A Pataphorical Interpretation of The Invention of Morel

Waiting at the back of an enormous line in the school bookstore, I remember sifting through a stack of books from my upcoming classes to ease boredom. Seeing that Jorge Luis Borges had written the prologue to The Invention of Morel caught my attention so it was the first book I looked at. The actual plot of the story was not described in more than one sentence of the synopsis. The rest of what was said about the book had to do with what other popular authors thought of Bioy Casares’ writing style, theme was briefly covered, and emphasis was put on Bioy Casares’s obsession with actress Louise Brooks. After watching clips from a documentary about Louise Brooks in class as well, it became clear that Bioy Casares’s life and the time in which he wrote the book (as Tony Prichard pointed out, the technological timing of a young cinema and the emerging advent of sound) had considerable bearing on the meaning of the book. This presents a level of reality that Bioy Casares is commenting on. How he comments on that reality, it seems, is often communicated through the metaphorical reality of the relationship between the fugitive and Faustine. There is another level of reality, however, that separates the fugitive and Faustine and complicates their “relationship”, and that is the machine that Morel has invented. With these three levels of reality set in place, an interpretation of The Invention of Morel based off of the structure of a pataphor appears to work.
In the Invention of Morel, the fugitive becomes obsessed with a woman that he can only interact with by observing. She does not know that he exists and she is destined to repeat the same actions that she took during the course of one week over and over for eternity. This is due to a machine that Morel has made. In Bioy Casares life, there is an actress named Louise Brooks who appears in a new invention called cinema. Similarly, all that Casares can do about his interest in Brooks is watch a moving film strip that simulates that she is right in front of him. This only lasts for a few hours, and unless she makes another movie, for all Bioy Casares knows those few hours are the only ones that she will live, over and over for eternity. If the metaphorical reality of the fugitive and Faustine corresponds with the average man and the movie star in Bioy Casares’s reality, particularly himself and Brooks in this case, then the second pataphorical degree of separation from that reality would be the fantasy that results from one’s observation of the other. The fugitive is led on what seems a completely random tangent as he tries to survive on an unforgiving island and remain hidden from the authorities searching for him. Randomly, several projected figures enter his life, one of which being a woman he cannot get off his mind, and he absorbs himself into an impossible fantasy in which he ends up sacrificing his life to create the illusion that he is the lover of that woman (who still has no idea that he exists). In this way, he has forced his own imaginative life to “take on its own reality”. The correlation to Casares’ reality can be further explained by the creepy nature of the fugitive’s observing and day dreaming. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray plays an egocentric man presented with a similar situation of being stuck in a repeating time loop, but he doesn’t come off as being a stalker, at least not as blatantly as Bioy Casares’s fugitive, because he gets to know everyone in the city he is stuck in, along with the woman he likes. The fugitive focuses on Faustine alone. He rarely thinks of the others and when he does it is often wishing them ill if he suspects that they are pursuing a relationship with her as well. What makes the fugitive and Bill Murray’s situation different is that Bill can interact with the people in the loop, but the fugitive can’t. This relegates the fugitive to voyeurism, he can only look at this fellow human that he desires and imagine a life with her. This is what watching a movie essentially is: looking at the image of other living people when they do not know you are there, daydreaming about them, being a voyeur. Idolizing and lusting after stars becomes like the relationship between the fugitive and Faustine. The daydreaming of these completely removed and irrelevant people to your own life becomes a second degree of separation and the time you spend thinking about them starts to resemble the actions of the fugitive trying to copy himself into Faustine’s life, still only able to make it seem like there is a two way relationship when there really is not and never will be. At the level of obsession you become a fugitive of reality attempting to live out a pataphor.