Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 3)

The conclusion to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

In the course of the Great War, newspapers and magazines sometimes turned away from the terrible worries of the present to consider what would happen later on, once peace had been regained.  The future of literature in particular preoccupied them.  One day I was approached and asked how I saw the future.  Somewhat confused, I declared that I did not see it at all.  "Don't you see at least," was the reply, "a few possible directions?  We admit that we cannot foresee the details; but you at least, you the philosopher, have an idea of the set of possibilities.  How do you imagine, for example, the great dramatic work of tomorrow?"  I will always recall my interviewer's surprise when I answered him: "If I knew what the great dramatic work of tomorrow would be, I would create it myself."  I saw clearly enough that he thought the future work locked away, since then, in who-knows-what cupboard of possible works; in consideration of my age-old relationship with philosophy, I was supposed to have obtained the key to that cupboard. 

"But," I say to him, "the work of which you speak is not yet possible." 

"But it simply has to be possible, so that it will come to pass." 

"No, it is not.  That said, I will grant you that it will have been." 

"What do you mean by that?"         

"It's very simple.  I mean that a man of talent or of genius will emerge and create a work: and then it will become real and even, by the same means, retrospectively or retroactively possible.  It would not be, it could not have been, if this man had not emerged."

"That's a bit much!  You surely would not allege that the future influences the present, that the present introduces something into the past, that action goes back through the course of time and leaves its mark behind!"

"That depends.  I have never claimed that one might insert some of the real into the past and thus work backwards through time.  But that one might lodge there some of the possible, or, rather, that the possible might lodge itself there at any time, this is not doubtful.  As reality gradually creates itself, unpredictable and new, its image is reflected behind it in the indefinite past; thus it finds it has been, at all times, possible; but just at the very moment where it begins to have always been, and that is why I was saying that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once its reality has appeared.  The possible is thus the mirage of the present in the past.  And as we know that the future will end up becoming the present, as the effect of the mirage continues unabatedly to produce itself, we tell ourselves that in our current present, which will be the past of tomorrow, the image of tomorrow is already contained although we haven't come to grasp it.  And precisely there lies the illusion.  It is as if one thought that, having espied one's image in the mirror before which one has just situated oneself, one could have touched the image if one had remained behind.  Moreover, in judging in this way that the possible does not presuppose the real, one admits that the realization adds something to the mere possibility: the possibility would have been there the entire time, a ghost awaiting its hour; thus it would have become reality by the addition of something, by who-knows-what transfusion of blood or life. 

"One does not see that it is exactly the opposite.  That, what is more, the possible implies the reality corresponding to something linked to it, because the possible is the combined effect of reality having appeared and of a device that sends it backwards.  The idea, immanent to most philosophies and natural to the human mind, of possibles which would be realized by an acquisition of existence, is thus pure illusion.  One might as well claim that the man of flesh and bone stems from the materialization of his image as it appeared in a mirror, under the pretext that in this real man there is everything which one finds in this virtual image with, in addition, the solidity needed so that one can touch that image.  But the truth is that here one needs more to obtain the virtual than to obtain the real, more for the image of man than for man himself, because the image of man will not be drawn if one does not begin with man, and one would need more than a mirror."  

This is what my interviewer forgot when he asked me about the theater of tomorrow.  Maybe he was also unconsciously playing on the sense of the word, "possible."  Hamlet was doubtless possible before having been realized, if one means that there was no insurmountable obstacle to its realization.  In this particular sense, we call possible that which is not impossible; and it goes without saying that this non-impossibility of a thing is the condition of its realization.  But the possible understood in this way is not virtual or ideally preexisting to any degree.  Close the barrier and you know that no one will cross the road; from there it does not follow that you would be able to predict who will cross that road if you open the barrier.  Nevertheless, you pass surreptitiously, unconsciously from the completely negative sense of the term "possible" to the positive sense.  Here possibility just meant "absence of impediment"; from this you now forge a "pre-existence in the form of an idea," which is something completely different.  In the first sense of the word, it is a truism to say that the possibility of a thing precedes its reality: by that you understand simply that such obstacles, once surmounted, were surmountable.***  

But, in the second sense, this is an absurdity, because it is clear that the mind in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was drawn in the form of the possible would thereby have created the reality.  Thus it would have been, by definition, Shakespeare himself.  In vain you may imagine initially that this mind could have emerged before Shakespeare, and here is where you are not thinking about all the details of the drama.   As you gradually complete these details, Shakespeare's predecessor will find himself thinking everything that Shakespeare will think, feeling everything that Shakespeare will feel, knowing everything that Shakespeare will know, perceiving therefore everything that Shakespeare will perceive, occupying consequently the same point in space and time, having the same body and the same soul; being Shakespeare himself.

Yet I insist too much upon that which goes without saying.  All these considerations impose themselves when one is dealing with a work of art.  We will not, I believe, end up finding it evident that the artist creates the possible at the same time as he creates the real when he is carrying out his work.  From where then would we likely hesitate to say just as much about nature?  Isn't the world a work of art, incomparably richer than that of the greatest artist?  And isn't there just as much absurdity, if not more, in supposing here that the future is drawn in advance, that possibility pre-exists reality?  Once again, I would like the future states of a closed system of material points to be calculable and, consequently, visible in their present state.  But, I repeat, this system is extracted or abstracted from a whole which comprises, apart from inert and unorganized matter, organization.  Take the concrete and complete world with the life and consciousness it contains; consider nature as a whole, generator of new species in forms as original and new as the drawing of any artist; follow, within these species, individuals, plants or animals, each of whom has its own character – I was about to say personality (because one blade of grass does not resemble another blade of grass any more than Raphael resembles Rembrandt); rise above individual man to the societies which unfurl actions and situations comparable to those of any drama: how can one still speak of possibles which would precede their own realization?  How does one not see that if the event is always explained after the fact by such and such preceding events, a completely different event would also be explained well, in the same circumstances, by antecedents chosen differently – what am I saying?  Ultimately by the same antecedents cut differently, distributed differently, perceived differently in retrospect?  From the front backwards a constant remodeling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect.

We do not see it always for the same reason, always in thrall of the same illusion, always because we treat as greater that which is less, and what is less as that which is greater.  Let us put the possible in its place: evolution is something very different from the realization of a program; the doors of the future open very wide; a limitless field is liberated and released.  The wrongness of doctrines – quite rare in the history of philosophy – that knew to grant a place to indetermination and liberty in this world, is not to have seen what their affirmation implied.  When these doctrines spoke of indetermination and of liberty, they had in mind with indetermination a competition among possibles, and by liberty a choice between possibles – as if the possibility were not created by liberty itself!  As if an entirely different hypothesis, in placing an ideal pre-existence from the possible to the real, did not reduce the new into nothing more than a rearrangement of old elements!  As if it could not be taken in this way sooner or later as being calculable or predictable.  In accepting the postulate of the adverse theory, we would introduce the enemy in its place.  One has to make a choice of the two: it is the real which becomes possible, and not the possible which becomes real.

But the truth is that philosophy has never frankly admitted this continual creation of unpredictable novelty.  Ancient thinkers were already repelled by such a notion since, being more or less Platonic in their approach, they concluded that Being, complete and perfect, was given once for all things, in the immutable system of ideas.  There was nothing that could be added to the world unravelling before our eyes; on the contrary, it was nothing more than a diminution or degradation, its successive states measuring either the increasing or decreasing distance between what is, a shadow projected in time, and what ought to be, the Idea seated within eternity, and sketching out the variations of a deficit, the changing form of a void.  It was Time that would spoil everything.  Modern thinkers, true enough, are fond of a different point of view.  They no longer treat Time as an intruder, a perturber of eternity; but all the same they reduce it to a mere semblance.  The temporal is therefore nothing more than a confused form of the rational.   What is perceived by us as a succession of states is conceived by our intelligence, once the fog has lifted, as a system of relations.  The real becomes once again the eternal, with the only difference that it is the eternity of the Laws in which phenomena are resolved, instead of being the eternity of Ideas which would serve as their model.  But in one case as in another, we are dealing with theories.  Let us stick to the facts.  Time is immediately given.  This is enough for us and, waiting for its inexistence or perversity to be demonstrated to us, we will simply conclude that there is an effective gushing of unpredictable novelty.

Philosophy will benefit from this by finding some kind of absolute in the moving world of phenomena.  But we will also benefit from this by feeling happier and stronger.  Happier because the reality that is being invented before our eyes will give each of us, incessantly, certain satisfactions that art procures here and there for those on whom fortune shines.  To us it will reveal – beyond the fixedness and monotony which our hypnotized senses initially perceived owing to the constancy of our needs – this renovative and incessant novelty, the moving originality of things.  But above all we will be stronger because we, creators of ourselves, will feel that we are participating in the great work of creation that is at the origin and that continues before our very eyes.  In pulling ourselves together, our faculty to act will increase.  Humiliated until then in a pose of obedience, slaves to who-knows-what natural necessities, we will rise up again, masters associated with an even greater Master.  Such is the conclusion of our study.  Let us keep seeing a simple game in our speculation about the relationship between the possible and the real.  It may be a preparation for living well.

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*** Perhaps again we should ask ourselves whether, in certain cases, the obstacles did not become surmountable thanks to the creative action which surmounted them.  This action, unpredictable in itself, would then have created the "surmountability."  Before this action, the obstacles were insurmountable and, without this action, they would have remained so. 

Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 2)

The second part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Great metaphysical problems are, in my estimation, as a rule badly described: they either tend to resolve themselves once their wording has been rectified, or reveal themselves to be problems formulated on the basis of an illusion, problems that disappear once we closely scrutinize the terms of this formulation.  In effect, they are born from what we shift or transpose in fabricating what we will call creation.  Reality is global and indivisible growth, gradual invention, and duration: as such, one might compare it to an elastic balloon that dilates little by little, suddenly assuming here and there unexpected shapes.  But our intelligence thinks of the origin and the evolution of all this as an arrangement and rearrangement of parts that would be doing nothing more than changing places.  Therefore it could, in theory, anticipate any state of arrangement and assembly; by starting with a definite number of stable elements, one is implicitly furnishing oneself in advance with all possible combinations. 

That is not all.  Reality, such as we perceive it directly, is of a fullness that never ceases to swell, one that knows no void or emptiness.  It has extension as it has duration; yet this concrete stretch is never infinite space and infinitely divisible so that intelligence exists as a terrain on which to build.  Concrete space has been extracted from things.  These things are not in it, it is concrete space that is in these things, and as soon as our thought process rationalizes reality, it makes space into a receptacle.  As it is accustomed to assembling parts in a relative void, it may think that reality encompasses who-knows-what kind of absolute void.  For if ignorance of radical novelty is at the origin of metaphysical problems poorly described, the habit of moving from void to fullness is the source of non-existent problems.  Besides, it is easy to see that the second error is already implicated in the first.  But I would first like to define the error more precisely.

I say that there are pseudo-problems, and that these are the most worrisome problems of metaphysics.  I will divide them in two categories: the first category has engendered theories of being; the second category theories of knowledge. 

The first category consists of asking oneself why there is being, why something or someone exists.  The nature of this is of little importance.  Regardless of whether it is matter, mind, or one and the other, or that both matter and mind are not enough, demonstrating a transcendent Cause, when one has considered existences and causes, and causes of these causes, one feels oneself drawn into a course of infinite length.  If one stops, it is simply to save oneself from the dizziness.  We may still say, or think we may still say, that the difficulty remains, that the problem remains and will never be resolved.  It will, in fact, never be resolved.  But it also never ought to be brought up. 

It is only brought up if we imagine a certain nothingness that would precede being.  One says to oneself: "there might be nothing there," and one may be surprised when, in fact, there is something there after all – or Someone.  But analyze this phrase once more: "there might be nothing there."  You will see that you are dealing with words, and not at all with ideas, and that "nothing" has no meaning here.  "Nothing" is a term of habitual language that can only make sense if we remain on the terrain, belonging to man, of action and fabrication.  "Nothing" means the absence of what we seek, of what we desire, of what we await.  Indeed, to suppose that experience could never present us with an absolute void means that it would be limited, that it would have contours, that it would be, after all, something.  But in reality there is no void.  We only perceive and, as it were, only conceive of fullness.  A thing only disappears when it has been replaced by something else.  Thus suppression also means substitution, only that we say "suppression" when we foresee the substitution of only one of two halves, or rather one of two faces – the face that interests us. 

We confirm in this way that we would like to direct our attention to the object that has left, and to turn our attention away from the object which has replaced it.  So we say that there is nothing more, understanding by that statement 'that which does not interest us,' and that we are interested in 'that which is no longer there' or 'that which could have been there.'  The idea of absence, or nothingness, or nothing, is thus inseparably linked to that of suppression, real or potential, and the idea of suppression is, in turn, nothing more than an aspect of the idea of substitution.  And it is here that we find methods of thinking which we employ in our daily lives.  It is of particular interest to our industry that our thinking knows how to linger upon reality and, when necessary, remain attached to what was and what could be, instead of being monopolized by what is.  But when we betake ourselves from the domain of fabrication to that of creation, when we wonder why there is being, why there is something or someone, why the world or God exists and why there is not nothing, when we wrestle with the most worrisome of metaphysical problems, we accept virtually an absurdity because all suppression is a substitution.  And if the idea of a suppression is nothing more than the truncated idea of a substitution, then talking at all about suppression is simply summoning a substitution, which would contradict itself if it were not one. 

For the whole idea of suppression has precisely enough existence as that of a round square – the existence of a sound, flatus vocis – or if it does in fact represent something, it translates a movement of the intelligence which goes from one object to another, preferring that which it has just left to that before which it finds itself, and, in so doing, designates the presence of the second by the 'absence of the first.'  We considered the whole matter then made it disappear piece by piece, one after the other, without consenting to see what replaced it.  It is therefore the totality of these presences, simply aligned in a new order, that one finds before one's eyes when one wishes to sum up the absences.  In other words, this pretended representation of an absolute void is, in reality, that of a universal fullness in a mind that leaps indefinitely from part to part, having resolved never to consider the void of its dissatisfaction rather than the fullness of things.  Which brings us back to saying that the idea of Nothing, when it is not just a simple word, implies as much matter as that of Everything, with, what is more, an operation of thought.

I would say the same for the idea of disorder.  Why is the universe ordered?  How does a rule impose itself upon the irregular, how does form impose itself upon matter?  How is it that our thinking finds itself among these things?  This problem, which has become for modern thinkers the problem of knowledge after having been, for ancient thinkers, the problem of being, is born from an illusion of the same kind.  It disappears once one considers that the idea of disorder has a definite sense in the domain of human industry or, as we say, in fabrication, but not in the domain of creation.  Disorder is simply the order we do not seek.  You cannot suppress one order, even by thought, without having another rise to the surface.  If there is no aim or willfulness, there is simply a mechanism; if the mechanism yields, it is to the benefit of willfulness, of capriciousness, of an aim.  But when you expect one of these two orders and you find the other, you say that there is disorder, formulating what is in terms of what could or should be, and objectifying your regret.  Thus all disorder is composed of two things: outside of us, an order; and within us, the representation of a different order which is the only one that interests us.  Suppression therefore again means substitution.  And the idea of the suppression of all orders, that is to say, the idea of absolute disorder, contains a true contradiction, because it involves assigning one face to an operation that, hypothetically, consists of two.  One may also say that the idea of absolute disorder only represents a combination of sounds, flatus vocis, or, if this idea responds to something, it translates a movement of the mind that leaps from mechanism to aim, from aim to mechanism, and which, to mark the spot where it is, prefers to indicate each time the place where it is not.  Thus, in wanting to suppress order, you provide yourself with two or more orders.  Which brings us back to saying that the conception of an order being added on to an "absence of order" implies an absurdity and thus the problem disappears.

The two illusions which I have just mentioned really compose only one.  They involve believing that there is less in the idea of a void than in the idea of fullness, less in the concept of disorder than in that of order.  In reality, there is more intellectual content in the ideas of disorder and nothing, when they represent something, than in the ideas of order and existence when they imply many orders, many existences and, moreover, a trick of the mind which juggles them unconsciously.       

And so, I find the same illusion in the case that concerns us.  At the heart of these doctrines that do not recognize the radical novelty of every moment of evolution there are misunderstandings, even errors.  But most of all there is the idea that the possible is less than the real, and that, for that reason, that the possibility of things precedes their existence.  They would thus be representable in advance; one could think of them before they were actually realized.  But it is the inverse that is the truth.  If we leave aside for the moment closed systems subject to purely mathematical laws, isolable because they are not gnawed upon by duration, if we consider the ensemble of concrete reality or very simply the world of life, and with even more reason the world of our consciousness, we find that there is more, and not less, in the possibility of each of these successive states than in their reality.  For the possible is merely the real with, in addition, an act of the mind which propels therefrom the image into the past the moment it is produced.  But this is what our intellectual habits prevent us from perceiving.                

Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

I would like to return to a subject I mentioned before: the continual creation of unpredictable novelty that seems to keep happening in the universe.  For my part, I believe I feel it every second.  I am fond of imagining the details of what is going to occur; and how feeble, abstract and schematic is my imagination in comparison to the event actually produced!  This realization brings with it an unpredictable nothing that changes everything.  Say, for example, that I have to attend a meeting.  I know what people I'll find there, around what table and in what order they will be seated, and what problem they will discuss.  Yet they can arrive, sit down and begin to talk just as I have imagined, and say what I indeed thought they would, and still the constellation of this data gives me a unique and new impression, as if it were drawn as a single original trait by the hand of an artist.  Farewell, image I had fashioned for myself, simple juxtaposition that could be calculated in advance of things already known! 

Now I do not want this image to have the same artistic value as a painting by Rembrandt or Velasquez; nevertheless it is just as unexpected and, in this respect, just as original.  One might claim that I did not know the details of these circumstances, that I was ignorant of these persons, their gestures, and their attitudes, and that if the totality of this picture seems new to me, it is because there exists a surplus of elements.  And yet I possess the same impression of novelty with regard to my internal life.  I feel it more than ever with regard to acts of exclusively my own volition.  If I deliberate before I act, the moments of deliberation are summoned by my consciousness as successive sketches, each one of its own kind, which a painter might make of his painting; and the act itself, in taking place, will arise from what is desired and hence from what is foreseen, and yet has no less of an original form.  

Be that as it may, one may say; perhaps there is something original and unique in a state of the soul.  But the matter is repetition; and the outside word adheres to mathematical laws, superhuman intelligence that would know the position, the direction and the speed of all the atoms and electrons of the material universe at a given moment, and could calculate any future state of this universe as we calculate a solar or lunar eclipse.  Such a conclusion is possible if we are dealing with an inert world, and here the matter may become debatable, at least for elementary phenomena.  But this world is nothing more than an abstraction.  Concrete reality encompasses living, conscious beings encapsulated in inorganic matter.  I say living and conscious because I believe that whatever is living is conscious de jure; it becomes unconscious de facto when consciousness falls asleep.  But up to those areas in which consciousness gets drowsy, in the vegetable state, for example, there is regulated evolution, defined progress, ageing – in short, all the outward signs of duration which characterize consciousness. 

Why then would one speak of inert matter in which life and consciousness would be inserted as within a frame?  How can we even speak of an inert state to begin with?  The ancients imagined a Soul of the World which would assure the continuity of the existence of the material universe.  Stripping this concept of its mythical components, I would say that the inorganic world is a series of infinitely fast repetitions or quasi-repetitions which are summoned in visible and foreseeable changes.  I would compare them to the oscillations in the pendulum of a clock: some are attached to the continued relaxing of a spring that connects them to one another and from which they declaim progress; others pace life of conscious beings and measure their duration.  In this way, a living being lasts in essence: he lasts simply because he designs and plans unceasingly and because there can be no design or plan without research, and no research without groping about.  Time is this very hesitation, or it's nothing at all.  Suppress the conscious and the living (and you will only be able to do so by means of an artificial effort of abstraction since the material world may imply, once more, the necessary presence of consciousness and of life), and you obtain in effect a universe in which successive states are theoretically calculable in advance like images juxtaposed upon a film before the film itself rolls.  Why does reality unfurl?  How is it not unfurled?  What purpose does time serve (I speak here of real, concrete time, and not of abstract time which is merely the fourth dimension of space***)?  Such was once the starting point of my reflections.  About fifty years ago, I was strongly attached to the philosophy of Spencer.  One fine day I realized that time served no purpose and did nothing.  For something that does nothing is itself nothing.  Nevertheless, I said to myself, time is something.  Thus it does something, it acts.  What could it do, then?  Simple common sense replied: time is that which impedes everything from occurring all at once.  It delays, or, rather, it is delay.  It must be, therefore, development and planning.  Could it not then be the vehicle of creation and choice?  Doesn't the existence of time prove the indeterminacy of things?  Isn't time this very indeterminacy?

If such is not the opinion of most philosophers, it is because human intelligence is designed precisely so as to understand things from the opposite point of view.  I say intelligence; I do not say thought; I do not say mind.  Astride intelligence there is the effect of immediate perception, for each of us, of our own activity and the conditions in which it occurs.  Call it what you will: it is the feeling that we have to be creators of our intentions, our decisions, and our acts, and thereby of our habits, our character, and ourselves.  Artisans of our life – artists even, when we want to be – we work continuously, with the matter furnished by the past and present, by heredity and by circumstance, at molding a single, new, original figure, as unpredictable as the form the sculptor bestows upon the clay earth.  Doubtless, we are aware of this work and of what makes it unique while it is taking place; but the main thing is that we do it.  We do not need to deepen it, nor is it necessary that we be fully conscious of it.  No more, in any case, than the artist needs to analyze his own creative power; this concern he leaves to the philosopher and he contents himself with creating.  On the other hand, the sculptor does indeed need to know the techniques of his art and everything that he could possibly learn about them, and these techniques relate first and foremost to what his oeuvre has in common with other oeuvres.  These techniques are dictated by the demands of the matter upon which they operate and which impose themselves upon the artist as they do upon all artists: in short, they engage, in art, what is repetition or fabrication, and not creation itself.  Upon these techniques the artist concentrates what I would call his intellect.

By the same token, in the creation of our character we know very little about our own creative power.  To learn about it, we would have to return to ourselves, to philosophize, to climb back up the slope of nature, because nature has always wanted action and has hardly ever thought about speculation.  As soon as it is no longer a matter of simply feeling within ourselves a certain impetus and assuring ourselves that we may act, but of returning the thought upon itself so that we might seize this power and grab hold of this impetus, the difficulty becomes so great as to oblige us to invert consciousness's normal direction.  On the contrary, we have an enormous interest in familiarizing ourselves with the techniques of our actions, that is to say, to extract, from the conditions in which our actions occur, everything that could provide us with general recipes and rules on which our conduct would be based.  There would be no novelty in our acts apart from what repetition we would find in things.  Our normal faculty of knowing is thus in essence the power of extracting what stability and regularity there might be in the flow of the real. 

Is this a matter of perceiving?  Perception seizes upon on infinitely repeated shocks which are, for example, light or heat, and contracts them into relatively invariable sensations.  There are trillions of external oscillations which perception condenses for our eyes in the fraction of a second, the vision of a color.  Is this a matter of conceiving?  Forming a general idea means abstracting from diverse and changing things a common aspect that does not change or, at least, that offers an invariable hold for our action.  The constancy of our attitude, the identity of our potential or virtual reaction to the multiplicity and the variability of represented objects – here is what first marks and outlines the generality of an idea.  Finally, is this a matter of understanding?  This is simply a question of finding connections, establishing stable relationships between the facts that take place and revealing laws – an operation as perfect as the relationship is precise or the law mathematical.  All these functions are constitutive of intelligence.  And intelligence is in the right as long as it befriends and attaches itself to regularity and stability, to what is stable and regular in the real, to materiality.  Thus it touches one of the sides of the absolute, just as our consciousness touches another such side when it seizes within us a perpetual efflorescence of novelty or when, enlarging itself, it sympathizes with the indefinitely renovative effort of nature.  Error begins when intelligence attempts to think of one of these aspects as it thinks of another, and puts it to a use for which it was not made.            

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*** We were able to demonstrate in our Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, Paris, 1889, p. 82, that measurable Time could be considered to be "the fourth dimension of Space."  We were dealing there, of course, with pure Space, and not the amalgamation Space-Time of the theory of Relativity, which is something quite different.

Rilke, "Abend"

To Alexandra on her birthday, a work ("Evening") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

The evening slowly changes vests,
Held by old trees in serried strand; 
You look, and from you break these lands – 
One heaven-bound, and one that sets –

That leave you unbelonging now,     
Not quite as sure of endless time, 
Not quite as dark as dumbest house: 
The stuff of stars that each night climbs.

Unravel life upon its loom, 
So anxious, huge, and ripe it'll grow;
Soon limited, and soon you'll know
How both in stone and star you'll bloom. 

Borges, "Prólogo a 'La invención de Morel'"

An introduction by this Argentine to this famous work ("The Morel Invention") by his countryman.  You can read the original here.

Around 1882 Stevenson observed that British readers tended somewhat to disdain peripeties and believe that writing a novel bereft of story line was an act of great skill; writing a novel with an infinite story line, however, they deemed degenerate.  In 1925 in The Dehumanization of Art, José Ortega y Gasset tries to rationalize the disdain noted by Stevenson and declares on page 96, "that someone today might invent an adventure capable of interesting our higher sensibility seems to be difficult," then, on page 97, that this invention "is practically impossible."  On other pages – on almost all the other pages – he champions the "psychological" novel and believes that taking pleasure in adventures is non-existent or puerile.  Such was, doubtless, the common impression in 1882, in 1925, and still in 1940.  Certain writers (among whom I am pleased to count Adolfo Bioy Casares) believe it reasonable to dissent.  I will summarize, here, the motives for this dissension.

The first (whose air of paradox I wish neither to underscore or attenuate) is the intrinsic rigor of the adventure novel.  The typical "psychological" novel tends to be a report.  The Russians and the disciples of the Russians have demonstrated ad nauseam that nothing is impossible: suicides out of happiness, murders out of benevolence, people who adore one another to the point of splitting up forever, informers out of fervor and humility ... This complete liberty results in complete disorder.  What is more, the "psychological" novel also seeks to be the "realist" novel: it prefers that we forget its character of verbal artifice and applies a new coat of plausibility with all vain precision (or with all languid vagueness).  There are pages, there are chapters of Marcel Proust which are unacceptable as inventions, to such an extent that, without knowing it, we resign ourselves to the idle and insipid of the everyday.  The adventure novel, on the other hand, does not pretend to be a transcription of reality: it is an artificial object that permits no part of it to remain unjustified.  The fear of incurring the mere successive variety of The Golden Ass, of The Seven Voyages of Sinbad or of Don Quixote, imposes upon it a rigorous story line.

I have cited an intellectual motive; there are others of an empirical character.  Everyone whispers sadly that our century is not capable of weaving interesting plots; no one dares verify whether, if this century possesses any primacy over prior centuries, it lies in the primacy of plots.  Stevenson is more impassioned, more diverse, more lucid, and perhaps more worthy of our absolute friendship than is Chesterton; yet the story lines he produces are inferior.  De Quincey, on nights of grave terror, fled into the heart of labyrinths; but he never managed to stamp his impression of unutterable and self-repeating infinities in fables comparable to those of Kafka.  Quite rightly Ortega y Gasset observes that the "psychology" of Balzac may not satisfy us; the same might be said of his story lines.  Both Shakespeare and Cervantes liked the antinomian idea of the girl who, without diminishing her beauty, manages to pass for a man; such a conceit does not work with us.  I believe myself free of every superstition of modernity, of any illusion that yesterday differed intimately from today or that yesterday will differ from tomorrow; but I do think that no other era possesses novels of such admirable story lines as The Turn of the Screw, The  Trial, The Invisible Man, or Le Voyageur sur la terre, or the book achieved in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

So-called police or crime novels – yet another of our century's genres that cannot invent story lines – recur to mysterious facts that one reasonable fact will later justify and illustrate.  On these pages, Adolfo Bioy Casares happens to resolve successfully a most difficult problem.  He unfurls an odyssey of wonders which do not seem to admit for any code other than hallucination or symbols, then deciphers them fully by means of a single fantastic, but not supernatural postulate.  The fear of incurring premature or partial revelations prohibits me from examining the story line and the many delicate wisdoms of its execution.  Suffice it to say that Bioy renews in literature a concept that St. Augustine and Origen refuted, that Louis Auguste Blanqui rationalized, and that Dante Gabriel Rossetti stated with memorable lyricism: 

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore...

In Spanish, infrequent if not rare are those works of reasoned imagination.  The classics utilized allegory, exaggeration and satire and, sometimes, mere verbal incoherence; of late I recall only a certain story from Las fuerzas extrañas and one by Santiago Dabove, unjustly forgotten. The Morel Invention (whose title alludes fraternally to another island inventor, Dr. Moreau) brings a new genre to our lands and our language.

I have discussed the details of the plot with the author, and I have reread the novel.  To me it seems neither imprecise nor hyperbolic to call this work perfect. 

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