Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel is Macedonio’s most important work. This is the first time it — or any of his considerable oeuvre — has been translated into English in its entirety. He began what he called the “first good novel” around 1925, at the height of his involvement with the avant-garde literary scene in Buenos Aires. He would labor over the book for the next twenty-seven years, producing five full manuscripts in total, the first of which was written out in longhand by his lover, muse, and companion, Consuelo Bosch. Although The Museum of Eterna’s Novel eludes categorization, its many prologues and self-conscious use of authorial persona often lead to its characterization as an example of proto-postmodernism. Macedonio himself would have shrugged off this label, and insisted instead that the novel is a sketch for a metaphysics wherein love conquers death.

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The Museum of Eterna’s Novel is written for what the author calls the “skip-around reader.” In an often hilarious but equally maddening series of between fifty-seven and sixty prologues — depending on whether you count the dedications, the post-prologue, and the blank page dedicated to the reader’s indecision — the novel postpones itself, thwarting both the reader who tries to skip ahead (where to?) and the dull “orderly” reader’s desire for linearity. There are prologues of salutation, prologues introducing the author and the characters, prologue-letters to the critics, prologues about characters who were rejected, a prologue of authorial despair and, of course, prologues about prologuing.

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel is also dedicated to its main character, the lovely Eterna, who has the power to change the past. She is at once transparently allegorical, as the idea of eternal love against the threat of death, and wonderfully real. Museum enshrines her laugh, her changing expressions, black eyes and hair, her grace. She is also real biographically: in the manuscript dedication, the word “Consuelo” has been crossed out and replaced with “Eterna.” Consuelo Bosch was Macedonio’s longtime companion, patroness, and muse after the death of his wife; The Museum of Eternas Novel is in a real sense the most earnest, complex, and heartwrenching of love poems. “I write this unnecessary book,” he writes in “Introduction to Eterna,” “because she wants to smile at her lover from outside this love, from the space of Art.”

The novel takes place on an estancia, or country home, outside of Buenos Aires. The estancia is named “La Novela,” and in it the characters share a domestic intimacy reflected in its prose. Much time is devoted to the small comings and goings of life at “La Novela,” and the eventual abandonment of this placid domesticity in favor of the action of the novel — the conquest of Buenos Aires in the name of beauty. Thus The Museum of Eterna’s Novel is also an ardent structure, dedicated to the suspension of time, its enclosure both still and fluid. The eternity it captures is intimate, domestic: kitchen conversations and stovetop kettles, the sound of eucalyptus leaves blowing against the eaves on wet afternoons.

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel asks a simple question: how can we give ourselves fully to love in the face of the certainty of death? And it proposes itself as an answer, however awkwardly and provisionally, by creating a space where neither life nor death exist, only non-being and oblivion. Where there is love, there is no death, only forgetfulness.

As difficult and visionary and ambitious as the structure is, this concern is very simple, human, and understandable. Love opens all of us up to the possibility of loss. What makes Macedonio’s story remarkable is how earnestly he wrestles with tigers that we all face. It isn’t the felicity of his prose, or the prescience of his ideas — though his prose is often felicitous and his ideas often prescient. Rather, it’s the open heart with which he takes up his pen and seeks, through its wanderings, to find a way to love the sound of the kettle on the stove, the crumbled mate leaves on the tablecloth, the arrangement of the furniture in the room — all the dull, pedestrian details of everyday life that clearly offer more irritation than fascination. And somewhere in these details, the tiny tinkerings that he inexhaustibly and minutely calibrates in every corner of his life, is the beloved. And in the beloved, in the other, there is passion, and death, and art, and eternity.

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“I was born a porteño , and in a very 1874 sort of year. Shortly thereafter (though not at first) I began to be cited by a certain Jorge Luis Borges, and with such unabashed commendation, that, thanks to the risks incurred by his vehemence, I became the author of his best work.”

— Macedonio Fernández,

in the Argentine literary magazine Sur

As Marcelo Ballvé recently observed, Macedonio invented Borges as much as Borges invented Macedonio. The difference is that it is more likely that a reader will have actually read Borges than Macedonio, whose prose is difficult and does not fit comfortably within any literary genre, and who has been much less widely translated. Like most people, I also came to Macedonio through Borges, in the wistful question that ends his prose poem “The Witness:” “What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or fragile form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a roan hoarse on the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?” Macedonio here is a voice — or the memory of a voice — that Borges alone possesses, and whose trace will disappear with him. The unusual name, and its casual inclusion in a list of vaguely eccentric, or perhaps anachronistic objects, catches the attention. It sets up a notion of Macedonio’s voice as talisman, momento mori.

There is no easy way, then, to place Borges in an introduction to Macedonio’s work that does not threaten to overwhelm or re-author the man he nevertheless called his mentor. Borges was a generation younger, and he “inherited” Macedonio’s friendship from his father, who had attended law school with Macedonio. When the Borges family returned from Europe (where their stay had been extended by the outbreak of World War I), Macedonio was recently widowed, and his life was in airless limbo. He lived in a series of flophouses, having given up his law practice and sent his children to live with his mother and sister-in-law.

Before his wife died he was a regular, if somewhat eccentric, bourgeois man with occasional literary pretentions and an interest in philosophy, psychology, and music. A photograph from this time in his life shows a small man in a bowler hat with a severe, resigned expression, kneeling with his arms around two small children whose faces are blurred by motion. Now, in his grief but also in his freedom, he divested himself of all bourgeois responsibilities and dedicated himself to metaphysics. As a young man he corresponded with William James and read Schopenhauer and Kant — now he would begin his engagement with the mystery of consciousness in earnest.

Borges wrote that in those days he felt “Macedonio is metaphysics, he is literature.” Nevertheless, the Macedonio of Borges’s eulogy is not so much a man of letters as of conversation. His jokes, his observations, his anecdotes, and his cordial, almost quaint manner — this was his brilliance, not the writing he left behind. In Borges’s construction, Macedonio was the Socrates to his Plato, the oral teacher whose words the disciple transcribed and transformed.

He was a creole Socrates, a New World Socrates, a founder of a new Argentine literature. Borges had spent his adolescence in Europe, and felt ill at ease, perhaps, in his homeland, which seemed backwards by comparison with the cafés of Madrid and Geneva. Macedonio, he writes, seemed to command a uniquely Argentine point of view on “certain eternal things.” The humbleness of his surroundings, his fraternization with the prostitutes and confidence men with whom he shared his lodgings, and his age all contributed to this romantic image.