The Invention of Morel / Adolfo Bioy Casares

My initial response to “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares was a desire to defend it. As the work of a gifted 26-year old writer, “Morel” is extremely impressive, even powerful. I found it marvelously clever, at times deeply perceptive and very funny, and also prescient regarding technology and science, and contemporary societies’ obsession with these related features as carriers of the ideas of salvation and redemption, and the un-life-like aspects of life itself (such as the “consciousness” of chemical processes and certain machine functions). I was both tired of the tedious recursiveness and moved by the over-stuffed emptiness. I did not find it satisfying, but I do not believe Bioy intended that particular effect. It is haunting.

It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.

Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.

Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an "entire" invention of the narrator's mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.

In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.