Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

God, invented so as to author our birth, was instantly worried about keeping our good graces, and so he created the World to make believe (this isn’t religious, but it’s religion’s first step) that he had been concerned with other matters before us; he called it the third, and believed that we’d ask about the others. “Yes, this one is number three, which I’ve given you in addition to the ones before.” On the contrary, when we saw the number we said, “Third and last.” If it had occurred him to leave a return address, we’d have sent it back.

The boy Federico tirelessly undertakes economic endeavors. He made a Noise Factory with all his friends. To equip the best rubble-flingers from amongst their workers they obtained metals, zinc, brass, or crystals treated with mineral agents. Easy transport and an available market assured prosperity. The financial crisis of 1921, the toppling of Stinnes, the colossal competition between Standard Oil and Dutchshell, the flood of paper German marks… all we know is that despite the great demand, there wasn’t a single noise left in the area that was ready for manufacture; Federico’s company couldn’t keep up, and had found a way to provide the public with a racket that no one would notice, without making noise, and without anyone knowing where it came from. Each father found his boy and helped him to walk at a variety of accelerated paces, two hours from the inauguration of this Establishment, which was so acclaimed by the population for its prescience and convenience. All the staff members were tucked into bed and thus avoided declaring bankruptcy, which either the Stinnes perturbations, currency instability, unlimited German marks, or the obscurity of Wilson’s 14 points would have made necessary… 1 or maybe the only coincidence was that in this city — and I congratulate them on their work in rounding up the boys — papas are larger than their sons. Before Federico could define, in his reflections, what the final mercantile determination had been, if it had been the Stinnes perturbation, the petroleum wars, et cetera, or if it were all of them, he began new individual operations as God’s secretary or official note-taker, to make note for Him of all the invocations of “God’s will” in reference to whether the patio would be cleaned “by tomorrow,” which the ladies of modest houses formulated when they were feeling mortified by their procrastination: “Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll wash the floors,” “Tomorrow, God willing, I’ll clean my room.” He kept careful observations, and calculated that each day God was forgetting to will some thirty thousand put-off floor washings worldwide. He also had to record all of the “Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll organize the closets;” another thirty thousand. All we know for sure is that Federico found himself that morning standing on the ground before the entrance of my novel, and it’s not proper to ask him if his dealings with God ended badly, thanks to boredom and bad pay. Gods are old and crafty; what’s more, God or the Devil (they’re the same) knows more because he’s old than because he’s a devil.

But there’s one more thing that we can’t put off saying for another minute: the coming and going of Federico around the world. We’ll say this at least: it was very slow. He left when it was time to shift Eterna’s lips and flutter her pale eyelids for an animated smile at the President’s ingenuity, and he returned when the smile disappeared because the President had suffered an impossibility of candor at the impossibility of sulking and he took hold of Eterna’s skirt as a signal that he wanted to “go to the wardrobe,” that is, be punished.

And with that we’ve introduced Federico into the prologues.

1 An allusion to the troubled times in the postwar period 1914–1918 (commercial and bank competition, unlimited printing of German marks, and the proposition of the North American President Wilson for a League of Nations). ( Editor’s Note— Adolfo de Obieta )

After long experience in beginning polygraphy, preceded by an A-plus silence, the kind of authoritative silence or encyclopedic clamming-up that touches on everything and that everybody welcomes, I have come to suspect that the Reader has a very fragile disposition. But his evanescence is not so extreme that Titles and Covers, at the very least, cannot reach him. From this reflection was born my innovation: title-texts. This is how I want to explain the length of my novel’s title.

Since the circulation of covers and titles is at the mercy of window-dressers, newspaper stands, and warning labels, the ideal Reader of Covers, Reader in the Doorway — Minimal Reader, or Unsought Reader, will finally here stumble across the author who had him in mind, the author of the cover-book, of the Title-Novel. And consider that “the hooked reader” must be the title of the Title that we’re presenting of our novel, since the first plot point already happened on the cover, where the Minimal Reader is solidly hooked by the only thing that the booksellers (ever stingy with their time) have read: the title page, the only page that for most books anyone bothered to edit; truly Posterity, which everyone worships and which no one has met in person, will recognize this.

The Sunday editions of La Nación and La Prensa perhaps suggested to me the cover-text, since they are a species of Sunday edition, a Sunday edition of titles and, despite their length, a holiday of titles. As I have also observed, after a long time believing that these editions never ended — and that’s a warning to everyone who leafs through these editions, thinking them endless — they do indeed end: you have to have a Sunday as desperate as I did during the times when I read them in their entirety, just to extricate myself from the error of believing them infinite, a belief that no thinking person should ever have about anything.

The origin and plan of my inauguration of the title-read is thus proved: to take advantage of the better circulation procured for the title by the shop window, compared with the bulk interior of the book. That part is later circulated by a cordial character, the man of letters, who operates like the match that lights more than one cigarette. One man alone, if he is able to obtain a pension from the “Promotors of the Book” and longevity from tonics (these are the only religion left to us, besides those two great Argentine religions: the faith that whoever goes to Paraguay will return with a parrot, and the faith that people come from the North bring Tafi cheese. Without these tokens no one will believe that they’ve really returned; you can’t bring back another bird, like the way rich gentlemen and ladies bring back philosophers from Europe, taking advantage of the sales) — one man, then, can make a whole edition from a single book, and the buyer won’t even notice when sales fall off, since the borrower leaves him far behind with his invisible trajectory. A hundred title-readers are calculated for each book reader; text-titles and cover-books do not mistake the reader; they are often brilliant Literature’s only hope for a wide radius of influence, since these titles are not content with the modest title of cherished and secret Literature.

I therefore prevent my book from continuing on after those who have finished reading my title withdraw, since it does not belong to that species of facsimile books in wood that simulate full library shelves. This way if the reader does not continue reading, no one will blame me for not warning him. It’s already too late for the author who doesn’t write and the reader who doesn’t read to come to an agreement: now I am decidedly writing.