[An American educator and critic, Christ is the author of The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion (1969) and has contributed to the critical collections The Cardinal Points of Borges (1971) and Prose for Borges (1972). In addition, he and Gregory Kolovakos have translated into English two works by Peruvian novelist and short story writer Mario Vargas Llosa. In the following excerpt, Christ comments on the complex narrative structure of A Plan for Escape.]

In contrast to [a] "hot" text, which outrages our sensibilities and aesthetics, Bioy-Casares's "cool" novel, A Plan for Escape, politely refuses to disturb us as it grows ever inward with a complexity that is the evident nature of its narrative…. A Plan for Escape confuses us with a slim mystery that is monomanically single, ostentatiously planned….

Bioy-Casares is a close friend of Borges and the two have collaborated on many fictions, including film treatments. Bioy-Casares is clearly the lesser writer, yet one of his novellas, The Invention of Morel, is the basis for one of Borges's most important aesthetic manifestos. In his preface to that book, Borges suggested a theory of plot construction which he developed in his essay on narrative and magic. The theory is quite simply a denial of psychology as a basis for fiction because psychology admits of all behaviors and explanations; instead, the writer is urged to make plots that function with the deliberate cause and effect, at a distance, of the magic whereby a pin stuck in [a] doll in one place kills someone in another. This aesthetic of what Borges refers to as "inlaid" details has largely been ignored [in the United States] because The Invention of Morel has been ignored. Nevertheless, this theory is the basis for any clear understanding of the revolutionary force of Borges's writings and for the elegant formalism of both his and Bioy-Casares's fictions, which Borges has called perfect fulfillments of the theory—in implicit rejection of [Miguel Asturias] and all writers like him.

Both Morel and A Plan for Escape are plotted in the tight manner of mystery stories and both of them depend on willful aberrations of the senses for their mystery. (Significantly, Rimbaud is alluded to in A Plan for Escape.) Working in line with Dr. Moreau's experiments in Wells's story, a secondary character in each novella (Morel in one, Castel in the other) devises ways to alter man's perceptions of the world and, thus, to alter that world itself. Both novellas are science fictions, born of Berkeley's esse est percipi by way of H. G. Wells and clearly reflect Borges's thematic presentations of time and space. What makes them notable, however, is the convoluted method of presenting the mystery so that everything in Plan, for example, is called into question, not least of all the reader's perception of what "really" happened.

The plot of Plan is simple enough: a young man, Henri Nevers, is exiled for a period to an island that makes up the Devil's Island complex, apparently because of some misdemeanor in the family business. Nevers longs to get away in order to join his fiancée in Paris, and his narrative takes the form of letters to his uncle who rather unsympathetically and coolly edits them into the text we read. What's more, the people Nevers talks to don't reveal themselves clearly and, besides, he's ill—all of which makes his perception of what is going on as well as our perception of him and it unverifiable. The more Nevers tries to understand what the strange Castel is doing, the more evidence he translates into explanation, the less he really understands. The fact that Castel, as we ultimately learn, is performing radical surgery—appropriately bloodless and discretely unspecified in the text—on men's sensory apparatus in order to make their nutshell prison seem an unbounded world simply confirms Bioy's repeated indication that while we can only read the world through the translation of our senses, those senses are unreliable in rendering that world.

Sophisticated, brittle, witty, and allusive, Bioy's novel has been robbed of some of the shock it must have had when it was originally published in 1945 during the Nazi atrocities—which it suggests by the most delicate and distanced means: rather like a technician handling radioactive isotopes with elaborately articulated forceps through a protective barrier. The content of his book is made safe for us, sterilized as it were, by the complicated technique, and in its remoteness, the experience of reading A Plan for Escape is something like the experience of reading Hawthorne's stories; but Bioy could not write of his tales, as Hawthorne could write of his, that they "have none of the abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the written communication of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation." Bioy's does seem a solitary mind in communication with itself, and the translation his fiction requires may be what we have come to expect of the act of reading in the time since Hawthorne's hypothetical censure.