SOURCE: "Morelli on the Threshold," in Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American Narrative, translated by Galen D. Greaser, University of Texas Press, 1984, pp. 54-9.

In the following essay, which was first published in the Fall 1983 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Ortega discusses the novel's paradoxical form and the significance of Cortázar's "mythical author" Morelli.

Hopscotch is many books in one, and one of these many books concerns Morelli, the author, or better still, the persona whose questioning of literature is also the convocation of another literature that implies this novel itself, along with its critical foundation and poetic open-endedness.

In "chapter" 22, Horacio Oliveira witnesses an accident in which a man is struck by a car on a Paris street. This man, who Horacio and Étienne visit in the hospital, turns out to be Morelli, a writer who the speakers of Hopscotch have read at length...