Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

All the characters are under obligation to dream of being, which is their proper way of being, inaccessible to living people, and the only genuine stuff of Art. To be a character is to dream of being real. And the magic of them, what possesses us and enchants us about them, and what only they know as the form of their being, is not the author’s dream, but the dream of being, in which they avidly participate, that makes them act and feel. Only realist art — which is not Belarte — the art of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Quixote, Mignon, lacks “characters,” which is to say, these characters don’t dream of being, because they think they are copies.

What I don’t want and what I’ve tried to avoid twenty times over in my pages is that a character seems to live, and this happens any time the reader hallucinates the reality of an event: the truth of life, the copy of life, which is my abomination, and certainly, isn’t that the genuine failure of art, the worst, perhaps the only frustration or abortion of a character, that he appear to live? I can admit that they want to live, that they attempt life and even covet it, but I cannot admit that they appear to live, in the sense that events seem to be real; the abomination of all realism.

For my pages, I want constant fantasy, and faced with the difficulty of avoiding a hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art, I have created the only character ever born whose consistent fantasy is the guarantee of the firm irreality of this novel, which is irreducible to the real: the character who does not appear, whose existence in the novel makes him fantastic with respect to both the novel and the world, being — he seems real to us because daydreams exist. To him I have entrusted the vouchsafing of fantasy here, if all else fails; to the Traveler who in life itself perhaps never existed, since I don’t believe in Travelers; the two sentiments that define the Traveler of quality are the faculty and desire to forget, and the desire to be forgotten. The magnificent Forgetter, complete with this latter faculty of indifference to being forgotten and even the valor and knowledge to want his image to die in the mind of others, a death more fearful than personal death, perhaps because we all sense that personal death does not exist. The death that exists in oblivion is what leads us to the error of believing in personal death. But this belief is very weak, that’s why we do a lot more to avoid being forgotten than to avoid dying.

— And so, where does our Traveler wander and sojurn?

— My Traveler lives there, across the way. And he doesn’t come out of his house except at the end of a chapter.

He functions exclusively as the extinguisher of the hallucination that menaces the story with realism.

The genre of there-never-was, so frequently invoked, but without precedents, will make its debut here, since it has never existed itself, there never has been a there-never-was, yet there will be in the current year, and, as is only fair, in Buenos Aires, the first city of the world to present itself in this category, the only city that is equally good for the conclusion of a trip around the world as for the start of one, a city that serves this purpose for trips started wherever else, as various and continual world navigators have successively discovered, with any around the world trips — whether they start in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro — being consumed, without regard for its future plans, in Buenos Aires, where it lingers, whispering its disdain for the other legs of the trip, instead going off into the streets, tramways and public works of Buenos Aires, buying a little house, getting married, producing offspring, all of which has the fullness and heroism of the fulminous completion of the whole trip.

With this genre, humanity will finally lay eyes upon the never-before-seen, a display of there-never-was; it won’t be a bridge that’s always dry, a conjugal frigidity, a religious war between peoples without religion, or other things that haven’t been seen. The never-before-seen will really be seen; this isn’t fantasy, it’s something else: the first example in this genre will be a novel. I’m just about to publish it, as the manuscript critics have already mentioned, admiringly, “it’s a novel that has never been written before.” And it hasn’t been written yet, but there’s only a little ways to go.

Such a collection of events is contained in the novel that there’s practically nothing left over to happen in the streets, houses, and plazas; the papers, confronted with this lack of current events, will have to content themselves with citing the novel: “the following exchange took place in the middle of the afternoon yesterday in the novel of Eterna;” “this morning the Sweetheart is smiling;” “the President of the Novel, responding in person to the rumors circulating among his numerous readers, told us that today he will positively launch his plan for the hystericization of Buenos Aires and the conquest, in the name of aesthetic salvation, of our population by humor.”

“After Chapter V of the Novel we can be sure that it isn’t because of GWDE (the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist) that Sweetheart’s existence is saddened today.” “This evening, the Novel will send its soloist orchestra — six guitars — to execute various obsequious polyphonies for the orchestras of the bars Ideal, Sibarita, and Real, so that they can listen to music for a change. The Polygraph of Silence will explain the reasons for this with erudite gestures, and he will circulate the bottomless collection plate of gratitude among the personnel of the orchestras, which will make the music of thanks as coin strikes against coin. The public will also serve as a harmony of contentment, as the listening orchestra, momentarily laying aside its instruments for calling-the-waiter in favor of its instruments of applause.”

This is a novel that was and will be futuristic until it’s written, just as its author is, until today he had yet to write a single future page, although he has left futurism until the future, as a proof of his enthusiasm, and doing so brilliantly from there on — without falling into the trap of being a consecutive futurist, like those who have adopted futurism, without understanding it, in the present. And, for that reason, they have declared much to come for the novelist, who has everything in front of him, including his own genial sense of haste, which arises from having thought that with the speed of progress, posterity has been left behind; each day comes quicker, almost completely forgotten, a series of contemporaneous events that exist in the last journalistic edition of the day it appears, and that’s it. We all die already judged immediately, book and author, made classics or corpses in a day, and meanwhile they recommend us to posterity and complain about the present. And today, all of this is done with sufficient justice in 24 hours. The old posterity, with all the time it took to think about it, consecrated a multitude of nonentities as glorious artists; there’s more equity and common sense in today’s reporter: vacuous solemnity and moralisms were posterity’s cheap and effective bribe, born until yesterday. I will look, trusting, for posterity’s universal judgment of my novel in the 30th of September 1929 edition of Critique and Reason, the day the novel will appear, a date which could not have been postponed, since all the postponements had already been used up in promises, with the most literary postponements having been used for prologues.

For the consecrated future literati that does not believe in, nor is able to estimate, posterity beyond each day’s night; it won’t make sense for authors to feel a sense of urgency to write promptly for a prompt posterior judgment: with the speeds that posterity can reach today, the artist will outlive his posterity and will know the next day whether he should or should not write better, or if he has already written so well that he should content himself by contemplating the perfection of his writing. Or if he has no literary accolades left to seek, other than the one that’s most difficult to find — the reader’s. The actual ease of writing makes the legible scarce, and it has reached the point of superseding the injurious necessity of having readers in the first place: writing is for the fruition of art and at best is for knowing the critic’s opinion. In all sincerity, this change is lovely; it’s art for art’s sake and art for the critics’ sake, which is art for art’s sake all over again.