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CHAPTER FOUR On “Ultrarealism”: Borges and Bioy Casares (THE INTERLACING OF THE IMAGINATION AND MEMORY ON THE THRESHOLDS OF OTHER WORLDS) For Christian Metz Those who sleep are in separate worlds, those who are awake are in the same world. —Heraclitus, Fragments Given the circumstances, it would perhaps have been more suggestive, and certainly more appropriate, to propose a title derived from “Un drame bien parisien,” the novella by Alphonse Allais presented for the first time in Le Chat Noir1 in 1890, a quite disconcerting piece of the gaité française, which Allais had nourished with a “poetic imagination situated somewhere between Zeno of Elea and that of children.”2 As is known, André Breton includes this curious text in his Anthologie de l’humour noir.3 The doubtful chromatic affiliation of the humor of this piece would be justified less by the macabre laughter than by a certain affinity with The Black Square on White Background of Kasimir Malevitch,4 because of its mystic, Suprematist suppressions that unite the profusion of forms into an elemental geometrical figure and that reduce the variety of colors to black, which is not a color. Too regular, “square où tout est correct”5 (square where everything is correct), the square paradoxically insinuates a worrying forecast of those not-so-mysterious black holes in which crumbles “the microcosm of a collapsing universe,”6 empty plenums of collapsed stars “on the edge of nothing they give us nothing on guarantee (nantissement),”7 that strange guarantee with which Breton sustains humor at the margin of these cosmic considerations. 31 In a certain way, the pre-vision of a square hole, which recalls the attempts to trace the quadrature of a circle, is close to the perplexity of the denouement of Allais’s novella—without another similarity than the rules of its own discursivity. The stupor in the face of its disarticulated logic drew attention to itself once again, more recently, in a different, less spectacular , literary and disciplinary circle, off-stage, starting from a series of conferences, colloquia, and seminars where Umberto Eco has converted it into the recurrent reference of his formulations concerning “Possible Worlds.” Published repeatedly in articles,8 re-elaborated in Lector in fabula,9 it constitutes a notion about which he continues to speculate in his more recent books.10 The expression “possible worlds” was originally formulated by Leibniz , who introduced it into philosophy as the divine act of giving existence to a real world, one which God chooses among the numerous possible worlds created by His providential mind,11 and God felt himself free not to create the best of all possible worlds; it was only He who preferred this one to all others. As Christian Metz says, “What delimits a discourse with regard to the rest of the world, and for this very reason opposes it to the ‘real’ world, is that a discourse must necessarily be pronounced by someone [. . .] it is one of the characteristics of the world that it is not proffered by anyone.”12 Actual or possible, preferred or proffered, the limits of my world are the limits of my language, and because it is known that the chiasmus is true: only if there is language will there by a world, whether of truth or of fiction. Its properties may or may not coincide with the real facts, but nevertheless it is possible to narrate them or describe them verbally— graphically, photo- or cinematographically, construct them. Defined by the discursive conditions that give form and figure to objects, they are like Lichtenberg’s knife without a blade that lacks a handle;13 they are not to be found anywhere but could come to exist some day in some place or, simply, can be described. Their discursive reality is certain; however , the real presence of an anterior posterior, or exterior reference beyond the text, with which it does not necessarily coincide, is merely possible. Each fictional character can be the onomastic origin of generations of people who carry its name without altering the archetypal docility of its aesthetic condition. A chimera is a mythological monster, a vain dream, or a gargoyle sculpted on the edge of a gothic cornice. If, because of an excess of municipal zeal, Illiers comes to call itself Illiers-Combray, the toponymic literalness of the interpretation gives neither more nor less credence to the fiction that is held in suspense. Despite the closure of the story,14 literary entities have a tendency to exist...

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