Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Moreover, I had planned to publish this novel twenty-two years after the earth completely exhausts its supply of petroleum, because a fortune teller once told me that at the same moment the world will run out of the ample supply of readerly yawns on which we presently rely. Unfortunately, the World Readers Union has promised to take revenge on a certain writer, reserving for him — he just announced his forthcoming work-all the abundant yawns at its disposal and thus severely limiting the available supply for my no less anticipated novel. So you see what good luck it is to be a writer. With this guarantee— which nobody until now has enjoyed — who wouldn’t happily hurl himself into the public eye?

Also I’ve noticed, since becoming an author, how grateful I am to the man who says, “I’ve read everything.” I’m counting on him to come through at an opportune moment, as this melancholy item just appeared in La Razon: “On The Impossibility of Reading Everything.” I’m hurrying to publish my novel so that it may appear before the commencement of this exasperating impossibility.

This is a celebrated novel in press, so often promised that the author himself isn’t willing to bet on when it will come out.

Nobody dies in it — although the book itself is mortal — since as people of fantasy, the characters all die together at the end of the story: it’s an easy extermination. Just as the sacristan puts out the candles at the end of mass, authors run the risk of forgetting things and repeating someone’s death, because they take upon themselves the unnecessary task of meting put a little expiration to each protagonist — so as not to leave the fish out of water, the “character” out of the novel.

What’s more, I’m sure no living man was ever in a narrative, since physiological characters, besides being hampered by fatigue and various indispositions — which is why one never sees protagonists falling ill and taking cures, because their job is only to represent falling ill, and to continue with an active performance of illness and death — are of a realist aesthetic, and our aesthetic is creative.

This is a work of the imagination not lacking in plot — so much so that it runs the risk of exploding out of the binding — and it’s such a precipitous plot that it’s already started in the title, to allow time to fit everything in; the reader comes late if he comes after the cover.

In this novel everything is known, or at least confirmed, so no character is forced to publicly display his ignorance, that is, that he doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that the author doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that he is maintaining the character’s ignorance out of a lack of trust. You never see our protagonists exclaim: “Dear Lord, what is this? What should I think? What do I do now? When will this suffering end?” The reader doesn’t know what to answer; distressed, he gets it wrong, and restricts himself to giving notice.

This must be what happens to authors:

1) They haven’t publicized their novel enough.

2) They don’t know how to render “the unsayable” with “ineffable” style.

3) They still believe that sonatas, paintings, verses, and novels all need titles.

In this Novel, the Impossibility of situations and characters, that is, the sole criterion in classifying something as artistic (without the complications of History, or Physiology), has been so cultivated that nobody — no one versed in daily impossibilities, or anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the impossible — could, by alleging that facts or characters were as familiar as their neighbors, deny the relentless fantasy of our tale.

It would be even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out in the street” that I had proposed to a few artist friends. We would have really increased impossibilities in the city.

The public would have seen our “scraps of art, ” novelistic scenes unfolding by themselves in the streets, catching glimpses of one another among the ‘‘scraps of the living” in sidewalks, doorways, domiciles, bars, and the public would believe it saw “life; ” it would dream the novel but in reverse: in this case, the novel’s consciousness is its fantasy; its dream the external execution of its scenes. But we would need another theory in addition to the one we just sustained, that of Impossibility as the criterion for Art.

This novel’s very existence is novelesque, thanks to having been so often announced, promised, and then dropped, and any reader who understands it is novelesque, too. Such a reader would make himself known by the label of fantastic reader. This reader of mine would be very well-read among all the many reading publics.

I sometimes anxiously wonder how this sublime and difficult novel-difficult now for the reader, but first for me — could be forgettable, considering it contains a frightened General who’s hesitating in the darkness on the basement stairs of the house, called “La Novela,” while Eterna guides him, and his trembling prompts her to say: But General, take hold of my skirt and walk confidently, I won’t lead you astray.

Also you will read how it happened that Eterna, one windless day in Buenos Aires, sent a messenger — with one arm in a sling and a paralytic hand — to cross the whole city with a lighted candle pressed into a contraption in his hand. He was on the point of burning himself because nobody had volunteered to blow the candle out, and he didn’t have enough breath to blow it out himself because he was a character in this novel and was consequently exhausted by the “efforts” that the dignity and glory of appearing in such an indubitably sublime novel so imperiously demands. Reduced to heroic ashes, the messenger was left in a reliquary, not because the porteño (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are known) isn’t the most benevolent and pious of men, but because so many scholars, writers, journalists, politicians, capitalists, communists, religionists both old and new, and penicillinists, have the porteños so full of promises and so lacking in a sense of reality and sincerity that — they didn’t trust the messenger! They didn’t trust Eterna! And so they begrudged the most endearing messenger that ever lived even a breath of assistance.

Also it will be discovered that I gave life to the nonexistence of the Lover, 1just as Posterity has given life to such illustrious nonexistences as authors, making them out of nothing in the name of glory. Another nonexistence given life by operas, novels, and poems is unrequited love, which, if it is actually love, is a structural impossibility. Innumerable nonexistent things have been invented: today there is a whole other world of nonexistences (the Unconscious, duty, synesthesia, lots of “Gods” from various “religions”). Permit me just this one inexistence in my novel: The Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist; it’s necessary to endow a work of art with such a character, so that the others can show off their existence. The one nonexistent character gives life to the others by contrast.

And the Lover agrees to put at our novel’s disposition all of his nonexistence, as long as it lasts, without the fear of putting it at risk by entering into a “life of art;” this life enchants him less than his nonexistence, and to this he prefers the “altruexistence:” existence for others, which is to say, love. The only thing he won’t risk is to live for the sake of living, or longevity, with birthdays.

With such rich elements I intend to make the first “novel,” and not only first of the day it appears, in the morning, the moment when all novels have their minute of primacy. I have tarried too long in Literature; I must urge myself to get up early, since the slow-footed are always hurrying towards something: that is, to get to a place that isn’t behind. It’s not yet late in the genre “novel:” I will start behind. I repeat: I aim to write the first genuinely artistic novel. It will also be the last of the protonovels: mine will make last of what came before it, since it no longer insists upon its own past.