Andrés Vaccari

MOREL’S INVENTION (1940) (”La Invención the Morel”)
By Adolfo Bioy Casares
(Sydney Morning Herald, date unknown, 2005)

This short novel is one of the great landmarks of Latin American literature, yet it remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone world. It is about time some publisher wised up and reissued it.

Written in 1940, Morel’s Invention is a prescient articulation of the postmodern obsession with simulacra and hyper-reality. These themes have inspired copious reams of turgid and pretentious prose, yet Bioy Casares spins a tale that is highly readable, and at once delightful and unsettling.

Accused of a crime he insists he did not commit, the novel’s anonymous narrator escapes from Caracas, Venezuela, and makes his way to a little known island in the Pacific that, apparently, has been ravaged by a strange, flesh-eating disease. Soon after arriving, the narrator realizes he is not alone; a group of upper-class holidaymakers are in the island. He watches them covertly as they follow the same routine week after week, doing and saying exactly the same things. After falling in love with one of the women, he decides to introduce himself. But it turns out everyone is completely oblivious to his presence, like he does not exist. The mysterious residents are, in fact, recordings, simulacra projected by hidden machines. Morel, the mad inventor responsible for all this, has found a way to create solid, perfect copies of real objects and living things. He has captured a week in the life of the island. And, in a game of metaphysical Chinese boxes, Morel has also placed himself in the recording, explaining to the projections the truth about who they are. Morel’s invention comes at a terrible cost, though, for the process of duplication destroys the originals. It sucks away the fundamental essence of matter, so that the body dies painfully, corroding from the outside in, consumed by the image. Yet the narrator is so hopelessly in love with this world that he pretends to be part of it, joining the conversations and inserting himself into the eternal ritual.

Morel’s Invention packs a prodigious amount of weighty themes into a slim space, without hardly breaking a sweat: the nature of consciousness and reality, the character of social relationships, the formation of the individual’s self-image, the fate of a culture enamoured of technological simulation—you name it. It is a comedy of errors, an allegory about class relations, a high-concept science-fiction tale, a doomed love story, and an existential treatise. It has the brisk pace of an adventure, the mood of a nightmare, and the angst of a tango.

Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares is better known for his long friendship with the much more famous Jorge Luis Borges. Their most outstanding collaboration is a series of short stories starring Isidoro Parodi, a detective who solves mysteries without ever leaving his prison cell (another classic work curiously neglected in the Anglophone world). Although it scores high on skill and inventiveness, the work of Bioy Casares can be quite obtuse and frustrating at times; Morel’s Invention is by far his best. “I have discussed with its author,” wrote Borges of it, “the details of its plot, I have reread it; I don’t think it’s imprecise or hyperbolic to qualify it as perfect.” This novel inspired, among other things, a ballet by Anders Koppel (1989), a stage play (Emidio Greco, 1974) and Alan Reisnais’ film, Last Year in Marienbad (1961).