The invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares [2]
Bioy's life was a gentler version of these fables. A shy yet witty, melancholy, and handsome man, he traveled often, mainly to France—a second home and, as for many Latin American intellectuals, a cultural mecca. Despite or because of his timidity, he was a "hero of women" (the apropos title of a later volume of stories).
Bioy's writing obsessively reenacted his early fascination with the ominous adventure. Time and again his hesitant protagonists are thrust headlong—out of some unspelled yet inevitable necessity—into situations they cannot comprehend and whose consequences may be disastrous. H. G. Wells's scientific romance The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist turns beasts into men, becomes a kind of leitmotif throughout Bioy's novels, from Morel (the name an obvious allusion) and A Plan for Escape (1945) to Asleep in the Sun (1973). In the latter, the animal metaphor for the human condition becomes literal when good-natured Lucio Bordenave suspects that a sinister doctor has transformed his wife (literally) into a bitch. Lucio's life is completely dissolved when his soul too is transferred into a dog's body.
Friends "explained" the supernatural to Bioy, according to him, at an early age. Bioy described these revelations thus:
Through cracks that might open at any moment in the earth's crust, a devil might grab you by the foot and drag you down to hell. The supernatural as something terrifying and sad. While we play at throwing a ball against the wall in back of the house, my friend Drago Mitre explains that heaven and hell are the lies of religion. I feel relieved. I would like to go inside a three- way mirror, where the images would repeat themselves clearly. The supernatural as something attractive.
So, for example, what is obviously hell in Edgar Allan Poe's classic story "The Pit and the Pendulum," in which a prisoner of the Inquisition is exposed to the torture of burning, shining walls closing in on him, became in The Invention of Morel an allusion to an ambiguous heaven. The mirror which reflects (but also threatens to supplant us) can be sinister or
good, fearful or beautiful, depending upon how it is perceived. In Bioy's paradoxical universe the symbol turns upon itself: his texts are filled with tantalizing allusions and symbols which are no longer keys but rather enigmatic ciphers. As the narrator quotes Mallarme in A Plan for Escape, the novella Bioy wrote immediately after Morel, "anything is a symbol of anything." His reader experiences an effect of referentiality but there is no reality outside the terrifying or beautiful mirror, outside the text—or the perception.
Bioy wrote and published six books between 1929 and 1940, but he considered (and his critics followed suit) that his real literary production began with The Invention of Morel. To entertain friends in later years he would often trot out one of the earlier attempts. He would claim it was written by some young writer, read a section that would be sure to produce mocking laughter, and then reveal that he was the author,- of these earlier publications he said: "I publish, my friends look sad and don't know what to say to me." But finally, he had a breakthrough, as he described in a chronology of his life and works:
At Pardo I glimpse what will be the plot of The Invention of Morel. I understand that something is wrong with my way of writing and I tell myself it's time to do something about it. For reasons of caution, in writing the new novel, I don't strive to make a big hit, just to avoid errors.
Bioy's early writings "suffered" from the chaotic influence of Surrealism's "automatic writing" and Joyce's stream-of- consciousness. In Bioy's first conversation with el maestro Borges, the mature writer responded to the young man's enthusiasm for Joyce, emblem of the "modern" and of "total freedom," by suggesting—against the grain—that Ulysses was more a promise than an achieved masterpiece. Borges may have