Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Put another way: The conscious effect that this novelism seeks is to delineate in the mind of the reader the mere conscious being, without a world, as an intelligible possibility. Now is not the time to discredit the entire library of novels, those that narrate gossip, of men acting on the world and acting in the world; consciousness without cause, with its own operability.

The current century isn’t apt for tales of events in the relation Cosmos-Person, but for the dream of consciousness, for the merely psychic Individual, liberated from the Cosmos.

The novel should take place in a climate without disturbances, brawls, jealousies — although the sorrows of life exist, as direct but nonspatial intercausal groupings (the other consciousnesses are the external “world” of each consciousness). These are beings who do not draw or write castles in the air; I play with a death that takes place, yet never kills: Where Everything Comes Back From Death. The characters are all returned from death a thousand times, from a self-death, from mere desire, without poison, or stabbing; they take death as sleep, without a schedule, not nocturnal. (Death is not the policing that we know, but a table always crowded with guests, from which one rises and says: I’m going to bed. This is death.)

The characters that the President has sketched for his novel up until now are:

Posthumia: She wants to be a dead beloved, to only be loved when dead.

Suicidia: She’s always dying “by her own hand” by a resort or conscious call to non-being that is instantaneous, which happens because of a lack of conscious simultaneity: when she’s in pain, there’s nothing else for her, and the automatisic evasion of pain executes the suicidal gesture.

Forgetful: The man who knows that woman’s secret is intolerance for the idea of being forgotten by man: he feigns forgetting, because he knows that this conquers feminine nature. And among his adventures, always triumphant, he meets Notawoman (you must not be a woman to stand being forgotten) and Forgetful instantly loses himself; she makes forgetting both absent and present. Forgetful despairs each time she sees him, and he falls in love; he falls in love with someone he can’t remember for more than a quarter of an hour; this is his punishment.

Bellamorticia: Beautiful because she exalts love, because of so much love lost.

Unforgettable: She never knows she is forgotten, not even in death of consciousness. (This death of consciousness, the only death that exists in the novel and which is procured by one’s own wish or by means of certain defensive reflexes, only signifies a suspension in consciousness. So it is that via mental exertion, on earth, we call existence in the mental present a memory that escapes us, so mere consciousnesses possess the means to self-paralysis. And these solutions of continuity in Unforgettable, obtained by the consciousness’s own impetus, are not capable of doing away with one feeling, the feeling of being unforgettable. In all of the psychic characters in the novel, the solution of conscious continuity which is death, leaves a conscious pulsation latent, a thread of conscious reality that never fails: in Unforgettable it is the inability to be forgotten; in Posthumia it’s the desire to be a dead beloved, and so on, with the others.)

Lost: She doesn’t know where she is; who she was; why she came; where she was going before; what she’ll be; if what she’s feeling is herself, or someone else. When she’s oppressed by sadness she exclaims: How sad Unforgettable is! Or How sad Retrograde is (her friends).

Volupta: Aspires to one kiss in a year, and to die.

Indifferent: Eternal consciousness or eternal death interest him equally. He makes everyone tremble with this sainted indifference.

Presentless: He feels everything on the border of the Past, as a species of past occurrence: “I was hungry” is “I am hungry.” His memory displaces his present: “I loved you” is “I love you.” He lives in the past, but with a present sensibility, and actually lacks both a present and past.

Aspires to Life: Wants to return to corporeal life, in which he must have been very happy — a rare exception.

Amnesia: Has no past. Yesterday never happened.

Sweetie: Hates to be deprived of affection: Material. She seeks tenderness, caresses.

Retrograde: Changes pasts. Someone asks for a happy past. Others, that their past be changed so that they are convinced they lived a different life than the one they actually lived.

Mnemonia: She only has memory, she has no current life or being. But she has a perfect memory: there’s no fact, no matter how fleeting or insignificant, that she can’t recall.

For Herself: She only loves the dead. She doesn’t want to be loved. She’s alarmed or repulsed by any care or interest shown her. She tells everyone: “I found Mydeath. How happy I am. But sometimes I’m not. Poor me, what would it be like if I died.” (She’s looking for a man whose expression shows that he’s lucky enough to die soon, the better to be happy beforehand; she doesn’t want anybody to die, but she’s looking for someone who will.)

Eterna: She knows no death; her consciousness is not suspended for an instant. She’s the maximum intensity of consciousness.

The Lover: Awaits Bellamuerte. He must obtain the resurrection of her consciousness, and prove to her that there is no happiness superior to the fullness of consciousness in his actual, which is to say eternal, passion.

No Return: Without personal eternity; does not return. Everyone knows that she only has one life and one death, and so she has earned the obsessive care of those who know that one fine day she’ll escape them. She must die for a reason, though; she can’t die without one. And since it isn’t known what the reason might be, they shower her with exquisite love and concern. But might it not be good fortune that kills her?

It’s not believed that in any of his conscious planes the President works on his novel for any reason other than to distract himself with the aforementioned annotations. If someone knew better than Sweetheart or Maybegenius how to spy on his consciousness, or maybe even his papers, they would find phrases dropped from who knows where, ideas to elaborate, names, situations, charged words. For example:

“While the author has a body and writes for readers with a body, writing the novel of this group of consciousnesses he uses the words that this group does not use for anything but which the readers need.”

“To exploit words in their excepted elements, in their irregular associations. To actualize or utilize words or nuclei of associations such as: The tick-tock of the clock on the night-stand — the whistle of the wind — thresholds-a glove — a small comb — distant thunder — a fresh gust of wind — a cat’s tread as it draws back its paw — the first whistle of a kettle on the fire — a head tossing on a pillow — the anger of a rose — a closed piano — a loose button — the carnation’s defiance — a suppressor of profiles — the gaze returned to its eyes — will there be another time?

To exploit the great ruptures and sweetness of family life.

The mnemonic context of the present: What position does any given present hold? I get up today, I think yesterday.

Within the generic matter of consciousness, to say for example: “It was sweetness that said yes;” ‘‘He spoke, and was sleeping;” “He felt that somebody was dying,” “Through the door by which the incorporeal, forgotten gentleman was not entering.”

Scenes: With the rose’s laughter — with the tick-tock sound of the little clock under the pillow — with a sleeper’s breath — on glances exchanged.

(Towards a metaphysics of inter- or intra-conscious novelism.)