3. Game as an aesthetic principle

Hopscotch is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Hopscotch is an introspective stream-of-consciousness novel where characters fluctuate and play with the subjective mind of the reader, and it has multiple endings. This novel is often referred to as a counter-novel, as it was by Cortázar himself. An author's note suggests that the book would best be read in one of two possible ways, either progressively from chapters 1 to 56 or by "hopscotching" through the entire set of 155 chapters according to a "Table of Instructions" designated by the author. Cortazar also leaves the reader the option of choosing his/her own unique path through the narrative. Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch remains one of the most influential and significant novels to appear in Latin America after the Second World War. It is, in part, notorious for its unusual presentation: it comes with a "Table of Instructions". There Cortázar announces: "In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all." 

The volume itself consists of 155 chapters. Cortázar suggests that the book can be read simply from the beginning to chapter 56, where the book can be considered to end — "the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience." The alternative he proposes is to begin with chapter 73 and then proceed according to a sequence listed in the "Table of Instructions". (For convenience, each chapter ends with an indication of the next that is to be read in this particular sequence.) Needless to say, this version does not end with chapter 56. To many readers this sounds like a contrivance that is too clever by half. Rest assured: it is not. The book allows for these — and other — readings.

Indeed it can even be read front to back in its entirety. 

The first section — From the Other Side — (56 chapters in some 361 pages) is fairly straightforward. The "expendable chapters" that make up the second section — From Diverse Sides — are considerably shorter (99 of them in just over 200 pages) and include a variety of notes, embellishments, quotes, even an Octavio Paz poem. They can be considered as integral to the text, or merely as support for it (or, as Cortázar suggests, as entirely expendable). 

The story centers around Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine living a fragmentary life in Paris and the Buenos Aires. As Cortázar makes clear, the text does not depend on any chronological order. The many episodes from Oliveira's life can be read in any variety of sequences without altering the gist of the novel. 

Literary and philosophical meditations abound in this intellectual's story. It is a very literary novel, in every sense, and literature is central to it, from the name-dropping of countless authors to the influences various works exert. Jazz also plays a role, and politics and specifically the state of Argentina and the state of exile. 

The text is often compared to hypertext novels, in how one can jump from scene to scene, chapter to chapter. There are also other experimental games within the novel — such as telling two tales concurrently, alternating lines between them (chapter 34, for example) — and there are first and third person narrators, as well as the diverse quotes and notes of the second part. All of it is very polished (and most of it comes through in Rabassa's translation). Cortázar, known as a short story writer, makes the book worth reading just for the pieces. The puzzle of the whole, however, also adds to the pleasure, fun, and — sometimes — frustration. 

Hermann Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game" is a story about the life of Joseph Knecht told from the perspective of the author. Hesse's book functions similarly to a biography, but in novel form. Hesse's character, Knecht, is part of the intellectual elite; he aims to master the Glass Bead Game. As the story opens, he masters the game, becoming Magister Ludi. With this context in mind, Hesse begins the novel by first introducing the structure of the game. It is a mind game of mental and spiritual exercises; the author uses his character to learn the game from a child to adult. With this context in mind, the novel is three-part, where Knecht receives instruction concerning his process of learning the games. Each of the parts is interconnected; in other words, each story runs parallel to the other. In the first story, a messenger tells Knecht that pursuing a life goal devoted to the mind is dangerous. Knecht defects from one country to another, symbolically shifting his spiritual thinking to another philosophy. The other parts reinforce this decision. By the end of "The Glass Bead Home," Knecht rises to "purposeful thinking," which represents a higher order. He dies achieving his goal.

The game itself functions to bring together disparate thoughts and ideas to attain perfection. Moreover, music is an important symbol integral to the creation of balance and harmony in the novel. Other recurring thematic concerns in Hesse's work are the roles of disillusionment and dissatisfaction and the inevitability of change—whether it is on the individual or collective level. In The Glass Bead Game, Hesse rejects his long-held ideal of a cloistered community of intellectual elites and affirms the value of asserting one's creativity and individuality. In fact, the role of the artist and intellectual in modern society is a recurring theme in Hesse's work. Knecht's life story has been perceived as a quest tale, following the archetypal stages of such stories: seclusion, escape, discovery, return, and celebration. A few commentators have found parallels between the Glass Bead Game and Hesse's literary career, and view Knecht as an autobiographical character.

A dictionary is a book that, while requiring little time every day, takes a lot of time through the years." So noted Milorad Pavic in his all-absorbing Dictionary of the Khazars (1982). This was no plain historical work about a vanquished 10th-century Caspian race. Subtitled "a lexicon novel in 100,000 words" it is divided into three sections, each arranged as a reference work, one overlapping with another so that time and space take further, even limitless twists across hundreds of years. It incorporates fable, myth, romance, a sabre manual, etymology, science, lute music, history – and purported history.

All this Pavic regarded as a form of autobiography. What's more, it appeared in "male" and "female" versions, which differed by one paragraph, almost making readers complicit in two deaths. To say any more would give the game away, but Pavic himself imagined readers chancing to meet, variant copies to hand, in a café, after which "I see how they lay their dinner out on top of the pillar box in the street and how they eat, embraced, sitting on their bicycles".

He had also worked for five years on his Dictionary of the Khazars. Its three sections (red, yellow, green) are each a version – Christian, Jewish, Muslim – of an encyclopaedic dictionary which purports to have been prepared by three 17th-century students. Each dictionary, in treating the same and similar subjects, incorporates a demon (including one whose breasts yield black milk), and, amid the limitless plots which derive from these triads, such sinister turns include one copy of the original, fugitive work containing poison. What's more, some of three 20th-century scholars, also of those three races, will meet a sorry end in 1982.