Simona Ardelean

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

 

Auster and Casares or Life between Movies and Reality

 

 

Abstract: Both The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Auster’s Book of Illusions share the same interest for the multiplicative possibility offered by the world of movie and literature. The South-American writer presents a palimpsest made from the overlaying of a beautiful love-story and a deep philosophical concern related to the problem of re-creating the conscience through filming machinery. The North-American one speaks about a disappeared actor of the mute movie world, who goes from being a character in a book to a real self-creator himself.

Keywords: Adolfo Bioy Casares; Paul Auster; Mute Movies; Louise Brooks; Delirium; Immediate Perception; Repetitive Eternity.

 

“Everyone thought he was dead.”

(Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions[1])

 

 

According to the first lines of Paul Auster’s book the entire world thought Hector Mann was dead. The art of this writer consists in finding the starting point of a writing process where you would least expect it, in the almost biographical final announcement upon someone’s life.

Hector Mann, the character, was a mute movie actor who lived somewhere in the twenties leaving behind nothing else but an almost vanished trace imprinted on some films that were hardly attracting viewers in the time when the plot of the book occurs.

The playful tone of Nicci Gerrard’s article[2] about Auster’s book, “Dead Men do tell Tales” is essential for our attempt to prove that although Hector Mann is merely presented as a shadow of the mute movie times, he is permanently interconnecting different temporal realities. Obviously, he has his own story and he becomes a sort of arguable “indirect false narrator” after more than 80 years from his sudden disappearance, when trough a movie sequence he makes professor Zimmer regain his lost smile (Zimmer is in deep emotional pain after the tragic death of his wife and two children in a plane crash).

When the professor sees that movie sequence mentioned he has the status of a living dead among the others. No longer active in society after the tragic happening he isolates himself in a sort of self-destructive own universe, outside any time reference, where all that is left are desperate and inutile attempts to bring back his wife and children by touching their clothes, toys or sensing their perfume. The movie Zimmer sees and to which he connects with presents the long disappeared Hector Mann, no longer important to the contemporary world. The professor starts a quest on Mann’s films because of the admiration for this actor but also to keep himself busy and far from the outside world, but surprisingly, after he finishes his project, “The Mute Universe of Hector Mann” he receives a letter saying that the actor is still alive and more to that he invites Zimmer to pay him a visit.

The main character of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ book “The Invention of Morel” is also dead for society. He exiles himself on an island running from some events that he keeps describing as “terrible” and he imagines that he lives alone. His belief of being the only one there is wrong. The story of this “dead man” (“I feel with disgust that this paper transforms into a will”) starts through a miracle: on the so believed deserted island simultaneously with the beginning of the early summer some rather anachronistic inhabitants appear.

There are no striking similarities between these two books to which we refer in this study and they are not even interrelated. “The Invention of Morel” is written in 1940 and finds its basis in the sustained interest of the writer for those ambiguous situations that cannot be understood by protagonists and which can have dramatic results, but also interest for other literary themes like time, metamorphosis (it is not a coincidence the fact that the name of the book resembles to “The Island of Dr. Moreau”), love and the way the lovers can loose themselves pathetically, or even ridiculous in totally different worlds and especially interest for the movie. Alex Leo Serban emphasizes in his article concerning Casares’ relation with the film world, published in Dilema Veche[3], that Adolfo Bioy Casares dreamt of seeing “the end of the world sitting in an armchair in the cinema “ but ironically instead of the writer Casares assuming the role of a spectator, his book becomes the inspirational subject for the movie “Last year at Marienbad”[4] (1961).

“The Invention of Morel” is never far from the movie. It is either an unintended projection of the mental imaginary of the other writers or inspired by the admiration for one of the famous actresses of the mute movie (Louise Brooks), whom he would have liked to perform in the role of Faustine, as he confesses to Sergio Wolf in 1995. It is worth mentioning that the edition appeared at New York Review Books in 2003[5] has on the cover the photography of the artist and writer (she writes “Lulu at Hollywood”), Louise Brooks, from 1927.

Adolofo Bioy Casares declares himself interested in movie, the inspirational source for his main feminine character is an actress and more to that the gist of his ingenious novella is based on the idea that the appearance of the anachronistically visitors is caused by the construction of a “demonical” machinery (by Morel), a machinery meant to register and continuously repeat a few days from the life of the tourists on the island.

On the other hand, Paul Auster is the writer deeply involved in the cinematography: he is the scene writer of the movies “Smoke” and “Brooklyn Boogie” in 1998 and the scene writer and director of the movie ”Lulu on the Bridge”, which “the Louise Brooks Society”[6] finds it similar, through the role of Mira Sorvino, to the Brooks’ style and which is described by Faber & Faber Reviews[7] in this words:

“In Lulu On The Bridge, Paul Auster plays with this image, creating not just a world within a world, but also alternative worlds where the variations on the themes of love and death are worked out eternally. Moving effortlessly between reality and the fiction of film-making, Paul Auster displays a mastery of form, as well as the ability to engage the emotions in a powerful way.”

It is the story of a saxophone player whose life is completely changed after an accident and especially after he finds, by hazard, a mysterious stone and a telephone number that leads him to a young actress who is performing the role of Lulu (Louise Brooks) in the remake of the classic 1929’s German movie “Pandora’s Box”. The farm where Hector Mann retires in “The Book of Illusions” is called Blue Stone Ranch at Tierra del Sueño, New Mexico, and its name comes from a little stone that the former actor finds in a rainy night near a sidewalk and which proves to be rather an optical illusion. His disappearance from the screen is a process of self destruction, but professor Zimmer embarks on an intense study of Mann’s nearly forgotten work and thus he re-creates the actor’s life indirectly and the result is that he saves himself. We are the second type readers (indirect presentation through the primary lecture of Zimmer) of the fictional film career of Mann and we find out that his disappearance as an artist was premeditated:

“Hector was looking for a way to say good-bye to us, to bid farewell to the world, and in order to do that he must eradicate himself in his own eyes. He becomes invisible, and when the magic finally wears off and he can be seen again, he does not recognize his own face. We are looking at him as he looks at himself, and in this eerie doubling of perspectives, we watch him confront the fact of his own annihilation”[8].

His movie, ”Mister Nobody” presents some particular traits that worth to be remembered in a future analysis: the main character becomes invisible (the mirror does not reflect his image) after he drinks from a strange potion (Jazzmatazz) goaded by his so-called friend. Although he is invisible he can still interact with the others (his body preserves the ability to touch). At the end of a series of comic scenes he defeats his opponent and he goes back to being visible again just when he was about to abandon any hope and to resign himself to watch his wife’s sleep, from posture of a guardian spirit. The immediate effect of his victory is his reflected image in the mirror, sign of his visible side, but not necessary of his identity. Hector is no longer Hector anymore, but a new persona. He is a reinvented man, a transformed one and his content smile fades bit by bit on the screen until nothing else remains of it.

Zimmer considers that this movie is the most relevant one for the mute actor:

“It is a meditation on his own disappearance, and for all its ambiguity and furtive suggestiveness, for all the moral questions it asks and refuses to answer; it is essentially a film about the anguish of selfhood”[9].

To assess his work fairly, we have to look at Mr. Nobody as his last film. It should have been the last film made by Mann according to its significance and at a certain extent it is, but it not the last one produced. In order to observe his contractual obligations he had with the production house, he makes another movie, a sort of repetition of his major themes, but whose name is important for the rigor of the title conforming the reality of the artistry fate. It is “Double or nothing” and it is the only movie where the “the end” finally appears.

David Zimmer travels through the entire world so as to retrieve the left few films of this actor. His fascination for the mute world of the big screen and the book he writes have no other subjective basis than his need to engross himself in work as a defensive mechanism to face the tragedy of his life. No need to make himself known to the public, no inner passion. When he completes this self imposed task another one appears shortly after: the translation from French of Chateaubriand’s book “Mémoires d’outre-tombe“ or as he calls it

“The memoirs of a dead man”. Are they simple coincidences? Let us analyze one relevant fragment: “No one can imagine what I have suffered in being obliged to pawn my tomb, but I owed this last sacrifice to my solemn promises and the consistency of my conduct… My plan was to bequeath them to Madame Chateaubriand. She would have sent them out into the world or suppressed them, as she saw fit. Now more than ever, I believe the latter solution would have been preferable”[10]

After a surprising letter turns up in his mailbox during his work on the “Memoirs” he finds inside the envelope a card saying that Hector Mann lives. More to that he is visited by Alma Grund, a woman who spent most of her live at the Blue Stone Ranch and whose only role seemed to be that one of convincing David Zimmer to go back with her at the farm to meet Hector. During this trip the professor will get to know the whole post-disappearance life of the actor: the jealousy of the two women he loved the when he was performing, the accidental death of one of them, the fact that he changes his name onto Herman Loesser (a lesser or loser Her Mann), his novice years in Spokane, the hometown of Brigid, the dead one (he wants to be near her family as a form of repenting), the time when he knows the vulgar side of the Eros through Sylvia, the porn star and finally the rescue of his future wife, Frieda, from the bank assault, when he was about to die and their decision to retire at the farm. It’s a form of backwards process of an initiation and Hector who meanwhile became Herman suddenly wakes up in a similar situation to his character from “Mister Nobody”: a changed man when no hope was left, reborn and yet dead for society, because he chooses to live anonymously.

What determines him to re-start directing and performing in movies is the premature death of his child, Tad[11]. He is filming in a crazy tempo, using an improvised studio, with poor means, outstripping the conventional taboos of the movies previously made, in an innovator manner (not using the dialogue or with a modern usage of the close-ups), but he promises himself that at the end, all these efforts would be for naught, because the movies will be suppressed. He acts like a destructive genius so as to feed his hunger for art, but he knows that his major oeuvre will be the final scene, the one in which his work will be burned. The previous quote from Chateaubriand was not a random choice, obviously. The wife is in both cases the one who is left behind and the one who has to accomplish this strange and tragic mission: to make sure that the creative agony of her husband will not survive. In Hector Mann’s library, Zimmer discovers to his amazement the volume of Chateaubriand. Auster’s world is a labyrinth, with permanent reflections and reverberations.

The first and the last movie the professor sees before the burning scene of the films is “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”. It is a movie about a writer invited to Hector and Frieda’s farm to find his peace and maybe inspiration for a next book. He meets there Claire, the “niece” of the hosts, proving to be nothing more than a mental projection, who lives in the pace of novel written by the man. The montage is zigzagged, based of the surprising combination of plans, natural sounds, strange perspectives and tempos. Quotes from Kant, like: ”if we divest ourselves of our self or of our subjective form of our senses, of the qualities and relations between objects and the spatial and temporal dimension – even time and space itself- would disappear” are inserted in the movie to offer an explanation for mixing the real and imaginary plan. To save Claire, the writer burns one by one the pages of his new book keeping his character as an unfinished project, of whose re-creation is at any moment repeatable in a fictional universe.

Paul Auster actually writes and directs the movie “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”, starring David Thewlis, Irene Jacob, Michael Imperioli, and Sophie Auster.
Unlike the fictional black and white film of the same title, Auster’s celebration of the mysterious paths of love, art, and the imagination is released in 2007. The recent critical journals we have read[12] are disputing the quality of the movie, but the idea of the movie itself, as a concept, of interrelating cinema and literature is accepted as salutary.

In the deserted island that Casares fictionally creates his main character, a refugee, goes from absolute silence and wilderness to the surprisingly former fashionable sounds of “Valencia” and “Tea for two”. The bizarre materialization of the tourists leaves him with a blank look. All that he can think of is that he will be discovered and to avoid that he isolates himself in the most secluded area of the island, living in the harshest conditions. In the rare moments when he feels secure he inspects the museum, but even if he is alone he has the permanent, strange and confusing sensation of a multiplied loneliness. One day he notices with wonder that there are two suns on the sky, but this unnatural phenomenon is not as appealing as the woman he sees on the cliffs, the woman who is contemplating the sunset in a statuesque manner. Lurking for several days he continues to observe her but by little by little the inner strength of the one who survived on such an unaccommodating island is taken by the fragile hope every in love person has: ”Perhaps my “hope” therapy is a little ridiculous; never hope to avoid disappointment; consider myself dead, to keep from dying”[13]. We know that this quote reflects Hector and Zimmer’s strategy in similar circumstances, but we also know that what saves them from an imposed death, even if denied, is love. The tragedy of our present character is that the woman simply does not see him as if he were invisible.

While lurking, all sort of strange things happen to him:

“and all at once two people were standing there, as if they had not arrived, as if they had appeared only in my sight or my imagination. I hid–nervously, stupidly–under the altar, among the red silks and laces. They did not see me. I am still amazed at that[14]”.

He finds himself in the position of a accomplice to repetitive dialogues, some objects are in different wears state, what was devoiced of life in a previous day the second one is living. The hypothesis he starts to think of look like a logical delirium. Plague or even the fact that he might already be dead is not excluded.

His inner roadmap suffers a process of objectifying itself. The first sight we have on him is that one of a refugee that keeps a journal, a journal understood as a future will, but then he is all of a sudden distributed in the role of an actor in a world that does not accept his existence and finally a mute witness. So his doubt whether he is real or not are almost justified. Sounds absurd, but the tourists he sees have a consistency that according to out way of judging if something is true or not is valid: his senses function and he hears, sees, smell their presence. Everything is empirically correct. Far from what we would call today through the concept of holograms, this tourists are complex structures according to the exterior relevance, “copying” everything that is accessible to the immediate perception. Parallel universes seem possible in this space, but the temporal variant is specific. The key of ontological multiplication rests in the Morel’s mechanism that registers three-dimensionally the person came in vacation on the island, propagating repetitive images of the same scenes. In a very interesting study, “Subjectivity and Mechanical Reproduction in Bioy Casares’ Morel’s Invention” of Irmgard Emmelhainz[15] she emphasizes the question whether it is possible to register in the same time the exterior appearance and the conscience as well, idea provided by the explanation of Morel who reveals to those present on the island that they were filmed and that their future fate is a physical discomposure, but an eternally life. We cannot cease asking ourselves what is the use of his explanation. The promised eternal life is just a pioneer fragment of a future complete experiment. This machinery can anytime be perfected.

To the refugee from “The invention of Morel” the world he comes to know has this essence: “Our life can be compared to a week of this repetitive images in neighboring worlds”[16]an explanation which even the creator of the machinery cannot understand until in the final phase of his filming process:

“My abuse consists in the fact that I have taken your photos without your permission. It is obviously that is not an ordinary type of photo; it is my last invention. In that photography we will live eternally[17].”

The main character feels he is performing a double role: actor and spectator and that’s why we are not surprised of his attempt of insertion in the scenes that he has seen so many times before. He does it knowingly thanking care to be always near Faustine so that a future spectator could be mislead to think that he was contemporary to those on the island. For whom he is directing the following of this “false” movie? For the one who will succeed more that Morel succeeded, the one who will be able to copy the fragmentary present and doing that, to copy the consciences as well. He is his first spectator is because he sees himself next to Faustine in the new scenes, but he sees himself living in the movie and dying in the real world in the same time. This may look like a split conscience, a tragedy to an everyday man. He “inherits” from Morel the cursed talent of creating in an indirect way, but no matter how his prove of love would be judged or appreciated he is a creator anyway.

Zimmer dreamt that one day someone will find the lost movies of Hector, the ones he liked to think that were copied before being destroyed by Frieda in the same way that Casares’ refugee hoped to find a future spectator of his movie, a spectator that impressed by this tragic love story would make possible his entrance into the conscience of the woman. In order to do that someone will have to read his journal too, because otherwise the movie might seem quite real. So the coexistence of movie and writing confession is a must. Books and movies are in a permanent interrelation for these two writers, Auster and Casares. Martin Frost, the character played by the character of Paul Auster re-writes his novel so as to keep alive his character. Sounds amusing we utter that, but it is one of the facets of the meaningful core of the “The Book of Illusions”. The permanent re-invention is characteristic to Casares as well. The refugee re-writes himself in the posture of an actor so as to live in a repeated and never ended creative act near the woman he loves.

Not directly correlated these two books share a common preoccupation balancing their beautiful content between the inseparable worlds of movies and literature, two of the most expressive means of expressing repetitive eternity.

 

 

Notes