It is virtually impossible for information that is inherently distributed to be rearranged in a way that makes it useful to a central entity, even one that can oversee the whole generation process - such as Cortázar’s narrator, or Hayek’s central planner. To some degree, it feels like Cortázar could be invoking Hayek’s knowledge problem: knowledge is never a given it is not held, and can not be held by anyone in its totality. You have to try really hard to reconstruct timelines from the jumbled anecdotes and understand how relationships between the characters evolve. The intricate and intertwined storylines laid out seemingly at random reinforce the idea that good literature builds empathy and strengthens our theory of mind. In Rayuela, our perception of a character’s actions might completely change based on whether or not we know what they knew when they chose what they chose. In this book of many books, that asymmetry is even clearer. In reading a novel, as in life, unavoidably, there’s information that the reader doesn’t have. At times, these appendices are completely senseless, adding little to nothing to the narrative, but ever so often they shine a light on how the characters got themselves into the situation they’re in, reveal what they actually thought about a conversation you’d read about earlier, or simply carry along from an unfinished tale from the linear segment.Īs I read, one thing that struck me was how, hidden between games of structure and arrangement, Cortázar’s omniscient narrator falls prey to the problem of local knowledge. The next 99 chapters, which Cortázar invites you to altogether skip on the first pages of the book, are a random assortment of side stories, quotes, memories, newspaper clippings, poems, and inner dialogue from the book’s various characters.

The first half of the book, chapters 1 through 56, follows a linear narrative: the life of Horacio Oliveira during his stint as an immigrant in Paris, followed by his return to his home country of Argentina. The novel, which the author insists in calling a counter-novel, forces the reader to be an active participant, not just by picking the order in which to tackle the book’s chapters, but also by deciding whether or not to skip those labeled “expendable.” I chose to read the book in the sequence established by the author, starting on chapter 73 and hopscotching back and forth between sections. In Rayuela (English: Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar plays with structure and subjectivity in ways that no other writer I know of does.

Cortázar, Rayuela, and Hayekian Knowledge Problems March 26, 2020Įste ensayo también está disponible en español.

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