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’ close friend Jorge Luis Borges, The Invention of Morel imagines an island on which a group of wealthy socialites unknowingly relive a single 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.

The novella takes the form of a journal, kept by an unnamed writer who is on the run. The writer hopes his journal will form the basis for a novel, or at least that recording his experiences will help him stay sane. He is alone on Villings Island, which he came to after learning that it had been abandoned. He knows that recent visitors to the island have contracted a mysterious sickness, whose symptoms resemble those of radiation poisoning, but fearful of the authorities at his back, the writer decided to row to the island anyway. Due to the danger of the sickness, and the difficulty of surviving on the island, the writer suspects that his journal may also be his will.

The writer finds several large, once-elegant buildings, including one so monumental that he calls it “the Museum.” He takes up residence there, discovering that its basement is sealed. He makes a hole in the wall, and sees an inactive engine room, although he cannot work out what the engines are supposed to power.



Loneliness gradually begins to threaten the writer’s sanity, until one day, as he returns home, 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 writer is relieved to have company, but he fears that if he makes contact with them, news of his presence on the island might reach 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 visitors 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 writer begins to develop passionate feelings for her. One evening, she is joined by a strange-looking man in tennis clothes. He does not seem of a piece with the other visitors. He joins the woman on several occasions, until the writer begins to feel jealous of him. By eavesdropping on their conversations, he learns that the man is called Morel and the woman Faustine.

Finally, the writer cannot resist approaching Faustine any longer, but she refuses to acknowledge him. It is as if she cannot see him. The writer tries speaking to the other visitors, with the same result. After a while, the writer begins to notice that Morel and Faustine sometimes repeat the same conversations word for word, even repeating the same gestures. He concludes that he must be going mad.



The visitors vanish as suddenly as they appeared. The writer 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, the writer begins to notice other strange phenomena. He witnesses the visitors jumping 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 writer is sure they are the same ones. Finally, he notices that there are two suns and two moons in the sky. The writer begins to believe that he is hallucinating, or else that he is caught up in some supernatural phenomenon.

He also learns that the visitors are wealthy, fashionable people, who have come to the island at the invitation of Morel, whom they consider a genius. The writer hopes that Morel prefers one of the other eligible young women amongst the visitors to Faustine. He also comes to suspect that Faustine is in a sexual relationship with one or perhaps two of the other visitors.



One day, the writer comes across Morel addressing the visitors as a group. Morel explains that he has invented a machine that captures reality so exactly that it even captures the souls of the people recorded. He has brought the visitors here so that they can be recorded. They will 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—their souls will be transferred to the recording. Stoever is upset, but Morel angrily insists that he is offering his guests immortality, and he storms out. Stoever wants to follow him to confront him, but the other visitors convince him that he should trust Morel, who is, after all, a genius.

The writer inspects Morel’s abandoned cue cards and learns that the machinery that projects the recording of the visitors is powered by the tides. The writer 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 writer 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.

The next time the visitors disappear, the man 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 up, 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 goes in search of the rest of Morel’s machinery. When he finds the projectors, he decides to record himself and superimpose the footage on Morel’s recording, in order to splice himself into the recording of Faustine. In his final entry, the writer hopes that his journal will be found in a future in which Morel’s technology has been perfected. He asks his future readers to merge his recorded consciousness with Faustine’s.



Exploring themes of consciousness, mortality, and exclusion, The Invention of Morel was Bioy Casares’ seventh publication, but the first to bring him widespread acclaim. He would eventually be awarded Spanish literature’s highest honor, the Cervantes Prize, in 1991.