BOOKS
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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 doll in one place kills someone in another. This aesthetic of
what Borges refers
to
as "inlaid" details has largely been ignored here
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 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 fiancee 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 [act
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, willy, 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
