Island in the stream: The Invention of Morel

Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1968

In his prologue for the original 1940 edition of The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges makes an impassioned and, unsurprisingly, hugely articulate defense of fantastic literature. He laments its denigration, citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s reports on the British reading public’s scorn for the fantastic back in 1880 before continuing to note the disapproval it drew through the ensuing decades. I wonder what would Borges think of today’s climate, where the fantastic has gained considerable acceptance both among the general public and the literati, yet is so often employed either ironically, as an ingratiating nostalgic device, or in works of juvenile fiction that cross over into an adult reading public for reasons that may have much to do with a longing for the sort of strong narrative many fear has been forsaken by the authors of what we bizarrely choose to call literary fiction. (As opposed to non-literary fiction?) Of course, even now, in the year of the death of J.G. Ballard, the adult-geared, diverting yet thematically rich fantastic abides—most excitingly in the work of Spanish novelist Albert Sanchez Piñol, whose first two novels I'll be writing about later.

But among the attributes that remain so extraordinary about The Invention of Morel is this short novel’s simultaneous homage to its forebears and its tremendous prescience. It looks backward, most openly to Clemente Palma’s XYZ and to H.G. Wells and The Island of Dr Moreau, and forward, most especially to the ontologically vertiginous novels and stories of Philip K. Dick, with which it shares a special gift for scenarios so resonant as to inspire a kind of terror that never really leaves you, and most recently to the game Myst and the television show Lost. It’s author, Adolfo Bioy Casares, was only 26 at the time of its publication, yet his prose reveals a precocious blend of ambition and humility (“I don’t strive to make a big hit,” he wrote of the novel’s genesis, “just to avoid errors”), the result being vivid clarity in constant tension with near-baffling mystery.

Avoiding a prison sentence, a man flees to an apparently uninhabited island. A small group constructed a museum, a chapel, and a pool there in 1924 and then vanished—the island is said to host a grotesque, fatal disease. The fugitive is, we’ll learn, Venezuelan, though he seems to have traveled widely. We never learn the precise nature of his crimes. He is writing two books: Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. He’s also developing theories about immortality. He’s smart, smart enough to actually interpret the strange events he’ll soon encounter, but of the fact that he’s evading one kind of prison for another he seems not entirely cognizant. Much to his initial alarm, he’ll be joined by a group of tourists, including a woman, possibly Quebecoise, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Yet rather than threaten his liberty, they seem not to notice him at all. What’s more, they seem to be repeating the same actions over and over. The repetition, combined with the apparently unbreachable distance that separates him from the woman he’ll learn to call Faustine, only intensifies the fugitive’s longing. (Bioy Casares was apparently drawing upon his own fascination-from-afar with the actress Louise Brooks.) As Ocatvio Paz would later characterize it, the novel conveys how in our longing for what we cannot touch “we bow to the tyranny of a phantom… not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows.”

Bioy Casares with Borges

Bioy Casares with Silvina Ocampo

Even if he had never written a word, Bioy Casares would have a hallowed place in the literary pantheon of Latin America, and his home country of Argentina especially, by mere association: he befriended Borges in 1931, and the pair would go on to collaborate on a number of ventures, beginning with a pamphlet on the virtues of yogurt; and in 1940 he married Silvina Ocampo, another magnificent author of peculiar and bewitching imaginative powers. (Their complimentary yet distinctive styles and subjects, as well as the unusual conditions of their romantic relationship, align them to another sublime pairing of 20th century talents, that of US authors Paul and Jane Bowles.) My fear that Bioy Casares may be forgotten by much of the non-Latin world seems confirmed by the fact that for all of the wonderful supplementary essays, testimonies and documentaries on the Criterion Collection’s new deluxe two-disc edition of Last Year at Marienbad, mention of the pivotal influence of The Invention of Morel on that film is nowhere to be found. It’s a shame, since knowledge of one only enhances the reading of the other.

As with Marienbad, the “rotating eternity” that streams through the fugitive’s experience on the island, the sense of moments that always build toward a point that can never come to fruition, create a fusion of elements that penetrate the emotions as deeply as they do the intellect. That says something. And we’re so much closer to actually living the fantasy of The Invention of Morel; to the merging of the fugitive’s dreams of immortality with that of the scientist who visits his island—and who the fugitive fears may be be wooing his beloved Faustine; to the synthetic duplication of experience that in allowing us to, in some sense, live forever, is also draining us of life. But don’t let me spell all of this out for you—Bioy Casares does such a perfect, surprisingly lucid job of guiding us through this labyrinth. Go back to him. There’s a wonderful edition of the book still in print from New York Review Books Classics ($12.95 US/$16,95 Can.), translated by Ruth L.C. Simms and complete with Borges’ prologue, a very informative introduction from Suzanne Jill Levine, and the original illustrations by Borges’ sister, Norah Borges de Torre.

The eternal return: Last Year at Marienbad

For all its ostensible chilly formalism, for all its legendary difficulty, in the slowly shifting dynamic of suggestion, resistance and surrender that underlies every moment of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) there are things that, to my mind, can’t help but worm their way into the most tenebrous corners of the psyche. Memory, to paraphrase a character in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, is a language we all (mistakenly) believe we speak. But its malleability, its essential formlessness holds the key to our deepest fears and desires. The seduction at the heart of Marienbad is that of having someone recount to you all that you can’t recall about some moment that’s either dissolved into the fog of your past or, your strongly suspect, never happened. The seducer wants you to believe in that romance you never had, telling it to you over and over until this miracle happens and you begin to complete the memory yourself. And if you can be persuaded of the verity of this memory—of not only the romance but also the possibility of its revival—you may still have the chance at freedom you thought lost.

The promise of Marienbad is right there in a narrative as utterly simple as its realization is labyrinthine, a variation on a thousand other movies—in short, a love triangle. At a vast luxury country resort populated by well-heeled guests, X (Italian heartthrob Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince A (Delphine Seyrig, virtually unknown at the time) that they met in this same place the year previous, fell in love, and planned to run away together. Away from prying eyes and oppressive décor; from M (Sacha Pitoëff), A’s pale, vaguely vampiric husband, who always wins at the impenetrable table games he plays with the other guests; from “this edifice of a bygone era, this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel where one endless corridor follows another,” a place where people seem to always be returning out of sheer habit, where statues seem to move when no one looks, and people often resemble statues, a place where even shadows reveal discrepancies and whose boundaries are never breached at any point in the movie. As the camera continually surveys the place, adrift like a listless ghost, you start to wonder if the only “true” memories are to be found within its moldings, chandeliers and sculpted doorways.

Director Alain Resnais and novelist-turned-screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet never let on. Robe-Grillet was inspired by Adolfo Bioy Casares’ fantastical masterwork The Invention of Morel, and his script shares the late Argentine author’s design of a narrative logic that remains partially hidden from the audience while providing a solid foundation for all that transpires. Sacha Vierny’s weightless camerawork and Jacques Saulnier’s production design—the hotel’s interiors were all constructed—convey an absolute elegance that would imbue countless perfume adverts and inspire Stanley Kubrick’s wandering through the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (80). In the flamboyantly elliptical editing patterns of Resnais and editors Henri Colpi and Jasmine Chasney, the film’s baffling yet most explicit expression of its interplay of memory and fantasy, we find the blueprint for the most mesmerizing sequences in Wong Kar-Wai. In Seyrig’s marvelous performance, aided by a dizzying array of costume changes furnished by Coco Chanel, bewitching make-up and sweep of bangs that seem to invite her being swept off her feet, we’re given a beguiling balance of cool opacity and near-palpable anxiety. She’s in danger. She proves just how many expressions one face can give to uncertainty and unease, while still every bit the embodiment of useless glamour and the elusive promise of sex. She’d soon play the central role in Resnais’ still more intricate investigation into the same core themes—plus a bracing political subtext—in Muriel (63), and moodily inhabit another similarly memory-haunted house in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (75).

Watching Criterion’s well-endowed and gorgeous new director-approved DVD edition—also available in Blu-ray—I fell under the spell of Marienbad all over again. Which is to say I got totally lost in the thing, its details, repetitions, infinite mirrors and strange echoes, the shattered glass and collapsing marble rail, the sexual assault that reads as clown show. And even after having just seen it again I question my memory of it, small moments that may have happened, or maybe just alluded to, maybe only suggested in some subtle way. Maybe I just invented them, as we sometimes do with movies that consume us. I’ll happily re-watch it and try to confirm whether this or that memory is true, though I suspect I’ll just get lost all over again. Either way, these memories are worth holding onto, even if they lead me astray.