The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

First published:La invención de Morel, 1940 (English translation, 1964)

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: The twentieth century

Locale: An unidentified island

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, who tells the story in the form of a diary
• Morel, a man who leads a group of people to the island
• Faustine, a woman in the group with whom the narrator falls in love
• The Editor, who annotates the manuscript of the narrator’s diary

The Novel

The text of this short novel is presented as a diary of an unnamed narrator, a fugitive from justice, living on an island that he assumes is in the Ellice archipelago. The narrator has found the island with the help of a rug seller in Calcutta who told him about a group of people who came to the island in 1925, built several buildings, and then disappeared. The island is known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease that attacks the body and works inward, its victims losing fingernails and hair and, finally, skin.

After a period of time spent alone on the island, exploring the museum, church, swimming pool, and mill built by the group in 1925, the narrator suddenly sees a group of people dancing and singing. He observes the group unnoticed for several days and becomes fascinated by Faustine, a beautiful woman who sits for long periods of time admiring the sunset. When he finally musters the courage to reveal himself to the woman, he finds that she pretends not to see him. As he becomes more open about his presence on the island, he realizes that he is invisible to all of the people and that they seem to be repeating at certain intervals their exact actions and words, as if they were acting parts in a play.

As the narrator eavesdrops on a meeting of the group, he hears Morel explain to the group that he has invented a machine which photographs the people through a complex process of recording their senses completely. The machine is then capable of projecting the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touch of the objects photographed, so that the images seem to be real. One entire week of their experience has been recorded and will be played forever through a kind of projector powered by the tides, so that the members of the group achieve immortality, forever re-created and forever repeating the actions of that week.

Once the narrator understands the nature of the mysterious images that he has seen on the island, he goes down into the basement of the museum, where the machine invented by Morel is contained. When he tries to leave, he finds that he is imprisoned. As he breaks an escape hole in the wall, it immediately repairs itself to the state of its existence when it was photographed. He must wait until the tides recede and the machine stops projecting the wall.

Desperately in love with Faustine, the narrator decides to try to inject himself into the photographed drama so that he may be with her forever. He observes the images until he has memorized every word and every movement, then sets the sensory receptors of the machine to record the images as he steps into the scenario. He plays to the images as if he were an actor in the scenes that they are playing. In this way, he becomes a part of their drama, so that no observer will suspect that his part has been added later.

Toward the end of the novelistic text, the narrator senses that he is dying and begins to recall his life in Venezuela. He desperately clings to the hope that he will survive and find that Faustine is a living person rather than merely a photographed image, and that they may love each other in a real, eternal existence. Then he awaits his death, at which time his soul will pass over to the image that duplicates and preserves his sensorial experience.

The Characters

Because of the unusual premise on which The Invention of Morel is based, the only fully developed character in the novel is the narrator. All the others are only shadowy images of a prior reality. Of the people that the narrator discovers on the island, the only one who is treated thoroughly enough to have what could be called a characterization is Morel, who becomes the narrator of his own document, the text of the speech that he delivers to the members of the group that he has brought to the island.

Because Faustine is only a sensorial image, the narrator’s attempts to interact with her are futile, for her actions are predetermined by the circumstances of her creation as an image. Her actions and her responses are all immutable and have no relationship to the narrative time of the novel. Thus, the only possibility for interaction between the narrator and Faustine is an artificial one. The narrator memorizes her actions, her words, and her reactions so that he may inject himself into the predetermined story as if he were a part of that unchangeable plot, as if her reactions were in response to his presence.

All the characters of the plot created by Morel’s invention are immutable and unresponsive to the narrator. The text of the novel, then, presents a set of personages whose characterizations are predetermined and one character—the narrator—whose attempts to understand the nature of the reality in which he finds himself form the plot of the novel. His final solution—creating from himself another immutable character in the plot of the story eternally reproduced by the machine—is a process of altering the aesthetic object, the novel of the projected images within the novel, so that the narrator becomes a part of that aesthetic object.

Critical Context

The prologue to The Invention of Morel is written by another Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, the writer with whom Adolfo Bioy Casares has most in common. Borges quotes sthe Spanish essayist José Ortega y Gasset, who discusses, in La deshumanización del arte (1925; The Dehumanization of Art, 1956), the impossibility of inventing an adventure story that would appeal to the contemporary British reading public, and the predominance of the plotless, formless “psychological” novel in current fiction. Borges offers the short novel of Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, as proof that Ortega y Gasset was wrong. He might have offered his own work, which consists of many stories that fit the description that Borges gives of The Invention of Morel, a “perfect” work of “reasoned imagination” which employs allegory, the exaggerations of satire, and, sometimes, simple verbal incoherence.

Borges and Bioy Casares have had a long career of collaboration on such novels as Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (1942; Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981) and Crónicas de Bustos Domecq (1967; Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976). Their partnership began in 1940 with the publication of Antología de la literatura fantástica (anthology of fantastic literature), edited by Bioy Casares, his wife, Silvina Ocampo, and Borges. Bioy Casares and Borges also collaborated on an anthology of the detective stories of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and Ellery Queen, and on film scripts for Hugo Santiago’s Invasione (1969; Invasion) and Les Autres (1974; The Others).

The Invention of Morel, which is modeled after the novel by H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), was not well received by the public when it was first published, but it was read and admired by many young writers, including Julio Cortázar, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier. Bioy Casares’s postulation of the ontology of human existence and of artistic creation places him in the role of precursor to later Latin American fiction writers who have dealt with the same problem. In particular, Cortázar has portrayed the interdependence of the real and the fictional in stories such as “Continuidad de los parques” (“Continuity of Parks”) and “Las babas del diablo” (“Blow-up”).

In the second half of the twentieth century, this particular type of fiction, of which The Invention of Morel is a flawless example, has been labeled “metafiction”—the self-conscious fictional work that, within itself, deals with the processes by which fictional literature is created. Bioy Casares has had a significant influence in the development of the Magical Realism of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, whose Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) initiated international appreciation of Hispanic writers.

Bibliography

Bach, Caleb. “The Inventions of Adolfo Bioy Casares.” Americas 45 (November-December, 1993): 14-19. Bach provides a comprehensive overview of Bioy Casares’s works. Bioy Casares’s early years as law student and his collaboration with Borges and Ocampo are detailed.

Camurati, Mireya. “Adolfo Bioy Casares.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Bioy Casares. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography.

Coleman, Alexander. “Fantastic Argentine.” New Criterion 13 (October, 1994): 65-70. Coleman profiles Bioy Casares and focuses on his fictional works. Includes an analysis of The Invention of Morel.

Levine, Susan J. “Science Versus the Library in The Island of Dr. Moreau, La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel), and Plan de evasion (A Plan for Escape).” Latin American Literary Review XVIII (Spring-Summer, 1981): 17-26. Levine relates Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau with Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape.

Snook, Margaret L. “The Narrator as Creator and Critic in The Invention of Morel.” Latin American Literary Review XIV (1979): 45-51. An analysis of the narrative voice in Bioy Casares’s novel.