Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Horrible art and the accumulated glories of the past, which have always existed, are a result of the following: the sonorousness of language and the existence of an audience; without this sonorousness, only thinking and creating would remain; without a clamoring public, art would not be drowned. Under these conditions, Literature would be pure art, and there would be many more beautiful works than there are at present: there would be three or four Cervantes, the Cervantes of the Quixote, without the stories, Quevedo the humorist and poet of passion, without the moralizing orator, various Gomez de la Sernas. We’ll be liberated from the likes of Calderon, the Prince of falsetto, from lack of feeling, which is poor taste itself; from the likes of Góngora, at least from time to time, with his exclamations of “Ay Fabio, o sorrow!” We’d have three Heines, each of sarcasm and sadness, or D’Annunzios to limitlessly versify passion. Happily, we would have only the first act of Faust, and in compensation various Poes, and various Bovaries — with their sad affliction of loveless appetite, despicable and bloody — and this other, lacerating absurdity: Hamlet’s lyric of sorrow, which convinces and breeds sympathy, despite the false psychologism of its source. We’ll be free of the scientific realism of Ibsen, one of Zola’s victims, and this magnificent artist for his part will be dismantled by sociology and theory of heresy and pathology, and instead of a dozen master works we’ll possess a hundred, of true, intrinsic artistic worth, not mere copies of reality. These works will be typically literary, works of Prose, not of didactics, without any musical language (meter, rhyme, sonorousness) or paintings with words, that is, descriptions.

With this I’m publishing a prologue of such a novel, since I hope to guarantee that in special rehearsals its characters, events, and jokes will all prove its utter seriousness; and even publishing it is a rehearsal, anterior to the reader. But only the prologues after this one!

I’ll rehearse the upcoming prologue instead. Also, there’s a new German word in Spanish that I consulted with Xul Solar about in his workshop: “Languages in repair.” It’s an amended adjective, but new, not like mended boots.

The “for-all-of-us-artists-gifted-with-daydreams” Reader.

The “often-dreamed-of” Reader; The “who-the-author-dreams-is-reading-his-dreams” Reader.

The “who-the-art-of-writing-wants-to-be-real-more-than-merely-real-reader-of-dreams” Reader.

The “only-real-that-art-recognizes” reader of dreams.

The “less-real, he-who-dreams-the-dreams-of-the-other, — and-stronger-in-reality, — since-he-does-not-lose-it-although-they-won’t-let-him-dream-them-but-only-re-dream” Reader.

I believe I have identified the reader who addresses himself to me, and I have obtained the proper adjectivalization of his entire being, after so much fragmentation and some false adjectives. “Dear” reader does not modify the reader but the author, et cetera.

The adjectivalization read above — conveniently, I speak before the novel of that which is not read that the book contains; but the rest, here, is before everything and I leave only a little of it; by means of prologues I have the refinement to privilege the readers who know the entire book, something only my readers have found in an abnegated author — I give the book to the public just to turn around and put it through the linguistic workshop of that singular artist, Xul Solar, who will make it into one, definitive word. And, already in its fourth edition, my salutation to the reader, which you’ll have to pardon me, will today be served decaffeinated.

To your health, reader. How sad we are in our books, and how distant. I, the most often mentioned and identified of the unknowns, find myself in a predicament with my Complete Works, to start with, in such a way that the entire future, my whole literary career, will be posterior, in my case, to the aforementioned Complete Works; only because the public has not stopped to wait for me and hasn’t given me the name of a great unknown. So now I am obliged to deserve it, composing myself a past as an author in one fell swoop, so that later I’ll be able to write. This is a new situation in the life of writers, and isn’t it adverse to success?

For those who have read me before I began to write, if you have a problem like mine, by now I won’t have it any more. I’ve finished my Complete Works. In my satisfaction, monumentally incapable of understanding difficulty, I can give you a distillation of long experience in art, collected in the present Complete Work.

Let art be limitless and free and all that is intrinsic to it — its handwriting, its titles, the life of its exponents. Tragedy or Humorism or Fantasy should never have to suffer a Past director, nor should they have to copy a Present Reality, and all should incessantly be judged, abolished.

It’s an axiomatic error to define art by copies: I understand life without getting a copy of it first; if copies were necessary, each new situation, each new character that we encountered would be eternally incomprehensible. The effectiveness of the author derives solely from his Invention.

I leave only the title finished, since:

A prologue that starts right away is really sloppy: it loses the perfume of its preceding, just as I said that the only genuine way to practice futurism is to put it off for later.

I will also have said, earlier, that this is one of the twenty-nine prologues of a novel that’s impossible to prologue, as a critic, who surely born in that tranquil country of “ask questions later,” has recently predicted; there’s another, more sympathetic, book, that is, one that’s more given to length and limited in prologues — which can still be remedied — which was going to be called “The Man Who Would Be President But Wasn’t.” 1

Or, an equivalent:

“Buenos Aires hysterical, torn between the hilarious faction and the faction of eternity, and saved by a splendid compatriot, who unifies humorism and passion.” But the title I’ve got left for “the novel permitted a beginning,” which although it begins late has no less of a beginning, and, if he reads it, the reader will wish it were all made of continuations, such as “Novel of Eterna, and of the Child of Melancholy, Sweetheart of-an-undeclared-lover.”

This last is the title a certain gentleman preferred; he began to read it and promised to come back right away, to finish finding out how the novel is named.

This is the only novel that tells everything and that, nevertheless, has nothing added, although the obligation to tell everything leads to telling more. I got hung up reading Arabic stories in my adolescence, because I didn’t know there were only 1,001, so I kept reading them after I’d finished: I was warned much too late, and so I continued devouring stories, which I found abundantly scattered through Morality, History; there are stories of Progress, the abnegation of statesmen or martyrs or propagandists of some selfless cause, like the happiness of the good, repentance of evil, the ultimate concordance of the general and the particular, or Utilitarianism, the order of the Universe and other miracles of the abundant “faith” of the men of science, which is so demanding of vulgar miracles!

This is a novel with two beginnings, depending on the reader’s preference.

It has a lot of sadness and a lot of enthusiasm, but no death, only the words The End, written much later, long after you have finished reading the title. It’s only written once, although the prologues need it (not all of them, but a few need endings), and even the title, when it ends: I’ve abolished The End of the title, The End of the prologue, so as to show just how little the novel depends on death for its existence — but neither does it rely on life (truth, realism)—.