Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

The disorder of my book is the same disorder of all apparently well-ordered lives and works.

Congruency, or an executed plan, in a novel, in a psychological or biological work, in a metaphysics — in all cases it’s a trick of the literary world, and perhaps the entire artistic and scientific world.

Congruency, or a planned-out work, is mystification in Kant, in Schopenhauer, almost always in Wagner, and in Cervantes and Goethe.

That there should be a continuity or congruency outside of some text or other treatment is just as fantastic as consistency in the reader or student of such works.

I would be remiss if I did not at the same time declare that there is nothing more delicious, yet maddening, than the integrally congruous work. I mean unity, continuity not by means of repetition but by development, by incessant variation in a kind of permanence (of a thought, of a feeling). The supreme specimen of this development in unity, in my judgment, is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

In a complete mystification of unity, Schopenhauer presents us with the three volumes of The World As Will and Representation, with many chapters, each numbered and in apparent order. This thinker, perhaps the greatest metaphysician, published a draft of his research as if it were a great book, solid and definitive. Kant’s argument in the complex Critique of Pure Reason is like the rattle of magazines inside a paper bag. Perhaps Spencer was able to write true books without an interrupted reasoning, without a single useless word. Perhaps today Husserl is more methodical?

Although I said otherwise in the opening, I don’t have anything to apologize for.

Maybegenius: “How did it occur to the author to give my name the extravagant modality of the interrogative: Maybegenius? It obliges me to appear in dialogues in the following way:

Sweetheart: “What have we here? Maybegenius? Again today you’re here in ‘La Novela?’”

Maybegenius: “Today’s birthday is…”

Sweetheart: “The business of having birthdays tarnishes this novice novel; to celebrate birthdays is to live counting, to clutch at life, marking it with a tendency toward the End.”

Maybegenius: “I’ll think about what you say, and I’ll continue with what you didn’t let me say. Today’s birthday is Nonexistence.

“But I’ll return to the matter of my name. The author thought afterwards that since I was destined to talk a lot and only with you, Sweetheart, it would be a bother to you to enforce the interrogative pronunciation of my name. I’m agreed, but I should be named Full-Character…”

Sweetheart: “This is fine, yet he still can’t mend his ways.” Maybegenius: “It’ll be the novel’s only defect. But the truth is that the author is only worried about his own convenience, giving me a short name that says nothing. Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes.”

They know that I’m extremely happy with their performances, but they’re begging me to tell them so before the novel, and not wait until its conclusion. Although they don’t show it, this is because they know I’m competent to finish prologues, and they believe me less than competent to finish novels. Seeing that I’m in the last prologue without keeping my promise, they have me cornered. The novel would already be starting if it wasn’t for this exigency, which occasions yet another prologue.

But if I acknowledge that they have conducted themselves admirably — for example, the Traveler, who has always been by my side and who has constantly been traveling within the novel, perfuming the chapters with his scent of suitcase-leather — it must be recognized that I, for my part, have been faithful to his docile character. In this way, although I have suffered shocking budget shortfalls while I wrote my great novel, I have neither sold nor pawned a single character. How much could I have gotten for the President? Or for the character who makes himself a millionaire, complete with a Rolls-Royce? Anyone would have pawned himself for Sweetheart’s life and happiness, but among ourselves we all found a way to avoid one evil or another, and if I’ve borne certain inconveniences so as to not have to be separated from them for a few weeks, the novel has not been totally frustrated.

Thus characters and author are mutually content and a joint reception is planned in their honor.

All the characters — and the readers announced so far — warned me that they would judge the interruption of the Boy with a Long Stick in the novel as a kind of “reading bruise” on the forehead. That’s a singular metaphor, of irritating intention; as if a stick or a cane could cause “hematomas” on the reading operation, which is the same as claiming that reading about bananas makes people slip and fall. I understand the warning if it comes from fathers of families who are incapable of achieving at home what I have done in the novel: keeping kids from running around and getting free from the little brats, who are kept outside. For a rest, these fathers resort to whatever reading is hooligan-free; they’ve let me know that they will only take up a novel that won’t be mistaken by those brats as a staircase, a wall, a cornice, or a tree branch, which all function as things to climb, only to fall down, get banged around, and renew any existing swellings and bumps. This taking to heights so as to fall down, and thus authenticate differences in altitude that nature so delicately provided, allows young people to always see these structures from below and to be up high, or falling, in every other circumstance. In this way they don’t stoop to blows, since old age begins with neglecting such things.

What do you expect: I must keep prologuing while avoiding the abuse of prologuing the prologues; and while I’m at that I have to make them prologues of something, that is, they must be followed by something (a novel); meanwhile I can’t permit my novel the caprice of prologuing itself (which is the equivalent of making biographical allusions in histories or doctrinaire declarations in the text of a novel in progress); meanwhile I must assure you, as I do now, that I am well on the road to auto-prologuery, which should definitely dampen the prologues’ hopes (they complained once) for autoexistence (autoexistence is the ultimate response to the mystery of the world, which involves eternity), meaning they would not have to subordinate their existence to whatever follows; the auto-prologue would be to a shaky literature, anticipatory of prologuing what the two most usual forms of reportage — auto-reportage (without a reporter) and reportage without anything to report, or antiquated reportage (which demands two people and a fixed appointment) — what the speed and expedition of our epoch have eradicated as too complicated, less than fiscally sound, and even informal in our obligated lives — what do you expect, until the novel comes, you’ll have to make do with what comes before …

I, who once upon a time imagined himself a man of complete good fortune, a man who elbowed his way through the multitude shouting, Make way for a happy man! — on the contrary, I must ask that you favor me with a show of compassion for all that’s happening to me, because everything is. See for yourselves:

I yearn for the destruction of cities, and what happens? I end up with a cousin who toils, with extraordinary talent and vehement determination, on behalf of urban prosperity and growth and resolves transit problems.