![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2010 09:52 pmHighly spoliative thoughts on The Invention of Morel:
1. It's interesting when authors of this kind of book leave things in that are not explained (i.e. figured out by the main character): when the narrator first sees Morel, his beard looks false. If it is, it implies he's already dying from having used his invention on himself earlier. This partly explains what he does, since he's dying himself--and, of course, makes him even more the narrator's double.
2. Some of the editorial comments, and various stray sentences through out, sound just like Borges.
3. This plot is basically repeated (coincidentally or unconsciously) in one of Calvino's later Cosmicomics stories, I think found in Numbers in the Dark. I'll find the name.
4. What's the deal with the footnote saying a passage that was supposed to start the manuscript in fact doesn't? Just foreshadows that his mind is going?
5. The influence on Lost is consistent but scattered--little bits here and there all through the five seasons. The secret room with machinery, the endlessly repeated messages etc. In Lost the past is invulnerable a bit more flexibly, though--and in some cases alterable.
6. Reads astonishingly like a (very sad) parable of the anxiety of influence, does it not? And art in general, in Morel's case: the madness of immortality at second hand--the totemic magic of assuming that if your mind is still perceived it still exists; in the narrator's case the double madness of accepting that and clumsily rewriting the earlier vision as starring yourself, while being wholly contained in it. Bloom must have been fascinated.
7. What on earth are the echo chambers beneath the museum? Was that ever explained? Between this and 4 (and 2!) it makes me wonder if this story's following, which was it, Quain's ideal of a book with a secret second plot. (He's an earlier copy of Morel with planted memories! Or he's Charlie! Or by copying the copy he'll cause the copy to die and only his own copy will be left playing its ridiculous part on an empty island for eternity! I don't know! Something!)
1. It's interesting when authors of this kind of book leave things in that are not explained (i.e. figured out by the main character): when the narrator first sees Morel, his beard looks false. If it is, it implies he's already dying from having used his invention on himself earlier. This partly explains what he does, since he's dying himself--and, of course, makes him even more the narrator's double.
2. Some of the editorial comments, and various stray sentences through out, sound just like Borges.
3. This plot is basically repeated (coincidentally or unconsciously) in one of Calvino's later Cosmicomics stories, I think found in Numbers in the Dark. I'll find the name.
4. What's the deal with the footnote saying a passage that was supposed to start the manuscript in fact doesn't? Just foreshadows that his mind is going?
5. The influence on Lost is consistent but scattered--little bits here and there all through the five seasons. The secret room with machinery, the endlessly repeated messages etc. In Lost the past is invulnerable a bit more flexibly, though--and in some cases alterable.
6. Reads astonishingly like a (very sad) parable of the anxiety of influence, does it not? And art in general, in Morel's case: the madness of immortality at second hand--the totemic magic of assuming that if your mind is still perceived it still exists; in the narrator's case the double madness of accepting that and clumsily rewriting the earlier vision as starring yourself, while being wholly contained in it. Bloom must have been fascinated.
7. What on earth are the echo chambers beneath the museum? Was that ever explained? Between this and 4 (and 2!) it makes me wonder if this story's following, which was it, Quain's ideal of a book with a secret second plot. (He's an earlier copy of Morel with planted memories! Or he's Charlie! Or by copying the copy he'll cause the copy to die and only his own copy will be left playing its ridiculous part on an empty island for eternity! I don't know! Something!)
