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.
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