THE INVENTION OF MOREL

'The Invention of Morel' (sometimes translated as ''Morel's Invention'') is a novel by Argentine fiction writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. Arguably his most famous work, it's a classic example of Latin American Science Fiction.

Contents

Plot introduction

Plot summary

Characters

Major Themes

Allusions/references to other works

Literary significance & criticism

Allusions/references from other works

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

Awards and nominations

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Trivia

Sources, references, external links, quotations

Plot introduction

A fugitive hides on a deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific. Tourists arrive afterward, and his fear of being discovered becomes a mixed emotion when he falls in love with one of them. He wants to tell her his feelings, but an inexplicable phenomenon keeps them apart.

Plot summary

The fugitive starts a diary after tourists arrive 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. He retreats to the swamps while they take over the museum on top of the hill where he used to live.
Through his diary we learn that the fugitive is a writer from Venezuela sentenced to life in prison. He believes he's on the (fictional) island of Villings, a part of the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu), but is not sure. All he knows is that the island is the focus of a strange disease whose symptoms are similar to radiation poisoning.
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 falls in love with her. Through Morel, a bearded tennis player who frequently visits her, he finds out her name is Faustine. She and Morel speak French among themselves.
He decides to approach her, but she doesn't react to him. He assumes she's ignoring him, but his encounters with the other tourists have the same result: nobody on the island notices him. He points out that the conversations between Faustine and Morel repeats every week and fears he's going crazy.

All of the sudden the tourists vanish. The fugitive returns to the museum to investigate and finds no evidence of people being there during his absence. He attributes the experience to food poisoning, but the tourists 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 and notices more strange things. He encounters in the aquarium identical copies of the dead fish he found on his day of arrival. During a day at the pool, he sees the tourists jump to shake off the cold when the heat is unbearable. The strangest thing he notices is the presence of two suns and two moons in the sky.
He comes up with all sort of theories about what's happening on the island, but he finds out the truth when Morel tells the tourists he's been recording their actions of the past week with a machine of his invention capable of reproducing reality. He claims the recording will capture their souls, and through looping they'll relive that week forever and he'll spend eternity with the women he loves. Although Morel doesn't mention her by name, the fugitive is sure he's talking about Faustine.
After hearing that the people recorded on previous experiments are dead, one of the tourists guesses correctly they'll die, too. The meeting ends abruptly as Morel leaves in anger. The fugitive picks up his cue cards and learns the machine keeps running because the tide and wind feed it with an endless supply of kinetic energy. He understands that the phenomena of the two suns and two moons are a consequence of what happens when the recording overlaps reality: one is the real sun and the other one represents the sun's position at recording time. The other strange things that happen on the island have a similar explanation.
He imagines all the possible uses for Morel's invention, including the creation of a second model to resurrect people. Despite this he 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, even though she might have slept with Alec and Haynes. This bothers him, but he's confident it won't matter in the eternity they'll spend together. At least he's sure she's not Morel's lover.
On the diary's final entry 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.

Characters

'''Main Characters'''

;The Fugitive
:He's the only real person on the island as everybody else is part of the 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 the scientific genius that willingly lead a group of snobs to their death. 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 who 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 probably related to Dora, because she's always in her company. She's drunk the night of Morel's speech, but the fugitive still 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 in Faustine's bedroom and that no one will get him out of there because he's heavy. It's unknown why he's there, but the fugitive is not jealous of him. Morel gives the speech anyway.
;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.

Major Themes

;Immortality
: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.
;Control
: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, but the island is under the machine's control 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 that 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.

Allusions/references to other works

;An Essay on the Principle of Population
: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''.
;De Natura Deorum
: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.
;Tea for Two
:The tourists like to dance to the song from the Broadway musical ''No, No, Nanette''. This foreshadows the fugitive's love for Faustine.

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.

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

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

;Tsutomi Sakuma
: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.

Awards and nominations

★ First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires, 1941

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

★ The 1961 movie ''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 movie ''Man Facing Southeast'' by the Argentine Eliseo Subiela makes refence to the book as the possible inspiration of Rantes' story of his existence. This movie probably inspired the novel K-PAX, which was made into a movie as well.

★ In 1995 Eva Halac Company adapted the novel into an award-winning puppet show featuring a real life actor as the fugitive

★ The 2005 movie ''The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes'' was originally inspired by this novel

★ The 2005 movie "The Island" was reportedly inspired by this novel as well.

★ There are also vast similarities to elements of the TV Series "Lost".

Trivia

★ Fans of the game ''Myst'' believe this novel is one of its sources of inspiration

★ One of the fugitive's theories is that he's on a psychiatric hospital while dreaming he's on an island. The same thing happens to Hurley from the TV series ''Lost'' on the episode "Dave"

★ 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.

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