The invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares [3]
Although Bioy had still not discovered his mode in the volume of stories that preceded Morel, titled Luis Greve, Dead (1937), Borges found in this book the seed of the writer-to-be, as he wrote in his review in Sur:
Our literature is poor in fantastic narratives, preferring the formless tranche de vie or the episodic. Which makes Bioy Casares's work unusual. In Chaos (1934) and The New Storm (1935) imagination predominates; in this book—in the best pages of this book—that imagination obeys an order. "Nothing is so rare as order in the operations of the spirit," said Fenelon. In Luis Greve he has begun to master games with time and space which attempt to impose another order—a literary one—upon an absurd universe.
One of the stories in this early volume, "The Postcard Lovers," about a young man who interpolates his image into the photograph of a girl he loves, anticipates The Invention of Morel, in which Vamour fou is carried to its ultimate consequences. When the girl in the postcard discovers the photograph and the love, her life changes.... The Invention of Morel transports this scheme into the realm of science fiction, and away from Argentina to an unknown and supposedly deserted island: Bioy needed to "decontaminate" himself from the subjectivity of his immediate Argentine reality to
gain aesthetic distance. But I won't ruin the fun for the reader by revealing the plot, which, as Borges observed, is a magnificent invention, inspired by science fiction ranging from H. G. Wells to Villiers de l'lsle-Adam's The Future Eve. I will remark, however, that Bioy's "invention," like all good science fiction, was prophetic, and intuitively predicted future scientific realities.
This meticulously wrought novella of just over one hundred pages was received with acclaim, and brought Bioy recognition beyond the borders of the Sur group,- he was awarded the first municipal Buenos Aires prize for literature. When translated into French in 1953, its narrative device of two lovers coexisting spatially in two different temporal dimensions would inspire Alain Robbe-Grillet's script for Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad (1961). He would continue to receive literary prizes at home and abroad, and films in Argentina and Europe have been based on his many seductive plots: The Invention of Morel has actually been filmed several times, but none of these films seem to capture the elusive charm of this novella about characters who are filmed. Aside from several movie and TV versions made in France, Italy, and Argentina, Morel has become a cult reference, as for example in the Argentine Eliseo Subiela's metaphysical film Man Facing Southeast (1985). At the same time, among Argentine proponents of realism, Morel gained for Bioy the reputation of "clockmaker," of an intellectual enamored of his own mental constructions or "bachelor machines." Lucio Bordenave, the bungling clockmaker in the later Asleep in the Sun, was perhaps a burlesque response to this misreading—but even Bioy himself felt that it wasn't until the story "The Idol" in The Celestial Plot (1948) that he had "loosened up" and found his style.
Bioy's style is terse and understated: the translation of The Invention of Morel by Ruth L. C. Simms, first published in 1964 by the University of Texas Press, tends at times—a common iciulcncy in many translations, even the best—to paraphrase, to crcatc smoother transitions where the original might seem excessively spare. But in general the translation is accurate and faithful to his elegance. Bioy's sentences reflect his tendency