Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

This collapse of the fictional and the real, the appearance and depth, is what was discovered in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, in the early part of the twentieth century: and it is still not clear what conclusions should follow. We still, for instance, believe that a novel is a description of the world. But if Macedonio is right, then every novel is simply a construction.

And yet, I sadly want to say: this world, however, is not a construction. A character is not a person. The conditions for each are different. But I love the fervour and the patience and the melancholy with which Macedonio Fernández tried to prove this wasn’t true: with the full weight of his grief at the world, the gravity with which he tried to be precise to the trauma of love. And in trying to prove this impossible truth, he discovered the limits of fiction.

7.

Early on in The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, Macedonio Fernández credits himself with the invention of certain novelistic specialities:

The Novel That Begins

The Frustrated Novel (a manufacturing defect)

The Novel That Went Out In The Street, with all its characters, to write itself.

The Prologue-Novel, whose story plays out, concealed from the reader, in prologues.

The Novel Written By Its Characters

The Inexpert Novel, which sets itself the task of killing off its “characters” separately, ignorant that creatures of literature always die together at the End of a reading.

The Novel in Stages

The Last Bad Novel — The First Good Novel — The Obligatory Novel.

It is such a witty, and noble, list. It makes me, in homage, want to invent my own list of possible futures for the novel — possible experiments with the ideas of the real and the reader:

The Novel with Only One Copy

The Novel as a Rewrite of Someone Else’s Novel

The Novel with Only One Reader

The Infinite Novel

They seem, I have to admit, unlikely experiments. And then I remember Borges’s own description of the problem of infinity as the problem of fiction within fiction, where he refers to the 602 ndArabian Night: “On that strange night, the king hears his own story from the queen’s lips. He hears the beginning of the story, which includes all the others, and also — monstrously — itself. Does the reader have a clear sense of the vast possibility held out by this interpolation, its peculiar danger?” And it strikes me that one homage is always possible, one immediate experiment.

Yes, everyone can write their own preface to Macedonio’s great novel of prefaces.

London, 2009

I first encountered the archive of Macedonio’s manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, and diaries in 2002, in the closet of an apartment in Buenos Aires’s Cabellito district. I had come to Argentina as a young Fulbright scholar in search of Macedonio’s son, Adolfo, who was his father’s literary executor and posthumous editor, responsible for the meticulous work of typing out and arranging Macedonio’s chaotic longhand. Since the bulk of Macedonio’s publication was posthumous — including The Museum of Eterna’s Novel— it is only thanks to Adolfo’s meticulous care and patience that this book exists at all.

Unfortunately, the elderly Adolfo had died just a few months earlier, and the archive was in limbo. Perhaps because North American pilgrims to the shrine of Macedonio are few, or perhaps because I had come so far only to face disappointment, I was eventually put in touch with a friend of the family, in whose apartment the archive was temporarily stored. I read the manuscripts, under supervision and in secret, every day for two months, as clouds moved across the Southern Hemisphere’s winter sky to settle over the river at dusk.

I inhaled the musty, yellowed pages, stroked my finger across the indentations made on the page by a thick pencil and a heavy, elderly hand, obsessively catalogued marginalia, stains on the paper, fingerprints in the ink, and even a crumb of something stuck to the page — perhaps evidence of Maceodnio’s famous sweet tooth? — the fun and the frustration is, one cannot know. An archive is in many ways defined by what it cannot contain.

The most obvious piece missing from the archive is the writings that are commonly thought to have been lost because of Macedonio’s own neglect for them. The story goes that he wrote on crumpled café napkins, that he used to light the stove or his cigarette with loose manuscript pages, or that he piled them up in suitcases, only to abandon them when he moved from one flophouse room to the next. Though this neglect for his own written production is a cornerstone of the Macedonio mythology, the enormous number of writings that have survived (over thirty notebooks, and five full manuscripts of The Museum of Eterna's Novel) suggest that perhaps rumors of Macedonio’s disinterest in his writings have been greatly exaggerated.

Less obvious, and more real, missing pieces are the notebooks full of undeciphered pages. Macedonio did not type: every one of the manuscripts in his archive is handwritten. The early notebooks, like the diary or so-called “Book for Oneself” (Libro para si mismo) are written in ink in the lovely calligraphy considered a courtesy and a grace in the nineteenth century. As he aged, however, Macedonio’s hand grew ever crabbed, and his utensil — in the later notebooks usually a dull pencil — more easily smudged and blurred. These later notebooks are thus often illegible for long passages. The object-quality of the notebooks, their stubborn thingliness , stands in this case as a kind of maddening tease, as the words, though they are there on the page in clear and obvious reality, do not necessarily give way to intelligible meaning, especially in an author whose hand followed his meandering and fragmentary thoughts with such obsessive fidelity. Like Poe’s purloined letter, some of these thoughts are hidden in plain view, illegible.

As physical and thus mortal objects, these manuscripts have a lifespan. They were almost all written on cheap dime-store paper, and many were written with highly acidic ink. This ink is slowly breaking down the wood fibers in the paper, which will eventually disintegrate even if they are kept under ideal conditions. But the immediacy of the stroke of the living hand on the page leaves its trace on these manuscripts in a way I can only describe in metaphysical terms. The marks are not always intelligible or identifiable: they are ciphers. The only certainty is that Macedonio once held his living hands to these pages. It’s like laying one’s ear to a train track to listen for the vibrations of a train that passed fifty years ago. Microscopically, they are there — and knowing that is the thrill that keeps your ear pressed to the tracks.

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Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952) is best known in his native Argentina as the mentor of a young Jorge Luis Borges, who later wrote of his friend, “I imitated him to the point of plagiarism.” This confession, however, belies the longstanding anxiety of influence between the two writers, and gives some insight into why Macedonio — as he is affectionately known — is more of a local folk hero than an internationally renowned writer. There exists a Macedonio of Borges’s invention, and this invented character’s reticence, or failure, to publish tends to reinforce Borges’s quaint mythology of a man dedicated to meditation, stillness, and only incidentally to the written word. Nevertheless, Macedonio wrote thousands of pages of manuscript in his life, most of which remained unpublished when he died, in 1952. His son, Adolfo de Obieta, organized and published these manuscripts, serving as literary executor, editor, and high priest of the cult of Macedonio until his death in 2002.