SOURCE: "Hopscotch," in Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American Narrative, translated by Galen D. Greaser, University of Texas Press, 1984, pp. 42-53.

In the following essay, which was originally published in Ortega's La contemplación la fiesta (1969), Ortega explores themes of nonconformism and chance in Hopscotch.

Hopscotch, Carlos Fuentes has stated, is to prose in Spanish what Ulysses is to prose in English. This comparison is possible because Hopscotch, first published in 1963, summarizes the new or current tradition of modernity in the Latin-American novel, a tradition that in the opinion of Octavio Paz is one of renewal. Hopscotch starts from the crisis of the novelistic genre as a representational system and from the baroque transgression of its Latin-American axis. Its foundation is another novel, one that begins when this book is closed.

The various readings demanded by Hopscotch are a game between the narrators, the characters, and the reader...