ASSIGNMENT FOR FRI, 3/19

**FINISH "The Invention of Morel"**

NB: THE STORY IS POSTED IN TWO CHUNKS ON THE PAGE ENTITLED: Week 9 - Hume ENQ, Sec 7 and Morel

Sergio sent this great talk of BORGES on the subject of metaphor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBsPTTVyid8

**IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

CLASS FOR FRIDAY 3/18 MEETS ON THE STEPS OF DWINELLE

Last Writing before break is an open assignment. Write what you please about how "The Invention of Morel" relates to any of the literature/fiction/hybrid lit-fiction we have studied. How does it situate itself as a "literary" work? A myth of selfhood? A philosophic fairy tale of love? An anatomy of human thought/knowledge/reason/perception? A commentary on divinity?

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Jack

The Orpheus who can’t sing…and the implications for a reader’s interest in Eurydice

Why the hero is not an Orphe

Why the hero cannot be and is not meant to be an Orpheus…and why Faustina fails as a Eurydice

Dr. Faustina

The Rival, the Visionary, (and the Treacherous Murderer)

When Faust summons Helen, how should we view the man who, in full knowledge of Faust’s impious deeds and his fate, chooses to imitate Faust and likewise summon Helen—even though he knows that Helen will not even be his own incantation, but that of another man?

            We have read a couple of Orpheus stories. Probably the most important aspect of these is the ultimate unreachability of the Eurydice character, and how the Orpheus character deals with his recognition of the immutable separation. Faustina, we are told, is an ultra-desirable, yet ultra-unreachable woman. In this most important characteristic then, Morel resembles an Orpheus story.

            In this story, the narrator’s claims to Orphic poet-status consist in his diary. He can often seem a quite decent guy, like Calvino’s Orpheus, but rarely is he poetic. After the appearance of the Others on the island, he pretty much slips into perpetual fear and discomfort (a formula for a lack of poetic reflection time). Personally, I found his paranoia too obvious and repetitive by around page 30; a rather boring Dostoevsky paranoiac imitation. Most importantly, this limitation on his characterization will place a further limit on portrayals of Faustina’s attractiveness: this is not represented with anything approaching a reasonable mind (the paranoia being the inhibitor of reason—not love). If the narrator’s ability to love is thus undermined by his highly unstable mental state, it is difficult to feel much attraction to Faustine.

            Of course, an actual portrayal of Faustine as an interesting human being might have helped this cause. Classical Eurydices didn’t really need too much personality when they had Orpheus; Faustine lacks both. Also, her name, I think importantly, is rather ugly. Why liken her to Faust? Morel certainly seems to have Faust like qualities: limited concern for other human beings, genius, lack of piety. Faustine doesn’t seem the guilty party in this narrative: but who is?

            For much of the novella, the narrator regards Morel as a romantic rival. When he learns that Morel wanted to eternalize Faustine and everyone else (by killing them, he almost seems to overlook for large streches), the narrator’s attitude seems to switch basically to admiration; he determines to imitate Morel and incorporate himself into the recording. The Faust link seems to contain an inherent refutation of Morel’s invention, despite the narrator’s final attitude of imitation (which implies approval).

            Faustine is a Faust insofar as she leads the narrator away from traditional piety and towards his pretensions of eternity, of divinity, of Raskolnikovian supermanhood, of Morel-hood. Even the last is hollow, as he possesses nowhere near the requisite technical genius or even competence to create or repair the machines.

            The most important reason this is not an Orpheus story is that Faustine is supposedly achieved in some form at the end. The hollowness of this achievement, and what the endeavor has done to the affable guy who started the story, is why we should prefer the fate of Orpheus.

(I started writing this thinking it was a failed Orpehus story, now I think it may be a successful Faust story. We will see if that interpretation survives.)

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Sara Sol 

Morel: “if we grant consciousness to all that distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by machinery” and “when all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges” This invention of the soul relies entirely upon what Descartes originally doubted, and Hume continues to doubt-= the legitimacy of perceptions. Morel is assuming that we are no more than the what others perceive of us (in all senses) from the outside, but the “I” in Bioy’s story finds the flaw in this idea, pointing out that the true essence of the characters beings- the consciousness- are not necessarily contained in the reproductions of physical perceptions. This doubt is Hume’s doubt, the doubt of necessary connection between cause/effect becomes a doubt necessary connection between consciousness and its effect- i.e. the things it produces that others can perceive.  It asks:  how do I know that your movement is a caused by, or is a production of your consciousness? And if I don’t know that, then what other basis do have to assume that you are conscious? I am not making the connection between Boiy and Hume very clear. What I mean is: Morel assumes that because he perceives the people around him, he knows their consciousness exists, but Boiys “I” sees the flaw in this- that you can’t really know whether or not the reproductions are actually feeling everything again, you only know that you perceive them again. This makes an extension of Hume’s thing- that we can’t ”distinctly and clearly” know some effect we perceive  is actually caused by the cause, and not just a sequence of different ideas that happen to recur,  because all we know is that it happens to always be that way. In the same way, we can’t know that all the extensions of consciousness- speech, movement, expressions,  etc – do anything more than imply consciousness.   

                In the “electric ant” PKD creates a character whose consciousness or soul is a product of all his perceptive devices, the reality tape, but Morel is assuming that a person is literally no more than a product of its being perceived. The difference is subtle, but important, PKDs being is a production of actively perceiving (even if this activeness is imposed upon him by a pre-set and pre-written reality tape), while Morel’s is a production of passively being perceived.

                I thought it interesting that there is an lapse of time between the “I”s recording and his subsequent death- in which he gets to see himself as a recording, supposedly, or at least according to Morel, feeling and truly experiencing. It reminded me of the overlap between Poole’s mechanic breakdown, his death, and Sarah’s death. It’s odd that there is an overlap in either of these, and although they each point out different oddities in the texts, I thought the similarity was worth pointing out.  

Stacy

Props to Bioy. I would have never imagined the outcome and believe me, I tried.

I can’t help think about the machine that captures the souls. I also found the parallel between “Electric Ant” and the novel but since I was beat to it I’ll try to somehow relate it to Berkeley.

Berkeley’s whole spiel was about how things are only perceived and that matter doesn’t really exist. He writes that the greater spirit (God) is the one who gives us the ideas of what we perceive and that’s why we think matter exists. He also states that the senses do not exist but that they are perceived. In the novel we have these tourists who do not exist in reality but they are projected onto the plane of reality by a machine. Although the narrator is able to perceive them they themselves cannot perceive him. It is interesting how the two planes of reality can be distorted so thoroughly. I should clarify this a bit. I consider both planes to be real. The difference is that they are real on a different space of time. It’s as if we were to make a recording of us in class on Monday and then merge that reality with our reality on Wednesday. I think it might be possible that we perceive on Wednesday  that which happened on Monday if these two planes of reality were merged. Since what happened on Wednesday has not yet happened on Monday, we, on the plane of reality for Monday cannot perceive the reality of Wednesday.

Wow…I have really digressed from the point I wanted to make. Well, more like my main question.

Here goes.

I want to question the absolute existence of the people as recordings and what does this existence entail. Are they able to sense things? It appears that they can sense things in their own plane of reality but not in the narrator’s. Also, let’s assume that the narrator is able to transfer his soul onto Faustine’s recording. Will she be able to perceive him? Can Berkeley’s “greater spirit” insert an idea onto a recording so that the recording of Faustine can perceive him? What do you guys think?

Ana

After reading The Invention of Morel, I was instantly reminded of Hume. There is a specific quote in the novel right after …”The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. Now reality appears to be changed, unreal. When a man awakens, or dies, he is slow to free himself from the terrors of the dream, from the worries and manias of his life.”

            In this quote, I think that the fugitive is really drawing from Hume’s belief that experience tells us things about the world we perceive based on custom. Like the billiard ball example, we just assume that one ball will hit the other and roll a certain way because that is the way we have seen it happen before and it is human nature to want to see a connection and to belief that there is a connection. The same with the fugitive on the island; he is so used to connecting point A to point B, [i.e. he is a fugitive and therefore anyone who goes to the island must be there to turn him in], that he at first can’t fathom the possibility that point A might lead to point G or Z or maybe might not even lead to a point at all. In that quote the fugitive writes that humans want to make sense of the world, make connections in order to survive but after Morel’s speech he realized that all the connections that he was making were completely different from what was actually going on with the tourists.  

Might I add that I totally agree with Stacy, the ending was something I did not expect or imagine at all, it was amazing. And I also don’t think the images sense anything, I think that since they are just images, they keep on thinking the same things that they were thinking when they were recorded/photographed over and over again.

Mazzin

"The Invention of Morel" reacts to many of the philosophers we've recently studied. The two which seem most blatant to me are Hume and Berkeley.  There are several moments in the story where Casares eludes to Hume's concepts of Habit andcause and effect. The first which I noticed takes place on pg. 32.  The fugitive is in the process of creating a garden to impress his love Faustine.  After finishing the garden he says this "When I made this garden, I felt like a magician because the finished work had no connection with the precise movements that produced it..." The fugitive has realized just as Hume has that the connection between the "cause" and the "effect" is missing. In this case the placement of the flowers (cause) with the portrait of Faustine (effect).  Another relation to Hume comes on pg. 41 when he speaks about habit. " I felt elated. I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior."  The fugitive has discovered what Hume has discovered; the human brain makes judgments on future events based on experience of past events, and that this judgment is unexpected, and irrational.  Later on in the story the fugitive makes a blatant relation to the ideas of Hume. Hume speaks about the idea of Habit or Custom "for whenever repetition  of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or understanding; we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom.  The fugitive makes a similar observation on pg. 65 "The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world."