The Invention of Morel

"A number of writers, including Borges and other luminaries of Latin American literature, have described this as a perfect novel. And there is something perfect in its plotting. As I mentioned before, it plays an amazing trick on you. It puts you in an odd situation in which you think you’re reading something like Kafka, where you shouldn’t expect any kind of systematic explanation. And then it miraculously delivers one, which makes a bizarre sense of everything that’s come before. It’s hard to know how much to summarize a book like Morel . I don’t want to give away too much of the conceit. But in essence, the fugitive lands on the island, thinking it’s deserted. He’s fleeing political persecution, or in any event he’s trying to escape from forces he believes are pursuing him. On the island, however, he begins seeing these figures, whom he at first takes as real and then increasingly—since they seem unresponsive to his presence—as phantasmal. He falls in love with one of them. And the plot of the book is his uncovering over time what’s really going on. The novel is said to be the basis of the film Last Year at Marienbad , which is fitting because Casares was apparently inspired to write it by his infatuation with the silent movie star Louise Brooks, who eventually transitioned into ‘talking pictures’ as well. On some level, Morel is a commentary on new technologies and their progression. Silent pictures were purely visual, then sound was added and they became more ‘real’. Part of what Casares seems to ask—if you accept the idea that as you incorporate more senses, more of life becomes amenable to representation—is if at some point the reproduction of reality turns into reality itself. If we know the world only through our senses, is there a point at which virtual reality becomes reality, if you see what I mean. Yes, certain preoccupations in my book overlap with those in Casares’, which today seems very prescient about our current age. Morel was already talking about how, as reproductions capture reality with ever greater accuracy, there may cease to be anything to distinguish them from the reality they reproduce. This obviously bears on issues we’re grappling with right now relating to technological advances in simulation and AI . At the most extreme we are led to wonder, when does a human subject emerge from a machine, if it recapitulates enough of what we think it means to be human? In The Dimensions of a Cave I was interested in asking two questions. First: What status, ultimately, do we give these things that come closer and closer to approximating reality? I place this in a long continuum that reaches way back to storytelling—to fiction—as the original ‘virtual’ reality. Second: How fully can you live in stories, in virtual realities, without becoming perilously untethered from the reality underneath them? At the same time, I think it’s important to recognise that we have always lived partly in virtual realities—in the stories and meanings that we invent to make sense of the world. I took interrogation as a jumping-off point because it concretizes the idea of wanting to penetrate another person’s mind. There is something irreducibly or impenetrably private about one’s conscious experience, but we want to know what other people think and what they keep hidden. On the flip side, people live inside minds with their own blind spots and limitations. It’s quite difficult to know the reality that exists outside one’s head. So it’s a two-way street: The world is trying to know what’s inside us, and we’re trying to know what’s outside us. The key allegory—and an almost perfect metaphor for virtual reality—is Plato’s cave. Yes. Borges was a very close friend of Casares. It seems that the metaphysical bent in their writing grew at least partly from their friendship and conversation. Borges’ story ‘ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ‘—an excellent candidate for the ur -text of metaphysical literature—begins with the narrator (presumably Borges) having a discussion with Bioy (Casares) about the abominable nature of mirrors. For me, Borges is the central figure in metaphysical literature. Some might argue for Kafka, but Kafka, to my mind, transcends the genre and moves beyond its preoccupation with the interplay between reality and that which eclipses reality. I’m not sure if people would accept that Borges wrote thrillers, but I consider his stories philosophical thrillers of a sort, or as close to a thriller as a thought experiment could get. Still, Borges didn’t write novels. So instead of including him, I let him hover in the background of Morel , which has the advantage of being less well known."