Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

It has two almost-impossibilities that are almost resolved: how to narrate the ultimate and what to do with a bungled joke — how to regain one’s composure after having laughed at a tragedy because the title gave no indication that it was not a comedy.

It interrupts its reading and narration once, so that Sweetheart can get dressed, during which the reader should have no pretext to read, as that’s his way of looking.

It has twenty-nine prologues written to prevent it from beginning.

It has the exclusive use of three new mathematical tenses. These are “novel tenses” which have never, before today, been spooled out in narratives and novels, as if time didn’t flee and flow during events of fantasy. The aforementioned tenses are: the tense of porteño or Buenos Aires-style courtesy, which dictates that no one be disposed of or denied, but that one simply wait “until there’s a new tango” to look for work or improve oneself. Second, the tense of the interval (on the floor) between two falls of the Prince of Wales: this surveyor Prince is very nice, he acquired his title by measuring short stretches against the length of his real persona, but I hope this won’t reinforce the hobo inclinations of the skip-around reader or encourage him to read by the illustrious example of this skip-around pony. Finally, the minimal tense: the one that’s left over now to make the first overcoat for the first cold of winter, or measuring this tense by another standard: the tense of rescuing a black hat which had been forgotten on the black seat of a chair, during the forthcoming visit of a recently arrived guest. Or, if you like: five minutes of film in which the entire cast of Hollywood has to run, falling over themselves to convert all of the disgraces in two hours of film — marriage, kissing, the unmasking of false virtue — into happiness.

It has characters from three different ages, measured by Oblivion: the age in which we leave a cigarette burning in Papa’s new cigarette holder and forget it in the maid’s room; the already advanced age when we forget a baguette that’s been left on a polished desk; and the desperate age in which we forget everything, including age, even forgetting a hat that’s been left in a soup tureen — a horrible turn of events. (The age in which we take the stairs in leaps will predominate, that age in which we tangle our last kite or our last fishing line, and the first game of billiards emerges, and the first night of forgetting one’s house keys.)

With the melancholy of the child, whose beautiful love remained unrequited.

And the valor of the quest of the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist.

All of which is stocked with indescribable confusion — but for the forbearance of the Novel we would describe it now — for a bank employee who doesn’t know whether he is a genius.

Once the prologues are finished, the novel will begin all of a sudden, opening surprisingly with “An executed novel, which has gone out into the street,” insistently insinuating itself to the point of the full extent of the “Novel of impediments” and ending with all the rest that the author found out in “What to cry about,” a chapter that will procure for the reader a list of what is worth crying about, plus the impossible death of the “Man who Feigned To Live,” here played by the barber who pretended he was awake and able to see, although he was sleeping at the moment, as he almost always is. His accursed sleep does not prevent everything from coming to be known and told, without being said, however, nothing that isn’t in the book, that comes from outside the novel or has the formality of an End, will impede this novel. It has its end in the same place as every other novel, that is, the point where the book is left with nothing to say, throwing into doubt everything it said in the first place. We assure you that very few eras have a forthcoming novel, even the ones who by the end have been more lauded, been as concluded as ours, written entirely before the end and not leaving behind a single continuation.

To conclude, this novel is sure to appear, since it’s been promised three times already just to fulfill the first promise. It does not contain any trips abroad, nor does it neglect to continue; both of these things are mere pretexts to leave the reader without characters, since obviously the story cannot move ahead if various protagonists don’t leave for Europe or are simply forgotten for pages at a time, obliging the reader to wait until so-and-so returns so that the forgetful parts will slap their hands to their foreheads and remember. That’s why I already said, or I will say, that we do not accept among our kitchen characters those that want a degree in mending buttons or making sure the pots on the stove don’t boil over and burn their bottoms with rice and milk.

1 This “Man Who Would Be President” (in the novel) and who wasn’t (in history, where who would want to be?) is connected to a possible political-fantastical action alluded to in the notes to “Towards A Theory of the State,” in Teorías. ( Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

What I have here is, strangely enough, now the promised Novel, which certainly had the instinct of assuring itself a state of effective non-existence — it hasn’t emerged from non-being because a promised book traces the border between being and non-being, and from a distant perspective, such as the mind of the author, its place in existence is being prepared, and energy, curiosity, and attention are reserved for it; even promising it so much existence that juries have reserved prizes for it — and it had the instinct of maintaining itself in this non-existence for a half-dozen years, so that it can appear as if its being had never known nothingness, which, doubling the virtue of its reality, makes possible such an abundance thereof that, in a fantasy, non existence lives in the person of the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, whose insinuated substance is only effective, can only breathe, whose slender shadow can only have a place in a novel whose existence is as strong as this one, whose beginning has not been preceded by a nothing.

I’ll say goodbye here, too, reader, not because you can ever forget me — you can’t, this is an unforgettable novel — but because I’m just a poor novel, ardent, but short on tremulous dreams, a little curtain of shadows that has decided to pull itself back so as to reveal everything, assuming you begin to read it: Sweetheart, the President, GWDE-Eterna is not on the same path — the sad being-characters only live in the minutes that someone spends writing them: once their making is concluded, they are concluded, they are nothing, they’re even sadder now because the ticklish feeling of being read ran over their dead figures like a butterfly, or disquieting peals of laughter, or even the piety that you will disgorge it gave them goosebumps all over their bodies because they never had access to Life.

My Novel has been executed without life, and yet it’s not to be forgotten. It’s worse that way, even sadder, even more pitiless. You who are eternal, the living, are those who can weep for it, since you have touched Life and there’s no death when there is a present, a single instant of Life is followed by eternity; you can cry, your tears burn your face, they run, they wet your cheeks; I, the Novel, am only made of daydreams, and the day you dream me you’ll forget me; I’ll be over forever, and I’ll end each time that, because he’s happy, because he’s triumphant, he doesn’t dream me; meanwhile you will never forget existing.

Why not? And why not call it a salutation, even if it doesn’t end up being one? I haven’t promised you my mental continuity and congruency as a man, but only as an author — to give a novelistic definition. Here I am, with all of the cravings that happen between the self and the intimate movements of every day; I live my day before the reader’s eyes. The reader is by definition a sympathizer, and I can be interesting to him in what I show of my doubt and inconstancy.