SOURCE: "Julio Cortázar: Self-Explanation & Self-Destruction," in Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 51-60.

In the following excerpt, Mac Adam analyzes Hopscotch, focusing on its significance in the history of the Latin American novel.

Julio Cortázar's Rayuela [Hopscotch], the work that put both its author and Spanish American literature into a position of prominence in Western culture, is a deliberately essayistic text. It attempts to enact a coming to grips with the problem faced by all authors, the relationship between what the author talks about and how he talks about it…. [Rayuela] dramatizes the problem any author faces when he writes—which elements he will select and which reject, and how he will use those he selects, whatever elements his culture supplies to him. At the same time, Cortázar represents the same sort of problem, the dialectical or nondialectical...