Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Everything’s done, but nobody’s contented.

Here’s where the readers will agitate for the characters to be resurrected and for the plot to continue, now that they’ve fallen in love with the novel. (Because my book was as enchanting as Eterna’s tresses, a loving enchanter of readers who do not know when, in what page, their hearts were conquered.)

In the final moment of a novel that’s been ripped apart, any appreciative reader begs the author for the resurrection of one or more characters, novelistic resurrection, which is to say that they continue to be characters, not novelistic birth, which is to make the character into a person; and since you can’t continue being a character without continuing the plot of the novel, the author would have to satisfy the reader by following the character’s ongoing trials and tribulations.

The character who I guess the reader would most like to see continue is Sweetheart, and that he would most like to see life continue in “La Novela.” Eterna’s sadness has such a halo of grandeur that the reader doesn’t have the stamina to continue reading her, he doesn’t want to know any more of this sublime and pain-stricken destiny. On the other hand, since the reader is just as smart as the author, he can imagine that if I have given him advance events in this novel in the person of Eterna and the enviable environment of “La Novela,” Maybegenius won’t be long in sniffing it out and making a second appearance to fight for Sweetheart’s love. Not even if he himself urged me to could I keep him separated from Sweetheart. The reader’s state of mind is this: he would bet that if Sweetheart and Maybegenius are able to stay together in “La Novela,” that there would be not only insuperable stories and dialogue like the ones through which they got to know Maybegenius, but also that both characters would be immensely and imperturbably happy, and the reader would thus have at the same time the picaresque pleasure of seeing an author who otherwise specialized in total misfortune obliged to portray unbreakable happiness. He would thus craftily put in my hands an “indestructible happiness,” and he would guarantee himself a lot of laughs at my expense, seeing me fail at breaking it, since I’m a slave to my pessimist’s instinct. If he does it, I’ll sign it; but for me to describe a felicity, knowing that none was ever immortal in art and that only some tears, sobs, and some unhappy “Ay, poor me!”s are what people read centuries later, I won’t undertake the task while I still have to invent at least a dozen situations in which my characters must sally forth into life.

Isn’t it sad, reader, that the living adventurers of the estancia “La Novela” are dispersed so far afield, never to return to that innocent existence?

Even with the few details I’ve given you of what life was like there, I’m certain that you envy it; and once there, no one would have pulled you away from there, since there was no sudden imperative to save Eterna from humiliation, or to save Sweetheart from the President when he involuntarily takes a brusque tone with her.

It hurts me, the author, more than anyone to interrupt this life; no one had more aptitude than I for the warm society of mutual affection.

No author has had the vision to torture the reader after the words THE END. No one took charge of that moment. I do it here for the first time, since I know that when the reader falls in love with a book he always wants two pages more, despite the words THE END. With the book gone, they stay with the reader.

Finally, grant me this merit (it chokes me to think of any merit), grant me that this novel, because of the multitude of its inconclusions, has been created largely in your fantasy, in your capacity and necessity to contemplate and give rise to finales. Except me, no novelist existed who believed in my fantasy. The complete novel, which is the easiest kind to write and the only kind that was previously used, is made entirely by the author. It kept us all like children, spoonfeeding us. Let us all enjoy the compensation that my novel provides for this irritating omission, which is in very poor taste.

The artistic school that shall soon dominate, to reign over art’s maximum severity, will only tolerate the novel in stages, a kind of melody without music in which it unfolds in stages that mirror the chapters, like a metaphor of what is felt in each moment of the novel.

Prose will be like music: a succession of states without being long-winded in motivation, which can be understood by reflecting on a Beethoven sonata. In a quarter of an hour we hear the totality of the feeling in a four-hundred-page novel, which we would need many hours to read.

In what follows, I give a summary example, using my own novel as a first attempt.

This is the same novel you just finished reading, in stages.

— There was a human plurality that lived in mutual sympathy (Estancia “La Novela”).

— They appear without a past: faced with a happiness that they never dreamed they could hope for but considered impossible, they cut off their pasts so as to feel it was more real, and made themselves dreams; family bonds and memories were forgotten.

— In the midst of the sorrow of forcing this oblivion, they were as happy as they could be, without passion. The President, who had gathered them there, urged them on.

— A stasis of the happiness of cohabitation, which was the first moment in which insecurity insinuated itself

— To escape from this first tremor in their fragile happiness, everyone— the President, Eterna, Sweetheart, Maybegenius, the Lover, Father, Simple, the Andalusian — all threw themselves crazily (and at the orders of the President) into training for happiness, a rare act of rehearsal in active withstanding.

— Everything is concluded; the characters have proven themselves, and they return to live in the estancia with high hopes.

— But happiness did not entirely return. They worried as the President worried, whether they should throw themselves into Action.

— The plan is to suffocate the long and obstinate battle between the Jubilants and Romantics in which Buenos Aires has been destroyed, a blind discord that the President believes was engendered by Ugliness’s long reign in the city.

The President and his friends dominate in the engagement and abolish civil ugliness.

— So it is done and accomplished, all by means of novelistic miracle.

— The melancholy satiation from a triumph that was erroneously believed powerful enough to return happiness to the inhabitants of “La Novela.”

The happiness in Friendship that the President gave them was real, but it delicately did not allow itself to be felt. But there were unhappy shadows that made Action necessary for him; later, again discontented, he will invite them to disperse, to die simultaneously.

He was unhappy because he couldn’t be what he should have been, a Thinker alone, and he made Eterna unhappy that he was what he should have been. And that obliged him to be a writer and reader of the melancholy.

— Backs, which are the curves of a Deathless pain, fade away in the distance.

I leave it an open book: perhaps it will be the first “open book” in literary history. Which is to say that the author, wishing it were better or even decent, and convinced that with its demented structure he has committed a terrific blunder with the reader, but also convinced that it is rich and suggestive, authorizes any future writer who is so inclined and who enjoys circumstances favorable to intense labor to liberally edit and correct it, with or without mention of the book, or his name. It won’t be easy. Surpass it, amend it, change it, but please, leave something of the original behind.