SOURCE: "Adolfo Bioy Casares: Satire and Self-portrait," and "Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Lying Compass," in Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason, The University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 29-36, pp. 37-43.

In the following excerpt, Mac Adam discusses The Invention of More and A Plan for Escape as examinations into the nature of metaphor and the relationship between text, author, and audience.]

Bioy Casares in Morel creates a series of linked metaphors to describe the transformation of a man into an artist and, finally, the artist into art. Like Machado, Bioy uses the first-person narrator, but unlike the Brazilian, he delineates more sharply the "textual" nature of his work by defining it as a diary. What we are reading is a remainder, a leftover, and by emphasizing this dead or inert side of any work of art, its existence as the object of attention, Bioy declares its...