Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Despite this confession, I must acknowledge a reduction of sixty-three readers, who demand impeccable style.

A MEETING BACK AT "LA NOVELA"

Sweetheart: “Listen, Maybegenius: I’ll tell you now what I’m scheduled to say — this novel is so well-organized — later on, in a chapter that has not yet begun. I can’t hold it in; in my spirit today there is sadness and aspiration, longing, a discomfort in my whole being, discontent, and tears swarm. Have you seen the Respiration of the living? What a mystery! What a worry it must be that we never will feel respiration ! What dignity, what communion with the cosmos!”

Maybegenius: “That does bother me.”

“I love you, Maybegenius, sad friend; right now, I love you. We suffer from all we deserve, so give me everything you want to say.”

“The pain we feel is character pain: tears that won’t fall, that don’t wet our cheeks. To breathe!”

“Yes, to breathe. Just as the author of this novel once said:

Neither pleasant nor complaining

I breathe the air of Life.

(The author adds a correction: Air should also be upper case! So yes, sir, my characters are citing me — of course it’s Sweetheart! — they’re making me famous. And it’ll be a painful fall, to see how they long to live and I’ve no power to give them a life. It’s only possible and polite for me to pardon her, to let her unburden herself here, saying what she’s supposed to say in the twelfth chapter. I’ll confess it, I feel myself falling in love, little by little: and if this feeling grows, if I fall in love (it could certainly happen), then I’ll know the pain and humiliation of impotence, finding what is impossible in my own creation; such an intense daydream will hardly change for tenuous reality. Even though it’s not in my best interests as an artist — the continuity of falsehood is at the core of novelistic Art’s dignity — I will say that Sweetheart exists; I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t for the fact that while I wrote this note I effectively stumbled upon a principle of love for her, though I was saddened by its impossibility for an instant, since I forgot that she existed and that I could hear her admirable voice just by picking up the telephone; now that I’ve felt the nullity of my power to give her life, I understand the torture it is to desire an unreal life for another, just as I insinuated that Sweetheart desires it for herself. The thing I created desires its reality and also its author, thus finding its author himself impossible; how easily the mind forgets, confuses, knots itself up, and the feeling is torn between seeing its object in a space of reality or fantasy. I still don’t know if my novel sprang from an impulse to the highest femininity, if it lived before or if a character, Eterna, has or has not been born; none of this implies realism, since I’ve copied nothing of Eterna; no artistic mind would have attempted or achieved it, nor have I even wanted to call this “Eterna’s Novel,” although it is she who has inspired me, refining my torpid perceptions and enriching my life with mysticism and passion daily.)

Maybegenius: “We’ve seen each other today more than ever and we spent a lot of time together in the months when you came along and helped me with my chores. I feel the sadness of this short existence that we have in the novel, I want to leave home, to be in truth.” Sweetheart: “What you say frightens and worries me. You really think yourself so bereft of life?”

“No, Sweetheart, I exist and I love it, because I’ve met you. Do we suffer from the desperation that there’s nothing that can give us life? After I so graciously, so sweetly encountered you here, you who arrived so unexpectedly where I was, you whose arrival was so directly for me, when we met at the gate, and now we’ve spent so much time in each other’s company…”

“You’re such a friend, so courteous.”

“And you?”

“I wish we had experienced something of life!”

“Sweetheart, we’re not unreal. If we were, we’d be smoking, like characters in movies. We will have life, we’ll keep asking for it; and we’re the same as all of those with life who find themselves facing death, this slim, moribund being who begs for life in gestures and words and in reality doesn’t feel pain from losing it, nor does he even believe that he has stopped living.”

Author: “You’re making me uncomfortable. What an itch you’ve got to exist! Who would have thought that characters of mine — this has never happened to another author; lots of them write contented characters, like Hamlet, Segismundo, characters who incline towards not being — I, on the other hand, am confronted with this vital craving.”

Reader: “What an inconvenience, where will I read you if you go to life instead? Please leave a forwarding address. Also, what more do you want, then to be agreeable to life? Also, I object that the title of the chapter bore no warning: ‘In which my appalling desperation, which no one imagined, is revealed.’”

Author: “You flatter me, Sir; if it weren’t for my characters’ cravings, I’d be so happy to have readers like you. What a beautiful, most complete desperation I’ve thought up, don’t you think?”

Reader: “The characters pain me. But I exist. Is there another chapter that wants to live? If there is I’m not reading anymore; there’s no spectacle so uncomfortable.”

(Just then, the happy man who still seeks a country where being good is also being happy, passes by. He looks like the President: he has all of his happiness, without his penchant for literary theory.)

Author: “How can I expect you to grasp my Great Idea. Nevertheless, I can’t predict what my characters crave; I only know what they’re going to say and do. You yourself, Reader, are here a part of my work and yet…”

Reader: “Here, yes, but for myself?”

Author: “I see that you like to live, and for this reason I must not bring you up or let you talk here anymore, unless it’s to fall in love with Sweetheart for yourself. I have the power to create appearance and death, to reign over all of this and yet there’s someone on the earth whose soul wants to be sounded — and I can’t do it!”

Metaphysician: “This is a lot of tangling, phantasmagoric tangling between characters, reader, and author. And it’s not that they pretend to get tangled up; they themselves don’t know what they are. This won’t resolve everything: they’re all real; any image in a mind is reality, and lives; the world, reality is all just an image of the mind. Affection is not an image; pleasure, pain. Existence is not pre-desireable; in the pre-desire to be there is already a being; what there isn’t is a beginning, the not having been, from which situation we began desiring existence.

Author: “I don’t doubt it: just try and extinguish it! Now you cease in my mind, and in the novel, so it can go on. Begone, Professor of Being! Exist no more!”

Metaphysician: ‘‘Wait, don’t rub me out just yet: we can’t be more than one image in a mind, in form and body; to appear in a mind is to be born.”

Author: “Flee, Metaphysician, you are ruined by frustration, like everything here.”

Metaphysician: “Call me at your eleventh hour, when you need an illusion.”

Author: ”I've got your eleventh hour right here! I won’t write you anymore. Stop it!”

(And, effectively, the author stopped writing him; but it’s such an incredible thing, resolving to stop being without an ontologist present, that the only effect is that the reader is convinced that they’re not talking about him any more here as he reads the rest of the novel.)

Author (to the Reader): “But so that nobody thinks that the novel remains in the dark because the Metaphysician has been exiled, I'll tell you that I don’t have the privilege of immortality, because this property is his, mine, and everyone’s; my privilege is that, although you don’t know a thing, you don’t remember your glorious existence, which merely coincides with what happened earlier, I, exhausting and mortifying myself for many years, was able to bring to mind all I wanted to remember about my conscious pre-existence. This helps me to conceive of a conscious post-existence, which is personal eternity. And I can give a transcript of what’s most pleasant for me to recall…”