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5. A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui (Conjectures and Conjunctions at the Limits of Possible Worlds)
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CHAPTER FIVE A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui (CONJECTURES AND CONJUNCTIONS AT THE LIMITS OF POSSIBLE WORLDS) Anywhere out of the world. —Charles Baudelaire, Le spleen de Paris Let us admit that, by coincidence, captain Ireneo Morris has fallen into another world; that he would fall again into this one would be an excess of coincidence. —Adolfo Bioy Casares, La trama celeste y otros relatos It could be even redundant to try to glimpse via “The Celestial Plot,” the story by Adolfo Bioy Casares, the possibilities of connection between the parallel worlds favored by fiction. The narrator recounts something more than the flying “accidents” of a pilot, of one who risks a crossing between one real space and another, similar, more or less new, more or less other. In this sidereal, literal, austral plot, the stars—the letters and signs— are presented as propitious for ciphered acrobatics in a kind of acronymic chance. The narrator—Carlos Alberto Servian—only signs with his initials : C.A.S. It was precisely at the CAS. (Centre des Activités Surréalistes, CNRS in Paris) where were initiated the first literary digressions about an astronomic hypothesis, about coincidences that could not only be 43 This piece was presented in Paris on January 30, 1995, in the framework of the CAS/ISCAM seminar at the CNRS, while another colloquium (organized by the same team), convoked around the theme Nouveau monde, Autres mondes, Surréalisme et Amériques, had already given me the occasion, a year before, to pose and discuss these questions. explained by chance, though chance be what is at stake. So many coincidences (casualidades) would result, consequently, at the very least, in two cases, in French, cas (Latin, cadere) fit (Spanish, caben) or fall (Spanish, caen, Latin, cadere) into the same letters. Casual cases? Such coincidences might be sufficient to indicate the accord between these two cases, without even including, in the “cas” series, the beginning of Bioy Casares’s second last name. The exclusion has the purpose of not giving into simplistic temptations of an onomastic fetishism more partial than elemental. Nevertheless, why not accede to interpreting these “cases” as fortuitous signs, above all those which are manifested in the literal/literary region that, “almost unexplored,” legitimates the “discoveries attributed to objective chance,”1 or simply to pure chance. One is surprised by the appearances or disappearances within the celestial plot that this narration by Bioy Casares weaves; they come to intrigue us even more due to clues that make us suppose the existence of parallel worlds, or other worlds in which other cities, other streets, persons or their doubles, their works, entities, identities, or alterities overcome or succumb for no other reason than their simple mention or omission. Like in an atlas or encyclopedia—where a nominal omission could imply the suppression of a continent—these discontinuities put in danger a reality that only the word could save. It is difficult to overcome the stupor, better yet, the fear provoked by the compromises that close in on the word, on writing, responsibilities that do not differ from others that tend to preoccupy the Kabbalists, who know that even the mere omission of a letter could upset the order of the entire universe; by that of just one word . . . On the occasion of the colloquium at the CAS I already evoked an aspect to which I will now only allude. I anticipated then a reality a ultranza—an ultrareality—repeated and accelerated by the pluralization of worlds in a culture of satellites where “the excesses of velocity” contribute to annulling or rescinding the oppositions between here and there, proximity and distance, present and past, both of these and the future, real and unreal. A mixture of histories and hallucinatory utopias of the technologies of communication favor unexpected crossings, coincidences between originals, copies, and facsimiles, that profusion of “lookalikes” that find in pluriplanetary localization a multiple exit to escape the limits of a narrow space, too temporal, too human. More than the vicissitudes of a pilot adventuring across strange worlds, more than the errancies of Bioy Casares’s narrator, who flies over a variety of narrative situations, we try to follow the profound tracks of Louis-Auguste Blanqui2 in the literary fictions of Bioy Casares. In this 44 Borges [54.89.24.147] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:02 GMT) strange intertextual universe, the books of Blanqui—author of the most fearsome insurrections, terrorist of the Paris Communes, the anarchist...