless. It is only in the interpretation of a reader that reality begins to make any sense at all.

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“One has the impression,” Oliveira said, “that he’s following old footprints. We’re unimportant little schoolboys warming over arguments that are musty and not at all interesting. And all because, dear Ronald, we’ve been talking dialectically. We say: you, I, lamp, reality. Take a step back, please. Go ahead, it’s not hard. Words disappear. That lamp is a stimulus to the sense, nothing else. Now take another step back. What you call your sight and that stimulus take on an inexplicable relationship, because if we wanted to explain it we would have to take a step forward and everything would go to hell.”

“But those steps backward are like unwilling what the species of man has already walked,” Gregorovius protested.

“Yes,” said Oliveira. “And right there is the great problem, to find out if what you call the species has gone forward or if, as Klages thinks, I believe, at some given point it took the wrong road.”

Ludwig Klages identified two forces: the soul or seele, an “earthly rootedness” which is life-affirming, and the intellect or geist, the rationality and industry which is life-destroying. He thought that the progress of industry and the dominion of rationality are not necessarily good, and perhaps even evil¹⁰—or, as Oliveira points out,¹¹ they are only good when considered from within their own perspectives, and these perspectives are individuated and separated from reality and therefore limited in their claim to truth. It is revealed through the Club’s discussions that Cortázar does not simply think that there is a higher truth in art or spirituality, for those domains too are limited. There is value in the combination of these domains, but on the other hand, there is something more valuable and fundamental which all of these things can only serve to get in the way of.

Klages’s seele and geist were developments of Nietzsche’s “affirmation” of life, which is well summarized by this quote from his The Will to Power:¹²

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

Also influenced by The Will to Power (and also named in Hopscotch) was Martin Heidegger, who developed hermeneutics—the theory and methodology of interpretation—into existential understanding, advocating for a more authentic “way of being in the world” over a mere “way of knowing.”

Knowing always falls short, because it’s impossible for the intellect to grasp objective reality. But you can access another ultimate reality—the “radical reality” of life pointed to by Ortega. This is subjective reality, reality as an observer, the reality of experience.

This existential transition, from knowing to being, from objective to subjective, from the life-denying to the life-affirming, is demonstrated in Hopscotch by the contrast of Oliveira and his lover La Maga: Oliveira is analytical and critical and he reads philosophical books, but he is miserable; he terribly envies La Maga,¹³ who just reads cheap romances and lives spontaneously, constantly saying yes to the moment.

I have suggested previously that the mark of great writing is that it rewards the reader who attends deeper and longer¹⁴ (another way of saying this is that great writing resembles the world—the greatest text ever written). This effort of reading a book and identifying striking passages, and reading them over and over, and endlessly analyzing and interpreting and searching for a “center,” and putting a response together in writing, is nothing more than an exercise in paying closer attention to text; and even after all of this, I have only made sense of a small fraction of Hopscotch. What I’ve related here is, of course, only one interpretation of a vastly complex reality. My interpretation is necessarily incomplete, doomed to be limited by my own experiences, tastes, and meager literary ability—naturally, I’ve zeroed in on the book’s philosophical and contemplative themes and largely ignored many others. If you have read it before you will probably have found the things I’ve discussed here a little surprising, and if you have yet to read it you will no doubt find all sorts of surprising things in there waiting for you.

So do not assign too much value to this undertaking of mine, for it is the effort of Oliveira,¹⁵ it is the effort of the geist and it is life-denying. The more noble activity is that of La Maga, the reception of the seele which is life affirming: saying yes to a single moment.¹⁶

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As a reader of Orbis Tertius you possess the rare power to Induct new members into this strange club. Wield it with conviction:

1

Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (Et tous nos amours, Emmanuèle was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. And since you have come out of childhood (Je n’oublierai pas le temps des cerises, Emmanuéle was kicking about on the floor) you forget that in order to get to Heaven you have to have a pebble and a toe.

2

To provoke, assume a text that is out of line, untied, incongruous, minutely antinovelistic (although not antinovelish). […]

An attempt of this type comes from a rejection of literature; a partial rejection since it does depend on words, but one which must oversee every operation undertaken by author and reader. To use the novel in that way, just as one uses a revolver to keep the peace, changing its symbol. To take from literature that part which is a living bridge from man to man, and which the treatise or the essay will permit only among specialists. A narrative that will not be a pretext for the transmission of a message (there is no message, only messengers, and that is the message, just as love is the one who loves); a narrative that will act as a coagulant of experiences, as a catalyst of confused and badly understood notions, which first off will cut into the one who is writing it, for which reason it will have to be written as an antinovel, because every closed order will systematically leave outside those announcements that can make messengers out of us, bring us to our own limits from which we are so far removed, while being face to face with them. […]

[To] not deceive the reader, not mount him astride any emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype, with traces of something that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual. Better yet, give him something like a façade, 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.

3

In some note or other, Morelli had shown himself to be curiously explicit about his intentions. Giving evidence of a strange anachronism, he became interested in studies or non studies such as Zen Buddhism, which in those years was the rash of the beat generation. The anachronism did not lie in that, but in the fact that Morelli seemed much more radical and younger in his spiritual exigencies than those California youngsters getting drunk on Sanskrit words and canned beer. One of the notes referred Suzukianly to language as a kind of exclamation or shout that rises directly out of an inner experience. There followed several examples of dialogues between teachers and pupils, completely unintelligible for a rational ear and for all dualistic and binary logic, just like he answers that teacher’s give their pupils, consisting in the main of whacking them over the head with a pointer, throwing a pitcher of water in there faces, throwing them out of the room or, in the best cases, throwing the question back at them. Morelli seemed to move about at will in that apparently demented universe, and took it for granted that this pedagogical behavior constituted the real lesson, the only manner in which one could open the pupil’s spiritual eye and reveal the truth to him. This violent unnaturalness seemed natural to him, in the sense that it abolished the structures which made up the specialty of the Western world, the axes on which man’s historical understanding rotated and which in discursive thought (including aesthetic and even poetic feeling) find their instrument of choice. 

4

Reading the book, one had the impression for a while that Morelli had hoped that the accumulation of fragments would quickly crystallize into a total reality. Without having to invent bridges, or sew up different pieces of the tapestry, behold suddenly a city, or a tapestry, or men and women in the absolute perspective of their future, and Morelli, the author, would be the first spectator to marvel at that world that was taking on coherence.

But there was no cause for confidence, because coherence meant basically assimilation in space and time, an ordering to the taste of the […] reader. Morelli would not have agreed to that; rather, it seems, he would have sought a crystallization which, without altering the disorder in which the bodies of his little planetary system circulated, would permit a ubiquitous and total comprehension of all of its reasons for being, whether they were disorder itself, inanity, or gratuity. A crystallization in which nothing would remain subsumed, but where a lucid eye might peep into the kaleidoscope and understand the great polychromatic rose, understand it as a figure, an imago mundi that outside the kaleidoscope would be dissolved into a provincial living room, or a concert of aunts having tea and Bagley biscuits.

5

As soon as you start to give some serious thought to what is written there you begin to feel what you have always felt, the inexplicable attraction of intellectual suicide by means of the intellect itself. The scorpion stabbing itself in the neck, tired of being a scorpion but having no recourse to its own scorpionness in order to do away with itself as a scorpion. In Madras or in Heidelberg it’s basically the same question: there is some sort of indescribable mistake at the very beginning of things, out of which comes this phenomenon which is addressing itself to you at this moment and which you are all listening to. Every attempt at explanation comes to grief for reasons that anyone can understand, and the fact is that in order to define and understand something one would have to be outside of what is being defined and understood. Ergo, Madras and Heidelberg console themselves manufacturing positions, some with a rational base, others intuitive, even though the differences between reason and intuition can be far from clear, as anyone who’s been to school knows. And for that reason, man only feels secure when he is on grounds that do not touch his deepest part: when he plays, when he conquers, when he puts on his various suits of armor that are products of an ethos, when he hands over the central mystery to some revelation. And on all sides the curious notion that our principal tool, the Logos that madly pulls us up the zoological ladder, is a perfect fraud. And the inevitable corollary, refuge in inspiration and babble, dark night of the soul, aesthetic and metaphysical visions.

6

For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt 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.

7

Simultaneanize [the reader], provided that the reading will abolish reader’s time and substitute author’s time. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and in the same form. All artistic tricks are of no use in obtaining it: the only thing worth anything is the material in gestation, the experiential immediacy.

8

A piece of yellow paper scribbled on in pencil: “Pebble and star: absurd images. But the intimate commerce with stones that have been rolled leads one to a passage; between the hand and the stone there vibrates a chord outside of time. Fulgurant… (an unreadable word])… of which Beta Centauri also partakes; names and magnitudes give way, dissolve, stop being what science thinks they are. And then one is into something that purely is (what? what?): a trembling hand that wraps up a transparent stone that also trembles.” (Farther down, in ink: “It is not a question of pantheism, delightful illusion, fall upward into a heaven set afire at the edge of the sea.”)

9

What we call reality, the true reality that we also call Yonder (sometimes it helps to give a lot of names to a partial vision, at least it prevents the notion from becoming closed and rigid), that true reality, I repeat, is not something that is going to happen, a goal, the last step, the end of an evolution. No, it’s something that’s already here, in us. You can feel it, all you need is the courage to stick your hand into the darkness.

10

The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, that is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwellian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, to the measure of its inhabitants, no mosquitoes, no illiterates, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service, with television in every room, great tropical landscapes, for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, science of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce all rebellions to conformity, and so forth.

That is to say, a satisfactory world for reasonable people.

And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable?

11

What means of comparison do you have to think that we’ve done well? Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves? If a worm could think he would think that he hadn’t done too badly. Man has grabbed onto science like an anchor of salvation, as someone said, and I’m quite sure what he meant. Reason with its use of language has set up a satisfactory architecture, like the delightful, rhythmical composition in Renaissance painting, and it has stuck us in the center. In spite of all its curiosity and dissatisfaction, science, that is to say reason, begins by calming us down. ‘You are in this room, with your friends, opposite that lamp. Don’t be frightened, everything’s all right. Let’s see, now: what is the nature of that luminous phenomenon? Do you know what enriched uranium is? Do you like isotopes, did you know that we have already changed lead into gold?’ It’s all very exciting, it makes you dizzy, but always from the easy chain in which we are so comfortably seated.

12

“I’ll quote anything I goddam please.”

13

And I don’t talk to her with the words that only used to serve to make us misunderstand each other, now that it’s too late I begin to choose others, hers, the ones wrapped up in what she understands and which has no name, sparks and emanations which crackle in the air between two bodies or which can fill a room or a line of poetry with gold dust.

But isn’t this the way we have been living, softly slashing at each other? No, that’s not the way; she might have wanted to, but once again I imposed the false order that hides chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was one that barely dipped its toe into the terrible waters. There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them like that swallow swimming in the air, spinning madly around a belfry, letting herself drop so that she can rise up all the better with the swoop. I describe and define and desire those rivers but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. And she doesn’t know it, any more than the swallow. It’s not necessary to know things as I do, one can live in disorder without being held back by any sense of order. That disorder is her mysterious order, that bohemia of body and soul which opens its true doors wide for her. Her life is not disorder except for me, buried among the prejudices I despise and respect at the same time. Me, inexorably condemned to be pardoned by La Maga who judges me without knowing it. Oh, let me come in, let me see some day the way your eyes see.

14

To attempt on the other hand 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.

15

Something which was not alive or capable of being analyzed because that’s the way it is and it makes us what we are, fulfills and strengthens. Man’s rape by word, the masterful vengeance of word upon its progenitor, all this filled Oliveira’s thoughts with bitter lack of confidence, forced to seek help from the enemy itself to open a path to the point where he might just be able to be mustered out and follow it—but with what means, on what clear night or shady day?—until he could reach a complete reconciliation with himself and with the reality in which he lived.

“Yes,” said La Maga, serving coffee. “We have to live, after all.”

16.