kaleidoscopic change
In Hopscotch, Horacio Oliveira reads the page which Morelli has covered with the unpunctuated words “Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any”1. Horacio spies, however, a place where the word “any” is missing. Reading this page, Horacio knows that the words echo their meaning, forming a “wall behind which there is nothing.” But he also feels that “a sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the light that shows through.”
There’s no saying for sure, but it’s hard not to feel that the eye is hypersensitive, that Horacio has made too much of a typographical error, imbuing sheer contingency with a burdensome charge of secretly coded meaning. At the very least, I’d want to remind Horacio that if there is a way to go beyond, to change things, to connect, then the lesson of the passage – and a law of the universe in which Horacio, like me, lives – is that such a possibility lies in an alternative arrangement of the given (a missing “any” for example) and not in the opening of a hole.
In other words, if Horacio perceives a light on the page, it’s not shining “through a hole.” Rather it is a light generated immanently by the page itself. Or, more precisely, generated from the productive energy that Morelli contains with his steadfast refusal of any beyond. “If you want to view paradise,” Willy Wonka sings to his guests in the chocolate factory, “simply look around and view it.” Or, as Thomas Merton put it more quietly: “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open. The sword is taken away. And we do not know it.”2
It’s true that Morelli has created a surface, but not every surface is a wall. It could be a wall. I don’t know for sure that it isn’t. But I want to ask Horacio what he gets by calling it a wall. Seeing a wall leads him, according to his tendency, to look for and find a hole in the wall. Nothing wrong with this except that not much, it turns out, fits through the holes that Horacio finds in the walls he sees. Not his lover, not his friends, not even all of him. Pretty lonely [Ù27, 28].
And that may be why Julio always preferred (and so thus constructed the laws of his universe) the more modest, sustainable process of continual changes figured by the kaleidoscope. Julio consistently manifested an interest in the possibilities for human beings to change, affirmatively, their ways of life, both as individuals and as societies. He knew individuals could be more free, less afraid. More adventurous. More playful, more humorous, more cooperative. He knew that societies could thus become more peaceful, less rigid in separating work and play, less violent without the perceived need to enforce social hierarchies. It was evident enough to Julio that any changes in society that were sustainable would have to be comprised of changes in individuals communicating with each other.
But Julio conceived this desirable change as possible only on two conditions. First, change should not come at the price of rejecting one’s past [Ù94]. As John Dewey knew: “Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore alive.”3 For Julio believed firmly in the tenacity and persistence of the past in the present, all the more so when the individual would deny or disavow that past. No durable change could depend upon a definitive transcendence of the past. The past, or elements of it at least, must come into the future with us as we change. That’s one condition.
Another is that Julio won’t allow change coming from outside: no saviors, no knights on white horses, no charismatic party leaders. The only stuff we have to work with as our raw materials for transformation is the stuff we already have. Hence, for Julio, the supreme importance of invention, the art of discovering something new just by rearranging the relationships among the things you already have. That’s why any change would have to be understood and, if figured, figured in images of process, not rupture. Hence the kaleidoscope over the hole in the wall [Ù2, 3, 27, 94, 95].
1 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 66, p. 362. In Spanish, Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch. 66, p. 425.
2 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,
3 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 18.