SOURCE: "Science versus the Library in The Island of Dr. Moreau, La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel], and Plan de evasión [A Plan for Escape]," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. IX, No. 18, Spring-Summer, 1981, pp. 17-26.

[A prolific translator of Latin American literature, Levine has translated works by such authors as Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortazar, Severo Sarduy, and Carlos Fuentes. She is the translator of two works by Bioy Casares, The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata and Asleep in the Sun. In the following essay, she characterizes H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape as literature revealing "the text's progressive awareness … of its own textuality." Levine contends that this self-reflexivity is most evident in the attitudes of Bioy Casares's and Wells's characters toward books and literature.]

This paper is part of a lengthy chapter of my dissertation which deals with Bioy Casares' novellas, La invención de Morel [The Invention of Morel] (1940) and Plan de evasión [A Plan for Escape] (1945), as parodic reductions or mirrors of H. G. Wells' "scientific romance" The Island of Dr. Moreau. This chapter discusses Bioy and his companion-in-letters, Borges, as readers of Wells and of a whole tradition of utopic literature which encompasses works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, Shakespeare, and last but not least, Sir Thomas More. Besides analyzing the echoes of Wells and company in the theme, plot, and "characters" of Bioy's novels, I also attempted, in this [essay], to trace the spiralling repetitions and variations of certain narrative devices such as "the first-person account of extraordinary events."

It is not difficult to discover, in La invención de Morel and in Plan de evasión, that the scientific content of the experiments carried out in these novels are used as metaphors of a textual experiment. Morel's machine, "scientifically" explained by Morel himself, while prophetic of a scientific possibility, is, as Alfred MacAdam has observed, [in "Satire and Self-Portrait," in Modern Latin American Narratives: The Dreams of Reason, 1977] a metaphor of the work of art. In Plan, a similar deception is involved. Castel, governor of the penal colony on an apocryphal Devil's Island and mad scientist in his spare time, takes synesthesia, a psychological and esthetic phenomenon, to unheard-of surgical consequences, making use of scientific theories of William James and Sir Francis Galton. Again, the synesthetic experience of the men in the prison cells works as a metaphor of the experience of the reader of the text, Plan: he sees signifiers—words—and interprets them; his interpretation is an illusion. There is no possible way of reaching for an absolute reality beyond the text, because the text, the signifiers, are the only reality within his reach.

Again, Dr. Moreau's experiment, the acceleration of Darwin's laws of evolution through surgery and behavioral conditioning, is, in this case, a metaphor of not a literary reality but a moral truism: man is biologically an animal disguised in a thin layer of training and of biological difference. As Dr. Moreau pontificates:

Very much, indeed, of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is the larynx … [The Island of Dr. Moreau]

This "message" is expressed most strongly by the book's apocalyptic close: when Prendick, the hero of the story, finally returns to civilization, he cannot stand the nearness of man in whose gestures he sees the sickening echoes of the beast men, among whom he had been forced to live during his last months on the island. Prendick isolates himself in the country (far from the "animal"-ridden city). Here we can see echoes of Part IV of Gulliver's Travels in which Gulliver prefers life among the horses to life with people. Prendick's last words are:

I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books, bright windows, in this life of ours lit by the shining souls of men … whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.

It isn't only the metaphoric intention of the scientific experiments in Wells, and more evidently so in Bioy, that make their works more fiction than science. There are also the intrusions of books, and even of the library, which "interfere" with the scientific content. In Bioy's texts, we know that this bookish interference is self-consciously signalled. In Wells, the presence of the book, though not a self-conscious signal, is an inevitable reality—as indeed it is in all literature. For example, when Dr. Moreau "explains" his experiment to the horrified Prendick, he places his "surgical" methods in a "historical" perspective:

A similar operation is the transfusion of blood, with which subject indeed I began. These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive, were the operations of those medieval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar cripples and show-monsters; some vestiges of whose art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in L'Homme qui rit … But perhaps my meaning grows plain now. You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another, or from one animal to another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth, to modify the articulations of its limbs, and indeed to change it in its most intimate structure?

And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought as an end, and systematically by modern investigators, until I took it up! Some such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery; most of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been demonstrated, as it were, by accident—by tyrants, by criminals, by the breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained clumsy-handed men working for their own immediate ends. I was the first man to take up this question armed with knowledge of the laws of growth.

Yet one would imagine it must have been practised in secret before. Such creatures as the Siamese Twins … And in the vaults of the Inquisition. No doubt their chief aim was artistic torture, but some, at least, of the inquisitors must have had a touch of scientific curiosity …

In the midst of a discourse of vivisection, in which scientific words like "grafting," "physiology," and "chemical" are used, Moreau cites as a historical source, Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughs]. And, he also refers to vivisectors as "artistic" torturers who practice an "extraordinary branch of knowledge." Both in his sources and his explanations, Moreau's scientific discourse is invaded by the language of art and of literature.

The mention of Hugo is another of the many cross-references which would appear to establish the relationship between Bioy's text Plan, and Dr. Moreau. In Plan, not only is the mention of Hugo synonymous with a mockery of traditional literature, but also a possible salute to the Hugo who appears in Wells, as the fictional source at the basis of Moreau's scientific experiment.

Moreau's "scientific" explanation is Wells' derision of science's pretense to be whole and coherent. It is a mumbo jumbo of scientific ideas mixed in with sadistic obsessions about "artistic torture," and Faustian urges of taking God's creation into his own hands, a college of Darwin and Victor Hugo. Indeed, Moreau's explanation is not far from the Beast-Men's chant of the Law, a mumbo jumbo of religion and fear which they sing to try to keep themselves from reverting to beastly habits. Moreau criticizes the chant because it is only evidence of their imprisonment in their animality:

There's something they call the Law. Sing hymns about "all thine."… But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish—anger, and the lusts to live and gratify themselves … It only mocks me …

If Moreau is mocked by the "Law," a poor simulacrum of civilized thought, he is mocked by his own discourse. It was, after all, Dr. Moreau who implanted certain "fixed ideas" in the heads of the Beast-Men—ideas about what they could and could not do—on which they base their chant. Indeed, the statement, "It only mocks me," is a possible indication of self-commentary intended by the text. Moreau's science is revealed as myth, and superseded by the fiction of the text. Levi-Strauss' concept of the scientist as myth is already recognized, perhaps not so unconsciously, by the scientist-writer, H. G. Wells. This concept has been described by Jacques Derrida:

The engineer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur [tinkerer], should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of nothing," "out of whole cloth," would be the creator of the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage [tinkering] is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells us that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. ["Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Structuralist Controversy, 1972]

Moreau, like Wells, the writer-bricoleur who brings together Darwin and Hugo to create a text of science and fiction—a Frankenstein stitched-together text—is the scientist-bricoleur who brings to life the metaphor of this patchwork activity, the piecing together of parts of animals to create a Frankenstein breed of men. The myth of the scientist, so secure in the fantasies of Jules Verne, is exploded in Dr. Moreau.

Bioy Casares, in his "reworkings" of the Island of Dr. Moreau, brings to the foreground this exposure of science as myth. Wells at least considered that he was using Darwin's theories as a real pretext to develop a philosophical "message." Bioy, on the other hand, is aware that his starting point is the text that is made from other texts, from Moreau, from a whole tradition of utopian-island works. If Moreau's explanations are mumbo jumbo, then Morel's and Castel's explanations are even more apocryphal and fragmentary.

But perhaps one of the most effective images in Wells and in Bioy which reveals the text's progressive awareness (from Wells to Bioy) of its own textuality, is the intrusion of the library upon the scientific adventure. At the beginning of Prendick's adventure on the island of Dr. Moreau, the doctor attempts to distract Prendick from discovering the true nature of the experiment. One of his diversionary tactics is to point Prendick's attention to something else:

He called my attention to a convenient deckchair before the window, and to an array of old books, chiefly, I found, surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics—languages I cannot read with any comfort—on a shelf near the hammock.

The first protagonist of Morel makes a similar discovery when he first enters the building called the "museum" on the island:

In one room there is a large but incomplete collection of books, consisting of novels, poetry, drama. The only exception was a small volume (Bélidor, Travaux: De Moulin Perse, Paris, 1737), which I found on a green-marble shelf … I wanted to read it because I was intrigued by the name Bélidor, and I wondered whether the Mulin Perse would help me understand the mill I saw in the lowlands of this island.

And in Plan, Nevers makes a similar discovery during his early explorations of Castel's domain:

In Castel's library there were books on medicine, on psychology, and some nineteenth-century novels; there were few classics. Nevers was not interested in medicine. The only benefit he got out of Tropical Diseases Made Easy was a pleasant but ephemeral prestige among the servants in his house …

The similarities and differences between the model, Wells' text, and its two parodies, are telling. Dr. Moreau's library, "an array of old books," is really just a selection of useful scientific books, dealing specifically with surgery, which would be guides for his experiments in vivisection, and for more "philosophical" reading, he has some Greek and Latin classics. Their presence too is in keeping with Moreau's "classicism." That is, in his explanation to Prendick, he claims that his ultimate goal is a truly Platonic quest for an ideal, within the principles of Stoicism—the indifference to Pleasure and Pain which justifies his cruel surgery. Moreau carries his surgery to a classically poetic extreme by creating a Satyr-Man, or, as Prendick comments: "The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau …" Prendick, a biologist, not a literary man, admits with gentlemanly irony that he is not up to Greek and Latin, though he attempts to read Horace.

On the other hand, Morel, not pretending to have its basis in a scientific reality like Wells' romance, but rather which is inscribed within a science fiction, Moreau, contains "bibliotecas inagotables"—that immediately suggest to the Borgesian reader the infinite library of Babel. This library is a parodic reversal of Moreau's not only because of its size, but also its content which is almost all fiction and no science, except for a book titled Le Moulin Perse [The Persian Mill]. As the Morel narrator later explains, it is a book about tides which must have helped Morel figure out how to run his machine by tidal energy—the "molino" [mill] on the island exists for that purpose. The book, whose apparent author is someone named Bernardo Forest de Belidor, is an "invention" of Bioy's—indeed, it would seem an attempt to confuse the reader with the double association to the Moulin Rouge [Red Hill], and Montesquieu's Les lettres persannes [Persian letters].

In the Morel library, the protagonist seems to echo Prendick's complaint about the presence, the intrusion of literary works. He is not a scientist like Prendick, but as he is writing an Elogio de Malthus [Tribute to Malthus], his interests would seem to be more scientific than literary. For him, Morel's library is "deficiente" because it doesn't contain scientific works, and indeed, he grabs the only "scientific" work there. Later, as spectator and then actor in Morel's movie, he complains that the lack of scientific information may lead him, in his ignorance, to threaten the immortality of the machine. But Morel's library, like Moreau's, is an index of the book's intention: Morel's science is mere pretext; it is its fiction, and not its science, that "immortalizes" it.

Castel's library, which is in many ways more similar to Moreau's than Morel's, contains an element of more complete reversal of the Moreau library. Like the latter, it contains an array of scientific books which would relate to Castel's experiment. Unlike Moreau's, but like Morel's more literary library, it contains novels. Nevers, a more "literary" type than Prendick and than the Morel diarist, seems to be in an intermediate position between Prendick and Nevers. Though not a scientist, he seems more interested in science than literature. He specifies that they are nineteenth century novels. He also seems to express disappointment at the lack of classical literary texts, in opposition to both Prendick, who is almost uncomfortable in their presence, and the Morel diarist who also disapproves of the abundance of literary books.

Indeed, whereas the Morel diarist reads Le Moulin Perse throughout his adventure—it is true, more to be able to deal with his immediate situation than for pure scientific interest—Nevers, who brought with him and read briefly the medical book only because of a morbid fear of catching a tropical disease, spends his reading time with the classic text of Plutarch on symbols, The Treatise of Isis and Osiris.

Nevers consistently avoids scientific "useful" matters; his own personal library that he brings with him consists mainly of the books of Jules Verne. His lack of knowledge of scientific matters is emphasized by the fact that in order to discuss prison matters at the Frinziné party, he resorts desperately to the Larousse. [The critic adds in a footnote: "Resorting to the Larousse (or the Encyclopedia Britannica) is what Bioy does in real life; thus this comic episode at the house of the Frinziné's has certain autobiographical echoes. Indeed, Nevers' bumbling speech on prisons at the Frinziné house is perhaps a repercussion of a bungled public performance that Bioy attempted in his youth. During his student days he was asked by a professor to give a speech in Paris, from memory and in French, for his class. He insisted that he was not good at public speaking, but the professor persisted. Bioy's father quickly copied the speech out of the Encyclopedia Larousse, and Bioy failed miserably to remember his lines…. The apparently frivolous joke about Nevers' getting his information from the Larousse involves a constant theme in Borges as well: the use of apocryphal or second-hand erudition, i.e., another form in which the veracity of the text is undermined. The Frinzinés—who represent a colonial cultural mileu that could be a mirror of Argentinian society—are another sign of apocryphal or false knowledge, since while pretending to know about poetry, they admire such a third-rate poet as Ghil. Although Nevers' mocks them, his knowledge and sensibility is just as apocryphal: his main source is the Larousse, his favorite poet: also René Ghil."] Nevers' cousin Xavier tries to encourage Nevers to do some solid research writing during his stay on the islands, aware of Nevers' poetizing Bohemian tendencies. And Castel criticizes Nevers' wasting his time on Plutarch, and in general denigrates the study of the classics when one should be more involved with the "progress" of modern culture. This is clearly Castel's message when he starts a conversation with Nevers by asking the young man:

"What are you reading?"

"Plutarch." It was useless to pretend.

"Why are you wasting time? Culture must not be confused with the study of elementary men," pronounced the puppet voice.

"Students of philosophy still pour over Plato's dialogues, and the most demanding readers laugh again and again at Molière's jokes about doctors. The future is black."

"Black, camouflaged," said Nevers shrewdly.

There was a silence. Cut out of weakness, Nevers continued, "This book interests me. It deals with symbols."

"With symbols? Perhaps. But don't you think that in eighteen hundred years the subject might have been enriched?"

The total belief in scientific progress, already disturbed by the pessimism of Wells in Moreau, is certainly undermined here by Nevers' burlesque attitude toward the demogogic words and puppet-like image of Castel, the scientist.

While all three novels are inscribed within the topos of the library, it becomes obvious that not only are Morel and Plan more self-consciously so, but that Plan is the more "bookish" of the two. This has already been pointed out in terms of the fact that Plan has many more allusions than Morel, and also is inscribed within the text of Morel, which makes Plan's textual texture more dense. This difference between Plan and Morel is also verified by the comparative treatment of the library. While the Morel diarist, like Prendick, rejects the literary texts in the library, Nevers does the opposite by fleeing, escaping, from the scientific, and into the literary.

Another indication of the fact that these three novels are enclosed within the library is that their characters, apart from being readers, are writers. Indeed, so is More's Utopia traveler, and Defoe's islander, which again emphasizes the textuality of the whole utopian tradition.

In Moreau, Prendick, after all, has left his nephew a "narrative." Prendick talks about the writing of his "chronicle":

There is much that sticks in my memory that I could write, things that I would cheerfully give my right hand to forget. But they do not help the telling of the story.

Here Prendick is revealing that he is not merely noting down facts, but he is, in a sense, editing the story, according to how he, the writer, thinks it should best be told.

The topos of the writer becomes, logically, more dominant in Bioy's self-commentative texts. At the beginning of both Morel and Plan we discover that the chief characters are writing works of a factual nature, in the case of Morel, a Defensa ante sobrevivientes [Apology for Survivors] and an Elogio de Malthus [Tribute to Malthus], and in the case of Plan, an Addenda a la Monografia sobre los juilcios de Oléron [Addenda to the Monograph on the Judgements of Oléron]. Though Malthus' prophecy of overpopulation and Les jugements d'Oléron—an anonymous maritime code—are historical referents, these "documentary" projects of both protagonists are as fictional as the adventure they narrate. They are fictional because—as they are never written—they exist only in the text, and because their appearance in the text is a result of their relation to its fictional theme. That is, in Morel, Malthus is mentioned in counterpoint with Morel's invention which is, after all, an antidote to overpopulation since it insures immortality without the need of procreation. The mention of the maritime code relates to Plan in that the legality of Nevers' actions as a naval officer and Castel's as governor are among the many elements in question within the complex plot of Plan.

However, even in the use of these documentary referents as commentaries on the text, Plan, again, is the more self-commentative: the fact that Nevers is writing addenda to a monograph on a document is a kind of joke on the act of writing which is about writing about writing. This burlesque commentary is further compounded when Castel reveals that one of his reasons for wanting Nevers as a collaborator is that he thinks Nevers is the "author de Los juicios de Oléron [author of The Judgements of Oléron]." This clownish mistake on Castel's part is not a simple joke; if, indeed, Bioy's books are about writing which is about writing, they are about writing as a continuous process that transcends the individual "author." In Les judgements d'Oléron, it is the text that matters, not the author, who could be one or many, i.e., a collaboration, like the many works written by "Bustos Domecq." The pseudo-concepts of the original and of authorship are surely being mocked here.

What is perhaps most significant about the historical projects of the Morel diarist, and of Nevers, is that, as Prendick leaves history behind when he ventures upon Moreau's island, they leave behind these documents, and sacrifice themselves, as writers, to fiction. Or as the Morel diarist writes:

Although I have been making entries in this diary at regular intervals, I have not had a chance to work on the books that I hope to write as a kind of justification for my shadowy life on this earth. And yet these lines will serve as a precaution, for they will stay the same even if my ideas change.

Though not a dabbler in metaphors and poetry like Nevers, the Morel diarist, like Nevers, communicates to the reader "I am a writer." He will be immortalized by fiction, not History. Nevers, too, ceases to mention his Addenda and becomes more involved in writing his account. The diarist and Nevers bring to the written page the "inventions" of Morel and Castel whose names unite the science fiction of Wells and the expressionist fiction of Kafka.