Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

That a promise to Buenos Aires has not been kept is a remaining subtlety in this matter.

I don’t know how it feels when promises aren’t kept; I give the novel what I promised; the promise not to write has not yet been invented, and I lack the ingenuity. What internal drama for the person for whom writing constitutes a broken promise!

I think I’ve arrived just in time, a day before the genre of Novel becomes impossible. Art is possible but any question of Art’s possibility is impossible; my novel has been possible and it contains only impossibilities.

I can’t boast of having discovered the region in this novel where nothing happens, which is known by another name, “Land of Lions.” But all the impossible things happen in it: there’s all of life for the possible, and for this and its equivalent besides, to what end realism? I only know that the reader complains when something Impossible is not achieved in my novel, and he knows that somewhere, in Art, to which he has recourse, there must be found something that you can’t get by tossing about in bed or looking out the window: the Impossible, which isn’t what’s left out, since there’s all of that in the world, but what is lacking when we want it, even if it existed before or after the desire.

This is how Eterna was an impossibility for me for many years, yet still she existed, perfect.

The only absolute impossibility is death. How limitless is Possibility: though now I can’t conceive of it, it was possible for me to live long years without Eterna’s love, even without knowing her.

Thus the President deliberates and resolves in his tormented spirit, he to whom Eterna says, “Let him love what he has believed, and not what is.”

1 It will be remembered now and again (to strike dead inexistence, Chapter IX) that a certain book of conventional literary success was displayed in public in a case alongside the quills with which it was written.

The model prologue is the best prologue, and I’m only abandoning it because I fear my originality is not up to the task, since it’s already worn out.

Even Cervantes, Dante, and Manzoni begged the indulgence that their work be considered perfect, which it would have been if it weren’t for “the miseries and privations of prison,” or because with “long study and great love” they were poorly done, or because their contemporaries didn’t know how to judge: “ai posteri l’ardua sentenza.”

Under cover of reticence and disguises, therefore, the perfect prologue — that is, the prototype of the bad prologue — may claim:

1. Lack of stimulation, of ample time and accommodations for writing well.

2. Recommend itself to the indulgence of the reader of bad books, like the carpenter who builds an unbalanced chair, and then recommends it for the acrobats in the family.

3. That in my childhood nobody told me that I had talent, and nevertheless, after trying everything, with the present literary system I have here my book. Just as the advertisements for drugs and other longevity systems intone: “I was delicate, with poor appetite, irascible, pale, no one believed I would live, but I used the Kühne system (or vegetalism) and today I can withstand considerable tasks: I effortlessly read Dante’s Paradiso and the wisdom of Baltasar Gracián without the slightest fatigue.”

What pains me is to see Cervantes put forth excuses with the deep cunning of one who knows that he’s written an immortal work. Nevertheless I’m recommending to everyone who wants to write a perfect book that moments before setting to work he should rob or kill someone, so that he can be in a dank jail with rats, humidity, hunger, and cold.

Now, I recommend for whoever wants to write a perfectly bad work a long treatment, if he can stand it, of Gracián reading, and the frequent recitation, while writing, of the entire poem (it’s the only one of his that I know) that begins “¡Estosi, Fabio, ay dolor, que veis ahora!” Fabio, these, o sorrow, you see before you! Even better would be, following the counterexample of Cervantes, to live a long life of excess, luxury, liberties, strolls, and relaxation and to later sit oneself down one fine day to write. If in the most uncomfortable situation Cervantes wrote best, he who writes in complete comfort will produce a terrible book.

I hope that my numerous prologues — a kind of “Complete Works of Prologuery”—and my novel will be considered so good that it will be as if Posterity itself, which decides what is good, had commissioned them.

And I seriously believe that Literature is precisely the belarte of: artistically carrying out something that others have already discovered. This is the law for all belarte and it means that the “subject matter” of art lacks any intrinsic artistic value or that the whole value of art is in the execution. To classify subjects, deciding that some are better or more interesting than others, is to speak of ethics: aesthetics as such is the artistic rendering of any subject. Everyone can easily find subject matter, it’s superabundant: artistic pages are extremely scarce, and manufactured with desperation, with Labor’s tears and rages.

Maybe this suffering and constant failure annexes the artistic urge, it’s the punishment for whoever prefers dreaming to living, art to life, when life has for us an Eterna in whom all beauty finds expression, heartbeat, breath; so that to look towards art is like using flashlights during the Day.

And if, having Eterna, we still pursue inventive art, we’re all the more blind and we walk as though guided against our better selves, carried away by baseness, since persisting in invention despite having found a living Eterna is a horrible option contrary to our nature.

In Eterna’s orbit invention is meaningless.

Observe that my novel is corpulent, and very mouthy; it has three outlets (the characters’ training, the conquest of Buenos Aires, and the final separation), two resumptions of the beloved quotidian: life in “La Novela” (after the Training, after the Conquest); the presence of the Traveler at the end of each chapter; Sweetheart and Maybegenius are in charge of the beginning of each chapter. There is also the entire prehistory of the novel’s existence in two, very different forms: first, ten years of reiterated promises of its future publication, and second in the seventy prologues designed for it; it also features loose pages, a total novelty for novels, as well as a model page and an exhibition of a day in the estancia “La Novela,” a cast of discarded characters, a sort of character internship, and an absent character; moreover, it expands to include the merit of never having been accomplished before.

Thanks to a flippancy, even a fraternity, with inexistence that permeates the novel’s tone, this bodily robustness, this substance on which the novel prides itself, does not result in a suffocating excess of atmosphere for the Lover’s slim figure, despite his aversion to existence.

Since I felt that there’s a good Literature to come and that Literature, or Novelism, had been bad up until now, with all of the publicity that I got thanks to my friends at the newspapers, who repeatedly lobbied me to announce my projected, great, and genuine novel—“Eterna and the Child of Melancholy, the Sweetheart of an Undeclared Lover”—as an inauguration of Good Literature, I proposed an entertainment for the reading public, that they indulgently continue reading the bad literature, relieved by the knowledge that the good stuff was on its way, since I know that it’s the virtue of dedicated readers to read while they wait; but if they don’t read they might abdicate readership altogether, which is to say, for my novel too.