Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

But Maybegenius is unfazed when he notices Sweetheart sleeping, and carefully wakes her.

Sweetheart: “It seems like this Hodgson you mentioned is a bad friend. You shouldn’t go around with him if he’s the one who betrayed Suicide.”

Maybegenius: “Oh, if I had thought you were listening, I would have talked about ‘ablation of the consciousness,’ and I would have emphasized that in clarifying what remains of the integral automatism I profess, I have clarified nothing of the essential Mystery of the All; no explanation, either Mechanical or Psychological, can ever be reduced to the Mystery.”

But since one never knows if the reader is sleeping. . and it should be known that Sweetheart is not someone to feign sleep while listening to a story. She’s so charming in her innocence that she’s made me a non-irritable author who, on the contrary, sympathizes with the reader when he falls asleep on him; consequently the reader gives no thought to correcting his own behavior.

Once Sweetheart sympathizes with Suicide, she won’t rest until someone finds her, consoles her, and ends her story, since Sweetheart so identifies with sadness and a “character abandoned in the telling” is the misfortune she most fears for herself and others.

I will rectify the situation (as the author or as Maybegenius) by saying that I don’t admit a difference between suicide under conditions of mono-consciousness in the demented instant of pain and suicidal dementia: the first is a chronic state, a hunger for suicide, and it comes with a constant pre-representation of the pleasure of the destructive act itself. Demented is the same as anti-vital, not the same as anti-hedonic.

1 “Suicide” appeared in the journal Columna (1938) and reappeared in A Novel Begins (Santiago de Chile, 1941), as a preview of:

“The new, soon-to-be-published literary work whose cover will read:

Novel of Eterna

And the

Child of melancholy Sweetheart of an undeclared lover

Dedicated to the Skip-Around Reader

By

Macedonio Fernández

(Of the three existing types of applause—

the one for calling a ‘waiter,’

the one for shooing chickens in the yard,

and the one for catching moths,

which will be the one for this Novel?)

The novel will contain the following ‘short story’ that the author has been kind enough to send us for insertion in Columna. A joke of a story in a joke of a novel, both are working at the extreme margins of Art, revising with a grave, desperate feeling and anxious but honorable investigation the limits of the aesthetic in the disinterested service of an Art most rigorous, stripped of all conventionality and sensuality. This is what Macedonio Fernández tells us of his aspirations, telling us also that he finds himself recently but assuredly rescued from artistic negation. Not so, however, for the ‘natural aesthetic.’

We predict that his novel will provoke the most powerful impulse to the investigation and discussion of Art that has ever been felt in our rocky literary field, where trial and initiative are considered a pleasure.” ( Editor’s note)

2 It seems the author has had a fright; he thinks he’s a character, trapped by his own invention. Will he recover? What if he stayed that way forever! This is the tenth time it’s happened to him: for two years running, he’s been thinking more or less every day about these characters, and sometimes he’s known the sweat and suspension of feeling himself to be no more than a character! Is he really more real than they are? What is it to be real?

3 Corporeal; sensory or psychic experience does not exhibit causality, and as a result shows nothing of itself in the Living Body’s skills or purposes in carrying out its tasks.

One day was not like the others. Returning from Buenos Aires they found the President lost in thought. Later in the evening he gathered them all together, telling them:

“I have bad news.

“I stretched this test of friendship over two years, and although you all have given me a life that is worth more than not living, it hasn’t given me consciousness of finality, of dignity. Only Passion can give me this. And passion’s cure for my soul, which I couldn’t achieve through friendship, I now hope — my new, and final hope — will be achieved through Action.

“Tell me if you will join with me in this Action, whose object will be something we once considered: the conquest, through Beauty, of Buenos Aires.”

It’s true; the President’s old hobbyhorse was to rescue that great city with whose destiny he so strongly identified, to save her. He observed the meaning of her history, the truth of her grandeur like no one else had. But she needed to be purged of a certain crassness and enervation of conduct.

The President had also exhorted the characters at other times, in what Maybegenius called his lucid meditations, like this:

“If solemnity, a prudent posture, statues, and streets with names were proportional to virtue and profound thought, how few they would be; this life does not need so much patience, nor does it abound in so much temptation to vileness in exchange for celebrity.

“For now, the profusion of statues, birthdays, historical volumes, named streets, and writings of secure virtue have made this society very suspicious of us poor, pardonable people; it runs in circles to recognize men’s labors to appear good, in a civilization so enamored of Yale locks and pleasant tones, which are a trick to put victims to sleep.

“The best cities have streets named for Rain, for Waking, for Mother and Brother, for He who is Called, and who Goes Without, streets named You’ll Come Back, and Goodbye, and Wait For Me, and Return, and Loving Family, Kiss, Friend, Hello, Dream, Again, Sleeplessness, Maybe, Remake Yourself, Forgetfulness, Undertaking, Come Back To Me, Literary Salon, Live in Fantasy, Home, Smile, Call Me, and the great avenue Later He Dreams the Day, which is crossed by the avenue Unidentified Man.

“It gives light, not ashes, to the day.”

His gaze was distant, his eyes open wide, searching, and seeing the phantasm of the future and the vacillations of the route between a doubtful future and a happy present.

“One day,” the President concluded, “friendship won’t be enough for you, either — and you, too, will sit with your gaze fixed on the empty air in the hours before dawn, looking to the future and yet not wanting to look at it, feeling pained to look at the floor, the house, the present which you used to regard so cherishingly.”

The long gaze that the President held that dawn was such that Sweetheart, asleep in her bed, became agitated with the anguish of friendship’s farewell that she, along with the others, had heard of in the hours before. Her caring nature was able to discern the defeated sorrow in the President’s decision. And she dreamed and mourned the now-truncated present, moments in the pleasurable length of their days which would see no more mornings when everyone was happy together in the kitchen or the garden, no more nights of everyone gathered together, animated, unconcerned — or even when each was troubled by his own pain but lighthearted in the harmony of communal life.

Such was his gaze, charged with sadness for Sweetheart’s future, for himself and Eterna, with thoughts about everything that lay at Eterna’s feet. He rested his elbow on the headboard of Sweetheart’s modest bed and inclined himself towards her, his hand supporting his forehead and his gaze a screen, with his face at an angle to the bed and his gaze at an angle to his face.

Friendship opened windows on to phantasms; it filled the friends’ eyes with phantasms; the gaze became empty again at the President’s proposition: “But President, is it possible that friendship is not enough?”