Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

1 A novel at that time still unedited, which now constitutes Volume V of the Complete Works (of MF). (Editor’s Note-Adolfo de Obieta)

PROTOTYPE OF ONE OF THE NOVEL'S LOOSE PAGES

A definition of the pain of the past, a sentimental jewel that Eterna ;fastened to her breast; better to call it the pain of a most subtle Impossibility, ensconced in Eterna’s soul, since neither in Being nor in the World does this impossibility created in Eterna’s mind exist, nor in any other soul.

This impossibility is founded in irreversibility, the unassailability of any given segment of any given person’s past, that which does not present itself as sentiment, but as when this person makes the always accidental discovery that it might or might not have happened, of the beloved or the person whom one loves more than oneself. Eterna,? who is the only human (individual, not ideal) who has the power of changing another’s past, even her lover’s, cannot change her own. Moreover, her soul can’t accept that her lover not love her for always, but after the inferior, insignificant action of “seeing her,” it might happen that he never again sees her by his side, that he’s indifferent, ignoring her and even displeased that she lightly crossed his path, she whom he didn’t look at, so absorbed was he in his own egocentric affairs.

When they met, she changed the President’s past, so that he already couldn’t recall a moment in which he didn’t know her and love; her, yet in practically all of her history Eterna sees herself without him and without his love. And even when the President has made her understand — and not everything, but to believe in eternity and eternal personal memory — and even when she believes in herself and in him that yes, they are eternal after death (but not after forgetting), even then, Eterna fears the future. Maybe she believes that totalove can exist one day, but nevertheless she always has this weakness about mutual not-loving and not-recognizing, in this past without vision or passion that they share, even so Eterna fears for the future of love.

THE PRESIDENT'S RESPONSE

Such tears, Eterna…!

These tears only say “never” in your eyes, they are the highest point of a wave that has washed over Being or Reality, they are the World’s supreme handiwork, as beautiful as a realized Reason For Being, after which even the cessation of Reality is possible and justifiable. Your tears over the mystical impossibility of a love that has no non-loving past, this pain hidden from the totalove that many women barely experience but which in you is constant, these tears are a clamoring demand that I fold myself into a meditation that will not manage to equal your Sentiment, since my certainty in thought, of the future, has no response for your demand that our past not exist, for your request that before our love you not exist. Your tears are the Tears of terror and longing for a boundless existence, for an impossible cessation.

The problem is as difficult as it is serious for me and for your welfare, Eterna; I need to consult with men of magnificent intelligence and nobility: pages from William James, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Fechner; making the problem less difficult as I seek aid in my quest for totalknowledge. I’ve read, I've meditated, I ask myself and I respond: In any present mind, the destruction of a past may be decreed and carried out, since in this present a personal past strikes the two notes of the personal and the past, and the operation of the psyche may, in that moment, with labor and insistence, disassociate the scene of a past event from a current image, from its two notes, or threads: the thread of the selfsame, and of the past, and make the image into a far-off occurrence of mere fantasy, not a real occurrence of the personal past.

What is indifferent, and cannot be destroyed, are the effects of the past event. These effects are felt, but they are indifferent to memory and the discrimination between “real” and “imaginary” and the designation of “far off” and “self-same;” these effects would be felt, but not as such, with a cause in our past. And what’s important is that the only fearful effect of a past without love over a present love does not come: if one day we reach a fullness of love as we think we have, its proof is that the past can do nothing to harm it.

Thus it seems to me, Eterna. that it’s specious to define the burning you feel as the bitter sentiment of having had a past before our love began. There’s a bitterness there, it’s true, but it doesn’t come from the notion of a simple past without our mutual vision but rather, as I suspect, from an insecurity about whether our love today has reached its fullness. And so I pass from one pain to the next, suspecting that you are not certain of the fullness of your love or of mine, and that this is what pains you, not the past.

Here an elegant praying mantis has paused, in front of my manuscript, undecided as to whether he would like to enter the novel.

NOVELS IN “LA NOVELA"

As Sweetheart and Maybegenius know from listening to conversations in the estancia (long Saturday conversations about art and science, with the President as friendly mediator), that he (the President) is preparing a novel. This is why they want to give him the argument about life in “La Novela,” since any day of this existence would make a charming tale.

The novel that the President is thinking of writing — and which, according to him, he’ll never write — would entail an original conception of “novelism of the consciousness” or “the worldless novel.” (So his passion for thinking alternates with his passion for creation.) Sweetheart and Maybegenius found these notes in his notebook:

The characters, who are not physical persons but consciousnesses, were living people, they lived in the World, or in the Dualism; they now inhabit the universe of events of consciousness, which is absolutely indeterminate (with inter-consciousness determinism: each time that someone experiences an intense mental state, it passes to the others; why does an intense mental state happen? Why does it work on the others? These “whys” do not exist: this is how it happens, and that’s all).

They live as consciousnesses operating causally among themselves; each one with its conscious phenomenology; they conserve the memory of their corporeal existences; but they are not only memory, they are actuality. (Except for Mnemonia, she’s only Memory.) Someone has a problem or forgets, has a fear or a confusion; the most powerful feeling sets the tone for the whole group of consciousnesses. The unfolding of consciousness is absolutely free; it is eventfulness, nothing more or less than how we can become dizzy without wanting to; in each consciousness the states come without reason; it’s ridiculous to say that some whirlwind of dust would cause fear or anger, because why was the whirlwind there? It is continuous spontaneity, which is to say: we are truly inhabiting the mystery.

Therefore the characters in this novel do not have physical bodies, sense organs, or cosmos. Their communications are direct, without words (which the author will have to invent and attribute); they are nothing but direct psychism operating from consciousness to consciousness; the nearness that one consciousness might feel to another is not distance but consciousness; causation between consciousnesses, which are connected among themselves but individually disconnected from the cosmos; a plurality of consciousness with immediate intercausality.

The characters must live on ideas and psychic states; they are psychic individuals. This “worldless novel” seeks to dissolve the supposed causality that the cosmos exercises over consciousness; that if without tigers we can feel that a tiger wounds and mauls us, we could feel what we feel without a cosmos: colors, sounds, odors. There is an original series of phenomena in conscious phenomenology: the first time they appear contiguously, and later they are voluntarily reproduced, they are copies; but an infinity of them are not — especially the ones that are truly the most important in themselves, like appetites, desires, affective phenomenology — the first ones are extrinsically important because of their supposed causality; the tiger appears as the cause of many destructive pains, but in themselves they are ineffective: colors, sounds, lines, noises — even though they cause subsequent events of a given intensity of pain or pleasure.