SOURCE: "Adolfo Bioy Casares: Satire and Self-portrait," and "Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Lying Compass," in Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason, The University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 29-36, pp. 37-43.

[In the following excerpt, Mac Adam discusses The Invention of More] and A Plan for Escape as examinations into the nature of metaphor and the relationship between text, author, and audience.]

Bioy Casares in Morel creates a series of linked metaphors to describe the transformation of a man into an artist and, finally, the artist into art. Like Machado, Bioy uses the first-person narrator, but unlike the Brazilian, he delineates more sharply the "textual" nature of his work by defining it as a diary. What we are reading is a remainder, a leftover, and by emphasizing this dead or inert side of any work of art, its existence as the object of attention, Bioy declares its alien nature. The reader can never have direct contact with the narrator: he is not speaking to us or confessing his sins to God in our presence. Like Sartre's La Nausée, Morel is itself a kind of cadaver. The "new" Roquentin exists beyond the text (and the life) he has left behind, and, in the same way, we are encouraged to follow his example. Bioy has no overt ideological message in his text; there is no hortatory aspect to his satire; and yet, it is clear that he is making an esthetic statement. He is interested in expressing what it is that the artist becomes when he commits himself to his work.

To demonstrate his point, Bioy revitalizes the story of the man who goes to a desert island. Borges himself notes that H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau is alluded to in Bioy's title; we might add that such a reference would automatically conjure up Swift, Defoe, Stevenson (also mentioned by Borges), Verne, Dante, and a host of others. One island text suggests another because they all deal with extraordinary circumstances, a hiatus in "normal" affairs. Even true stories about island visits contain the element of adventure that stimulates our appetite for the exotic, which, even when real, is somehow beyond literary realism. No matter what the text is, the sea we cross divides us from the world of our dreams. The sea may be real, but it is also our subconscious; and for that reason, no voyage to an island can be absolutely free from symbolic or metaphoric traits. Ordinary tourist advertising realized this long ago and continues to play on our desire for adventure.

Bioy's story is simple. A man fleeing from political persecution seeks refuge on an island supposed to be the epicenter of a fatal disease. Once on the island he begins to notice strange things: the seasons seem to accelerate, and then, with no warning, people appear out of nowhere. He writes to leave testimony about the climatic change, but his diary changes as he grows increasingly interested in the strange visitors. This interest becomes critical when he falls in love with Faustine, one of the women in the company. He learns that to them he is invisible, although he only learns why when he discovers that they are not really people but images projected by cameras operated by the tides. They have bulk, need no screen, and will last as long as the machines function. Desperate, the unnamed diarist decides to interpolate himself into the film (an act which kills all who are photographed) so that anyone who comes to the island will think he is part of the original.

The protagonist's life consists of a series of spatial reductions. First he shares a political and social life with others, then he becomes a fugitive, constantly in motion. On the island his possibilities for movement are limited. He has fled society and history; all he has left is his own mind, the island, and the various texts he projects and the diary he writes. The withdrawal from the world (for no matter what reason) is a metaphor for the writer who withdraws from the world to compose his text. The voyage to the island is that withdrawal, just as the blank page is the island which will be "populated" by words.

The reader, again the writer's mirror twin, recapitulates the writer's self-exile when he withdraws from the world to read the text, which is his island. The portrait of Saint Ambrose that Augustine gives in the Confessions (book 6, chapter 3) constitutes a perfect image of this act: Augustine describes the saint reading silently, so absorbed in his reading that he does not notice the presence of other people in the room. The reader, like the narrator, is alone on an island filled with people.

Our relationship with the text is as complex as that of the narrator with the images he finds on the island. He cannot reconcile himself to the idea that they are not real (his last words are a plea for someone to make Faustine truly aware of his existence) just as we might be tempted to affix a personality and a psychology to the narrator himself. We must realize that such an act would betray both the text and our roles as readers. The lesson Bioy implants in his text is the concept of art as suicide, an act mirrored in the suicide the unwitting reader commits when he takes fictions for realities: to create a text means to create an artist, and to do that it is necessary to "kill" a man. Morel is elegiac in that it celebrates the death of a man who has achieved immortality, the ironic immortality of art which requires the death of a man. Like [Borges's] "Borges and I," although less ironic because it is not toying with the idea of autobiography, the mode whereby the self is immortalized by being transformed into a fiction, Morel is concerned with the distinctions between the artist as man and man as artist. It is no less involved with our identities as individuals and our identities as readers. We must also give up something, "die" a bit, before we are reborn in the act of interpretation, the act by which we liberate ourselves from the text, deforming it into our own image. A failure to interpret is the situation described in Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" [Ficciones (1935–1944), 1944], where all fictions are subsumed into the insidious and false encyclopedia because no one treats the fiction as a fiction.

Both Machado's and Bioy's texts invite interpretation, but they also demand one sort of interpretation instead of another. The fact that the "real" narrator is always separated from us by a linguistic void is never attenuated in these books by the creation of sentimental links between us and him. We are made to realize that what is speaking to us is a text and not a person, that if there ever was a person behind these words he is irretrievably lost. The narratives themselves are metaphors for communication, since they are composed without the presence of any known listeners, again in direct contrast to Augustine's ideal listener…. It is the nature of first person narratives always to be "about" something, even if that subject is forever absent, replaced by words, that is, by metaphors….

In Morel, the verbal artifact is ironically juxtaposed to another absence, Morel's film. The film literally swallows up the narrator, who can look at himself in it in the same way someone who has written his autobiography can read about himself. There is of course a difference: the narrator has deliberately inserted himself in someone else's creation, hoping that his intrusion will pass unnoticed by newcomers. In any case, the elegiac note is again sounded, and the dying man sees himself transformed into a work of art, although that work of art is itself bizarre. Morel, not an artist but a sentimental scientist, creates a tranche de vie, a direct copy of life. In explaining to his friends what he has done, he states: "My abuse consists in having photographed you without permission. Of course mine is not a common photographic method; it is my latest invention. We shall live in that photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these last seven days will be acted out completely." The machine neither edits nor selects; it simply captures whatever images it can. It is the narrator who imposes his will on the film when he creates a new reality by interpolating himself. He does what the reader should not: he enters a world with which he can have no real contact.

Paradoxically, however, the text, like the film, requires the reader to "make something" of it. Why should this invitation to interpret be part of the text instead of part of the reader? How do we know Morel is a metaphorical text? There is no answer except to point out the elements of the text itself: the island voyage, the decision to write, the relationship between the narrator and the woman in the film (a variation of the Romantic belle dame sans merci theme, where she comes to stand for the text itself in its complete otherness), and, of course, Borges's preface [to The Invention of Morel], which prejudices the reader. These same elements may nevertheless remain insignificant to another reader. Unlike Renaissance literature, where mythology, symbolic names, and rhyme signalled to the reader what sort of reading he was to do, these texts leave everything to the reader's instincts. Perhaps the examination of another text by Bioy Casares, Plan de evasión (1945), may help to establish some of the landmarks in this perpetually shifting metaphoric literature.

..…

Bioy's Plan de evasión (1945) is more clearly a case of metaphoric writing, of satire, than Morel, Morel is deliberately nonallusive, except for its title and one or two other incidental references to painters or authors; but Plan is shot through with literary allusions and references to cultural matters in general. It is as though Bioy were attempting to tantalize the reader into drawing connections between his and other texts which would ultimately prove either misleading or useless. This technique recalls Borges, whose myriad references are a plague to all his readers; and both authors may have the same goal in mind: to proffer the expectation of meaning to the reader and withdraw it before it can ever become a reality.

Bioy creates metaphorical texts, but he carefully leaves open the concept of referent. The text becomes something like a historical event in that it can have any number of meanings depending on the context into which it is inserted. Indeed, this simultaneous inscrutability and disponibilité underlines the close relationship between all kinds of extended narratives and the writing of chronicles. Critics like Lukács, who for reasons of symmetry want the novel (and, we assume, other narrative forms) to be the counterpart in the bourgeois era of the epic in an earlier age, destroy the value of genre study. The idea that the novel is our epic is much too "neat" to be accurate, especially because it fulfills the critic's idealized view of modern history and not the actual state of esthetic affairs. Texts like those of Machado, Bioy, or Cabrera Infante do not strive (and fail) to be totalities; they are deliberately incomplete, encouraging the reader to participate to the fullest in the creative process, at no small risk to both parties. We know Plan is "about" something, but we will never know what.

Plan is, ostensibly, the prejudiced presentation of the letters of Enrique Nevers, who had been sent to Cayenne in 1913 by his hostile uncle, Antoine Brissac. The uncle's goal seems to be either to condemn Nevers or, to say the least, discredit him. In this the uncle is not unlike Bento in Dom Casmurro when he speaks about his wife, but in this text the uncle is an actor only in the sense that it is he who presents the letters to the reader. This is a grotesque elaboration of the "editor" device used in Morel and would seem to be a reminiscence of the complicated mass of editing and translating involved in Don Quijote. In fact, the very drama of the text, Nevers's discovery that the warden of the penal colony on Devil's Island has been altering the perception of his inmates so they will think they are living on individual island paradises, is virtually "lost" in the editorial fluctuations.

The text's form mirrors its basic principle: what we see is not what is but what our senses and our brain tell us we see. Again, the esthetic ramifications of such hypotheses are myriad. They transcend the Renaissance topic of appearance and reality precisely because they suggest that appearance is reality. The only possible desengaño in a situation like this is to realize that there is no message, no secret hidden under the surface of things, that the surface is all. But even this cannot halt the process of interpretation, which does not pretend to alter the text's meaning so much as to situate it in contexts where other possibilities are affixed to it.

The idea of the island explored so intensely in Morel is restated here: what the warden, Castel, does for his prisoners, who are already on an island, is to create for them another island; he does this in a spirit of charity, science working for the benefit of man. Naturally, what he creates are monsters, creatures whose "dérèglement de tous les sens" is a physical truth. The irony of Rimbaud's desideratum in this context, the irony of a synesthesia more absolute than any ever dreamed of by either the symbolists or I. A. Richards, is that it is not achieved through words but through surgery—at least in the most literal reading of the text. But what happens here, as in Morel, demands interpretation. To come to any island is to leave the world behind; it is a transfer from the macro- to the microcosm, from the public world of the conscious, the world with which the ego interacts, to the private world of the subconscious, comparable to the world in which, in Freudian terms, the ego interacts with the id and the superego.

If we establish equivalences, if we see the text as an island, the writer's as he composes it and the reader's as he deciphers it, then other possibilities materialize. In Morel the narrator undergoes a metamorphosis and, like Proteus, becomes an immortal. If metamorphosis is the ruling idea, the dominant metaphor in Morel, we may say that derangement is the guiding principle in Plan, particularly literary derangement. If Morel is "about" how a man becomes an artist and how another man becomes a reader, Plan is concerned with the effects on the public of its encounter with a work of art. In this sense, it may be seen as an extrapolation of the encounter the narrator of Morel has with the images: until he finds out what they really are, he thinks he is mad. This is exactly what the reader of Plan experiences; he knows that the uncle-editor is biased and that the text is therefore twisted to conform with his understanding of his nephew's sins; but just what it is that lies behind the nephew's letters, his relationship with certain family papers, with a girl (Irene), with his cousin Xavier is left deliberately ambiguous. All we know is that Enrique Nevers is either guilty or innocent of a certain crime (we never learn what it is), is either loved or not by Irene, is either mad or sane, and is either dead or alive by the end of the narrative. Such an abundance of clarity is likely to dazzle almost any reader.

This is the point. The text is a series of dead ends, both in its plot and in its allusions. All of the elements seem to be relevant to the story as a totality, but that totality never emerges. This discord between the whole and its parts may be exemplified by the references to Rimbaud which appear throughout the text. Early in the book the narrator-uncle reports, "Those days [Nevers] spent in the capital of the penal colony seemed to him a season in hell," to which an indulgent editor adds a gratuitous footnote, "une saison en enfer." A little later the narrator refers to two ships, "one Sunday the Schelcher, the next the Rimbaud." Then, much later, Nevers reads in notes left by Castel, "A noir, E blanc, I rouge … is not an absurd affirmation; it is an improvised answer." There may be more references or allusions, and some of the above are repeated, but these are the most obvious.

But what is the relationship between Rimbaud and Plan? To call a stay in a disagreeable place "une saison en enfer" is to be pedantic and trite, so we may conclude that the reference is not intended to impress us, especially with the addition of the French original in a footnote. Perhaps its only purpose is to introduce Rimbaud as a type, the "poète maudit," and to make the reader think about his techniques. This second idea is somewhat tenuous, especially if we recall that in Une saison en enfer Rimbaud refutes the association of vowels and colors he makes in the earlier "Voyelles," from Poésies:

J'inventai la couleur des voyelles!—A noir, E blanc, I rouge, O bleu, U vert.—Je réglai la forme et le mouvement de chaque consonne, et, avec des rhythmes instinctifs, je me flattai d'inventer un verbe poétique accessible, un jour ou l'autre, à tous les sens.

This ironic passage might lead us back to the "Voyelles," but there too we are ultimately baffled. As Castel's reference to the poem suggests, it is not Rimbaud, as stylist or as "poète maudit," who is at stake but the concept of sensation or the mind's organization and interpretation of sensation. It does not seem terribly important for an understanding of Plan to link the ship Rimbaud to Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre," although one must wonder why Bioy insists on referring to the French poet. It may be because Enrique Nevers is himself a poet, but again, this is certainly a circuitous association. It depends on the reader's recognition of some link between Nevers and Rimbaud, of the allusions to Rimbaud, and the reader's ability to connect only one aspect (synesthesia, let us say) of Rimbaud's verse with the matters dealt with in Plan.

This unnecessary complication is characteristic of all external references in Plan and seems to say to the reader that he will never be able to trace the text back to its origins, whatever they are. Naturally, even its consistency in this is inconsistent. In one of the rare conversations between Nevers and Castel, it is revealed that Nevers is reading Plutarch's essay on Isis and Osiris. When Castel reproaches him for wasting time on such antiquated trash, Nevers replies, "I'm interested in this book. It deals with symbols." The book not only deals with symbols but also investigates the differences between proper and improper readings of myths; in short, it deals with problems of interpretation. It is this sort of allusion which sheds light on Plan, not the references to Rimbaud or to nineteenth-century investigators of hypnotism or to Goethe's book on colors. Allusions such as the one to Plutarch or scenes like the one in which it is revealed that the character Dreyfus is called Dreyfus because of his admiration for the historical Dreyfus and for no other reason, clear matters up to some extent. From these we learn that what is happening may not be important in itself, but may refer to something important: the name Dreyfus is a symbol; the man who bears it is unimportant. This same character idealizes Zola, because Zola defended the real Dreyfus, and Victor Hugo, because his name sounds like the name of an early governor of the colony, Victor Hugues. (This name is doubly confusing for this reader since Victor Hugues is a character in a work by Alejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces.) That is, the associations made within the text, as well as the associations the reader makes by himself, are all material which contributes in one way or another to a reading of the text; they are designed to vitiate the concept of the "correct" reading.

Interpretation here is a kind of "guilt by association." If something sounds like something else, Hugo-Hugues, or if it is connected with something else by means of repetition, Dreyfus-Dreyfus, the reader is tempted to make something of the association. The pitfall in the creation or deciphering of metaphors is to assume that they do in fact have a single, discoverable meaning, and it is on this misconception Bioy Casares pounces. When the text says, "On the dock, waiting for me, was a dark Jew, a certain Dreyfus," we automatically associate him with the real Dreyfus, who was alive at the time of the narrative (1913). Bioy depends on our association of the two names with the same man, and he does it in order to frustrate our expectations.

This invitation to misread is referred to in the text by the word camouflage. When Nevers scrutinizes Devil's Island carefully, he discovers "the ominous truth," it is camouflaged. This leads him to a series of conjectures until at the end of the book it is explained that the buildings, in which the men operated on by Castel are housed, are painted (inside and out) in such a way that they look to a normal person as if they are camouflaged. The men within see a seascape and tropical islands instead of patches of color. But what is most important is the complete absence of anything beneath that surface: there is nothing "hidden" in this text, just as Castel camouflaged nothing when he painted the walls.

Those who read Plan thinking it a rite of passage are sadly disillusioned when they finish. All seems resolved in the experiments with sensation; at least, almost all. The problem of the fate of the protagonist is left unresolved; he vanishes. The text too will vanish after the reader finishes reading the last word, the last piece of a letter compiled by the fictitious uncle-editor. What he has just experienced is nothing more or less than a confrontation with a totally metaphoric text whose subject is metaphor. Everything in Plan stands for something else, but just what that something is is never explained. It is not important that it is left a mystery because this is just what is supposed to happen. How better to explore the nature of metaphor than to create a colossal metaphor? The symbolist strategy of the recreated sensation or premeditated effect is an obvious ploy here (another gesture toward Rimbaud perhaps), except that this is an entirely cerebral situation, one linked with words and words alone.

Bioy Casares's metaphoric representation of the artist and art in self-reflecting fictions was certainly unique in the context of Latin American literature in the 1940s, and the abstruseness of the texts may account for the dearth of critical material on them. Authors who investigate many of the same problems, Julio Cortázar and Severo Sarduy, who are both part of the "Boom" of the 60s, have received much more attention. Cortázar's principal inquiry into the complex relationship between artist and text, Rayuela, is much more mechanical in its approach to the problem. Cortázar himself seems much more concerned with constructing dialogues or monologues in which ideas about literature are expressed than in presenting his thoughts in a completely metaphoric fashion. This makes him seem a much more timid experimenter than Bioy, despite the fact that Rayuela proposes to attack traditional forms of literary discourse by disordering reading sequence.

The parallels between the works of Severo Sarduy and those of Bioy are striking in spite of the fact that Sarduy and Bioy have radically different intellectual formations. If Bioy's roots lead back to Borges's notion of narrative as he expresses it in "Narrative Art and Magic" and in the preface to Morel, Sarduy's may be traced through the pages of Tel Quel, Roland Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Heidegger, and, ultimately, Jakobson and Saussure. It is a bizarre coincidence that Jakobson's adaptation of Saussure, his association of diachrony with narrative realism, and synchrony with poetic metaphor, should be a parallel to Borges's adaptation of Frazer's two kinds of magic (mentioned by Jakobson), magic worked through contiguity and magic worked through analogy. Borges's invectives against literary realism in favor of metaphoric writing, and Jakobson's objective observation of the differences between these modes of writing are also fortuitously parallel. The result in both cases was the composition, by Bioy and Sarduy, of texts which are highly metaphorical, texts which are in fact metaphors. It is true that Sarduy does not use Bioy's island-and-invention schema, and he departs even more radically from Bioy's superficially comprehensible narratives (they might be taken for science fiction), but the texts are nevertheless similar: they are works that can only be understood as metaphors on metaphor, metaliterary texts designed to show what literature is.