Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Some want life, others want art. Only the Lover is happy the way he is. (Struggle between the author and the reader; the author wants to pull the reader towards the fading away of his being in character. The reader wants it, but he doesn’t dare to renounce life forever, he’s afraid to be spellbound by the novel. He doesn’t know that he who enters “La Novela” never returns.)

Author: I shouldn’t say to the reader, “Come into my novel,” but rather save him from life indirectly. My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out. The first reader who was exiled from himself and fell in the thin air of my novel (this happened while reading page 14) was a twenty-three-year-old student who fell softly into the pages, racking his brains to follow me and to identify himself. He smoked as he read, and sometimes I’d be concerned when some hot ash fell into my pages: but in time he too fell, relieved and thankfully not smoking, into languid oblivion. He very much loved, a bothersome coquette, fickle but affectionate. He was exhausted.

Reader: And I’m not?

Author: Maybe. I hear light steps; I sense a mischievous shadow on this page. You’re here too, Welcome.

Simple: Let’s make a pavilion at “La Novela” for spellbound readers.

New reader: I anxiously wait my turn to descend into the pages of the novel. Am I not there yet?

Maybegenius: Reader, are you truly the one reading, or does the author now read you, giving that he speaks to you, or at the representation of you that he has before him, and that he knows you like he knows a character?

Reader: I’m not interested in whoever I might be; this delicious dizziness is enough to bring me into the subtle orbit of the novel.

Someone calls?… It’s my beloved.

There’s beauty: to soothe

The anxiety of a world,

To put to sleep in the laxity of success

The peregrination of this waylaid and prescient quest

That is the perception of reality

A quest that knows no road nor what it wants,

Let he who has it keep his appeasement

And trade his sorry thirst for delight

In all that is dream of the real

There’s beauty: enough to hold back all Pain

Humans, breathers, those innumerables incessantly stirring the world’s air, relentlessly ordering it into your chests, elevating your eternally open mouths to an eternal heaven, beings of the heartbeat and the voice that either brightens or breaks, which perhaps every day demands alternately an end or an eternity, there’s beauty to give us all understanding of the Mystery, and to stop all pain. But where is it? Is it in Art, in Conduct, in Understanding, in Passion? In Cervantes, or Beethoven, or Wagner, or in some greater delirium: in adoring intonation, dazzled by Walt Whitman’s Man?

Where is Beauty, which clarifies “being” and hypnotizes Pain? Where is Beauty? Where does she call?

Is she calling? Is she truly calling?

It’s Eterna, the only one in whom our friend the Secret found security, who’s coming so we can write this page, told only to ourselves, in which nothing of our secret will be revealed since words alone cannot tell it, if the whole secret were told nothing would have been risked, nobody would discover anything, neither what it is nor if it’s secret in a dream or a secret in the real.

Sweetheart: “What do we have today in the novel?”

Maybegenius: “Today we have Suicide.” 1

Sweetheart: “Oh, tell me about it right away.”

Maybegenius: “It’s a story about ‘novel characters,’ not living persons, and it was conceived this way because in it I found* a magical method for you and I to live and be people, because it seems to me that the moment a character appears on a novel’s page narrating another novel, he and all the characters listening to him assume a reality, and they only feel themselves to be characters that are narrated in the other novel: whether the reader likes it or not. There’s another recourse that gives ‘life’ to ‘characters,’ and I’ll ask the novelist that’s writing us to use it with us if what we’re going to do does not procure for us, Sweetheart, life, that will be happy for us both, since we love each other so. This other method (I hope our author is listening, that he learns it and uses it with us wisely) consists in the authors of novels (they aren’t necessarily indifferent to their characters’ suffering) depicting a novel bursting out in this sort of vehement exclamation (only in the last line of the novel, therefore, are there ungrateful ‘characters’ who take advantage of this instance of life they’re given and go away to live it without staying for even a line longer in the novel)…”

Sweetheart: “I don’t know that I wouldn’t do the same, although our poor author inspires my sympathy…”

Author: “What’s got my characters so piqued that I find them in conversation giving themselves alternate functions?”

Maybegenius: “Poor author!”

Sweetheart: “I don’t know anything about him, but I sense him, vaguely, as a directionless soul, perhaps an unhappy one.”

“I didn’t hear anything good or bad and the only thing bothering me is that there’s something envious about him, and now he’s spying on me because of these two magnificent ideas that I’ve communicated to you. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t make him happy to see the President set out to write a book and he criticizes his eloquent and moving letters. Who knows how he’d look upon the happiness that your love might give me in Life. As for me, I’m about to burst out with the exclamation that I’ve prepared. I’ll take your hand and run away with you to Life, since I can assure you that this is a Life-giving elocution.”

“Yes, let’s flee, take me away this minute, say the word and I’ll be yours.”

“When I say, we’ll both recite at the same time: ‘Oh, unhappy me’—you’ll use the feminine pronoun, of course—‘with this Horror that we all must bear, sadness upon sadness for always, oh how it plagues us not to be alive, to only be a ‘character’ in whatever novel, when before we read, enchanted, believing that only in novels was there misfortune, desperation.’”

“Oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here, from this nothing; I feel. . I am. . Oh, Maybegenius, could it be true, could we. . hold to this feeling. Repeat it, speak always, Maybegenius.”

“I’m confused, I don’t know… what a horrible pain… ay, Sweetheart! We could have done it!… I must weep! Please, Sweetheart, tell me again what you’re feeling! What did you say, Sweetheart?”

“Speak, for God’s sake, say it again, say it quickly.”

“Oh no, there it is again!”

The author: 2“I’ve got goosebumps! I want to give them every word they ask for. What pain! Have these words ever given them what they hoped for? Luckily it’s not Eterna who’s asking me for life! If in her personal majesty and tones she had demanded, clamored as these poor young people do, if she had asked for a life that until today she has not seemed to desire, that in the frustration of her love’s destiny she disdains! How could I reply? If this love is fulfilled and, in the privileged happiness that only souls’ long suffering can give, she had begged to be made a living being, by means of the magic of the artist’s words, would my talents be worthy of placating her?”

Maybegenius: “What’s happened to us, Sweetheart? What dizziness did you feel?”