Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

With her reproach

But ever melancholy over her unrelinquished past, her unappeaseable past.

Today we release to the public the last bad novel and the first good novel. 1Which one will be the best? In order to prevent the reader from opting for his preferred genre at the other’s expense, we’ve arranged that these two novels be sold as an indivisible set; considering that we’re unable to impose a mandatory reading of both novels, at least there remains the consolation of having devised an obligatory purchase of what one does not want, because it cannot be untangled from what one does. Therefore, the Obligatory Novel will either be the last bad novel or the first good novel, depending on the reader’s taste. There is one absurdity that must not be permitted: that the reader thinks the two novels are equally good, and congratulates us on such comprehensive “good fortune.”

The Bad Novel deserves its homage; this is mine. This way, nobody can say I don’t know how to do things poorly, that I didn’t have the talent for this novelistic genre; that is, the bad. Thus I’ll show the full scope of my capacities in the same day. It is true that I have run the risk of mixing up the bad thoughts of Adriana Buenos Aires with the good ones that constantly occurred to me for Eterna’s Novel, but it’s up to the reader to collaborate and sort out the confusion. Sometimes I found myself perplexed, especially when the wind blew the manuscript pages around the room. Then I wouldn’t know which page belonged in which novel because, as you know, I wrote a page of each novel per day; nothing could help me because the pagination was the same, the quality of ideas, paper, and ink were all equal — I had made an effort to be equally intelligent in each, to keep my twin novels from quarreling. How I suffered, not knowing if the brilliant page before me belonged in the last bad novel or the first good one!

Let the Reader take charge of my agitation and trust in my promise of a forthcoming goodbad novel, firstlast in its genre, in which the best of the bad of Adriana Buenos Aires and the best of the good of Eterna’s Novel will be allied, and in which I will recollect the experience gained in my efforts to convince myself that something good was bad, and vice versa, because I needed it in order to finish a chapter of one or the other…

1 Already in The Newcomers Paper and the Continuation of the Nothing (1944) these novels were so announced. As the Warning to Adriana Buenos Aires says, with its publication the original plan was restored, because although they were not sold as a set, the two novels have nevertheless appeared almost simultaneously. ( Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)

When the world hadn’t yet been created and there was only nothingness, God heard it said: it’s all been written, it’s all been said, it’s all been done. “Maybe that’s already been said, too,” he perhaps replied out of the ancient, yawning Void. And he began.

A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old.

There’s nothing worse than sloppiness, unless it’s the facile perfection of solemnity. This book will be eminently sloppy, which is to say it will commit the maximum discourtesy possible to its readers — except an even greater and all too common discourtesy: the perfect, empty book.

I’ve done what I can to hide the seams in the patchwork passages of my novelistic prose, which brings with it inexhaustible swatches of revision; and I do myself the service of confessing what no one will notice, because if ever a book demanded hard work it’s this one, and I believe that all art is labor, and very arduous labor at that.

But I know that a highly personal, compensatory immortality awaits me: Generations of readers will pass the shop window, and nobody will stop to buy the book.

This will be the novel that’s thrown violently to the floor most often, and avidly taken up again just as often. What other author can boast of that?

A novel whose incoherencies of plot are patched together with transversal cuts that show what all the characters of the novel are doing at every moment.

An irritating read, this book will annoy the reader like no other, with its false promises and inconclusive and incompatible methodology; nevertheless it’s a novel that will not cause reader evasion, since it will produce an interest in the soul of the reader that will leave him allied to its destiny — it’s a novel that needs a lot of friends.

In the end, the final organization and revisions took me three frenzied days; happily, I wear detachable shirt cuffs, and I had kept all of the ink-stained ones ever since I began to conceive of the novel; about a thousand of them have all of my notes, in addition to twelve thousand composition books and notepads and loose pages: I threw it all into a corner of my room. Once I made it out of bed, I flung myself to the floor, where I stayed for three days; I raved and I cried, a hundred times over I howled: This is the last time I write for publication.

If Eterna had seen me, she would have laughed so hard it would have almost made her sick. It’s unhealthy to laugh when you don’t want to laugh, and this is the way she laughed in the face of this Hysteria. She never understood Hysteria — what a hopeless creature! — and I appreciate it so much, and it’s so essential to me that I procured for her an expensive and extremely ornamental cigarette holder made of vinagrol, a material whose discovery I commissioned. When it solidifies, it may be made into cigarette holders for smoking hysterics. It is this characteristic of Hysteria, so typical of the male of the species, that particularly excites the fatal explosion of Laughter in Eterna. “My my, what a tantrum!” she exclaims, and thus can’t help but make it worse. One could be on the point of death, choked with passion by the dexterity and patience with which, during a long telephone call that she herself initiated and which began with words of soothing kindness, one has been brought to the ultimate in ridiculous desperation, making one feel he had indeed been quite intemperate.

This is the mystery of Eterna that only I know: she finds more goodness in the sentiment of men than in the soul of women, yet she would like to correct this defect in the male character. There are therefore two Mysteries of Eterna: her felicity in turning a distant phrase; her felicity in her perception of the Ridiculous, to the point of making not only herself but others ill with her own Laughter. Thus she is a Mystery I have never grasped.

Later:

All human suffering, without a father and son having to fall in love with the same woman, without desire between a brother and sister, without kinship, or aberration, or blindness, or madness — all human suffering makes Tragedy and

All the blessings of human life, without the millionaire marrying the factory girl, without a happy marriage between a blind man and an ugly woman; without power or glory, but for Passion, the only certainty.

The greatest risk one runs in publishing a novel at this stage in life is that nobody knows your age; mine is 73, and I hope that it will rescue me from a potential judgment such as: “For the First Good Novel, it isn’t bad at all, and since it’s the author’s first novel, we predict a brilliant future, if he perseveres in his aesthetic conjurings with strong will and discipline. In any case, we’ll await his future work before rendering a definitive judgment.” With this kind of postponement, I’ll be left out of posterity, and prematurely at that. It’s not flattery at every age when the critics postpone the judgment reserved for novices and squander all confidence on our future.