Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

The Lover came about because of the most important discovery that human intelligence has made: Hodgson’s conception of automatism. At the first perspicuous discovery of psychological automatism, the author of this novel was led to formulate his theory of integral automatism, which could be considered one of the world’s most audacious ideas and clear perceptions.

Departing from Hodgson’s supreme example, the author was not afraid to raise it to its most extreme systemization. As we say, the novelesque author of this novel, by means of whose magic we promise to make of you a novelesque reader, discovered: that it’s never been proved that a man or a woman who laughs or cries, who wrinkles his forehead, shouts, gets agitated, attacks, defends himself, searches, finds, plays, delays, writes, or seems to read, or pay attention is feeling or thinking anything in particular; that in this man or woman states of sound, color, odor, and pain exist — everything that the senses encompass. In sum: the fact that a “state of consciousness” does not exist does not impede anything — nor would the presence of consciousness help anything — from playing out exactly the same way an identical situation would play itself out in a person without consciousness and sensibility. 1

It’s in the interest of the physical organism to carry on living: it’s not interested in being, or having perceptions. Automatism takes incessant charge of everything we do, and this automatism is totally acquired by individual experience (experience that does not necessarily have to be felt or perceived to produce the modifications we call adaptation), except perhaps in two fundamental reflexive impulses, which are congenital: flight from pain (which is what could destroy the physical organism, not psychic pain), and the retention or pursuit of pleasure. With this basic, congenital automatism experience goes on recording the physiological sequences of every emergency: a man who is assaulted by a furious mastiff may not see or hear or have any sensuous memory of a dog or his wound; or if we like, we could say: a man who today awoke with a total loss of consciousness would defend himself or run automatically, provided that at some point in the past a dog had wounded him, even if he had no memory of this. It will be said that I should admit it’s necessary that once, at least, this person had a psyche, intelligence, emotion, felt sensory perceptions. But it’s not like that: a child may be born absolutely without sensibility and develop in exactly the same way as his little brother, who has it (the halo of psychic sensibility).

The hurts that the body suffers have been associated with the sensations of the visual and auditory nerves, because of modifications in the nervous system provoked by the figure and the barks of the animal, without it necessarily being the case that these neural alterations have been translated into psychic facts of vision or audition. (Psychologically things are like this; metaphysically, all material phenomenology, the human body, sound and light waves, are nothing more than psychic states, or sensations in a psyche.)

What the author has tried to ascertain, unsuccessfully, is under what circumstances what we call the total domination of consciousness in a physical person may be produced; but it’s enough to caution that the location of a consciousness in a body is an absurd idea, because the psychic is not malleable in terms of space: an emotion, a felt visual perception, this doesn’t happen in my brain, although there might be a discernible causal relationship between sensations and cerebral alterations…

The author knew the Lover for many years, seeing him often, and he noticed that after the death of his wife, whom he seemed to love immensely, there was an almost imperceptible shift in the shading of his conduct and expressions, which was troubling, although hard to define. (The author professes in this professional novelist paragraph, but he retains the right to ask that the reader believe a little bit in novelistic miracles, something I’ve consented to believe in for many years, as a reader of a considerable number of less explicable and congruent novels than my own.) And so it was that little by little the Lover lost his sensibility, until he was reduced to a body without consciousness.

If the reader is also unaware of everything I’m ignorant of (and I thank him for his company), he won’t know how to fully and satisfactorily explain Hodgson, or should I say the incomplete automatism that he discovered. It’s only possible to understand the basics of what I’m explaining. For that reason I’d swear that the Lover stopped being a personal consciousness years ago, and I myself observe that his conduct in the novel is that of a man who does not feel anything, who neither thinks nor sees, but who lives in an attitude of hopeful waiting, without feeling hope, for his beloved to return and with her, his happiness. In other words, he is actually an insensibility with the perspective of a sensibility. This is very mysterious, and it would be censurable in a person who didn’t know that in this world there are movies, and Conan Doyle novels.

The tone of what surrounds him operates on his automatism without the Lover feeling it, that is why he participates in the movements of the novel.

The body is the dominant party, and it does not need sensible collaboration; it can live perfectly without consciousness, and when there is consciousness, the body can oblige it to live, even when it doesn’t want to; it opposes itself to suicide in man as the most intolerable pain and will dispense with all feeling in order to maintain the integrity of a personal body: the Body has no other plan than Longevity, not Hedonism.

The novel does not have the Lover as a character, but as an insensible but automated body coordinated with a character. We’re not bragging about any great novelty in introducing an automatic person (who would run for a month, perhaps, on clockwork) to the novel, because the Lover is not an automaton by birth; he had consciousness, and he can have it again…

The novel hopes that the visual, tactile, and auditory tone of a revived and returned beloved will bring about the miraculous recuperation of the Lover’s consciousness.

And the Lover, for his part, will show his tenderness to the novel, enriching it with his beloved. How will he resuscitate her? By being the only man who does not deny his dreams. The Lover revives his beloved because he believes in his dreams and he’s happy, because he has faith in lovers’ eternity.

1 The reader is whispering with Hodgson and the author perceives that both are making marginal annotations.

“I want to know what kind of people I’ve ended up with here.”

“Nobody who isn’t worthy of it. Eterna, the Lover, the President.”

“But you should know, Mr. Author, that I can’t learn any more, and I can’t teach anything to anyone else. Sometimes I’m called Mignon, in Wilhelm Meister…

“But if we have Eterna here, who was called Leonora in Poe; and the one who was called Rebecca in Ivanhoe , and our own Eterna finds herself in Lady Rowena.”

“When will I find my own great novelist?”

“Haven’t you found him here?”

“But look, your novel doesn’t have a ‘hermetic seal,’ but it leads the way to another novel, because I’m a transmigrating character and I arise not from readers’ posterity but out of authors’ posterity.” “Let’s leave it at this: behave yourself for me. For the rest of it, I don’t believe that the authors of the future will be content with used characters, but this isn’t my concern. We have an understanding.”