Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

You can make your own list of rejected Characters; I’m only rejecting one kind of Reader: the reader who skips to the end. Thanks to his procedure of giving substance in advance to the whole story and the ending, he’s already quit the scene.

My tactic as a novelist is: the Reader only catches glimpses of the characters, but what he comes to know of them he knows so well that he is pricked by readerly irritation. He’s left insatiable by his incomplete knowledge or “half-knowledge,” yet loves their delicacy. Thus two mnemonic devices are at work in his memory (you can’t remember without some sort of emotion, be it irritation or tenderness), rendering the characters unforgettable. This explanation anticipating the novel will make it so that the reader is not worried that he doesn’t understand its imperfections; this way, he’ll read comfortably and won’t set himself the task of understanding the truncated or obscure.

Any author should candidly advise the reader right from the start: “This is a novel that will go like this:

A gentleman of a certain maturity, the President, is assembling all the people who were good to him during his excursions away from home, and who want to live with him, in a certain countryside locale.

This circle of friendship prolongs itself for a happy while, but the host himself is not happy, and he incites his friends to undertake a certain Action.

The Action is undertaken with success but he continues to be unhappy.

Having concluded the action they separate, and aside from other details and events, nothing more is known about anyone.

The essence of this tale therefore consists, reader, in the President, who does not feel satisfied with the life of friendship in the Estancia, moving with a great effort to prove himself in the vocation of happiness and, departing from his perennial discontent with this movement, struggles to action, but once he fully attains it, he falls into disillusionment with the action and with the great desire to be happy in love, since before he formed his friendly group in the Estancia he held Friendship, Action, and Love in disdain and his only vocation was meditation on the Mystery.

Before and after the novel’s narrative, what dominated in him was metaphysical meditation, which made him a failure in Friendship, in the happiness of Action, and the fullness of Love.

The only character in this novel who’s got this kind of devil in him is the President; he comes up short in everything: love, metaphysics, friendship, action; he’s deep into the Mystery, he loves Eterna very much; later he seeks friendship; unsatisfied, he decides on Action; again discontented and always one to make suggestions, after nights of deliberation and suffering he invites those companions that he made so happy, that he enlightened and filled with problems during years of communal life, to part ways permanently. So as to never meet again, deliberately, those who were once so happily united and who are now separated, so as to never know one or the other’s fortunes, disgraces, finales. This Academic Death is a not a foolish decision for those without Faith — which is almost all of us. It’s true that it would be better to be united, and with Faith.

With these vacillations, that great character, the President, imposes on this novel a disjointed disposition and redaction, but the denouement of academic death gives it grandeur, and the rehearsal of the characters that comes before it shows a respect for the reading public that no author has yet mustered: there won’t be any more plays and novels without first putting the characters through their paces in full view of the reader.

To conclude, the President author ends up with two discontents: the personality of Eterna imposes itself upon him to such a degree that he’s unable to use his evocative power in the service of what would have been Eterna’s august sentiment in the Farewell and the mystery of her subsequent destiny. And likewise the author, just as much of an artist as he is believed to be, can’t imagine or even mention how beings of such innocence and sweetness — Sweetheart and Maybegenius — are torn from each other’s company by the resulting dispersion.

In summary: the Finale of the half-written novel by the best of the semi-novelists is left unrealized.

If you think there’s a probability that a novel like the one thus synthesized might be agreeable to you, read it. And allow me to exercise my artistic talent while you read it, since this novel might be agreeable without having anything artistic in it or having any value for me. But it would be useful for me if I could exercise the only true artistic operation over your spirit. You will feel, first obscurely and then more clearly, an artistic emotion, the one I have sought to elicit.

The reader who won’t read my novel if he can’t know all of it first is my kind of reader, he’s an artist, because he who reads only seeking the final resolution is seeking what art should not provide, his interest is in the merely vital, not in a state of consciousness: the only artistic reader is the one who does not seek resolution.”

He’s so substantial that he is what’s the matter and yet another matter entirely.

I don’t labor under the illusion of keeping the Boy with the Long Stick out of the novel forever — he’s the one you all know as a future character without a birth, yet confined in the novel as its resisted aspirant, plotting to be a part of the story — and in my squeamishness I’ve prepared titles in the eventual though undesirable case that a place must be made for him, so that although I’ve received him under duress he has not been denied all consideration in his actual reception, at least that he can discern (for all the characters of my invention — who make the plot using the combined existence that I’ve allotted each one — are beings whose births were mandatory, called to novelistic life by the lazy cravings of Fantasy, not like we who were consulted in the matter, and they nevertheless feel themselves so in possession of this casual and thin existence that they’ll yield a place to this hooligan). I’ve consented to what he’s sensibly asked of me: that I make antecedents for him, giving him access in a prologue that will ease his ingress in to the novel, when he’s able to obtain it thanks to a moment of carelessness on the part of the powerful characters who have been assured existence in the novel from the beginning; they’re like retirees from unreal existence, they have such an easy air about them, as though they’ve been accustomed to exist in this way even before they started, an ease which we the living also bring with us from birth, since none of us showed any surprise when we began living, which we wouldn’t believe if they hadn’t told us so — and I, like those who remember my birth but don’t remember their own, have opted for not believing it necessary, thus affirming our eternity—.

Although Federico may cause more ravages than a critic, the possibility of his appearance must be considered, and prepared for, so as to best ensure the peace if he does appear. Putting this boy in the novel saves the critics the trouble of destroying it.

He has titles, books, the past; he’s not a boy whom the author began writing only in the present book and edition (this popular author, recently settled in Literature, which is here inaugurated, isn’t so well-known that he demands that the sale of his book begin with the fourth edition, the way that great authors do).