La Invencion de Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares

Morel’s Invention is a classic Argentine Science Fiction novel from the 1940s. Written in spare, elegant Spanish, it is accessible to the intermediate student of the language. Adolfo Bioy Casares is a well known figure in the Hispanic world, but not widely read in English. An author of novels and short stories, his prose is in many ways more readable than that of his famous contemporary Jorge Luis Borges (whose poetry is seen as his main legacy in Latin America). The two were close friends, writing and publishing literary detective stories together under a pseudonym. Bioy Casares wrote the definitive Spanish language biography of Borges, a tome of over 1000 pages, while the blind master penned as a prologue to his colleagues’s best known work: “It does not strike me as imprecision or hyperbole to classify it as perfect” (11). Often remembered for its anticipation of holograms and hypereality, Morel’s Invention is also one of the twentieth centuries strangest and most haunting love stories.

A nameless Venezuelan fugitive arrives on a deserted and inhospitable island, where he finds a swimming pool, a chapel and a museum with a basement full of mysterious machinery. Soon afterwards a group of strangers arrives on the island and he is forced to hide in the swamps “between the aquatic plants, and the indignity of mosquitoes, with filthy water to the waist” (13). Everywhere we are given hints that our narrator’s perceptions are not be trusted. “You would think from their inexplicable appearance that they were effects of last night’s heat on my brain” (16). And yet he insists “ these are no hallucinations or images, these are real men, at least as real as I.” He watches from a distance as they proceed to sunbathe, listening to the phonograph and bathe in the pool full of frogs and vipers, as though on summer holiday. Have they come to capture him and bring him to justice, or for some other, stranger purpose?

The narrator becomes captivated by the beautiful Faustine, a gypsy woman who watches the sunset from the cliffs every evening. He is aware that his feelings may be little more than “the affection of accumulated solitude” (39), but tries to woo her anyway, leaving a message written in wildflowers, “The timid homage of an admirer” (53). When his advances are ignored, he begins to suspect that the strangers can neither see nor hear him. Their appearances coincide with the periodic flooding of his swamp refuge at high tide. Could there possibly be some connection to the machines in the basement? They appear to be repeating the same gestures and conversations endlessly.

It won’t spoil the novel too much to reveal that our protagonist has, in fact, fallen in love with a hologram. His rival Morel, the inventor of the device, has produced three dimensional images of his friends through “a new kind of photography” (106). The concept is charged with philosophical possibility. Do the reproductions have souls? Is it possible to feel love for a being without a soul? Many cultures, the narrator reminds us, fear that when a photograph is taken, the soul may pass to the image and the person die. And what of ethics? As is so often the case in Science Fiction, technology is a source of potential corruption. In pursuing his “sentimental fantasy” of an eternally recurring beach holiday (108), Morel may have exposed his friends to dangerous radiation.

Bioy Casares’s extremely knowing text is itself, of course, a kind of literary hologram, a replica of any number of previous desert island narratives, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Coral Island, Treasure Island and Moreau’s Island to name just a few. But while the island was traditionally a site of conflict between humans and nature, here the struggle is between humans and machines. In the nuclear age there is no corner of the earth beyond the threatening reach of technology, no human relationship that is not mediated by it to some degree. The true prescience of Morel’s Invention, then, lies not in its anticipation of specific scientific innovations, but in its awareness of technology’s consequences for the human soul. Family dinners before the television screen, bus loads of commuters with headphones, huddled millions seeking sex through their computer monitors; these are all symptoms of the modern ache. It is technology’s potential to isolate as well as connect that the novel anticipates. The most enduringly remote island, it suggests, is the estranged individual, who may never be able to cross the unbridgeable gulf between self and other. “To be in love with an image is worse than to be in love with a ghost,” concludes our protagonist, before adding ambiguously, “perhaps we have always wanted the one we love to have the existence of a ghost” (121). His final desperate strategy to capture his beloved, like the conclusion to all great stories, is both unforeseen and inevitable, recalling a Borges verse from The Self and the Other:

“In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
The Heaven and Hell that lies in wait for us…
A sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the one you love, or, perhaps, your own)
And the sheer contemplation of that face…
Will be for the rejected, an Inferno,
And for the elected, Paradise.” (151)