Iulia Micu

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

 

 

Imaginary Intimacy as a Death Metaphor

in La Invención de Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

 

 

Abstract: This paper analyses how imaginary intimacy becomes both the equivalent of death in La Inventión de Morel and the key metaphor in Casares’ fiction. In combining two essential points of view (circular time and the transmigration of consciousness from the original to the replica), the novel insists on the ingenious way in which reality can be restructured and multiplied. Intending to avoid or postpone death, the mechanical temptation really brings it closer. The idea of virtual reality as ‘life inside an image’ reinforces the inversion of the relationship between image and its object and carries the metaphor to its ultimate consequences. The story is also at its best in creating a painfully ironic new metaphysics, an allegory of individuality in the modern world. It also relies on all the modern concepts related to image theory.

Keywords: Argentinean Literature; Adolfo Bioy Casares; La Invención de Morel; Mirror; Photography; Reflection; Reality vs. Virtuality.

 

 

In Alternating Current, the poet Octavio Paz, one of the Nobel Prize winners, defines Latin American literature as a mask of the author and the world. Literature is a critique of the world and of the author himself. Every novel is centred on an axis whose two poles are the mask and consciousness, verbal invention and the critique of language. Each novel strikes the reader as a hieroglyph. Each sign leads to another sign. Besides this lies ‘an enormous, joyous, painful, hallucinatory verbal material which may remind the reader of the baroque style’ (Paz, 1990: 42). Paz also talks about a process of abstraction and purification, about cosmopolitanism and crystallisation. The body occupies a central place in literature. Erotic passion has a privileged place, and imagination, its implacable double, is consequently uniquely privileged. Although they belong to different generations, Márquez and Casares regard love as a sovereign passion.

‘Bioy Casares’s theme is not cosmic [as in Márquez] but metaphysical: the body is imaginary, and we yield to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most complete and the total perception not only of the unreality of the world but also of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; we ourselves are shadows’ (Paz, 1990: 43-44).

Casares considers phantoms no less real than physical bodies. Paz concludes,

‘The body is a very real thing, and the revelation that it offers us, whether animal or divine, is human: it tears us away from ourselves and projects us into another, more total, life or death. Bodies are visible hieroglyphs. Every body is an erotic metaphor and the meaning of all these metaphors is always the same: death’ (Paz, 1990: 44).

The Invention of Morel is a text about a man who first became an artist, and then a work of art. At first, he keeps a diary, and then he turns into a component of an image and becomes part of an art object. This is how what we could call the “l’ère du faux” (Guy Scarpetta, 1985) begins. The Argentinean writer combines two essential points of view: circular time (the eternal recurrence theme that also fascinated Borges, his close friend) and the transmigration of consciousness from the original person to the replica which then plays out his part endlessly, from the very beginning to the end. To create a copy of a person in an identical context means that the consciousness of the copy cannot be differentiated from the originals and they simply cannot coexist. Casares inverts here the idea from The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the picture and not the man is subject to time. He inverts it again until the playback of a recording takes on greater reality than the continued existence of the subjects. The story is also unique for its alienation from the consciousness that persists in the projections. Although Morel claims his machine creates nothing, it only replicates what exists; Casares makes it clear that the machine restructures reality. Or, maybe the book wants only to give a painfully ironic new metaphysics, an allegory to freedom and individuality into the modern world. The priority of this novel is to reflect on all the modern concepts about image theory.

Deeply influenced by his father’s library (especially by Schopenhauer, Hume and Barkley), Bioy Casares began writing under the influence of the cosmopolitan atmosphere from Sur magazine founded by Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires, in the early 1930’s. Casares travelled often, mainly to France, which was a second home for him and, as for many Latin America intellectuals, a cultural Mecca. Thus, his early writings reveal the chaotic influence of the Surrealist ‘automatic writing’ and Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Also he embraced Borges’s poetics of condensation and concision and favoured the speculative and the artificial over the expansive representation of human experience. On the other hand, he was more concerned than Borges with re-creating the ‘lived and the seen’. Bioy’s sentences are relevant for his tendency toward shorter, more concise narrative forms made up of elliptical phrases meant to be read between the lines. Borges wrote upon Casares’s Luise Greve, Dead (1937) in Sur,

‘Our literature is poor in fantastic narratives, preferring the formless tranche de vie or episodic which makes Bioy Casares’s work unusual. In Chaos (1934) and The New Storm (1935) imagination predominates; […] In Luis Greve he began to master time and space games which attempt to impose another order – a literary one – upon the absurd universe’.

One of the stories in his early volume, The Postcard Lovers is about a young man who interpolates his image into the photograph of the girls he loves. It anticipates The Invention of Morel which carries it to its ultimate consequences, transporting this scheme into the realm of science fiction away from Argentina to an unknown and deserted island as the author needs to decontaminate himself from subjectivity and gain aesthetic distance. Relying on science fiction from Wells to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, his textual ‘invention’ was prophetic and intuitively predicted future scientific realities. The central female figure in the novel is Faustine, one of the virtual beings with whom the narrator happens to fall in love while watching her as she watches the sunset:

‘She wears a bright scarf over her dark curls; she sits with her hands clasped on one knee; her eyes, her black hair, her blossom make her look like one of the Spanish or gypsy girls in those paintings I detest’.

This was apparently based upon the great silent movie actress Louise Brooks, star of Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. In July 1995, when asked by Sergio Wolf about this as his prior inspiration for La invención de Morel, Casares admitted that he was in love with her but he didn’t have any good luck. She disappeared quickly to Europe in order to shoot a movie and then quickly vanished from the movies. ‘She would be Faustine’, the Argentinean writer concluded. The idea of voyeurism reinforced here the mythological orphic story re-thought in a technological way mixed with the literary theme of the shipwreck. Translated into French in 1953, this plot about the two lovers coexisting spatially into different temporal dimensions inspired Robbe-Grillet’s script for Resnais’s 1961 film L’Anée dernière á Marienbad. Soon, Morel became the cultural pattern for all images of an intellectual enamoured of his own mental constructions or ‘bachelor machines’.

Seeing his friend’s work as a ‘perfect’ contemporary model of the genre, Borges placed Casares‘s first successful fiction in the company of Henry James‘s The Turn of the Screw and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In Borgesian terms, the fantastic or the ‘magic’ emanates from pre-modern modes of thought. The fantastic narrative involves the irruption of a lucid magical system of causation known as ‘natural’ causation, making the reader question the normal boundaries between fantasy and reality. Borges concludes in his 1940 preface,

‘In Spanish, works of reasoned imagination are infrequent and even very rare […] The Invention of Morel […] brings a new genre to our land and our language’ (Casares, 1964: 7).

Casares’s 1940s novel turns out to be a veritable tangle of texts, like a Borgesian labyrinth of a library. First, it is an island book, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or, more pertinently still, Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. This island on which the fugitive narrator has shipped up is full of voices and holographic entities just like Prospero’s. The entire book is about the human capacity to interact with imaginary worlds. The island, either empty or the land of monsters, is a sham virtual underworld. Secondly, in her essay on the Psychology at the Fin de Siècle, Jenny Bourne Taylor talks about a real Doctor B. A. Morel, an influent psychologist, whose Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneracy of the Human Race of 1857 was regarded as one of the most important works on mental science in the nineteenth century. Degeneracy, in psychologist Morel’s opinion, takes the form of a ‘morbid deviation from an original type’ which ‘contains transmissible elements’ that accumulate in descendants, until the line finally becomes infertile (Marshall, 2007: 15). He changes the evolutionary optimism of his time into a degenerationist theory which sees humans in a gradual process of adaptation to the environment and which had many echoes in all the artistic manifestations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from H. G. Wells up to Casares. In contrast to these Morel doctors, there is another Morel, Carlos Morel (1813-94), the most important Argentinean painter. He is mostly known by posterity for his social scenes with ‘gauchos’, Indians and local customs in the late 1830s and early 1840s. This is how Leslie Bethell characterises him when analysing the cultural history of Latin America. He was the first who felt that the labyrinthine metaphysic of fantasy emanating from the River Plate, in the absence of such alternative culture, fused local reality (Bethell, 1998: 169). In Le miroir. Revelations, science-fiction et fallacies, Jurgis Baltrušaitis comes up with a different Morel, who lived between 1728-1810, was a gardener, architect, and coined the French term architecte-paysagiste. His ideas were far more influential on the later landscape style of the early nineteenth century (Baltrušaitis, 1978: 24). Last but no least, H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist turns beasts into humans, becomes a kind of leitmotif throughout Bioy’s novels, from Morel and A Plan for Escape (1945) to Asleep in the Sun (1973).

Later on, the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz described the central themes of Casares’ fiction as not cosmic but rather metaphysical. From The Invention of Morel to such later stories and novels as The Adventure of a Photographer in La Plata (1985), Casares’ fiction is meant to suggest the awareness of solitude, of the pathetic, the tragic and yet comic ways in which lovers lose one another. It also suggests the impossibility that one should be the heroic master of his/her destiny. Borges once called Bioy the ‘secret master’ in order to pinpoint how he experimented with baroque metaphors in classical prose. Love was always to be an endangered and endangering obsession for the Latin American writer. In a short chronology of his life written in 1975, he recalls the stories his mother told him in early childhood, around the age of five. They provided the blueprint for many of his own fictions,

‘My mother tells me stories about animals who stray from the nest, are exposed to danger, and in the end, after many adventures, return to the security of the nest. The theme of the safe, or apparently safe, haven and of the dangers that lurk outside still appears to me’.

In search for a new demonstration of the secret of Golem, Maurice Blanchot considers The Invention of Morel a proper example of a story in which the image-men produced by the diabolic camera of a demiurgic scientist, lure into their retreat a fugitive who is seduced by one of them, becomes an image himself and dies in the wake of these immortalised shadows. The French writer dismisses any relation between the image and the audio-visual production. What matters here first is the relation to the myth of Orpheus and the double composition of the image-experience. The image is demonstrable insofar as it is born of the gaze cast upon the object; secondly, far from replacing the gazed upon thing or being, the image insinuates itself at the core of the object, precipitating its ghostly becoming. No doubt it would be appropriate to connect this experience with the experience of death, as proposed by the second version of the imaginary, where the vision of the corpse offers a radical example of the becoming-image of the human in and through death. But this unveiling of the image in the human’s mortal fall which, paradoxically, is also the becoming immortal of the human, should not conceal the fundamental relation that the uncovering of the image maintains with the condition of writing. The writer resides in proximity to the image. He aims to live wonderfully in this imaginary intimacy.

Blanchot explains next that Morel, like Orpheus looking at Eurydice, precipitates the death of representation by the transformation of the body into image. As it proposes a double of the real, writing is a process of doubling. Eurydice was twice lost in the gaze of her lover, given over to the night, and thereby to the inspiration of Orpheus. As a shadow, she opens the network of resemblance that from text to text designates, with Blanchot, the relation between becoming image and the exile from the self. The extreme logic of the intransitive resembling is manifest in the gaze of Narcissus, who does recognize himself in his image, initiates a fundamental paradox, and simultaneously proposes the imprint and the exile, splitting and becoming estranged. Having already looked at Eurydice, Orpheus experiences expropriation and death, ‘he, himself in this gaze is absent’ (Blanchot, 2003: 89).

The image has a contradictory relation to space. As it is both a symptom and a mask of space, it figures the attraction of the void while denying it in any figural form. The image has a reaction to the gaze, to the attraction of death: this is what was at stake in the above-mentioned story by Casares. But the image’s relation to death is not one that could be underwritten by too a rash reading of the second version of the imaginary or even of the gaze of Orpheus (Bailey Gill, 1996: 146). It turns out that Morel’s invention is a diabolical holographic recording, a device that captures all of the senses in three dimensions. It is diabolical because it destroys the subject in the recording process, rotting the skin and the flesh off the bones. Thus it confirms the natives’ fear of being photographed and it is also a warning of the dangers faced by art when it holds up a mirror to nature.

In his story The Aleph, the name of the kabbalistic Hebrew letter, Borges invents his own ‘mirror of ink’ in which he saw the whole history of the world and his own self immersed as in a mirroring whirlpool. Borges always regarded all literary production as an infinite reproduction. Thus he compares textual reproduction with the reproduction in a mirror and he also considers it is analogous with sexual reproduction.

‘Then, Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they both multiply the number of men’ (Borges, 1962: 17),

says the narrator in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius , one of the most important stories of the century. They are all stories about the parallel existence of words and worlds, replicas of reality, its copies which finally disintegrate the real world. Explaining his first contacts with the supernatural, as ‘something attractive’, Casares wrote, ‘I would like to go inside a tree-way mirror, where the images would repeat themselves clearly’. Thus, Morel, the novelistic character, invents a machine which can produce perfect copies using a sort of catoptrical theatre. The exact replicas of images such as those from the cinema fascinate him as much as they fascinate Bioy. The copies would be so realistic that they would get confused with the objects they were meant to represent, giving ‘perpetual reality to his sentimental fantasy’. The points of correspondence between the objects and their representation are so minute that the device seems not to invent but to preserve them,

‘Before these machines, a person, an animal or a thing are comparable to a broadcasting station […] if you open the full range of the transmitters you will see Madeleine as a totality and totally similar to herself. Do not forget that we have here images extracted from mirrors, perfectly synchronised with the sounds, the touch, the tastes, the smells and the temperatures. […] No one who sees this will admit that he is seeing images and if, later, it is our own images which appears to your eyes, you will not believe that these appearances are images: it will be easier for you to think that I hired a company of actors’ (Casares, 1964: 58).

Such an opposition may introduce an aesthetic of the disappearance contradictory in many ways. The disappearance through multiplication would be the first contradiction. Furthermore, the aim of mechanical preservation is total and in order to be accurate, it destroys what it conserves. By confusing the representation with the object it represents, it ceases to be what it is and become something else, it can be any object or it can simply not be at all. Therefore, technical recording has a double meaning: through mechanisation it both preserves and destroys. Because of its increasing fidelity the mechanical overproduction of images makes the real thing become redundant, even disposable. As the narrator from The Invention of Morel says, ‘the copies survive, incorruptible’ (Casares, 1964: 81). The same thing occurs in Tlön where ‘even in memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of another, so that we can know nothing for sure – not even if it is false’.

But the mystery of mirrors is no less important than the mystery of reflection. In the Invention of Morel the reflecting mirror can be sinister or good, fearful or beautiful, depending upon how it is perceived. In this paradoxical universe the symbol turns upon itself. As Casares quotes Mallarmé in his Plan for Escape, ‘anything is a symbol of anything’. Neither mirrors, nor fatherhood are abominable to Bioy, who would often recall with delight the triple mirror in the dressing room in which his mother, Marta was repeated to infinity. Sliding between two images, the hero of The Invention of Morel, becomes an image that moves away from real life. The narrator from Tlön discovers that mirrors are monstrous devices but, at the same time they normalise the phenomenon of inversion. Here is both an inversion and an investment: an object, when turned upside down is inverted, but it also invests, because it multiplies. The mirror-image is monstrous not only because of its hybrid condition, not only because it multiplies itself, but also because it (de)monstrates (the Spanish monstrous comes from the Latin monstrare). To show (mostrar) is to make visible, and it is, above all, not to tell. Since Antiquity to tell and to show (contar vs. mostrar) appear as opposite actions, rooted in two different figures, the former agonistic, the latter imitative: diegesis and mimesis. Both figures appear at the beginning of the Borges story as contradictory and cooperative principles: ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia’ (Borges, 1962: 17). The mirror exposes, it shows and risks. By not showing, the book contains and conceals. Both are imperfect limitations, ambivalent reproductions. They present an absence, i.e. they re-present, they present something anew.

Borges’ narrator says:

‘Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we pondered a long time on a vast polemic concerning the execution of a novel, in the first person, whose narrator would omit and disfigure facts, or incur in diverse contradictions which would allow just a few readers – indeed very few readers – to intuit atrocious or banal reality’ (Borges, 1962: 17).

It is still possible that the novel Borges refers to is The Invention of Morel. The publication date of the story coincides with that of the novel. In this short novel, the narrator speaks in the first person singular, leaves out data, twists the facts and contradicts himself. Both works justify a philological leap and they even seem to be identical as a way of denying time. They also seem to affirm a sort of bi-localisation and talk about a parallelism between worlds and words. The two books need one another in order to support but also to contradict themselves. Bioy dedicates his novel to Borges, Borges writes the prologue. Borges uses Bioy as a character of his story and attributes to him the invention of the discovery of a secret cita as an encounter during which imagination and thought, reason and unreason, are reconciled.

The multiplication of a figure in a mirror or in a species, i.e. reproduction, does not start with the image or with the mirror, it predates both of them. Whether textual or natural it saves the existent species from extinction. This is why the museum is a recurrent site with Casares. The museum and the library (also frequent metaphors with Borges) are both spaces which collect, index and exhibit all kinds of relics in a parallel world, metaphors of displacement, the utopian outside-time place where history and human imagination is preserved. In the novel, Morel explains his invention which anticipates death and consequently, will afford immortality:

‘Now I have entered this new universe; it is now impossible to suppress Faustine’s image without mine simultaneously disappearing. […] I hardly felt the process of my death. I still see my image in the company of Faustine, but my soul has not yet passed into the image. […] When this occurs, it will mean that I am dead and have ceased to see Faustine in order to reside with her in appearance, an appearance that no human eye will capture’ (Casares, 1964: 88).

In the same year, 1940, Walter Benjamin, persecuted and threatened by the French police or the Gestapo, committed suicide. Neither Borges’ story nor Bioy’s novel are detached from the tragedy of a century which could not stall the advance of totalitarianism, the obsessive problem of a Trauerspiel, a mourning for which memory cannot revive and which mechanical reproduction killed in a final game. It is an inside-out Faustian pact: the narrator falls in love with Faustine, a Faust turned woman but above all, a false Faust an un-Faustian one. Significantly, the first syllable of Faustine is pronounced Fausse in French. If we spell out the capitals letters in the title of Borges’ story, we get T. O. U. T. which, if read the way round, give us the French word tout. Everything is referred to as the image in the mirror. It is an upside-down world ruined by machines such as those invented by Morel in order to reproduce life and which ended up immobilising it. Thus, an invention intended to avoid or postpone death does bring death closer. As Benjamin said, all is about an aura and its loss, an aura which earlier marked the individuality of each work of art leading to individual denial, to suicide. Instead of a person, here comes the image. Instead of the work, here comes its reproduction. Man is exposed to a mechanical temptation which blinds memory and destroys immortality by upholding a replica to the original. Neither Mephisto, nor Dr. Moreau or Morel, nor any Doctor Faustus could prevent the ultimate advent of machines and through them ultimate death as memory loss.

The story’s theme, i.e. the constant duplication of events, is literally enacted as it is represented both by the writer’s diary and Morel’s holographic invention. As Lucia Santaella argues, if a sign had the power to become identical with what it represents, it would cancel itself out. If a sign could lead an independent life, it would no longer be a sign: because of his intimate link with the object, it will become an object itself. This novel is about life and death because Morel has pushed the metaphor of death to its limit. And although this metaphor is valid for each sign, it reminds the absence of what it represents: ‘The sheer presence of signs brings with it a kind of death, which is the longing for what is absent’ (Lucia Santaella 1998: 267). In Photography and Fetish, Christian Metz analyses the lingering look upon photography as a powerful trauma of loss and separation, concerning the inevitable approach between representation and death. Firstly, he tackles the social custom of keeping the photographs of those who died as souvenirs. Secondly, the photographed person becomes an effect of time and of his/her own disappearance. Thirdly, the instantaneous becomes a link between photography and death, a spontaneous detour of the object away from this world into another one, into another time. This is also what Barthes means when he says that any photograph is a memorial of a relic of the person or the thing whose image it preserves (Barthes, 2000: 96). This idea is very well explored in Bioy Casares’s novel. For Barthes, as for the others, the photograph is a way to represent the relation between the subject and the photographed object, the relation between the human being and things.

‘The structure of culture – and therefore existence itself – is undergoing a fundamental change’, Vilém Flusser writes (Flusser, 2000: 7). In Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography) he proposes the hypothesis that two fundamental turning points can be observed in human culture since its inception. The first can be summed up under the heading the invention of linear writing. The second is being experienced by us right now and it could be called the invention of technical images. As significant surfaces, images signify mainly something out there in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions. It is imagination which has the specific ability to do all these. Consequenly, the significance of the image is a synthesis of a double thinking process, of two intentions. One is in the image, the other belongs to the observer. ‘It follows that images are not denotative but conotative complexes of symbols providing space for interpretation’ (Flusser, 2000: 8). One’s gaze at the surface of the image can return to an already seen element. The ‘before’ can become the ‘after’, reconstructing the time as an eternal recurrence of the same process. Therefore, images have magical powers and become mediations between the world and human beings.

‘They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: instead of representing the world they obscure it until human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create’ (Flusser, 2000: 10).

In fact, today technical images have taken the upper hand when magically reconstructing reality and turning it into a global image scenario. Aiming to remember the original intention behind the images, linear writing was invented, thus transposing the circular time of magic into the linear time of history. From this moment onwards, historical consciousness was ranged against magical consciousness: it was the struggle of writing against the image.

In the nineteenth century, the organic metaphor still reigned. Perfume companies produced crystal bottles shaped as coffins and meant to hold the last drops of the perfume the beloved departed preferred. It was a futile gesture defying the irreparable loss. First, the invention of the photography, and then the invention of the phonograph would keep alive the memory of the deceased while the mortal body dissolved into the inert matter of the universe. The uncanny confluence and confusion between the human and the machine was motivated by the external struggle against death. It would change the expectations and forms of mourning and melancholia even more, transposing the very modality of the humans’ intimate relation to death. The perfectibility of simulacra through recording, the hybridisations of humans and machines are cultural results of this anthropology of modern death which has split the world into poets and scientists. The former fantasise that technology would compensate for the cataclysms of the soul; more specifically it would counter the nostalgic wounds of lost or unrequited desire. The latter imagine that technology would compensate for all the catastrophes of the body. If prosthesis can be created for a lost limb, why not also for an impossible passion or a lost love?

In the 1950’s the French artist Michel Carrouges coined the term machines célibataires (bachelor machines). It refers to ‘a fantastic image that transforms love into the mechanism of death’ (Carrouges, 1976: 21-22). Recording becomes intimately bound to transformations in the poetic forms of nostalgic lyricism and romantic morbidity. Such transformations describe the solipsistic circuit of the same three terms: a delirious metaphysic, a useless simulation, and a morbid functionalism where time, solitude, and death exist synonymously and contemporaneously. The major characteristics of the bachelor machines are the chronological transformations, art-making, artificial life, and voyeurism. They are like the “machines désirantes” of Deleuze and Guattari, the same as those imagined by the Avant-garde movements at the start of the twentieth century. Through this kind of early modernist technophilia and technophobia, science and literature diverge even further within the genres of science fiction and Virtual Reality. Living virtuality as a life inside an image reinforces the inversion of the relationship between image and its object, in Peircean terms, the inversion between an object and its representamen. Here phenomenology becomes necessary to complement semiotics. The question of a consciousness ‘entering’ an image was already examined by Sartre in his seminal L’imaginaire (1936), the most complete phenomenological description to this day. The idea of virtual reality as ‘life inside an image’ transgresses the limit between the object and the icon.

Casares dreamed of a machine that could penetrate consciousness and record the thoughts and feelings of the transmitter. The artificial ecosystem he describes evokes the most recent developments in the domains of Interacting Cinema and Virtual Worlds where symbolic relationships develop between human and artificial sensorialities. Like Augusto Roa Bastos’s ‘pluma recuerdo’ in Yo, el Supremo, Morel’s machine is like the memory pen, a sort of light pen which optically reads and records the objects over which it passes. Like the Aleph in the story with the same title by Borges, the holographic camera in Bioy Casares, or like José Buendía’s spinning dictionary in Cien años de soledad, the memory-pen is an attempt to capture, control and dominate reality.

 

 

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