The Invention of Morel

“I have the uncomfortable sensation that this paper is changing into a will. If I must resign myself to that, I shall try to make statements that can be verified so that no one, knowing that I was accused of duplicity, will doubt that they condemned me unjustly.”

Though the narrator despairs about his chances of survival, he is committed to making his diary a methodical document of his experiences on the island. He initially plans to write about the injustices he has faced that caused him to become a fugitive, but the strangeness of the intruders’ arrival shifts his focus.

“I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.”

The narrator was working on a research project about immortality before his trial. He asserts that fear of bodily death interferes with progress in the field of preserving consciousness, introducing the theme of Defining Consciousness and Life. Ironically, he develops a strong physical attraction for a woman who exists only as a limited consciousness.

“I had nothing to hope for. That was not so horrible—and the acceptance of that fact brought me peace of mind. But now the woman has changed all that. And hope is the one thing I must fear.”

The narrator’s infatuation with Faustine complicates his life. He hopes to win her affections, but success is not guaranteed. Isolated on the island, life after that failure would be worse than it was before she appeared.

“I believe I was blinded by my wish to appear as an ex-corpse, and I was delighted with the discovery that death was impossible if I could be with the woman.”

In composing the inscription for his flower garden tribute to Faustine, the narrator uses metaphors comparing himself to a corpse, saying he was all but dead and she has reawakened him. These inscriptions are ironic foreshadowing—Faustine, like everyone else, is already dead. The narrator will become a zombie, then a corpse, in his pursuit of her.

“Spontaneity is the mother of crudity.”

A play on the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention,” the narrator tries to make sense of his decision to jump out at Morel and Faustine, point to Morel, and cry that he is a woman with a beard. The narrator frequently behaves irrationally, though his high opinion of himself means that he often rationalizes his behavior, characterizing himself as more scientific or methodical than he is.

“Now I understand why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living.” 

The narrator realizes that he must be on a different plane of existence than the visitors. He speculates that either he or they could be dead. He prefers the latter option, as it makes him feel like a character in a book because he can shout at them, but they don’t hear or see him.

“I was not dead until the intruders arrived; when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.”

Theorizing about the strange appearances and disappearances of the visitors, the narrator latches onto the idea that he is dead. However, had the visitors never arrived, he wouldn’t have had any indication that he was dead. This hints at Morel’s motivations in his experiment—immortality is nothing without company, so he manufactures a loop for him and his companions.

“We are suspicious of a stranger who tells us his life story, who tells us spontaneously that he has been captured, sentenced to life imprisonment, and that we are his reason for living. We are afraid that he is merely tricking us into buying a fountain pen or a bottle with a miniature sailing vessel inside.”

The narrator’s attempted flirtations with Faustine are not successful. He thinks through his approach and what he might say. Though he wants to blurt out his life story, he realizes that that could well make her suspicious and drive her away. Ironically, this is how he opens the diary, making this a playful nod to the narrator’s unreliability.

“And, if it is a trap, why is it such a complex one? Why do they not simply arrest me? I find this laborious method quite idiotic.”

Despite the mounting evidence that something either otherworldly or beyond his comprehension is happening, the narrator cannot get over his paranoia that the visitors are working in league with the police. This statement is ironic because he says this plan is “laborious” and “idiotic,” but it’s a plan he made up himself.

“I could give perpetual reality to my romantic desire.”

Morel says this as one of his motivations for bringing Faustine and his friends to a lovely island to be recorded for all eternity. His desire is evident in the replaying images, but the romance between him and Faustine is questionable, if there at all.

“When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges.”

Morel believes that the soul lies in the conglomeration of senses that his machines record. He supports this notion by how the act of recording and transmitting the sensations causes the death of the living subjects. His machines, however, are not capable of ascertaining whether the images have consciousness, emphasizing the difference between Memory versus Immortality.

“Like the unheard music that lies latent in a phonograph record, where are we until God orders us to be born?”

Morel’s arrogance comes out in this rhetorical question. He is comparing himself to God since he invented the machine that springs to life with the tides.

“The theory that the images have souls seems to be confirmed by the effects of my machine on persons, animals, and vegetables used as transmitters.”

Morel uses omission to persuade his audience of his brilliance. He misdirects them, alluding to “the effects” of his experiments without explicitly stating what those effects are. The truth he conceals is their gruesome deaths.

“I have been accused of a crime, sentenced to life imprisonment, and it is possible that my capture is still somebody’s profession, his hope of bureaucratic promotion.”

Even after hearing about Morel’s invention, the narrator suspects that it is all a trap created by the police to capture him. He knows that it’s absurd, but Morel’s revelation is so astounding that it’s hard for him to absorb all at once, so he returns to his own narrative.

“I experienced a feeling of scorn, almost disgust, for these people and their indefatigable, repetitious activity. […] To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares; to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost).”

The narrator’s first reaction, once he accepts the truth of Morel’s machines, is a negative mix of emotions. He is angry about being duped, and there is some eeriness about being surrounded by simulacra. He is also embarrassed about developing feelings for a woman who isn’t real. His speculation about wanting one’s lover to be a ghost reflects his objectification of Faustine more generally—real or not, she is largely a projection of his desires.

“We will be able to live a life that is always new, because in each moment of the projection we shall have no memories other than those we had in the corresponding moment of the eternal record, and because the future, left behind many times, will maintain its attributes forever.”

The narrator reads this assertion in Morel’s papers, part of the speech Morel didn’t read aloud. It emphasizes the importance Morel places on the preservation of memory. His concept of immortality keeps beings separate from the living world and never changing.

“The indefinite conservation of the souls now functioning is assured. Or rather: it will be assured when men understand that they must practice and preach the doctrine of Malthus to defend their place on earth.”

The narrator is a firm believer in the Malthusian principle: An increase in food production leads to overpopulation, which, in turn, leads to starvation and environmental destruction. The narrator believes that whatever Morel preserved will exist indefinitely, and immortality can lead to the island being overrun. This is an irrational worry on an island where the narrator is alone—the images don’t compete with him for resources—but he cannot give up his old framework for viewing the world.

“Then life will be a repository for death.”

The narrator envisions a future in which someone creates a more sophisticated machine than Morel’s that can detect thoughts and feelings as a catalog or alphabet of experiences. Calling life “a repository for death” casts a shadow on such an existence, asking whether immortality is worth it.

“A rotating eternity may seem atrocious to an observer, but it is quite acceptable to those who dwell there.”

While initially the narrator finds his life among the images unsettling, he eventually gets used to them. Their repetitions calm him and provide structure and predictability. The images are also his only companions on the island, though they are not aware of him.

“Finally my fear of death freed me from the irrational belief that I was incompetent. I might have seen the motors through a magnifying glass: they ceased to be a meaningless conglomeration of iron and steel; they had forms and arrangements that permitted me to understand their purpose.”

Bioy Casares undercuts the narrator’s Malthusian beliefs and outsized sense of self here—the narrator has been trapped in the motor room for days and fears he will starve to death or suffocate because he doesn’t understand how the machines work. He says his fear of death eventually gives him clarity, but his solution is simply disconnecting the machines—something he could have done from the beginning.

“Away from this island Faustine is lost with the gestures and the dreams of an alien past.”

The narrator comes to accept that Faustine only exists on this island in this projected form. His feelings for her are still real, though, so he remains on the island. In reality, he cannot leave the island because his boat is ruined and he cannot fix it, but Faustine provides another, more noble reason.

“He loved the inaccessible Faustine. That is why he killed her, killed himself and all his friends, and invented immortality! Faustine’s beauty deserves that madness, that tribute, that crime. […] And now I see Morel’s act as something sublime.”

The narrator understands that he has something in common with Morel, whom he despises. Both men have patriarchal views about women as objects of desire to be owned rather than people in their own right. This also foreshadows the narrator’s later decision to record himself interacting with Faustine, dooming himself to his own eternal repetitions with her.

“The real advantage of my situation is that now death becomes the condition and the pawn for my eternal contemplation of Faustine.”

The narrator is confronted with a paradox. His death would spell the end of his ability to contemplate Faustine. However, if he records himself with Morel’s machines, which would also kill him, he can remain with her forever, though his consciousness will disappear.