On Morel and Marienbad
I wonder why it has taken until now for me to read The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940), given the fascination it exerted on Borges. That writer's many stories, poems, and fake encyclopedia entries provided a fluid substrate for my own imagination. I read him early and enthusiastically, relating his fabulist output back to more conventional science-fiction.
So how did I forget Bioy, his colleague and friend? Borges even wrote the (original) introduction to this book.
There is a story here to uncover through figures of representation and obsession. Brooks / Faustine / Seyrig / Karina. I've made a few belated discoveries.
The absence of Morel from my own history is particularly surprising considering that this slim novel was the inspiration for Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). That being perhaps my favourite film, though alongside many others that might be called favourites.
Somehow in my years of watching this film and reading about its place in the context of both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, I had missed this reference. Despite it being mentioned often enough. Read for example Thomas Beltzer's "Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation" (November 2000) at Sense of Cinema.
Previously Marienbad had stood as an enigmatic totem, alone on a landscape, casting false shadows. Morel provides an antecedent for that most mysterious filmic event. The place Marienbad is even mentioned by name early in the narrative. Is is easy to see Faustine in Delphine Seyrig, even if the narrator's position has been modified from pure observer to participant.
The cover blurb of Morel's New York Review edition mentions Philip K. Dick. But the strange angular style of this text, its settings and character arc, instead prefigure J.G. Ballard. He too wrote of solitary figures, lost in realities at least partially the construction of their own psyches, partly provided for them by totalising forces beyond comprehension. The tidal lagoon is a terminal beach.
The cover shot of Louise Brooks acknowledges Bioy's obsession, the object of his amour fou transferred on these pages to the character Faustine. The mysterious withdrawing of a once pervasive figure from the world of film becomes a symbol for the protagonist's own isolation.
The omission of this book from my life becomes even stranger considering my enjoyment of Hombre Mirando Al Sudeste / Man Facing Southeast (Eliseo Subiela, 1986), in which the psychiatrist reads aloud from this novel.
Then there's a French TV movie L'invention de Morel (Claude-Jean Bonnardot, 1967) and subsequent Italian film L'invenzione di Morel (Emidio Greco, 1974). At two hours in length, this might just be bearable, if only for the presence of Anna Karina.
Perhaps an appropriate diagram for the intersectional nature of these mediations is a helix. Plot the following coordinates:
(Brooks, 1927)
(Faustine, 1940)
(Seyrig, 1961)
(Karina, 1974)
Then add your own vector. As a fan of cinema, the novel, and the cine-roman. As a subject of each medium in a world largely constructed from their imagery.
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