"Sin embargo, de un momento en otro, en esta pesada noche de verano, los pajonales de la colina se han cubierto de gente que baila, que pasea y que se baña en la pileta, como veraneantes instalados desde hace tiempo en los Teques o en Marienbad."
-Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel
Borges wrote that "To classify [La invención de Morel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." (7). If anything will finally reveal one's poverty of thought, that they are merely an impostor among impostors, it will be any attempt to write about the perfect novel. There was a critic that believed he had happened upon an original idea, one that had not yet been weighed down by volumes of criticism or, worse yet, a few books of that ugly beast we call "critical theory". Still, he wasn't surprised to discover that two South American's (one Chilean, the other a pompous Uruguayan) had prefigured what he once thought to be "his ideas." Their bibliography is an exact copy of the sacred combination of texts he'd hurriedly penned nine days ago in the University of Texas library. How strange that someone else had read Ecographies of Television and thought to include it in a study on Bioy Casares's masterwork. Returning to the novel he'd attempted to understand, hoping to salvage his work, the young critic read on page 52, "Di un paso: por arcadas de piedra, en ocho direcciones vi repetirse, como en espejos, ocho veces la misma cámara...". Then, according to the librarian's report, he stood up and staggered out of the library, repeating these words again and again, "los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres."
No comments:
Post a Comment