Science Fiction in Argentina: Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse by Joanna Page

Author:Joanna Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The difference between the predetermined repetitions of the weeklong lives of the island’s inhabitants, captured forever by Morel’s machine, and the comparatively arbitrary and meaningless nature of the narrator’s existence is heightened by Bioy Casares’s recourse to the diary form in La invención de Page 117 →Morel. The diary conjures up the vagaries of daily experience: the contingent nature of events; misunderstandings that are later corrected; inconsistencies in behavior or motives; moods and desires that are at the mercy of changes in the weather. The narrator is thus immersed in the present, struggling to understand the wider meaning of a thousand daily mundanities and unable to construct the kind of broader, more coherent picture that hindsight might permit.

Wolfram Nitsch’s perceptive analysis of the representation of writing in La invención de Morel finds that the old technology of the text is repeatedly set at a disadvantage in relation to the newer technology of Morel’s machine.38 The power of literature appears to pale in the light of Morel’s invention, and the narrator admits that “un hombre solitario no puede hacer máquinas ni fijar visiones, salvo en la forma trunca de escribirlas o dibujarlas” (a solitary man cannot construct machines or bind visions, except in an incomplete way to write them or draw them).39 As Nitsch observes, writing also fails in its task of seduction: the words of love laboriously formed out of flowers do not (cannot) attract Faustine’s attention. When he reflects on his obsession with Faustine, the narrator notes “lo escribo para fijarle límites” (I write about it to set limits on it),40 but this endeavor also clearly fails, and Nitsch reads his eventual abandonment of the diary and his surrender to the machine as a recognition of its superior power.41 On the other hand, what restores writing to a position of partial transcendence for Nitsch is the fact that it provides Morel with the keys—set out in Morel’s manuscript—to modify the machine, that in the form of the narrator’s diary it is able to stage a reflexive return to reinterpret earlier observations with the greater accuracy of hindsight, and also, of course, that it survives as a testimony of what has taken place, communicating the truth of the island’s machine to future readers.42

While Nitsch’s discussion thus explores a conflict staged between “el viejo medio de la escritura” (the old medium of writing) and the fantastical new possibilities for reproduction and simulation evoked by Morel’s machine,43 in what follows I emphasize instead the repeated parallels drawn in the novel between Morel’s machine and the narrator’s diary. These relate in greater part to the desire for transcendence and immortality encoded within them. When Morel is overheard saying to someone that all his actions and words have been recorded, for example, referring to the machine, the narrator mistakenly jumps to the conclusion that they have discovered his diary. Once he discovers that the machine’s images may be subject to destruction, he declares that “mi propósito es salvarlas, con este informe” (my purpose is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.