Reading Hopscotch, appropriately, is like reading several books bundled haphazardly into one. “The reader,” wrote Cortázar, “has to be an accomplice.” Interpreting these narratives forced readers to pick their own paths, colluding with the author to assemble the trajectory of the piece. William Burroughs’s cut-up technique in his Nova Trilogy(1961-64) and JG Ballard’s use of fragmentation in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) resulted in texts so disrupted that the best way to read them was sometimes, as Ballard wrote, to “turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye” then “scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an interesting way”. BS Johnson’s famous book-in-a-box The Unfortunates (1969) was published as a collection of pages and pamphlets that could be shuffled and read in any order. Instead of offering what Cortázar called a “hypnotic story” that shepherds the reader from first page to last, these books offer open-ended narratives whose presentation changes depending on the path that the reader takes through them. The Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, or Hopscotch, is one of the small and wayward genre of books that we might today think of as hypertext fictions.
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