Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Knowledge is a deep and complex thing, nothing like the melancholy thing which is to know words. That’s the worst thing that can happen to us, and at the same time, it engenders such infatuation. I say that we live with very little knowledge, as if to convince ourselves we don’t need it. And if it were true that our knowledge is very small, it would be doubtful if it were true: if we know scarcely anything in depth, it’s probable that our vast ignorance includes ignorance of whether it’s certain we know nothing.

This isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that everyone has deep knowledge of two or three complex truths, but that our experience with life embraces a thousand more aspects, so that we live almost all of our lives in darkness, something that is not conducive to constant misfortune, not least of which because pain tends to engender pleasure on its own just by ceasing, and vice versa. What’s certain, knowledge, counts for very little in light of this rule.

But if we lived in constant surprise; almost totally in the unexpected. We don’t know a single scrap integrally ( integrally, scrap, these words denounce the fragility of human mental labor), not even a total fraction of our lot in life, unless we dedicate the better part of our lives to learning all the motivations of every action and passion, which is rarely possible. We like to reconstruct the beginning of effects and events that continue a long time or a short time, and connect us, but rarely do we find the stamina for a methodical evocation of an effect or event.

We also rarely know whether we are dealing with ideas, or with conduct.

In music, for example, if we were to document the immensity of the small melodic labor of artists who were contemporaries of Bach, or who came before him, the common people of the past and of the present, and of Bach himself, it’s possible to doubt regarding Beethoven that we have really, even now, been dealing with music; or if we only consider music to be this remote music which is not artistic in itself (even less so with earlier music). Maybe all that we call music, starting from Bach, and fragments of song which these musicians and people left behind in an immense number is nothing but the elaboration of an obsession tied to fear. Perhaps genuine music has never, or almost never existed: it’s the traffic of the state that the individual artist feels and its direct and personal expression, the search for a means and the desire to express oneself. What I have here is how we work for a long time in darkness and then give our work a name that it has not earned.

So now I also ask myself: What has motivated the idea and the will to make a novel? Do these last two or three years of my life not show me any one of these motivations, not because nothing should be mysterious or inaccessible, but because inquiries are tiring or troubling, even though we are all interested in the search for origins in our history and in schemas of the whole motivation for an action or a sentiment.

At first, I wanted to express myself, and also I wanted to look at life psychologically, and I wanted to commit myself to a general study of aesthetics, and I wanted to better myself economically, and thereby make a bit of a reputation for myself which would facilitate my means in difficult circumstances. All of this was erased by a great, new motivation, which coincided with my unexpected meeting of a person of such elevated influences on my spirit, such incredible grace, that sometimes I don’t know if I only dreamed her.

To show my gratitude — or to keep her dream alive — I began the manuscript. This remained the main motive, though there was one other, smaller motivation, which will interest the public more: to execute a theory of Art, particularly of the Art of the Novel.

So it is that we even write a letter to this novel in darkness, and in darkness the person to whom it is dedicated asks to read it, and a consternation arises in her that she cannot define. She also cannot guess Eterna’s motives, because she does not know herself well, and so she writes this missive for unknown reasons.

The reader will have equally confused impressions of this Novel. I don’t believe I’ve made a novel that’s faithful to the doctrine that it expresses. If both were excellent, the reader would still have plenty of time to form his impression, finding much to doubt, to declare vague or contradictory or inartistic, since in order to justify these imperfections I’ve just argued that it’s difficult to really know motivations and impressions.

Goodbye, reader!…

We are now able to present the model novel, thanks to a curious upheaval in the circulation among the literati of the character named John Mountainclimber, who as everyone knows — even Socrates, who didn’t know anything, and even those who only know what he said— has appeared in literature for two or three thousand years, since the days of Greek and Roman literature, and in every truly sensational, modern novel which resembles no other, not even in having Mountainclimber as a character.

This protagonist has always been known for his invariable position, which makes him afflictingly interesting: John Mountainclimber, driven by love to a life of adventure, on a mountaintop with novelistically opportune precipices, has fallen several meters from one of the same, something that’s always a pity, and even more so in those moments when the story can’t be put off; proof of this is that the story begins by describing his accident, which serves as the impetus for the novel and as the imperilment of the life of Mountainclimber, and for the reader as a way of maintaining suspense and worry, and in the story to move things along: it’s the only effective contrivance for confounding the skip-around reader.

Mountainclimber is at a great height and in great danger, but the story continues, like those crime serials that need something to happen in order to get going; and Mountainclimber’s enthusiastic mountain-climbing only begins to enthuse the reader and the author when they see him miss a step and incur great danger. He’s holding on by a twig, toes clinging to some tiny outcropping of insecure rock, mortally exhausting himself, struggling and shouting at thirty or more unknown meters from the bottom of what we must already begin to call the abyss.

The whole novel happens while he’s in this bind, I’ll leave the reader to decide how he was rescued in the end. I can’t think of a novelistic device that can more assuredly hold the reader until the end in suspense and uninterrupted interest, there’s no novelistic procedure that yields a better value per page; even if the book were blank between the first and last pages and the promise of others— which are almost always as follows: plot, denouement, characters, unity and congruity— were not kept, the reader wouldn’t skip a single one. Therefore, there’s nobody like this John Mountainclimber for a model novel that is unlike any other; he’s all characters in one, since he’s plot personified: beginning and end without anything in the middle to unravel, or wrap up with a simulated solution.

Suspended in the air as he is, the attention of every reader cleaves to him; I needed him for the hardest part, the beginning of a novel, where the reader begins his task. It may be because Mountainclimber successfully procures both of these difficult beginnings — though the reader thinks his is the most difficult — or it may be because he’s made us believe these things are difficult. With him, author and reader together take up their respective burdens on uncertain ground.

Uncertain ground and suspensions in the air helped in this case. When the Newcomer entered, he hung up his dog on the hook in the vestibule; the workers at Ford hang up their hats, which according to Ford is a type of movement as slight as the ones that later make up the day’s work in the factory; I hang up a borrowed character and I fetch him on my way out so I can return him, but in the interim he grips the reader with such intense interest that he regrets any Skipping Around in the future. Any future author will be grateful for this method.