Whoever has endured short stays in faraway cities will have discovered--as I have--
that solitude, with its endless monologue and string of petty decisions (now I'll do this, now I'll do that)... 
Adolfo Bioy Casares

Oddly enough, in that fickle and suspect realm of images, celebrity, or reputation--in short, in the public perception--Adolfo Bioy Casares hasn't had a moment alone. For this reason he would be an unusual writer in any country, but in Latin America he may be unique. The whole enterprise of literature is too precarious to conceive of a living community of writers, let alone a group dynamic. Nevertheless, for most of his writing career he was regarded as a lesser, but still important figure in the clique that regularly contributed to the literary journal, Sur.ⁱ He collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges on many projects. Their joint productions were so interwoven they sometimes appeared under a single pseudonym. Not only was he seen as Borges' understudy, a protégé fifteen years his junior, but Bioy Casares had to contend with the growing literary reputation of his wife, Silvina Ocampo. Since Borges' death Bioy Casares has finally received the recognition that has fallen to others around him all of his life.

As a consequence of this sudden attention a large portion of Bioy Casares' writing has found its way into English. There has been a concerted push to reprint translations of his earlier books, introduce old work that has never been translated, and still keep up with his very latest material. Determining what was done when isn't easy. Nor have I found a good bibliography that might help sort through these translations. I've made an arbitrary decision to look at the new materials in English, the work that hasn't been seen before, even if in some cases it may have been first written years ago.

In a review of Bioy Casares' The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata, John Updike described this Argentine writer as "an assured literary performer." This same label could be accurately applied to Borges and Gombrowicz (if not Updike himself for that matter). However, the professionalism implied in Updike's characterization didn't strike me as all that worthy at first. It had an empty, dispassionate ring to it that put me off for years. In the technical displays that these writers can muster sometimes one does have the feeling that they are performing, acting, engaged in rhetorical embellishment at the expense of life. I'll take the head over the heart any day, but I resent being forced to make the choice.

I think it's somewhere in Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water that he makes the same complaint about Borges and Bioy Casares. He too was initially put off by their skills but eventually came to appreciate both of them further on in life.

Fortunately, in Bioy Casares case, there may yet be more materials to relish. He is still appearing in the cultural pages of the papers in Buenos Aires. Although he turned eighty-four last month, in recent photographs he looks well.

The Russian Doll & Other Stories was originally published in 1991 and then translated into English the following year. These stories are new writing and some of them are clever, really clever. Perhaps too clever. They often have the feel of literary games. However when Bioy Casares sets himself in the universe of art paradoxically the sense of artifice dissipates. Clearly it's a realm that he knows well and he writes about it convincingly. You won't see many descriptions of a community of creative artists in Latin American literature, not even among the multitudes that have been in exile. (That experience of persecution and banishment has the universal effect of isolation and despair. Even being plunked down in a Parisian café doesn't seem to alleviate the sense of loneliness.)

Presumably because the arts--all of them--are such marginal enterprises there have been precious few cities in Latin America where a community of artists have flourished, where vibrant mixtures of playwrights, painters, musicians, novelists, and actors have discovered the contrasts and similarities of their disciplines and their individual gifts. Cross-fertilization is a rare phenomenon. Outright attacks on the intellectuals and artists by the military, stagnant or dead economies, and the sheer weight of illiteracy are all to blame. And yet, there in Buenos Aires is one of the stunning exceptions in this bleak atlas. It's a stark instance of a Latin American city that has raised, promoted and maintained a tradition in the arts. Perhaps if these governments of the hemisphere provide something other than revolutions and dictatorships we'll see more literature about the lives that create. At this point it would seem that only an eighty-four-year-old man can write about such things. The theme apparently requires an imaginative mind, a long memory, or the good fortune to have been associated with the remarkable achievements of a small coterie of writers.

Although The Russian Doll presents the most recent tales that have been translated, since its publication Suzanne Jill Levine has collected and translated a sampler of earlier stories that span thirty years in Bioy Casares' career. Selected Stories (1994) includes 15 tales published between the 1950's and the 1980's. I think this is the fifth book of Bioy Casares' that Levine has translated--these two volumes of short stories and three novels.

Unfortunately, I don't have The Russian Doll before me at the moment and cannot assert that those stories, like most of the tales in the Selected Stories, are first-person accounts. The narrator is always male, recounting events around him or adventures in which he took part. This tale-teller is never the same individual, a single, identifiable voice or character reappearing in several different stories, but there are common features of that voice that many of the narrators share. Not the least of these common elements is a mind barraged by the niggling interior thoughts that he alludes to in the epigram. Bioy Casares' ability to capture this endless monologue of instructions, doubts, second thoughts, dreams, wishes, irritations and so on does more than establish a certain fidelity to consciousness; it gives the reader access to the narrator's motives and strategies in daily life.

These motives may not always be worthy ones, as is the case with the narrator of "Pearls Before Swine." The story begins in an arena for the arts. The narrator attends a performance of Berlioz' "The Damnation of Faust" on his last night in Montevideo. He falls in love with the woman who sits next to him, conquers her, leaves in shallow triumph the following day and gradually realizes that he threw away his soul. The brevity of these events is not mirrored in the slow reckoning of the hell that the narrator will face in himself. That monotonous string of interior directives born of solitude is the harbinger of lifetime regret, not the light-hearted lunacy this narrator scoffs at. This particular story is first-rate and the collection as a whole is an excellent one.

Following Bioy Casares' own lead, Levine has divided the selections into two groups, just as the author himself had in a pair of previous (untranslated) anthologies of his own tales. The first half is explorations of love.ⁱⁱ The other half is flights of the fantastic. The love stories usually portray the wealthy, the well-to-do, who seem to be insulated from many mundane concerns that dominate those less well-off As was not often true of Borges, political events in Argentina and the region make some startling appearances in Bioy Casares' work. Nor do these political intrusions ring false (as I felt they did in the latter stories of Mario Benedetti)ⁱⁱⁱ because they faithfully reflect the manner in which everyone, even the rich, were rocked by events.

"The Hero of Women," a story grouped with the fantastic tales, seems to be narrated by Bioy Casares himself. Nowhere else in these stories, or the other works I have read, is there anything akin to the overt authorial intervention that occurs here. A couple of pages into the story the narrator stops and declares: Even the narrators of fantastic tales finally learn that a writer's first duty is to observe a few events, a few places and, more than anything, the few persons who have crossed his path or whom at least he remembers.

This admission seems to imply that Bioy Casares' bipolar world of love and fantasy had broken down. Many critics have emphasized that, for this author, the fantastic is rooted in the ordinary. I don't think this is true of Bioy Casares' best-known novels, The Invention of Dr. Morel (1940)^iv and A Plan for Escape (1945), both of which were written before "The Hero of Women." But it certainly is the case following those novels.

Levine marks the novel The Dreams of Heroes (1954) as Bioy Casares' retreat from the abstractions of his earlier fantasies. This book was first translated into English in 1987, thirty-three years after it first appeared. The story opens when Gauna, a young mechanic in Buenos Aires, wins a long shot at the races and takes his friends out to celebrate during the 1927 carnival. In three days of drunken revelry Gauna has an experience which he cannot remember. However, in the afterglow of his blackout, he convinces himself that the mysterious event represented the apex of his life. Although he will fall in love and gradually assume a middle-class life, he becomes obsessed with recapturing his destiny by reliving the fateful last night. Three years later he places another winning bet, invites his friends out during carnival and sets off to complete the shape of his destiny.

So there may be another explanation for Vargas Llosa's experience reading Bioy Casares. Vargas Llosa may have come around (just as I have) not only because Bioy Casares has gotten more proficient but because his vision of his craft has grown. The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1985) was translated in 1989 and seems to be a culmination of an open-ended literary philosophy. It's quite a piece of work. There are games afoot but this time the author has created a narrator (a provincial photographer commissioned to take pictures of La Plata) who readily acknowledges that things might appear suspicious yet obstinately denies to himself that there is anything amiss. Never mind that he rooms with an old friend who is a police detective, ignore the fact that this detective's friend disappears in the hands of the police, write off his fortuitous meeting with two sisters, both of whom sleep with him, ostensibly with the permission of their father. No, he's just having a busy time, a good week. Isn't this what always happens in the swirl of urban life? What could possibly be wrong?

The last time I was with you in Montana I became pretty absorbed by photography, what exactly it is or does. (My fascination hasn't abated either.) Among other wonders I have to admire Bioy Casares' insights into the mind of a photographer and the power that the narrator/photographer gradually realizes he can wield with the camera. As the complexities of his relationships with the sisters, their father, a landlady, etc., begin to multiply the narrator takes to photographing these people rather than the buildings he's been commissioned to shoot. And so it is that some really profound understandings about art and imagery enter into this short novel. Bioy Casares may not wrap up the loose ends to everyone's satisfaction, but for a man still writing, still sifting through life, this isn't his concern. A tidy conclusion would run counter to the point of the argument that he's making here: the detective novel, photography, or art are only forms of apprehending the world, not the unknowable mystery itself.

-October 27, 1998

-Editor’s note: Bioy Casares died in Buenos Aires on March 8, 1999.

Endnotes

ⁱ In a memoir written just a few years ago Bioy Casares indicated that he found the editor (his sister-in-law, Victoria Ocampo) insufferable and had little in common with most of the literary crowd she attracted.

ⁱⁱ Every one of these love stories that Levine has chosen is a first-person narration. This is not true of the second group. Clearly the fantastic tales would seem to be at a greater remove from him than the intimate material of personal relations between the sexes. Or he has deliberately distanced himself in the one case and not in the other.

I'm not going to belabor what might seem like a technical point, but, given the skill of this writer, it would be a real mistake to skip lightly over this pattern because it points to a core philosophical stance that marks Bioy Casares: truly knowing someone else--in particular a lover--is by definition an impossibility. Bioy Casares' relentless use of the first person, at least when portraying lovers, is a stoic admission of that belief.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ironically the hollow tone in Benedetti's condemnation of the Uruguayan tyranny may also be a product of exile. I think the circumstances of an exile tend to harden one's opposition, if for no other reason than to prove your credentials to a population that hasn't been lucky enough to escape. The cry for justice often becomes shriller as the injustice becomes less lived as a calamity shared with one's countrymen. Many of the exiled Latin American writers, returning to their homes when a civilian government has been restored, confront a wall of resentment from former friends who "toughed it out" under the dictatorships.

^iv Two of Bioy Casares' books, The Invention of Dr. Morel and Diary of the War of the Pig (1969), have been made into Spanish-language films. I've not seen the former, but the latter, La Guerra del Cerdos (1975), is an interesting production that has been subtitled and released on video.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf