My initial response to “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares was a desire to defend it. As the work of a gifted 26-year old writer, “Morel” is extremely impressive, even powerful. I found it marvelously clever, at times deeply perceptive and very funny, and also prescient regarding technology and science, and contemporary societies’ obsession with these related features as carriers of the ideas of salvation and redemption, and the un-life-like aspects of life itself (such as the “consciousness” of chemical processes and certain machine functions). I was both tired of the tedious recursiveness and moved by the over-stuffed emptiness. I did not find it satisfying, but I do not believe Bioy intended that particular effect. It is haunting.
It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.
Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.
Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an "entire" invention of the narrator's mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.
In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Borges, The Aleph / House of Asterion
Though Borges accuses literature (and language) of being incompetent, in his hands it is anything but. A crashing and conflicted cosmos is ever at hand, pre- and post-Big Bang, simultaneously, as some physicists would agree. Emma Zunz is a marvelous contradiction/conflation of fact and point of view, both true and false at the same time, vengeful and redemptive. The Dead Man gets to live because he is already marked for death, therefore his actions do not matter (who is not marked, eventually, for death?) Flaminius Rufus realizes that he and the troglodyte (who will turn out, perhaps, to be Homer, more or less) have identical perceptions, but that they “live” in different universes: they coordinate and construct the same perceptions differently, in ways incomprehensible to each other.
I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.
Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.
Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction—a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the Garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.
Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?
I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.
Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.
Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction—a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the Garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.
Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Fictions, J.L. Borges
Origin, originality, and time recur as principal touchstones in these highly original stories in which no originality per se is described—rather, endless re-creation of an all-encompassing and timeless original. The dreamer of “The Circular Ruins” finds out that he, too, is but a dream. Of course they are clever, but not merely clever—the source they return to every time is the transcendent and mysterious power that animates life, and the powers that reconfigure, slow and destroy it, in turn.
I understand that Borges is often referred to as foreshadowing post-modern literary concerns, such as the inclusion of the response of the reader (an idea that to me is marvelously Borgesian, because it identifies the book, not the reader, as being the active agent). Also, Borges will have to be credited with foreshadowing the current art world tendency away from the idea of genius as being individual or particular.
Any number of passages could be cited, but page 76 seems especially rich. In one paragraph Borges includes the principles of all perception, art, psychology, and Einstein’s definitions of relativity and acceleration in the “greater than” and “less than” reference—think of a black and white photograph that exists only as areas that are lighter or darker than each other. The next sentence includes the scientific notion that is most clearly associated with Quantum physics in the reference to counting, and how the act “changes” the outcome, a concept now universally understood in many fields, say, sociology, and Borges includes it here as a funny aside that contests the notion of fixed ideas of reality while at the same time suggesting that, at base, everything is “fixed”—just a different view of the one eternal “it.” And yet, at the same time, agreement is most often merely the predictable result of forgetfulness, or collective expectations and coercion.
My favorite of these stories so far is “Menard.” How perfect for the consummate artist to avoid tautology by working steadfastly on something not of his own creation (Cervantes’ “Quixote”). The principle theme that strikes me is life in its present moment, the only moment in which one can “do” anything. Menard is like a monk making a sand painting of the divine.
I understand that Borges is often referred to as foreshadowing post-modern literary concerns, such as the inclusion of the response of the reader (an idea that to me is marvelously Borgesian, because it identifies the book, not the reader, as being the active agent). Also, Borges will have to be credited with foreshadowing the current art world tendency away from the idea of genius as being individual or particular.
Any number of passages could be cited, but page 76 seems especially rich. In one paragraph Borges includes the principles of all perception, art, psychology, and Einstein’s definitions of relativity and acceleration in the “greater than” and “less than” reference—think of a black and white photograph that exists only as areas that are lighter or darker than each other. The next sentence includes the scientific notion that is most clearly associated with Quantum physics in the reference to counting, and how the act “changes” the outcome, a concept now universally understood in many fields, say, sociology, and Borges includes it here as a funny aside that contests the notion of fixed ideas of reality while at the same time suggesting that, at base, everything is “fixed”—just a different view of the one eternal “it.” And yet, at the same time, agreement is most often merely the predictable result of forgetfulness, or collective expectations and coercion.
My favorite of these stories so far is “Menard.” How perfect for the consummate artist to avoid tautology by working steadfastly on something not of his own creation (Cervantes’ “Quixote”). The principle theme that strikes me is life in its present moment, the only moment in which one can “do” anything. Menard is like a monk making a sand painting of the divine.
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