Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

The droning bees of Life will alight on the new smile of the returned woman, just as they did in her departing smile, finding for a time that both smiles were fresh and united in an ever-present time, an adamantine time that breath cannot corrupt.

The vigil of The Lover was also pure and singular. His non-existence, which is purer than death, gives him the power, “among equals,” to marry her again — as if she had died without confusion, or shame.

1 Cf.: “The Idyll-Tragedy” in Miscellanea, as well as other references in this novel. ( Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

2 M.F. had thought of consecrating a book to the “Ella” named or alluded to in various passages and who he later characterized as “character with the being of being awaited.” In a letter written in 1932 to Ramon Gomez de la Serna (in the Epistolario) he says: “I’ll soon finish my Novel of Eterna and my metaphysics Ella (theory of the Eternity of Figure, Feeling, and Memory)”, and from here I’ll start with a new page:

“Explanation. Having lived from a young age among poets, thinkers, musicians and statesmen, the inclination to occupy the public’s attention and to leave a public record neither dominates me nor repulses me. For the first time, already in the shadows and the superfluities of so-called life, the impulse to publish and perpetuate a public persona and a public action has appeared to me, which probably won’t happen again. So it is that I enter the world of professionals in the expression of thought and feeling just in time to leave it without any pretension possible, neither possessing nor mourning the tact and vigor of the profession; it’s better to beg pardon and aid beforehand so that my ambition to win a bit of glory for this name (an ambition that She will look upon with disapproval and pity) and principally, to win a bit of sympathy and knowledge of this person, her character and her actions.” ( Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

Every existence, every time, is a sensation, and each one of us is only this, always and forever. Where does a feeling or a sensibility get any notion of what might be a non-feeling, like time without passing? Only things that happen in our states of consciousness and senses exist. Only our eternity, an infinite dream identical to the present, is certain.

But you will say that there are dreams that end, or rebel dreams that we cannot recover: there are dreams that conceal themselves, concealments, perhaps, of those who once existed but who we will never see or know again.

These concealments only exist for a hesitant Dreamer: there are dreams that clamor to return to the plenitude of the overflowing soul, itself a shadowless certainty as soon as we dream it.

In our hesitant dreaming, who knows how many times we have bid farewell to a fantasy of those who may return to us, how often have we disbelieved, denying the full and eternal vision that someone Returning from Concealment can bring! 1

1 Cf: “Majesty” in Miscellanea. (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

(In which it is observed that the readers who skip around in a book are nevertheless complete readers. Moreover, when something like skip-around literature is inaugurated — as it is here — they should exercise caution, and read in order, if they want to continue being skip-around readers. Equally, the author is surprised to discover that although he is an out-of-order man of letters, he likes skip-around readers just as much as the ones who read in order, and to persuade the reader he has found this good argument: he who reads everything to the end (since it’s lazy to read out of order and disrupt the frame) will be mortified by this novel, saying to himself: “I read it in bits and pieces; very good novel, but a little disjointed, very truncated.”)

Disorderly reader, I do not ask you — unconfessed — to read all of it, or to stop reading all of my novel, what with the pagination having been unraveled in vain for you, but you should know that in the book in which the reader will finally be read, Biography of a Reader it disconcertingly happened that with such a trench-riddled book the disorderly reader had no other recourse than to read in order, so as to maintain the disorder of the text, since the book was out of order before… I do not ask your forgiveness for giving you an out-of-order book that, as it is, would be an interruption for you, because you interrupt yourself on your own and you are so uncomfortable with the disorder I brought you with my prologues, in which the disorderly author makes you a figure of art and dreams, that you have flipped and are now a continuous reader to the point that you doubt the inveterate identity of the disorderly self.

If you have to read all of it, a bit of forewarning. Don’t go around trying a little bit of my novel here and there to see if it’s finished, if it needs sugar or if it’s too cold; you’d do better to do as my butler does when he ties on a napkin and takes up knife and fork “just for a taste,” as he meekly tells the cook. 1I’ve made you an orderly reader thanks to a work full of prefaces and such vague titles that you have finally been trapped by the unexpected continuity of your reading.

Now I can’t keep you happy any longer. I’ve already advanced you all the postponements that I’ve been able to cook up: I don’t have any more prologues until after the novel. How it oppresses me, this artistic endeavor to which I have committed myself! I still don’t have any true comprehension of the theory of the novel, let alone an aesthetic or plan for my own. 2

Very well, as for the point of the title of this prologue, which is to say, as for the reader who is bothered because he doesn’t know everything in the novel:

It’s true that “the Traveler then uttered a few words, inaudible from this novel, and, waving goodbye, went away” (travelers tend to do that). My novel also waves, but it is mortified that one of its characters hasn’t finished reading everything. It’s curious about the story it’s going to tell, a reading of itself, or better a narrative of itself, since self-love is inherent in Art (for Art, and to Art). Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression. As an author, I despair of my novel every time I am slow to finish a scene. The novel is enamored (and Eterna is not) of itself (Eterna’s not in love with herself, either: in a disregard of self that is immensely beautiful and which fills me with sadness and reverence, she also disregards my daily pleas that she love herself. Is it that neither she nor I should love ourselves or love at all, or is it a supreme error that clouds her vision of herself and of the grandeur of her destiny? I’m not uncertain about this: Eterna, our passion is as plain as can be; but you don’t care that passion exists, you don’t admit it is even possible in this phase of your life; and despite all this, you love Art, without loving yourself)…

This novel is enamored of itself and it is the sort of novel where mishaps and adventures happen, artistic indecisions, whether to get lost in art, to be silent, to be ignorant; even as it relates events it is swept away by others; it contains accidents and it is the victim of accidents. We see it today, in streetcars with internal warnings in the form of drawings of transients being run over, even as the machine metes out shock and alarm. It is curious about itself, like children in costumes who shout “Trick or treat!” and ecstatically run away. What is disguised is that they are children with an audience. Going around in costume is for them a disguise: the mask is the disguise. I, the author, am principally public even now, in publicity. I am always searching, and I’m missing knowledge and living because there’s a kind of living that I’d still like to experience even though I think I already understand it: the finality of Art as the end of life, of the individual aspect of life: the Tragedy-Idyll that is Love, which is itself made from Beauty by Death which makes of love as much tragedy as idyll, since the certainty, along the path of life, of the personal destruction of lovers (also there are those who aren’t in love who, although they have death they don’t have the Beauty of life, an individual matter) exalts, makes love just as it makes its tragedy. Death is only death of love; there is only the death of the other, her concealment, since for oneself there is no concealment. But there is much for me to learn about love in its execution, about how to slake its daily thirst, about its delicate and implacable congress.