If you are a movie lover, fascinated by images, those fragments of time forever frozen on footage, if you're enthralled by the beloved past, fictional o real, printed there for eternity...then you are also likely to love Bioy Casares'
The Invention of Morel.
Why? Many of us occasionally have felt under the spell of a movie star. Thrilled by her talent, personality, voice or beauty. Either a living present day star or, more often, one that is long gone. In this case there is hardly any difference. What is what we call a star or a movie legend? Actually "a star" is nothing more than a bunch of sounds and images, haunting our minds. Nothing more than virtual stuff, so powerful, that is, as to create in us a feeling of actual reality.
The person who was the basis for the now mighty myth may have long disappeared, slipped away into non-existence, but oddly it feels as real as if she was actually out there, somewhere. True she is not tangible or material, but in some mysterious way she's fully real.
One of the issues of The Invention of Morel is hopeless love and its obsessions and infatuations. Our fancies for no longer existent people, or in a broader sense, for people that are first of all our own creations, be they as well either present-day physical, or dead and gone. Unreachable in both cases. if not as merely phantoms in our minds.
Technology and dreams
Movies, those phantom-generators, have always dealt with technology. Movies are a product of culture but also an outcome of technological progression. And as image technology moves on, images become more and more real, so they will reach the point that they become indistinguishable from reality. (Probably we're not that far-off from it by now). And myths created out of the images, those fancies based on long gone stars, will then become still more overwhelmingly alive in our imagination. Progression in technology will have a great impact on our dreams. These will be more polished, a result of an increasingly more sophisticated manufacturing.
Adolfo Bioy Casares (born in 1914) was a witness to technological change in movies during the 1920s and 1930s. He grew up at a time when this new form of entertaining was in rapid evolution. Movies gradually moved away from being a rather fringe thing onto the very center of pop culture, displacing in the process such beloved forms of show biz as vaudeville. They also evolved from the first silent movies into talkies, and from black/white sobriety into over-the-rainbow ravishing technicolor. Each moment one step closer to a greater realism, always at the service of myth and the public's fantasy. Today in our digital time, that process is strongly accelerated.
Bioy Casares published The Invention of Morel in 1940, at age 25. By then, and like many other people, he too had an unreachable star living on the screen as well as in his mind: Louise Brooks. And it seems as if the legendary silent actress was the model for Morel's ethereal Faustine, responsible for all the fugitive's (Morel's narrator) lovesickness.
Faustine and Louise Brooks
The main character of the story, the narrator, a nameless fugitive, arrives on an (apparently) desert island in Polynesia, a place with a bit of Dr Moreau echoes. There he soon encounters some weird presences, astonishingly non congruent people, who do not seem to pay any attention to him, but whom he obviously finds advisable to hide away from. Among them is the beautiful and divine Faustine. A magnetic dark woman "who speaks French with an accent from South America". Enchanting in the eyes of the fugitive, and as enchanting (we suppose) in Bioy's mind as movie heroine Louise Brooks. And here is one of the keys of the novel: the lovable phantoms we create with the aid of technology, and their power of attraction.
The Invention of Morel is a brief narration of around 100 pages, just a little longer than a short story. It is so well written and plotted that has gathered high praise from quite a few first rate authors, mainly Latin American, among which Borges, Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier or Octavio Paz. And apparently, Bioy's story was also an inspiration for that strangest movie of all: Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad.
Morel is also what we may call a "science fiction" novel(ette), a label I rather dislike. It is a narration with a "technological device" at its center, true, and shows the impact of its activity on a human being's existence. That is after all, carefully considered. what good Sf is always about: present or potential realistic techno-science and its human impact. Here in Morel is a far reaching technology (of virtual reality) along with its spiritual consequence. Bioy's novel is a beautifully written reflection on virtual reality (in 1940!) and the power of its irresistible phantoms.
