The Invention of Morel
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| First edition dust jacket cover | |
| Author | Adolfo Bioy Casares |
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| Original title (if not in English) | La invención de Morel |
| Translator | Ruth L. C. Simms |
| Cover Artist | Norah Borges |
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Editorial Losada |
| Released | 1940 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
The Invention of Morel (sometimes translated as Morel's Invention) is a 1940 novel by Argentine fiction writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. Arguably his most famous work, it's a classic example of Latin American Science Fiction.
[edit] Plot introduction
A fugitive of justice arrives on a deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific. Tourists arrive, and his fear towards them becomes a mixed emotion when he falls in love with a woman from the group. He wants to tell her his feelings, but an inexplicable phenomenon keeps them apart.
[edit] Plot summary
The fugitive writes an account of his actions after the arrival of people to the desert island where he's hiding. Although he considers their presence a miracle, he's afraid they'll turn him to the authorities if they discover him. He retreats to the swamps while they inhabit the buildings on top of the hill. Through this diary, we learn he's a writer from Venezuela sentenced to life in prison for "an error of justice". He thinks he's on the (fictional) island of Villings, a part of the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu), but due to trouble he experienced during his voyage, he's not sure. All he knows is that the island is the focus of a strange disease whose symptoms are similar to radiation poisoning. Before the outbreak, a group of people built there, around 1924, a museum, a chapel and a swimming pool. Later on, he cast doubt on the accuracy of this information, but it turns out to be correct.
Among the tourists, there's a woman who sees the sunset everyday from the cliff on the west side of the island. The fugitive finds her an easy target to spy on, and while doing so, he falls in love with her. He approaches her, but she doesn't react to him. He assumes she's ignoring him and continues to spy on her with the intention of making further contact. He learns that the bearded tennis player who visits her every other time is called Morel and that her name is Faustine. They speak French. As Faustine, Morel doesn't react to his presence, but the fugitive still thinks they're ignoring him. His encounters with other members of the group carry the same result: nobody seems to notice him. He also points out that the conversations between Faustine and Morel repeats each week. He fears he's going crazy.
The disappearance of Faustine and the others makes him go back to the museum to investigate. To his surprise, there's no evidence of people being there during his absence. He remembers he's been eating roots and attributes the experience to poisoning, but the people reappear that night. They have come out of nowhere and yet they talk as if they've been there for a while. He watches them closely while still avoiding direct contact with them and notices more strange things. In the aquarium, there are identical copies of the dead fish he found on his day of arrival. During a day at the pool, the men jump to shake off the cold when the heat is unbearable. The strangest thing he notices—which is the most famous aspect of the novel—is the presence of two suns and two moons in the sky.
He tries to find an explanation to what's happening around him. Maybe the island's strange disease is affecting him. Maybe the swamp gases and his poor diet have rendered him invisible. Maybe the tourists are aliens who don't use their senses the same way we do, and French is common on both worlds. Maybe he's dreaming he's on an island when he's actually on a sanatorium. Maybe the tourists are dead and he's a traveler like Dante, and the island is the Purgatory. His ordeal ends when Morel gathers all the tourists late one night at the aquarium and the fugitive listens to what he has to say. Morel tells them he has been recording their actions of the past week with a machine of his invention capable of reproducing every aspect of reality. He claims the recording will capture their souls and through its endless looping, they'll relive that week forever. The reason behind the recording is that Morel is in love with a woman and he wants to spent eternity with her. Although Morel doesn't mention her name, the fugitive is convinced he's talking about Faustine.
After hearing that the people who Morel recorded on previous experiments are dead, one of the tourists guesses correctly that they'll die, too. Morel neither confirms nor denies this; his response is to leave the room. The meeting ends and the fugitive picks up Morel's cue cards before leaving. These cards contain the later part of the speech Morel didn't give and explain that the machine is able to run forever because the tide and wind feed it with an endless supply of kinetic energy. The fugitive understands that the phenomena of the two suns and two moons are a consequence of what happens when the recording overlaps reality: one sun is real and the other one is the copy that represents the sun's position at the time of recording. All the strange things that happen on the island have a similar explanation. He then imagines all the possible uses for Morel's invention, including the creation of a second model to resurrect people. It's clear he believes the machine is capable of capturing the soul.
The fugitive feels repulsion for the "new kind of photographs" that inhabit the island, but as time goes by, he accepts their existence as something better than his own. He learns how to operate the machine and inserts himself into the recording, so it looks like he and Faustine are in love, despite the fact there's evidence she might have slept with two of the men of the group, Alec and Haynes. Although he initially decided to let go of his anger and not find out the truth about Faustine's relationships, it now annoys him, but he's confident he won't care about it in the eternity he'll spend with her. At least he's sure she's not Morel's lover. In his final entry on the diary, the fugitive describes how he's waiting for his soul to pass onto the recording while dying. He asks a favor to the man who will invent a machine capable of merging souls based on Morel's invention. He wants the inventor to search for them and let him enter Faustine's conscience as an act of mercy.
[edit] Characters in The Invention of Morel
Main Characters
- The Fugitive
- He's the only real person on the island; everybody else is part of the machine's recording. The state of paranoia he reflects on the diary opens the possibility that he's hallucinating. His final speech indicates he went to prison for political reasons.
- Faustine
- One could say she's the most ambiguous character in the novel or that the fugitive misjudged her the most. She looks like a Gypsy, speaks French like a South American and likes to talk about Canada. She's inspired on silent film star Louise Brooks.
- Morel
- He's a scientific genius that leads a group of snobs to their death, intentionally. The fugitive dislikes him out of jealousy, but in the end, he justifies his actions. His name is a salute to the analogous character of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Secondary Characters
- Dalmacio Ombrellieri
- He's an Italian rug merchant living in Calcutta (now Kolkata.) He tells the fugitive about the island and helps him get there.
- Alec
- He's a shy oriental wool dealer with green eyes. He could be the lover of either Faustine or Dora, or just their confidence. As the rest of the people from the group, he sees Morel as a messianic figure.
- Dora
- She's a blonde woman with a big head who's close friend of Alec and Faustine. The fugitive hopes that she, and not Faustine, is Alec's lover. He later considers her as Morel's love interest when he suspects Morel might not be in love with Faustine after all.
- Irene
- She's a tall woman with long arms and an expression of disgust. She doesn't believe their exposure to the machine will kill them. The fugitive thinks that if Morel is neither in love with Faustine nor Dora, then he's in love with her.
- Old Lady
- She's always in company of Dora; they're probably related. The night of Morel's speech, she's drunk. Despite this, the fugitive considers she could be Morel's love interest, in case he's not in love with any of the other women.
- Haynes
- He's asleep at the time Morel is about to give his speech. Dora says he's on Faustine's bedroom and that no one will get him out of there (he's heavy.) It’s unknown why he's there, but the fugitive is not jealous of him. Morel gives the speech without him.
- Stoever
- He's the one who guesses they're all going to die. The other members of the group prevent him from following Morel when he left the aquarium. He calms down and the group's fanaticism towards Morel prevails over his own survival instinct.
[edit] Major Themes
- Within the boundaries of the story, the invention of Morel is the invention of physical immortality. Both Morel and the fugitive prefer it to spiritual immortality, because they consider it the solution to all problems.
- Love and Loneliness
- Loneliness represents death to the fugitive while love represents life. He made this clear when he says, "I'm no longer death: I'm in love." It's possible Morel perceive things in a similar fashion. Death might represent loneliness to him, because he'll lose touch with the people he loves—in his own tyrannical way.
- The fugitive struggles to regain control of his life after his unfair conviction, and fails miserably. When he finds out about a place where he can be in control (the island), he risks his life to get there. Unfortunately, the island is Morel's property in every sense, and the fugitive keep struggling in vain. His love for Faustine renews his hope, but when he realizes such relation is impossible, he gives up and expects somebody else—a hypothetical inventor from the future—will give him what he can't get. Morel, on the other hand, is an all-powerful figure that controls everyone around him. When he can't make the object of his affection love him back, he invents a machine that will put her under his control by forcing her to spend eternity with him.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
- Throughout the novel, the fugitive cites Thomas Malthus view on population control as the only way to prevent chaos if humanity uses Morel's invention to achieve immortality. He also wants to write a book entitled Praise to Malthus.
- Before he finds out the truth about the island, the fugitive cites Cicero's book as an explanation of the appearance of two suns in the sky.
- The tourists like to dance to the song from the 1925 Broadway musical No, No, Nanette. This foreshadows the fugitive's love for Faustine.
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in the prologue, "To classify it (the novel) as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." Mexican Nobel Prize winner in Literature Octavio Paz echoed Borges when he said, "The Invention of Morel may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel." Other famous Latin American writers have expressed their admiration for the novel, too.
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[edit] Allusions/references from other works
- Villings appears in the world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as an island off the coast of South America
[edit] Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
- While trapped in the machine's room, the fugitive promises himself he won't die like the Japanese folk hero Tsutomi Sakuma, one of the victims of Japan's first submarine accident. The fugitive's recollection of Sakuma's final message is wrong.
[edit] Awards and nominations
- First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires, 1941
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
- The 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad was inspired by this novel
- In 1967, French filmmaker Claude-Jean Bonnardot adapted the novel into a movie for television
- In 1974, Italian filmmaker Emidio Greco adapted the novel into a theatrical movie
- The 1986 film Man Facing Southeast by the Argentine Eliseo Subiela makes refence to the book as the possible inspiration of Rantes' story of his existence (This film was also in turn the probable inspiration of the movie K-PAX).
- In 1995, Eva Halac Company adapted the novel into an award-winning puppet show featuring a real life actor as the fugitive
- The 2005 film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes was originally inspired by this novel
[edit] Trivia
- Fans of the computer game Myst believe this novel is one of its sources of inspiration
- Often compared to The Island of Doctor Moreau, this novel also borrow elements from the 1934 novel XYZ by Peruvian author Clemente Palma
- First edition cover artist, Norah Borges, was Jorge Luis Borges' sister. He was Adolfo Bioy Casares' lifelong friend
- Although this was Adolfo Bioy Casares' seventh publication, he considered it the true beginning of his literary career
- In 1996, Argentine artist Carlos Boccardo made an installation inspired on this novel
- Villings couldn't possibly be part of Tuvalu. The islands of this archipelago are coral atolls—they're flat, barely above sea level, with no hills or cliffs.
[edit] Release details
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[edit] Sources, references, external links, quotations
- Review by Seamus Sweeney on nthposition.com
- Review on waggish.org
- Essay on the novel
- English page about the 1995 puppet adaptation
- English page about the 1996 installation
