(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
By actual count there are about 50 novels that could be labeled “cyberpunk” as contemporary literature plows into the latest century. Of these, “Hopscotch” (Pantheon – Random House) by Julio Cortázar keeps re-emerging as a focal point for relating current cybernetic developments to novels created before the birth of “cyberness.”
The novel was first published in Spanish (“Rayuela”) in 1963 and in English in 1966. The English translation by Gregory Rabassa won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award. Argentinean Cortázar wrote in Paris in exile and played trumpet in a Jazz band and lived the life of the boheme until his death in 1984, according to the publisher.
By definition, Examiner.com is a cyber product – cyber being a combining form meaning computer, computer network, or virtual reality, used in formation of compound words (cybertalk; cyberart; cyberspace) and by extension meaning very modern (cyberfashion).
So much for the Oxford Dictionary – here’s what’s going on that may alter some definitions in the future.
When “Hopscotch” was first published a response like the following was typical: "The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers." -- New Republic
Now “Hopscotch” author Cortázar experiences something of simultaneous afterbirth. An essay on Cortázar, first published by expatriate British critic Christopher Rollason, Ph.D in 2007 (Spanish) appears in the most recent issue of Creative Forum published in India and edited by Dr. T. Ravichandran. He’s the assistant Professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Dr. Ravichandran has put together an international look at the cyberpunk phenomenon. Creative Forum includes essays on cyberpunk and architecture (Joyce Goggin; Angel Mateos-Aparicio), Japan and cyberpunk (Setsuko Adachi), Michael Ondaatje (Guru Charan Behera) and Orwell and Huxley (Nicuta Rad).
Dr. Rollason writes that “Cortázar has hitherto been best known as a major modern short-story writer in the fantastic mode and distinguished continuator in that genre of his still rather more famous compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, as the canonic translator into Spanish of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the author of the experimental novel “Rayuela” (Hopscotch).”
Dr. Rollason reminds readers that “Hopscotch” is noted for the two alternative arrangements of its chapter-sequence and its invitation to “readerly” participation.
“Today, however, Cortázar’s work is – in parallel to that of Borges – gaining a whole new lease of life for its remarkable, daring and ambivalent anticipations of the new relational structures that characterize the emerging universe of cyberspace,” writes Rollason. “It is in this context that the present article will examine one particular story by Cortázar, Las caras de la medalla (“The Faces of the Medal”) and attempt to draw some lessons from this pre-Internet text for certain issues of human interaction in today’s brave new cyberworld.”
Dr. Ravichandran believes cyberpunk literature offers ample scope for research in the interface between literature and technology; man and machine; cyberspace and hyperreality; utopia and dystopia; identity conflicts; professional ethics and human values (Ravichandran).
For those who have not read “Hopscotch,” Examiner notes the publisher’s synopsis:
“Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves ‘the Club.’ A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. ‘Hopscotch’ is the dazzling, free-wheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.” – Copyright © Pantheon – Random House
As previously noted, readers can read the chapters in whatever order they may choose.
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