The Invention of Morel

The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel) is a 1940 novella by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. A literary thought experiment in the manner of Bioy Casares’s close friend, Jorge Luis Borges, The Invention of Morel imagines an island on which a group of wealthy socialites unknowingly relive a single weeklong holiday over and over again. They are observed by the novella’s narrator, a political criminal who has come to the island to hide from the Venezuelan authorities. Exploring themes of consciousness, mortality, and memory, The Invention of Morel was Bioy Casares’s seventh publication but the first to bring him widespread acclaim. He won the First Municipal Prize for Literature for the City of Buenos Aires in 1941, and in 1991, he was awarded the highest honor for literature written in Spanish, the Cervantes Prize.

This study guide refers to the 2003 New York Review Book Classics edition, translated by Ruth L. C. Simmons. Outdated spellings for place names are preserved, such as Calcutta (now Kolkata).

Content Warning: The source material for this study guide contains references to suicidal ideation and uses an outdated, offensive term to refer to Roma people. This language has been preserved only in quotation.

Plot Summary

The novella takes the form of a journal kept by an unnamed writer who is on the run. The narrator hopes his journal will form the basis for a book, or at least that recording his experiences will help him stay grounded in reality. He is alone on Villings Island, which he came to after learning that it was abandoned. He knows that recent visitors to the island have contracted a mysterious sickness with symptoms resembling radiation poisoning. Fearful of the authorities chasing him, the writer rowed to the island anyway. Due to the danger of the sickness and surviving on the island, the narrator suspects that his journal may also be his will.

The island has a chapel, a swimming pool, and a museum that is more like a hotel, where the narrator takes up residence. Discovering that its basement is sealed, he makes a hole in the wall, hoping to find food in it. Instead, he finds an inactive engine room, although he cannot work out what the engines are supposed to power.

Loneliness gradually affects the narrator’s state of mind, until one day, he hears music playing from the museum and sees a group of carefree people dancing and laughing. He notices that they are playing the same two songs over and over again. The narrator is relieved to have company, but he fears that they could report his presence on the island to the Venezuelan authorities. He even suspects that the visitors are part of a plot to entrap him. He retreats to the swampy part of the island, watching the intruders from a distance.

One young woman comes to sit on the rocks along the beach every day at sunset. Observing her from a distance, the narrator begins to develop passionate feelings for her. One evening, she is joined by a strange-looking man in tennis clothes. He joins the woman on several occasions, and the narrator begins to feel jealous of him. By eavesdropping on their conversations, he learns that the man is called Morel and the woman Faustine.

Eventually, the narrator cannot resist approaching Faustine, but she refuses to acknowledge him. It is as if she cannot see him. He even creates a flower garden arranged to look like Faustine watching the sunset, but neither she nor Morel acknowledges it. None of the people seem to notice him or acknowledge his presence. After a while, the narrator notices that Morel and Faustine sometimes repeat the same conversations word for word, even repeating the same gestures. He concludes that his perception has broken from reality.

The intruders vanish as suddenly as they appeared. The narrator returns to the museum and finds no evidence that anyone has been in the building since his departure. He decides that he must have had a bout of severe food poisoning that caused him to hallucinate.

That night, the visitors suddenly reappear. Watching them closely, narrator notices other strange phenomena. The visitors jump up and down to warm themselves on an unbearably hot day. An aquarium full of dead fish is suddenly full of living fish, and the narrator is sure they are the same ones. Finally, he notices that there are two suns and two moons in the sky. The narrator believes that he is hallucinating or is caught up in some supernatural phenomenon.

He also learns that the visitors have come to the island at Morel’s invitation, whom they consider a genius. The narrator hopes that Morel prefers one of the other eligible young women to Faustine, though he suspects that Faustine is in a sexual relationship with one or perhaps two of the other visitors.

One day, the narrator comes across Morel addressing the visitors as a group. He explains that he has invented a machine that captures reality so exactly that the images are alive and have consciousness similar to the people recorded. He has brought the visitors here so they can be recorded and relive this holiday forever, although they will not remember that they have lived it before. Morel, too, will relive, forever, this brief period with the woman he loves. Morel does not identify his beloved.

One of the visitors, Stoever, presses for more information, and it becomes clear that the visitors will die; the recording process has led to several unexplained deaths at the companies where Morel tested it. Stoever is upset, but Morel insists that he is offering his guests immortality and storms out. Stoever wants to follow him to confront him, but the other visitors convince him to trust Morel.

The narrator inspects Morel’s abandoned speech papers and learns that the machinery that projects the recording of the visitors is powered by the tides. The narrator speculates that this is why the visitors only appear at certain times. The other strange phenomena he has noticed can also be explained by the fact that he is witnessing a living recording superimposed on reality.

At first, the narrator is horrified by Morel’s experiment, but as he continues to watch the visitors, he comes to accept that their lives are better than his; they are eternally on holiday with nothing to worry about except their romances. They may have consciousness of the moments that were recorded, but they are unaware of anything that happened before or that happens after. He gives up his fleeting notion of finding Faustine in the real world, especially when he realizes that she is most likely one of the dead found aboard a ship who succumbed to the island’s mysterious illness.

The next time the visitors disappear, the narrator returns to the basement of the museum, entering again through the hole he made on his first visit. He waits for the tide to rise and confirms that the motors start, although he cannot see how they work. When he tries to leave, he finds that the hole is no longer there—it has been replaced by the recorded projection of the unbroken wall. When he escapes from the basement, he searches for the rest of Morel’s machinery. When he finds the projectors, he decides to record himself, superimpose the footage on Morel’s recording, and splice himself into the recording of Faustine. In his final entry, the writer hopes that his journal will be found in a future where Morel’s technology has been perfected. He asks his future readers to merge his recorded consciousness with Faustine’s.