Morel

A conversation I just had with a colleague has revealed something to me that I find a bit disturbing but recognize I am powerless to change. Social media and an online presence is all very well, and in fact entirely unavoidable in a world that depends on the internet, but who turns off the switch when you ‘leave the room’?

‘La invención de Morel’ (The Invention of Morel), written by Adolfo Bioy Casares in Buenos Aires in 1940, is a short novel that describes a man alone on a desert island who sees and falls in love with a mysterious woman who appears to him at certain times of the day but disappears and will not speak to him at others. I won’t spoil the book for anybody who wants to read it, and I recommend that everybody does, but suffice to say that in ‘La invención de Morel’, which Borgés himself qualified as ‘perfect’, Bioy Casares foresaw an aspect of the new age of post-reality that we currently inhabit, in which through the compilation of images and actions we create an online presence that we bring to life but will not die when we do.

Recent deaths of either people I know or people who acquaintances of mine known have seen their Facebook profiles turn into shrines, where ‘friends’ or connections can place endless tributes - some of which are truly touching, and some of which venture beyond the limits that physical reality places on us. Let me explain. A friend of yours dies; you leave an emotional message to that friend the same way you would leave any message on Facebook, communicating directly with that friend although that friend will never read it or be aware that it exists and will certainly never respond. If someone else is to come across the friend’s Facebook profile, the profile will be just as alive as it ever was when the friend was, because nobody dies on Facebook – your profile never disappears, or at least not up to now. Without ever knowing it, your presence will exist forever, and, although the interaction will be one-way, the people that inhabit the world you already left will be able to ‘communicate’ with you as if you never had. Over this, like death, you have no control.

Bioy Casares in ‘Morel’ wrote “I believe we will not gain immortality because we have yet to evolve our resistance to death.” Facebook, and the world of online presences and profiles, where children who have yet to be born (let alone aware of conscious thought) have profiles and people who are long departed will never fade away, is taking us as a society one illusory step towards such a resistance. It will remain illusory though – like everything online, your presence is only as real as you believe it is.