Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

I hope that the Man of Supreme Misfortune alone gives himself over to the certainty of the beloved’s eternal existence, that which we can only have by means of permanence, an eternity of the spiritual figure as much as of the personal, physical figure. But, also, I assume the responsibility to continue seeking this certainty for others.

1 This doctrine is included in “Towards a Theory of Art,” in “Theories,” and the exercises in Newcomer’s Papers and The Nothing Continues. ( Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

2 Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness presents itself precisely as a pro-passion discourse against exhausting intellectualism. (“Passion, the supreme suitability of Being!”) But in addition to the metaphysics of passion with its correlative issues of Being, Non-Being, Death, Persona Eternity, Body, etc. initially allude there to the being of a character of art and its metaphysical operation (“Solution,” “Fantasy is a formality”). (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

The present tentative aesthetic is a provocation to the realist school, a total program to discredit the truth or reality of what happens in a novel. Only the subjection of truth to Art is intrinsic, unconditional, and self-authentic. The challenge that I present to Verisimilitude, to that deformed intrusion of Art, Authenticity — this is already a part of Art, it makes anyone who has recourse to fantasy and wants it to be Real absurd — this challenge culminates in the use of incongruities, to the point of forgetting the identities of the characters, forgetting continuity, temporal order, forgetting to put effects before causes, etcetera, thus I implore the reader not to detain himself disentangling absurdities or reconciling contradictions, but to follow the course of the emotional pull that, molecule by molecule, the reading promotes in him.

In my attempt there are various ideas that are, most likely, original. I’m interested in method: I seek to distract the reader for moments, even oppressively, when I want to impress him with the emotional subtlety that I must engender in him, little impressions that concur with the emotional purpose of the whole, which is to obtain in him a unique, final, and general state enabling me to unexpectedly trap his senses when he isn’t on guard and conscious that he is dealing with a literary campaign. He won’t expect, nor later realize, that he has been conquered.

There is a reader with whom I cannot reconcile myself: the reader who wants what all novelists have coveted, to their shame: Hallucination. I want the reader to always know he is reading a novel and not watching the living, not attending to a “life.” The moment the reader falls into Hallucination, that ignominy of Art, I have lost rather than gained a reader. What I want is something very different, which is to win him over as a character, so that for an instant he believes that he himself does not live. This is the emotion for which he should thank me, since until now no one has thought of procuring it for him.

The reader should know that this impression, never before achieved for anyone by the written word — this impression that, along with my novel, seeks an introduction into the human psyche, in the natural consciousness of man — is a benediction for all consciousness, because this impression obliterates and liberates the mental or emotional fear that we call the terror of ceasing to exist. Whoever experiences even a moment of the state of belief in not existing and later returns to the state of belief in existing, will forever understand that the whole content of the verbalization or notion “not to be” is the belief in not being. It’s not possible to believe that one does not exist without existing. For example, Descartes’s metaphysics had to begin with “I don’t exist” in order to substitute the lamentable “I exist.” In sum: existence is frequented just as often by the belief in non-existence as it is by the belief in existence. Whoever believes, exists, even if his belief is that he does not exist; whoever exists can in effect believe that he does not exist and, alternatively, believe that he exists. “I think” never had anything other than innocent consequences, but it can be said lazily or even distractedly; or, it can be a fact and a judgment that is felt. To exist is a fact, but I exist can never be a “felt” judgment: it is a mere juxtaposition of words, as it does not contain a moment of belief; it just happens that words come together. He who assures you of all this is one who laments it, in contrast to all of those great readers of Kant, who understood him too much, which is to say, had not a single doubt that Kant was a metaphysician. (The French demolish a deified painter every twenty years, a deified poet every fifteen, and a deified novelist every ten; at a hundred and fifty years it’s high time Kant were thrown into doubt. This isn’t daring, it would be more daring to call him a metaphysician. With these antecedents I anticipate future arguments for the demolition of my Art.)

It seems to me that no one else has used this method, or that it would be applicable to any other genre but the novel. Besides technique, there is a series of contrivances of in-verisimilitude and denials of the reality of the story. This is the doctrine, and it is executed most notably when it explains expositionally, not artistically, a fact that never happened, but which was fully deliberated in a living consciousness, (Sweetheart’s father’s consciousness), and which constitutes the defining fact of her destiny.

Even if I have invented the novel-museum, it won’t matter if I’m able to raise interest in the story if all the while the reader believes himself to be only a reader. If to him the characters are only characters in a novel and in the prologues (although delicate, smokily glimpsed and in truncated actions and facts, I believe that Eterna, Sweetheart, Maybegenius, and The Lover will be unforgettable even though I’ve barely put them in the story) I’ll have failed to effect a “shock of inexistence” in the psyche of the reader — the shock of being here, not reading, but being read, being a character, in favor of the conscious carelessness obtained by interestedness.

If the novel fails as what is called a novel, my Aesthetic will save the day: I admit that it could be taken as a novel, a good fantasy, a substitute novel. So if the novel fails as a novel, it could be that my Aesthetic will make a good novel.

I have entrusted the execution of my novel to the following characters, having selected them carefully based upon their conduct in other novels. I have indoctrinated them in everything a “character of art” should know, I’ve made them read my prologues, which are studies in Aesthetics. If the novel turns out badly, don’t blame me. I did everything that as an author it was incumbent upon me to do: to prove the characters’ discipline by means of their previous conduct, and give them a theory that they didn’t have before, of the character of art.

Every character only halfway exists, because none was ever introduced who wasn’t taken by half or more from “real life” people. That’s why there’s a subtle discomfort and agitation in every character’s “being,” since there are several humans wandering the world that a novelist used partially for a character and who feel a discomfort in their “being” in life. Something of them is in a novel, fantasized in written pages, and it can’t truly be said where they really are.