Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

By offering this opportunity I insist that the true execution of my novelistic theory can only be achieved by various people, who have gotten together to read a different novel, to write it — so that they are reader-characters, readers of the other novel and characters in this one, will incessantly create themselves as existing persons, not “characters,” as a counter-shock to the figures and images in the novel that they themselves are reading.

This plot of characters who are reading and read with characters who are only read, will, if systematically developed, achieve a uniform and consistent doctrine. The plot of the double novel.

A dialogue to confess that my book is very far from the formula of belarte of written characters. There’s this, too, the “open venture.”

I thus leave the perfect theory of the novel, an imperfect execution thereof, and a perfect plan for its future execution.

Notice that there’s real possibility in the adhesion of the double plot, for someone who is able to give life to a character-reader, by means of an alchemy of consciousness — thus invigorating the existential nothingness of the read-character, who becomes much more of a character because of this accentuation of his frank non-being with an emphasis on nonexistence, which purifies him and carries him far from any promiscuity with reality; and in his own time the reading character’s existence will resonate for the real reader, who writes himself out of existence as a counter-figure to the character.

This deliberate confusionism is probably the result of a fertile urge towards liberation in the consciousness; it’s a genuinely artistic labor; artificiality is fertilized by the consciousness in its attempt to undermine the notion and the certainty of being, from which follows the universal intimidation of the equally absurd and vacuous verbal notion of non-being. There is nothing more than not-being; the character’s non-being, the non-being of fantasy, or of what’s imagined. He who imagines will never know non-being.

Macedonio Fernández is considered one of the greatest Argentine writers of the twentieth century. He was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, and Macedonio’s metaphysical and aesthetic ideas greatly influenced Borges’s generation. The mythical life of Macedonio is almost as interesting and fun as his books. Some of the stories about his life include: his campaign for president, which consisted of leaving notecards with the word “Macedonio” on them throughout Buenos Aires’ cafes; his attempt to found a utopian society, only to be thwarted by pesky mosquitoes; and his belief that he shouldn’t publish, instead allowing his work time to “age.” He passed away in 1952, and the first edition of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna was released in 1967.

Margaret Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She was a Fulbright fellow in Argentina in 2004, during which time she researched the life and work of Macedonio Fernández. In addition to translating and teaching, she is also developing a book based on her dissertation, which analyzes representations of the embalmed corpse of Eva Peron.

Adam Thirlwell’s first novel, Politics , was translated into thirty languages. In 2003, Granta chose him as one of the Best Young British Novelists. His much-praised book The Delighted States won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2008. He lives in London.