Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

I invent the best titles for novels and essays, and upon reflection discover that it is ridiculously unjustifiable to title a work of art.

I seek out the most dolorous and intense of affairs for a novel, poem, or play, and some time later my meditations on aesthetics impose upon me the obvious truth that affairs are utterly worthless in art, they are extra-artistic, and that moreover in art the invention of affairs is superlatively lazy, since life is full of affairs of all sorts.

I conceive and produce a few captivating, eloquent poems, and, as I’m always in search of truth, I later discover the truth of the artistic nullity of poems, in prose and especially in verse, in so many stories and personifications.

I deny death and spend my time researching a way to prolong life, and all I’ve managed is to avoid medication.

I go to a lot of trouble to cultivate elegance and talent in literary redaction, and I end up with a character, the President, who eclipses me with the grandiloquence and tear-jerking desperation of his letters, and another character, Maybegenius, who tries to woo me as a protagonist in the most counterproductive and boring system ever: short story writing.

I expect that a story that turns the corner will only turn up jokes.

I make friends with the reader, who makes me write better, and he confides that in me he found an author who gives his readers a bad reputation.

In the end, when I had assembled a complete cast of aesthetic experts, scientists, and philosophers in this novel (three grammaticians, a chemist, a historiographer, two inventors, two biologists, a man of genius, a painter with talent, three poets, an astronomer, two musicians, a mathematician, a psychiatrist); when my inventive plan was ripe, full of embryonic theories, and deciphered palimpsests, with the characters at the helm of scintillating dialogues about art and philosophy, just now I’m captivated by the simple, amiable, and generous conversation of friendship; and all my plans, to present the first novel to come complete with a lab and technicians, pathetically crumbled.

Now the only thing left for me is to make a proverb of my misfortune, saying:

After wrongdoing

The worst you can do

Is to think it through

I won’t start it, reader, because upon summary examination I understood that I already had “La Novela’s” porch in place. I feel intimidated: it’s just that I’m easily entertained by making prologues, and for the first time I realize that I’ve been promising all along to write a novel — that the moment will come when I have to conceive it, complete it, and give it form. I don’t recall how the idea of authoring a novel — which to me signifies an attempt at Tragedy, otherwise I don’t understand the point, at least as aspiration, of the novel and all art — I don’t recall how this idea began and developed in me; and the composition of prologues has sheltered me from the arduous responsibility of what they are meant to precede.

I proposed to myself that we take a prologue to go over the results of something that I had taken care of previously: a general rehearsal of the characters’ psyches (rather than one for the plot). It was a kind of test for the characters, or better, of their “good character,” the resistance that comes from good humor and from selflessness that each shows in the face of adversity; an altruistic “armed forces,” governed by camaraderie. It’ll be necessary that some of them have altercations and even become enemies, as is obvious, considering the close quarters they share, living in the same novel: characters destined to be permanent rivals, or those who are so only for a moment, must both conduct themselves as people who nevertheless share the same death, at the same place and time: the end of the book.

I already have my Novel’s porch, it’s the first place you cross; you enter through the porch to get to the first chapter of the novel. It’s already occurred to me that we’re in the immediate fascination (I am fascinated with tragedy — of which I must conceive — and I don’t have the words for it, just like in a recent dream that I had where there was a person, and I knew who it was, and that person directed everything that happened in the dream, but I couldn’t manage to see who it was or remember a name; in a certain way, even if it’s a vagary, I have the emotion of this person without an image or a name) — we’re in the immediate fascination of the Novel, as if we had fallen into its fevered interior, so that it’s more and more difficult to prologue it.

The novel for the present prologue fell in love with the Novel and aspired to be a prologue for it, which is why I’ve trapped it and put it in to the Novel, thus incurring another prologue. (I should say that all of the prologues and all of the characters are in love with the novel, and that even all possible topics for its prolongation have been besieged by love; there’s nothing but totalove in the novel, there’s not a pen, word, or idea that, if separated from the novel, does not seek her out, smitten: Voices, Gazes, Laughter, Sighs, Sobs, Diversion, all want to see Tragedy achieved and to be with her.)

This proximity to Tragedy that I’m experiencing now myself and which diverts me towards it, this is Life itself wherein all is post- or ante-Tragedy, since this isn’t yet Life but its Mystery, the Mystery that brought this humble “Prologue” to me in its anxiety to be wherever the tragedy unfolds.

You won’t want to believe, reader, that prologues just show up somewhere and fall in love; but I know that they do (and it’s not an infatuation), and I must take care of this one, now that it’s here; I need to attend to its topic. Because what I’ve got here is a prologue that’s not even started, and it should be put wherever I need to say something unimportant about the Novel, out of anxiety, something that needs to be said somewhere but not IN the novel. There should be something roughly equivalent to a Chapter One, but it would be a crass confession, gratuitous and antiartistic, like, for example, if I were to show in the novel itself that it’s a novel.

So I’ll say it in this prologue: 1) That what is detailed in Chapter One, “The rowdy thirteen characters are home again at last, from the rehearsal of the novel,” is a drill maneuver for the characters, something that has never before been done. 2) That everyone was excellently behaved, as if they knew that art itself were reviewing them; but I can assure you, with all of the inside knowledge of an author, that none of them thought about it, consciously, except that they didn’t want to make anyone unhappy or to go against the novel in any way with a mistake, an absence, or breach of contract. They think of it as returning, not home, but to the novel, and they know that the novel is keen to achieve Tragedy, which is what all characters of Art in all times have longed to execute, witness, and suffer.

How did this inspiration happen in the Quixote, in the Fifth Symphony, in Tristan and Isolde ? (Pardon, reader, I’m anxiously studying and examining the problem of Tragedy, looking for examples, my commitment to this undertaking frightens me and I forget myself, in these last, weak revisions, since now is the time not to study but to go to work.)

There are two useful exceptions that I’ll add here, that will augment the pretexts for existence that we need for this prologue.

1. Let the record show that the rehearsal of my characters does not imply any doubt in the fundamentals with which each one of them came recommended. It’s nothing more than an irrepressible nervousness on my part.

2. Let the record show that the good behavior that all the characters desired, and in fact achieved, was not that they came home on time but that they came back today at all costs, so as not to leave Sweetheart alone in the estancia. They all knew that because of the brevity of her appearance, Sweetheart would be the first to return. I’m not spoiling any part of the novel with this; I want to establish that in my novel there are neither schedules nor examinations in conduct.