Sunday book pick: In the 1940 novella ‘The Invention of Morel’, a premonition of digital memories

“I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.”

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said that his contemporary Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel is “perfect”, and that his praise “is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.”

Octavio Paz goes one step ahead and says, “without exaggeration … it is a perfect novel.” Casares’s fantastical novella is said to have influenced the fiction of future Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. The main character, Morel, bears a resemblance to HG Wells’s mad scientist Dr Moreau, while the female love interest, Faustine, is a hat tip to Faust.

Casares’s novella resists genre classification – is it magical realism, speculative fiction, or is it a work of fantasy? Or perhaps a long, inventive thought on scientific progress and the ensuing psychological chaos? For a work so expansive yet ephemeral, how does one write about it?

The disruptions

The story opens with a nameless fugitive who has arrived on a remote island rife with dangers to human life. He is warned of the island’s hostility and how even the most formidable of men succumbed to it. But the fugitive is adamant to live out the rest of his days on the island. He hides in an abandoned museum and exists in relative peace. However, his safety is under serious threat when a group of people suddenly arrive on the island. The disruption has a silver lining – he quickly falls in love with the melancholic Faustine, who turns up to watch the sunset every evening.

The fugitive is suddenly aware of his unappealing ways, his unbecoming appearance but he performs for her nevertheless – she appears unmoved and, at any rate, ignores him. Another disruption occurs when a man named Morel is successful in catching Faustine’s eyes, but the fugitive cannot tell if they are or have been intimate with each other. Much to his chagrin, Moreal seems unmoved by his presence too.

The arrival of these new people also begins to disrupt life on the island. The conversations repeat themselves, and it feels cold even in the oppressive heat of the island, and suddenly, there are two suns and two moons in the sky.

The island, hostile as it is, reveals a more nefarious secret: it belongs to Morel, a scientist conducting a “sensorial” experiment. Capturing just images and sounds isn’t enough anymore; could all senses be distilled into one experience? (The reader immediately recalls the much-hyped 7D movie experience, and the strange reality it embodies.)

The experiment is not at all innocent as one might believe it to be. The “recording” could kill the subject and the subjects, in this case, are Morel’s friends who are, without their knowledge, spending a week on the island as scientific subjects.

So when their bodies cease to be alive, they live on in these recordings – doing and saying things that they usually would. This is an energy-heavy project, and two suns and two moons are required to do the job – time becomes an infinite loop, so do memories themselves, which can no longer be classified as real or imagined. Linear time exists, and so does circular time; both entwine, making it impossible to separate one from the other, superimposing themselves on not just memories but on the very philosophies that make the distinction between the past and the present possible.

After death

In so doing, death itself becomes a continuation and no longer the definite end. When the conscious self lives on in physical forms, what does one make of death? The finality of it no longer appears daunting; a moment can be replayed forever and ever, in exact precision, without memories and feelings playing havoc with the purity of that one captured moment. Morel summarises what would become a permanent reality of the digital age: “Even if we left tomorrow, we would be here eternally, repeating consecutively the moments of this week, powerless to escape from the consciousness that we had in each one of them – the thoughts and feelings that the machine captured.”

Faust’s pact with Death also unfolds in sinister ways (not that it was ever innocent to begin with) in the novella. The fugitive is ready to make a deal to live in this continuum of time, to be immortal, so that he may fulfil his desire for Faustine. This immortality is limited in its scope – he will have no new memories, do no new things, just live in an endless repetition of one moment. Morel grants a kinder fate to his subjects by taking away his consciousness, in the absence of which it is indeed possible to live in a moment forever without feeling fatigued or dreading an existential crisis.

The question thus returns to the reader: Is Morel’s pact with death more benign than Faust’s? Can consciousness be traded for everlasting happiness? The more one grapples with these questions, the closer one comes to realising that the ethical dystopia that Casares imagined is already here, well-accepted, and a sure part of our 21st century lives. The horror is perhaps not so much an untimely death but a life free of all constraints of time – The Invention of Morel dabbles with the idea that immortality is incomprehensible in the ways that the soul is, love too. Perhaps the only way to have love and soul eternally is to become immortal, but Death humbles all – you cannot have everything. Perhaps this is the realisation that fuels all invention and art – perhaps temporality, and time itself, so short and fleeting, makes all love so worthwhile.

Is Death a fair price to pay in this bargain? I don’t know.

Is Immortality without a conscience the most elevated form of happiness? I doubt it.

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth LC Simms, NYRB Classics.