Cortázar understands the tension between these two writers and offers the story as a means to understand the particular place in which his own attempts might be located. Ĭortázar could not have coupled two more disparate writers than Derrida and Bioy Casares because, although some of the ultimate consequences of their conceptions of literary representation might coincide, the modes of reading they each invite are opposed. Cortázar locates the problems he encounters in finding out how to go about his writing in a counterpoint between Bioy Casares and Jacques Derrida, whose « La vérité en peinture» he quotes 5. The story Cortázar wishes he could tell like Bioy Casares is a love entanglement involving the narrator and a woman named Anabel, whose name evokes Edgar Allan Poe and Juan Carlos Onetti 4.
This is explicitly the case, for example, in Borges's «Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius» 3. These words, written for the 1940 first edition of the novel, are not only a testimony to the admiration he felt for it but an indication of the literary friendship between Borges and Bioy Casares, which over the years produced a number of texts in collaboration and an intertwining of the works they signed separately. The quotation from Borges is part of the preface he wrote to Morel's Invention. The first epigraph belongs to Cortázar, who writes about his wish to be Bioy Casares as he starts writing a story that he would like to tell with the kind of detachment and precision he admires in Bioy Casares's work. I believe I am free of every superstition of modernity, of any illusion that yesterday differs intimately from today or will differ from tomorrow but I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw, Der Prozess, Le Voyageur sur la Terre, and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Sometimes, when I can't do anything but begin a story the way I would like to begin this one, precisely when I would like to be Adolfo Bioy Casares. A Poetics of Misencounters: Adolfo Bioy Casares
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