They do it with mirrors

In Adolfo Bioy Casares’ mesmeric novella “The Invention of Morel”, virtual reality meets magical realism

>>>Spoiler warning<<<< If you want to experience the unraveling of the strange events in the Argentine writer’s story without premonitions, I recommend skipping this essay. I will discuss some of the elements of the novella in detail, but leave everything else untouched to motivate as many library trips as possible. This book deserves to be added to my list of Influential pieces of literature, which includes all the books I recommend to anyone interested in understanding humanity as a species.

Introduction

“The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares tells the story of an anonymous fugitive who seeks refuge at a mysterious island rumored to be the birthplace of a disease manifesting the symptoms of radiation poisoning. The book is laid out as an edited diary by the fugitive, gradually revealing the reasons behind the strange phenomena he comes to witness on the island. Jorge Luis Borges, a famed Argentine writer and Casares’ friend and colleague, has described the plot of the book as perfect, likening it to The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, and The Voyage to the Center of the Earth. Without going too much into the level of ingenuity of Casares´storytelling, I want to take a little dip into some of its themes.

Much like its titular (and partially thematic) father “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, “The Invention of Morel” focuses on an outsider’s observations of an inaccessible island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, where an amoral scientist has conducted cold-blooded experiments attempting to challenge the natural order (in Casares’ case, time). As debatably the first example of magical realism in South America, the novella offers a mix of themes, some juxtaposing. I have listed some of them hoping to bring structure to what I suspect will otherwise become a hard-to-follow jungle of obscure historical links and spirited personal opinions. The themes I will visit (to varying extent) today are as follows:

Reality and fabrication
Unattainable love
Quest for immortality

A fallout garden

“The island vegetation is abundant […] But the trees seem to be diseased; although their trunks have vigorous new shoots, their upper branches are dry.”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], pg 13)

The setting of the unpleasant scientific experiments in the novella is a lush island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, although the animal and plant life on the island has suffered because of the experiments Dr. Morel has conducted. At first, the state of the environment is the only physical evidence of the turmoil the scientist’s blind ambition has led to — later, it is revealed that an entire group of people has also faced their death because of a machine he has created.

While the experiment has left some parts of the natural life in a sickly condition, others remain flourishing. This has a jarring effect on the reader, for the surviving parts remind us constantly of the initial paradisiacal state of the island. This mosaic of well-being and illness can also be seen as a hint at parallel realities introduced later in the story. As a symbol of the dangers in humanity’s blind drive for innovation at the cost of our safety, I find the partially decaying nature among the most powerful in the story.

Another angle on flourishing and decay can be seen in the recurrence of the mentions of Thomas Robert Malthus (already mentioned on the first page of the novella) and his theory on population growth and control. There´s a cyclicality in the way Malthus’ theory predicts the increase and decrease of the population according to the food resources available, and this cyclicality is mirrored in the cyclicality of the scientific experiment by Dr. Morel.

At the time of the book´s publication (1940), the natural catastrophe and the radiation poisoning symptoms depicted in the book eerily foreshadowed the development of the nuclear bomb just a couple of years later. Reading it now through the lens of the multifaceted global environmental crisis and the years of COVID-19, the message seems to be even clearer: Mess with the fundamentals of life, they mess with you right back. I am especially looking at you, AI developers. But more on that later.

Cherchez la femme

“I fell in love, simultaneously or successively, with cinema screen actresses; Louise Brooks, Marie Prévost, Dorothy Mackay, Marion Davis, Evelyn Brent and Anna May Wong.

Out of these impossible loves, the one I had for Louise Brooks was the one that was most alive, the most unfortunate. I didn’t like the thought that I would never meet her! Even worse, that I would never see her again. And this is precisely what happened. After 3 or 4 films, in which I saw her, spellbound, Louise Brooks disappeared from the cinema screens of Buenos Aires. I felt that disappearance first as being torn apart; later, as a personal defeat. I had to admit that if Louise Brooks had been liked by the public, she wouldn’t have disappeared. The truth (or what I felt was the truth) was that not only did she pass unnoticed by the grand majority but also by people that I knew. If they admitted she was beautiful, well more sort of “pretty” — they regretted her being a bad actress. If they found her to be an intelligent actress, they regretted that she wasn’t more beautiful. As one facing Firpo’s (an Argentine boxer who lost to American Jack Dempsey in a famous match) defeat, I concluded that reality and I were not in agreement.”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, Memorias, pg unavailable).

Whoever is even superficially familiar with Casares´work, knows that actress Louise Brooks was carefully recreated in the character of Faustine, a central figure and motivation for the narrator in “The Invention of Morel”. I had limited access to sources for this article but I found the excerpt above in its original language Spanish in this illuminating article on Brooks and her influence on Casares (translation is provided by my friend, Spanish teacher Amanda Geismann).

In the excerpt, Casares recalls his disappointment in Brooks’ career development. I sense a hint of embarrassment through these lines: the embarrassment of a man who has chosen his goddess, only to realize her power is ridiculed and undermined by everyone else. This embarrassment may be the motivation behind Casares´ decision to place Brooks’s written replication Faustine as the main motivation behind the narrator’s actions.

In the novella, it is gradually revealed that Faustine is not a person, but a kind of three-dimensional recording of the real Faustine, who was a small part of a bigger recording experiment conducted by Dr. Morel on the island years before the narrator arrived. The turning point for the plot occurs when the narrator witnesses the part of the recording, where Morel reveals to his party that they have been a part of the grand operation run by his recording machine.

It is unclear, whether Faustine is the romantic interest Dr. Morel brings up in his defining speech to the party. Nevertheless, Faustine becomes an obsession to the narrator, who finally chooses to record himself with Morel’s machine, hoping he can spend eternity with Faustine that way, despite knowing he will die as a result. Maybe there´s a message from Casares to the doubters of Brook’s talent hidden in the ending: some women are worth taking the ultimate risk for.

“The sight of her: As if she were posing for an invisible photographer, she surpassed the calm of the sunset.”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], pg 26)

Like the quote above alludes, occasionally Faustine appears to be aware she is being recorded. Like Ms. Brooks being filmed acting at a movie set, it seems Faustine is trying to appear a natural part of her environment, yet her mannerisms either appear or are calculated. This is not where the similarities end, though. Because of the way Morel´s recording is perpetually projected from start to end, Faustine is doomed to repeat her movements cyclically until eternity, much like Brooks, permanently preserved through the magic of cinematography.

The way the narrator obsesses over the artificial Faustine is not too different from the way Casares obsesses over the Louise Brooks on film in real life. Assuming Casares made a conscious choice to expose his admiration of a fabricated woman in his book, I must admire his ability for introspection. It seems he uses the novella to apply the same kind of scrutiny to assess himself the reader uses to judge the sanity of the narrator.

Isis, Kiki, and the Phoenix

To make a single man (who is now disembodied) with all his elements, and without letting an extraneous part enter, one must have the patient desire of Isis when she reconstructed Osiris.

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], pg 78)

Reconstruction as an act of love is one of the most abiding themes of the book, illuminated here by the narrator’s reference to the influential Egyptian myth. Osiris was resurrected by his wife; conversely, in “The Invention of Morel”, the narrator (Osiris) reconstructs himself so that he live alongside already reconstructed and resurrected Faustine (Isis). A modern equivalent for this act could be Photoshopping oneself onto a picture with a celebrity (this simile is borrowed, but I sadly cannot find the source anymore), which is something one only does with an unattainable love interest.

“The dining room measures approximately forty feet by fifty. There are three mahogany columns at each side, and each group of columns supports a stand with a figure of a seated divinity that appears to be Indian or Egyptian, of ocher terracotta. Each god is three times larger than a man, and is garlanded by dark plaster leaves. Below them there are large panels with drawings by Foujita, which present a discordant aspect (because of their humility).”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], pg 16)

Another cultural reference worth noting is the mention of artist Tsuguharu Foujita, whom Casares might have decided to feature in his book after having seen his painting “Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy”. The painting depicts the famous jazz age influencer Kiki de Montparnasse, who carries a significant resemblance to Brooks both in real life and in the painting (at this time, Brooks had been pictured completely nude in a myriad of photographs, many times astonishingly similarly to Kiki).

For the character of Morel, it would be understandable to decorate the building he has chosen for the recording with art that reminded him of his love (provided it was Faustine, which is left uncertain). However, the timing described in the book is unlikely: the narrator is told the place was built “around 1924” (pg 19), but Foujita was still living in Paris at this time, and would not visit South America until the 1930s. It might either be an oversight by Casares or a way to create logical ambiguity, raising doubts about the narrator´s reliability.

There´s an interesting mention of the statue of the dying Phoenix, behind which the narrator is hiding as he observes the recorded arrival of Morel and his party (pg 56). The statue, undoubtedly placed there according to Dr. Morel’s plan, symbolizes a hypothesis he has on his invention: that the recordings will retain the soul and consciousness of the recorded persons, hence achieving immortality. As I wrote before, the nature of this immortality is cyclical, resembling the immortality of a Phoenix.

At the end of the book, the fugitive is about to die after having recorded himself. Yet, he has also come to believe his soul will be restored as he is reborn as the perpetually repeated recording along with Faustine, Morel, and others. In this way, the novella presents him as the dying Phoenix, right before being reborn from its ashes.

They Do It with Mirrors

“Now that I have grown accustomed to seeing life that is repeated, I find my own irreparably haphazard. My plans to alter the situation are useless: I have no next time, each moment is unique, different from every other moment, and many are wasted by my own indolence. Of course, there is no next time for the images either — each moment follows the pattern set when the eternal week was first recorded.

Our life may be thought of as a week of these images — one that may be repeated in adjoining worlds.”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], pg 85)

I leave you with the part of the book that was an aha moment for me. This paragraph manages to elegantly summarise the eternal problem we have with artificially preserved sensations: we are all bound by the restrictions of time, even if those restrictions would manifest themselves differently on things that are alive, and things that are reproductions of those things.

Casares’ early exposure to the philosophical significance of reflections and repetitive images included a triple photo of his grandfather, in which he appeared to be having a conversation with himself. Perhaps this is why “The Invention of Morel” links duplicates (recordings of people, animals, and plants) with cyclicality so inseparably, that even reflections in mirrors (such as the ones in the room Morel used for tests for his machine) become a symbol for eternity. Reflections also bring to my mind the idea of multiverses and infinite events unfolding all at the same time, with no end in sight— but that is a topic for another time.

It is astonishing, how despite the novella being written years before virtual reality became anything close to reality, Casares was able to communicate the psychological tension we experience when we interact with what we know is not real: the detachment we experience when we understand we can never affect the true state of what we are observing, and the attachment we formulate against our will towards the things we experience (despite knowing they are not real). The tension results in a kind of monstrous internal dance; it´s the psychological tempest we experience when we step into the pseudo-physical uncanny valley of fabricated reality.

The artificial world outside of the barrier of our skin is already out there, and we have increasing access to it. And I do not only mean virtual and augmented reality, but also deepfakes, AI-powered information sharing, and anything else created to mimic or artificially enhance reality. With the technology we have now, it is just way too easy to preoccupy our minds with realizing our dreams in the virtual world without remembering that every recording has its source. This is why Casares’ vision of the disastrous effects of the reproduction of reality is more relevant than ever.