Hopscotch
Perhaps one of the most well-known uses of materiality and structure to convey metaphor in a print novel, is Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. It has been called a pre-curser to hypertext, and attempts have been made to remediate it into hypertext form. As those attempts could not capture the beauty of the metaphor of this text, it emphasizes to me the idea of medium as message. As Anne Wysocki says, the materiality is inseparable—functioning alongside the context and the text itself (15).
It is by flipping to supplemental
chapters in the latter half of the book that meaning and metaphor are
added to the story. This also requires reader interaction beyond the
eye-hand-eye, page-turning that is the norm. The reader feels as if
they are on a treasure hunt of sorts, and uncovers additional fragments
of the story as they go back and forth between the main text and the
“extra” chapters. This, therefore, enhances the overarching
metaphor of the novel, the hopscotch game.
Similar to new media work,
it is the interaction and choice of the
reader that creates meaning in the text—even changing the story,
as they choose whether or not to flip to the supplemental chapter listed.
Cortazar offers this choice in his “table of instructions”
and says, “In its own way, this book consists of many books, but
two books above all.”
