On Joining Oulipo by Accident
From Jorge Luis Borges’s "Prologue" to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (University of Texas Press, 1964; republished by NYRB Classics, 2003):
There are pages, there are chapters in Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions, and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of each day. The adventure story, on the other hand, does not propose to transcribe reality: it is an artificial object, no part of which lacks justification. It must have a rigid plot if it is not to succumb to the mere sequential variety of The Golden Ass, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, or the Quixote. . . .
We hear sad murmurs that our century lacks the ability to devise interesting plots. But no one attempts to prove that if this century has any ascendancy over the preceding ones it lies in the quality of its plots. . . . I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, Voyage to the Center of the Earth, and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
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In the original, Borges cites Le Voyageur sur la Terre, which (as far as I could discover) is a novel by Julien Green that has not yet been translated into English. It’s interesting that the translation renders it Voyage to the Center of the Earth. Do you know if the Green novel has been translated or if Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth was alluded to by mistake?