Literary Worlds: Cortázar's Hopscotch and Márquez's Macondo

Julio Cortázar: Fantastic Conception of Reality

He began as a storyteller with works like Bestiary (1951), End of the Game (1956), and Secret Weapons (1959). Later, he wrote stories such as Stories of Cronopios and Famas (1962), All Fires the Fire (1966), Octahedron (1974), and A Certain Lucas (1977).

Cortázar's accounts show a special, fantastic conception of reality, composed of aspects that go far beyond the routine and accepted: the unexpected, the exceptional, the irrational, and the intuited. There is an existential search and reflections on creation and poetic language.

Hopscotch (Rayuela)

This book was written in 1963 and develops in Paris and Buenos Aires. Its main character is Horacio Oliveira, who in Part 1 lives in Paris with La Maga. After the death of Rocamadour, La Maga's son, she disappears. In the second part, Horacio returns to Buenos Aires, where he lives with his former girlfriend, but constantly remembers La Maga. He worked with Traveler and Talita, first in a circus and then in an insane asylum.

Key Themes in Hopscotch

Hopscotch discusses several key topics:

• The Existential Search: The angst and feeling of loneliness sometimes disappear through love and friendship.
• The Game: Reason or logic does not prevail; the game represents freedom and ceremony.
• Literary Creation: A search for other worlds where language itself is challenged.

Structure of the Novel

The novel is divided into three parts:

1. Beyond the Side of There (Paris)
2. On the Side of Here (Buenos Aires)
3. From Elsewhere

The source language converts into recreation and game, and the novel obviously revives the use of the absurd.

Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is one of the works that best combines the technical elements synthesized from the features of magical realism. The order of time is linear, yet the development is circular.

The Argument and Macondo

The story centers on two families, the Iguarán and the Buendía, who are destined to give birth to a boy with an iguana tail due to the Iguarán kinship.

Úrsula, newly married to José Arcadio Buendía, refuses to consummate the marriage because she fears a child born with a tail. This leads José Arcadio to confront Prudencio Aguilar for questioning his manhood. José Arcadio, provoked, ends up killing him, but Aguilar's ghost constantly appears.

Fleeing the dead man, and leading a group of companions, José Arcadio arrives at a village consisting of "twenty mud houses built on the bank of a river" and decides to stay there. This village is called Macondo, the mythical setting of this and other works by the author.

The only contact its inhabitants have with the outside world consists of the periodic visits of gypsies, headed by Melquíades, who, besides knowing Sanskrit, introduces ice and magnets into Macondo.