A Poetics of Misencounters: Adolfo Bioy Casares by Alicia Borinsky

Sometimes, when I can't do anything but begin a story the way I would like to begin this one, is precisely when I would like to be Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Julio Cortázar

I believe I am free of every superstition of modernity, of any illusion that yesterday differs intimately from today or will differ from tomorrow; but I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw, Der Prozess, Le Voyageur sur la Terre, and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Jorge Luis Borges

The first epigraph belongs to Cortázar, who writes about his wish to be Bioy Casares as he starts writing a story that he would like to tell with the kind of detachment and precision he admires in Bioy Casares's work. The quotation from Borges is part of the preface he wrote to Morel's Invention. These words, written for the 1940 first edition of the novel, are not only a testimony to the admiration he felt for it but an indication of the literary friendship between Borges and Bioy Casares, which over the years produced a number of texts in collaboration and an intertwining of the works they signed separately. This is explicitly the case, for example, in Borges's Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

The story Cortázar wishes he could tell like Bioy Casares is a love entanglement involving the narrator and a woman named Anabel, whose name evokes Edgar Allan Poe and Juan Carlos Onetti. Cortázar locates the problems he encounters in finding out how to go about his writing in a counterpoint between Bioy Casares and Jacques Derrida, whose "La vérité en peinture," he quotes.

Cortázar could not have coupled two more disparate writers than Derrida and Bioy Casares because, although some of the ultimate consequences of their conceptions of literary representation might coincide, the modes of reading they each invite are opposed. Cortázar understands the tension between these two writers and offers the story as a means to understand the particular place in which his own attempts might be located. From Derrida he reproduces some lines about the relationship between subject and object; in Bioy Casares he admires the capacity for detachment, the ease and synthesis of his prose. The story that Cortázar wants to tell concerns a misadventure with Anabel. In that respect, he has been able to reproduce a quality that haunts Bioy Casares's work-endowing the entanglements of love with somber impossibilities, humorous complicities with the reader, and a dangerous imminence of the fantastic.

Of Machines and Writing

In a scene from Erich von Stroheim's memorable film Foolish Wives, a Russian nobleman played by von Stroheim looks at the reflection in a mirror of a retarded girl he has selected as a victim. The viewer needs the barest information about what follows; the light and the expression in von Stroheim's face as he looks at her in the mirror are already a rape. The crime has already taken place symbolically in the mirror before it is actually executed.

Before becoming a criminal, the Russian nobleman is an artifice; before being a protagonist in his own experience, he is a spectator who watches the very elements that make up his own representation. In this context it matters little whether the crime is actually committed; the violence of the plot is already in the mirror. The pact between victim and executioner has been sealed, and the viewer knows that any other twist in the plot would only be a violation of the mirror's precise economy.

In Foolish Wives, as in other silent movies, the absence of sound grants a nightmarish vividness to the images, a faithfulness to their visual nature that is not as immediate in films with sound. The plot is always inferior to the density of non-discursive images; the captions in silent film are trivial in relation to the allusive power of the frames. Silent films may be more faithful to the nature of their medium. The Russian nobleman observing his victim is a reduced model of the mirrorings effected by film; he is seen and sees simultaneously elements that are to be articulated by a spectator projected in a character who is also portrayed as witness.

A vast part of Bioy Casares's work is to be understood in its relationship to the visual as found in film. His relationship to this medium, however, does not involve quotation of films, such as we find in Manuel Puig, for example, but instead grapples with the relationships between the different layers sustaining visual representation and the kind of detachment built into being a spectator.

Morel's Invention suggests one of the ways in which Bioy Casares formulates the issue. The novel is narrated by a man in flight who wants to leave a record of his experiences. He refers to the existence of a museum and to the fact that he is on an island where there are mosquitoes and aquatic plants. The report is written uncomfortably and with great anxiety:

"The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine."

There are other people on the island; the narrator is above all obsessed with meeting a woman named Faustine. We learn later that the meeting is impossible because Faustine is an image projected by a machine.

The narrator considers different strategies in his efforts to get closer to Faustine; the sight of her makes him feel inadequate but also incapable of doing anything but try to approach her:

"Then, while waiting to speak to her, I was reminded of an old psychological law. It was preferable to address her from a high place that would make her look up to me. The elevation would compensate, at least in part, for my defects."

We are initiated into the protagonist's desire by the awareness of an inequality in love; his embarrassment makes him delay the moment of getting closer to her. Although that closeness remains impossible, given the fact that Faustine is a projected image, the reader is so caught by the rhythm of this deferral of action that when the protagonist does decide to utter some words, they are startling:

"'Please, young lady," I said, 'will you please listen to me,' but I hoped she would not listen, because I was so excited I had forgotten what I was going to say.' The words young lady sounded ridiculous on the island. And besides my sentence was too imperative (combined with my sudden appearance there, the time of day, the solitude).

I persisted: 'I realize you may not wish-' But I find it impossible now to recall exactly what I said. I was almost unconscious. I spoke in a slow, subdued voice with a composure that suggested impropriety. I repeated the words young lady."

The man embarrassed by his words sliding toward the sleazy pick-up, obscenity, impropriety. The coarseness with which the "young lady" is perceived is a product of the interruption of the protracted silence that, while there, opened up countless possibilities of contact between the characters. Once the silence is broken, the anonymous "young lady" sets limits to the eloquence of the situation. The universality of the island becomes erased; we enter the realm of the concrete, of daily existence. The slippage toward vulgarity, the commonplace, and the familiar are rejected in Morel's Invention. Instead, being attracted by another is seen as enjoying the pleasures of detachment, whereas closeness signals the end of the freedom granted by separation.

Faustine's power resides in her capacity for revealing, as an image, the weaknesses of the man who desires her, through his fear that in uttering words that define him he will also show the pettiness of his aspirations. Thus Morel's Invention focuses on the parenthetical aspects of love by prolonging the tensions of the mis-encounter and, in a resolution that echoes E. T. A. Hoffmann's Olympia, it suggests that the loved woman is nothing but a projected image. If the impossibility of contact resides in the radical difference between the characters, the intention of overcoming the distance is portrayed as a somberly heroic gesture.

The fleeing character in Morel's Invention attempts to save himself through love and become part of the same system of representation that reproduces the image of Faustine. The novel suggests that such an encounter is not to take place; a kind of nostalgia colors the awareness that it may be mechanically impossible to integrate the protagonist into the film that shows his loved one to him time and again. The music, «Tea for Two» and «Valencia», provides a sentimental background for the film sequences, in contrast to the harsh island existence with its mosquitoes and humidity.

Loving Faustine is equivalent to thinking of oneself as dead, invisible, a puppet:

"And I still wonder: what does all this mean? Certainly, she is a detestable person. But what is she after? She may be playing with the bearded man and me; but then again he may be a tool that enables her to tease me. She does not care if she makes him suffer. Perhaps Morel only serves to emphasize her complete repudiation of me, to portend the inevitable climax and the disastrous outcome of this repudiation!

But if not -Oh, it has been such a long time now since she has seen me. I think I shall kill her or go mad, if this continues any longer. I find myself wondering whether the disease-ridden marshes I have been living in have made me invisible. And, if that were the case, it would be an advantage: then I could kidnap Faustine without any danger-"

The published English translation renders the last phrase as "then I could seduce Faustine without any danger;" the original reads" "podría raptar a Faustine sin ningún peligro." Raptar means to kidnap, an important distinction for Morel's Invention because the protagonist carefully avoids any intimation of untoward plans in his desire to join Faustine. The novel stresses a counterpoint in his feelings between total incapacity to rise to the challenge of the woman he desires and the brazen actions he thinks are needed to take her away; seduction has no place here. The narrator considers his condition as invisible outsider through the desire to join Faustine and concludes it is an advantage. Persecuted by his enemies in the «reality» of his adventure and also in the projected images that turn Faustine's companions into his rivals, he builds a problematic bridge toward the reader. The report he writes tries to clarify doubts and give information by forging a bond with the reader that parallels the approach in his earlier novel, Plan for Escape. The reader is granted the invisibility that the protagonist wants for himself; unseen by the characters in the novel, the reader looks at the protagonist looking at Faustine, while also trying to explain what he or she sees as he listens to "Tea for Two" and "Valencia."

"Here is some evidence that can help my readers establish the date of the intruders' second appearance here: the following day two moons and two suns were visible. [...] I am not mentioning them because of any poetic attachment, or because of their rarity, but rather to give my readers, who receive newspapers and celebrate birthdays, a way to date these pages."

Unlike Faustine, the narrator wants to be the reader's friend. But is he really helping the reader to frame what the report says? Is Morel's Invention positing behind the disjointed couple of Faustine and the narrator an ideal couple consisting of reader and narrator? The reader cannot date the pages, despite being subjected to such chronological data as birthdays; the excess of information provided disconcerts the reader as much as it does the protagonist. Thus the appeals to direct dialogue with a hypothetical reader delineate the image of another character, the narrator's double, who relates to the text with the same kind of difficulty that the narrator has as he goes through his adventure.

The main role of the protagonist of Morel's Invention is to be a witness. His experience consists of observing and trying to interpret what he sees as he strives to discover the mechanism of the machine producing the images he observes. His report is the very purpose of his adventure; his text is an attempt to reproduce the images he sees already reproduced:

"If one day the images should fail, it would be wrong to suppose that I have destroyed them by writing this diary. [...] A recluse can make machines or invest his visions with reality only imperfectly, by writing about them or depicting them to others who are more fortunate than he."

Morel's Invention registers the inexorable loss of the immediacy of its images. Only copies survive, with markings of the fissures that separate them from their originals; the narrator is the discoverer of those fissures and, at the same time, the producer of additional ones through the writing of his report, that other machine of representations.

Carlos Nine 

Morel's Invention is a violent novel. Its machine of representation cancels the references that support it; its articulation of the visual consists of undermining the reliability of the projected images, and the clues given throughout the text are only there to be obliterated by interpretation.

The narrator-reader couple is constituted here in oblique celebration of its disjunction subject to the virtuality of their link in a paralyzing and repetitive logic. Faustine remains floating, shifting names and gender, silent, and remote in a multiplicity of representations. It is no doubt this aspect of Morel's Invention that prompted Borges to claim for it the lineage of Louis Auguste Blanqui and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Bioy Casares continued to pose the puzzling questions introduced here in other works; his short fantastic stories frequently engage the figure of repetition. "The Celestial Plot" has the most affinities with Morel's Invention. The name of Blanqui appears there explicitly to render more credible the experience of a protagonist who, sick and disconcerted, is lost in parallel and barely connected worlds. Blanqui, who spent time in prison himself, was forbidden to look at the outside world from the window of a cell near the sea. He formulated eloquently the despair caused by the kind of infinity produced by endless repetition in his book L'éternité par les astres:

"What we call progress is bolted into each planet earth, and fades with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial sphere, the same drama, the same backdrop and the same narrow stage, a noisy humanity, infatuated with its greatness believing itself the universe and living in its prison as in an immensity, to succumb in short order along with the globe which has borne in the greatest disdain the burden of its pride. The same monotony, the same immobility, in the alien stars. The universe repeats itself endlessly and prances about in place. Imperturbably, eternity plays out the same performance through infinity."

Morel's Invention tells us that love, writing, and watching projected images circulate in parallel worlds that turn those who try to grasp them into proliferating versions of themselves.

Credits:  The complete version of this article can be found online at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.  It has been edited slightly for coherence.

Rereading: Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig

by

Nicholas Lezard

When Stefan Zweig, forced into a peripatetic life by the rise of Nazism, arrived in New York in 1935, he was persistently asked to make a statement about the treatment of the Jews in Germany. He refused to be drawn out, and said in correspondence that his reason was that anything he said would probably only make their situation worse. Similarly, when staying in London, he found that while he loved English people's way of not getting too het up about things, their civility and general decency, he found the regular denunciations of the Third Reich a little too much: he felt that they lost force by repetition.

To which one might have countered: one couldn't say often enough that the Third Reich was evil. And one would have thought that Zweig, himself Jewish and fully aware that his books were being burned in universities all over Germany might have had more to say publicly on the subject.

His novel Beware of Pity, composed over a period of years and completed in 1938 (there are 11 extant – volumes of notes and drafts that attest to Zweig's painstaking work on his only full-length novel) itself very pointedly has almost nothing to say about contemporary times, on the surface at least. It is the story of a young Austrian cavalry officer, Anton Hofmiller, who befriends a local millionaire, Kekesfalva, and his family, but in particular the old man's crippled daughter, Edith, with terrible consequences.

Well, it almost has nothing to say about the times in which it was written. Which means that it has something to say about them; obliquely, and passed across your eyes quickly, like a Hitchcock cameo. But the novel's flight from pressing concerns is in itself significant. Following Hitler's rise to power, the first project Zweig embarked on was a biography of Erasmus, which he described as "a quiet hymn of praise to the anti-fanatical man". In other words, it was in direct but non-violent opposition to the loathsome qualities that were deemed desirable, indeed compulsory, in society at large. But sometimes evasiveness isn't a straightforward matter of wanting to keep out of trouble, or stick up for virtues that are in danger of being trampled.

One of the earliest writers to note what Freud was doing, Zweig took on board early the lesson that directly dealing with terrible things is not necessarily the way the mind works. His stories are full of characters poisoned by things left unsaid, or situations misread. We tell ourselves stories about what is going on; but sometimes these are the wrong stories. In one of his earlier short fictions, "Downfall of the Heart" (whose original title, Untergang eines Herzens, is a proleptic echo of the German title of Beware of Pity – Ungeduld des Herzens, or the heart's impatience), a self-made businessman succumbs to a terrible decline after seeing, or imagining he has seen, his daughter sneaking out of a man's hotel room in the middle of the night. In Beware of Pity we have a hero who makes a habit of getting things wrong. "Since this seems to be the day for making wrong diagnoses . . .", says the admirable Dr Condor at one point in the novel, but it is the "hero" (and I had better start using inverted commas around that word, for reasons our "hero" would most certainly approve of) who keeps making wrong diagnoses. There is the terrible gaffe he makes which sets the whole terrible train of events in motion (it's a small train, admittedly, but big enough to cause havoc); there is his initial impression that Kekesfalva is a genuine venerable Hungarian nobleman, that Condor is a bumpkin and a fool; and, in one splendidly subtle piece of writing, in which an interior state of mind is beautifully translated into memorable yet familiar imagery, he imagines himself to be better put together than Condor, when they walk out in bright moonlight on the night of their first meeting:

And as we walked down the apparently snow-covered gravel drive, suddenly we were not two but four, for our shadows went ahead of us, clear-cut in the bright moonlight. Against my will I had to keep watching those two black companions who persistently marked out our movements ahead of us, like walking silhouettes, and it gave me – our feelings are sometimes so childish – a certain reassurance to see that my shadow was longer, slimmer, I almost said "better-looking", than the short, stout shadow of my companion.

This has a ring of interior psychological veracity and shows just how sharply Zweig could pay attention to his characters' inner workings. And if, as Henry James said, a novelist is someone on whom nothing is lost, then we have in Zweig's "hero" here a man on whom everything is lost, in more than one sense of the phrase.

When we first meet Hofmiller, it is not the eve of the first world war, when the events described in the novel take place, but on the eve of the second: explicitly, in 1938, when the framing narrator – a famous novelist whom we may as well assume to be Zweig himself – is briefly introduced in a café to Hofmiller by a well-meaning "hanger-on" (who could also, possibly, be said to be a mischievously unflattering self-portrait of another aspect of Zweig's personality: he was known for that kind of thing). Hofmiller is a famously decorated soldier, but he treats his decoration – the highest military order Austria can bestow – with disdain bordering on contempt, and only speaks to the framing narrator when they meet accidentally at a dinner party later on.

And it is at this moment that we should realise that the message of the book is not only the ostensible one – that pity is an emotion that can cause great ruin – but also that we must not judge things by appearances. Hofmiller may be entitled to wear the Order of Maria Theresa but he can tell you that, in his case at least, what others might regard as courage is actually the result of a monumental act of cowardice.

Stefan Zweig was extremely famous throughout the world as a writer of novellas and short stories, as well as popular histories and biographies, so it is remarkable that he wrote only one full-length novel. It has led some commentators to suggest that in this instance he overstretched himself, that he became prolix or, more charitably, that Beware of Pity is actually two novellas of unequal length stitched together. The latter suggestion is certainly worth consideration (how Kekesfalva got his loot is certainly a story in itself), but Beware of Pity is the length it is because it has to be (and, as with all Zweig's writing, it zips along almost effortlessly; it doesn't read as though it could do with much trimming). The loop back in time that Zweig is taking us on has to be accounted for; it has to take time. He said himself that the impulse behind the novel was not only nostalgia – itself one of the most powerful of narrative impulses, as anyone who has heard of Proust knows – but pity: pity specifically directed at Lotte, his secretary, with whom he was having an affair and who was to become his second wife (and with whom he would successfully undertake a suicide pact in a hotel room in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942).

He wanted this to be the Great Austrian Novel, and so a certain scope was demanded of him. And he had to go back to before 1914 as that was when everything began to go wrong. In his story "The Invisible Collection", first published in 1927, a collector of rare prints who has gone blind is deceived by his family: they have sold his valuable collection bit by bit in order to feed themselves, and him, during the disastrous inflation that followed the first world war, and have replaced the prints with blank paper of the same dimensions and thickness. When he strokes the blank sheets the narrator notes his happiness: "Not for years, not since 1914, had I witnessed an expression of such unmitigated happiness on the face of a German . . ." (Italics mine.)

It is a scene of such potent and telling symbolism that it verges, tremulously, on the corny. But that is not to gainsay its validity and power. The Great War ruined and erased everything, and reduced the past almost to a state as if it had never been. Zweig's autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is a long lament for a vanished world, tantamount to a suicide note. Interestingly, he does not, in Beware of Pity, allude to, or make any real use of, the atmosphere of stifling sexual repression that animates "Eros Matutinus", one of the best chapters of The World of Yesterday, in which Zweig acknowledges there were some very significant aspects of genteel society the world was right to discard. If anything, the return to the values of 1913 is tacitly endorsed, albeit in a complex and ambiguous fashion, when Hofmiller discovers, to his horror, that Edith has sexual desires.

But Beware of Pity ends with a note of almost bitter disillusionment. (Not to mention the reader's relief at having finally climbed out of an emotional tumble-dryer, which is just the effect Zweig wanted his best work to have.) In fact, if it didn't sound so off-putting, "Disillusionment" could be a perfectly plausible title for the novel (to go with Zweig's other one-word titles for some of his novellas: "Amok", "Confusion" or "Angst"). But disillusionment is, though often painful – and Beware of Pity has moments of high melodrama that have the power to make one put one's free hand over one's mouth as one reads – a very necessary process, and the stripping away of illusions was, after all, one of the abiding aims of the Freudian project. And it is a very useful kind of bildungsroman, in which it is not only the chief character who learns something by the end of it, but the reader, too.

Credits:  This article originally appeared in 2011 in The Guardian.