Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

This is how the period of promising my novel began, and it soothed me to note that people kept reading the bad — for which I thank the bad authors — and awaiting the good — for which they should be thanking me: We’ve cooperated, you could say, but we parted ways decidedly when I began to write. The only explanation is that since the new novelism is so good, no one knows when it will be fully realized.

Thus I justify my repeated promises of the Good Novel and also the confection of my Bad but final Novel: to keep the reader waiting, and yet still in good condition.

We’ll make a spiral so twisted that it will make even the wind tired winding inside it, and it will come out the other end dizzy, and forgetting which way to blow; we’ll make a novel that for once isn’t clear, isn’t a faithful, realistic copy. Either Art has nothing to do with reality, or it’s more than that; that’s the only way it can be real, just as elements of Reality are not copies of one another.

All artistic realism seems to arise from the coincidence that there are reflective surfaces in the world; therefore Literature was invented by store clerks, which is to say, copyists. What is called Art looks more like the work of a mirror salesman driven to obsession, who insinuates himself into people’s houses, pressuring them to put his mission into action with mirrors, not things. In so many moments of our lives there are scenes, plots, characters; the mirror-artwork calls itself realist and intercepts our gaze, imposing a copy between reality and ourselves.

Art begins only on the other side of truth-telling, which is itself science’s justified hard work, but it’s an ungainly intruder in art. Let our characters remain ignorant of whether we are bringing them to the estancia “La Novela” or to the novel itself. I want to know what it is that scenic actors are pretending to be. Are they pretending that they are people and not characters, which imitate men and aren’t alive? But their personal lives still are happening to them; whatever they are on paper, they are not paper characters, that is, they are not written. I don’t want my characters to resemble either people or “actors,” I want the enchantment of being “characters” to be enough for them.

The President sought the happiness of his companions, but after he had achieved something of that in a deeply held Friendship and in a sustained and amenable Action, plus the most joyful of returns to the home of the novel with high hopes for regaining the happiness of the past, his sick impulse was to impose upon them a goodbye that, robbing them of speech, would only exempt them from the inevitable heartbreak of seeing each other die (only an earthly death, since to his credit the President had given them eternal serenity by inculcating them in his “Metaphysics without Death”).

The author is only happy with this novel of mine because there’s no Death in it, even though, to his great surprise, it’s so sad in the end. (Not as sad as the Quixote, the most spontaneous, unpredictably pessimistic novel in all of literature, even for its author; the Quixote is much more sad than this fancy of mine; in the Quixote the failure of Living is sanctioned — involuntarily, I believe — and also its Fleetingness, and that of Innocence: justice; in mine only Happiness, not Personality or Eternity, meets with failure).

The President resists this adieu in the face of the Nothing, before the eternal concealment of existences. (Even though he knows that the presence of bodies in the absence of love is harder still: Oblivion). The President also believes, perhaps thinking of the Lover, that if something big and new doesn’t happen after seeing the beloved, we’ll always see her with the same feeling that we did when we saw her before she “died;” because without new things happening there’s no forgetting, because there’s no Time — which is nothing — outside of events, which weaken our images of the past. It could be a formula for unforgetfulness: to remove oneself from new important events when one is obliged to stop seeing the beloved.

In the end, the President believes in an eternity of Personal memory, individual memory, of all that once made up someone.

It’s also known that, in addition to his general obligations in this novel, the author — who sometimes is and sometimes is not the President — has two different metaphysical obligations: one to Eterna: to show her the nothingness of the Nothing, that is, of Death, because for those who already have Love their entire concern is the future and the possibility of its ending; the other obligation is to Sweetheart: to show her the nothingness of the Past, where she had her greatest humiliation and sadness, thus liberating her from the tinge of reality that she gives to a certain tortuous scene. This image must be annihilated as such so as to convert it into an image without this tinge of reality, which is to say, a fantasy image of mere unreality.

But what is the President’s personal metaphysical anguish? He doesn’t believe in Death, but he can’t love what he believes to be mortal, or what he does not know to be immortal; he describes this sentimentally as a disaster of destiny: “He who cannot love someone whom Death awaits.” From which it follows that Eterna’s misfortune (to believe herself mortal) is the immortalist President’s misfortune as well (incapacity to love the mortal). Such is the President’s metaphysics, which we found among his papers, finished, period.

I'm confident that I won’t have a single orderly reader. An orderly reader could bring about my downfall and strip me of any celebrity I've more or less honestly managed to swipe for my characters. And failure is a dubious distinction at my age.

To the reader who skips around, however, I accommodate myself. You read my entire novel without knowing it, because I scattered the telling of the whole novel before I started, and so you turned into an unknowing orderly reader. With me, the reader who skips around is most likely to read in an orderly fashion.

I wanted to distract you, not correct you, because contrary to appearances you are a wise reader, since you practice inter-reading, which makes the most forceful impression, in keeping with my theory that characters and events that are only insinuated or skillfully truncated are the most memorable.

I dedicate my novel to you, Skip-Around Reader; you, in turn, should be grateful to me for a new sensation: reading in order. On the other hand, the orderly reader will experience a new way of skipping: the orderly reading of a skipping-around author.

I never believed in the existence of the Orderly Reader. And, for that matter, I am most often right when I don’t believe in something than when I do. Yet I have stumbled in my novel across the only existing orderly reader. He’s the one who will ruin and betray all my weak efforts as an author, getting them on the credit of his accumulated imcompletenesses and lack of attention. If he’s anywhere around this novel, I already know that all hope is lost.

What would it cost you to just shut up, sir! Doesn’t thwarting Eterna’s serene and sorrowful talent bother you? Were you not conquered by tender Sweetheart’s meekness and cruel destiny? Doesn’t the Lover’s inextricable entanglement, in what you cannot deny is the mysteriousness of having one’s soul in one place and one’s body in a novel where he waits his beloved’s return from death — doesn’t this mystery fill your artistic practice with rage and sorrow, as you string together a solid life, day after day, placidly dining each night with thoughts of the next day’s lunch? Will your betrayer be Maybegenius, who has taught you previously unknown skills for the conquest of ladies? Perhaps, in the execution of these newly acquired skills, you will know success for the first time in touching a woman’s soul! May you then throw away all your breakfasts and lunches, thus correcting your bile for this publisher of defects!