SOURCE: "'The Infinite Game': Cortázar's Hopscotch," in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 61-74.

In the following essay, Simpkins discusses reader participation and authorial control in Hopscotch.

Every text can be played according to the reader's desires, but Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch specifically invites reader participation in its production. Intensely preoccupied with the reader's role in the text's creation, Cortázar offers an alternative plan, a "Table of Instructions," at the onset of the novel to encourage the development of multiple interpretations—the "many books" he ostensibly hopes the reader will find. The reader is urged to either follow the book as it is laid out, or to pursue the "second" book, the one suggested by Cortázar's alternative chapter arrangement. While readers can choose to deal with the novel in other ways as well, their inclusion in the assembly of...