Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

For all this I believe, as Author, to have credited myself with the following novelistic specialties:

The Novel That Begins

The Frustrated Novel (a manufacturing defect)

The Novel That Went Out In The Street, with all its characters, to write itself.

The Prologue-Novel, whose story plays out, concealed from the reader, in prologues.

The Novel Written By Its Characters

The Inexpert Novel, which sets itself the task of killing off its “characters” separately, ignorant that creatures of literature always die together at the End of a reading.

The Novel in Stages

The Last Bad Novel — The First Good Novel — The Obligatory Novel.

1 In Índice de la nueva poesía americana (The Anthology of New American Poetry ) (1926) there appears a “Salutation from the Lover to the Non-Existent Gentleman-Novel of Hope,” included in Miscellany (volume VII of the Complete Works). The Lover appears again in Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness , which bears precisely this subtitle: “A Compilation of the Papers Left by a Novel Character Created By Art, the Lover, the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, the Student of His Hopes;” in “Solution” and “Conclusion” the aforementioned persona explicates his metaphysical doctrine, which correlates with that of the present novel. (Editor’s Note-Adolfo de Obieta)

Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he’s able to achieve that sobering “second edition:” making his a suicide that waits until it’s justified. But I’ve taken more precautions against true suicide, which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that’s what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus, this novel, started at age thirty, continued at fifty and at seventy-three, has finally achieved supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author "and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I’ll be the author of a letter to the critics, a sort of “open letter” but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out.

I’m the only one who understood you, gentlemen; the first who grasped your basic vocation: those eternally in hope of Perfection, who are daily reduced to eulogizing book binding, driven to it by the continual failure of the poem, the novel, the printed word, one after the other and day after day; you, gentlemen, are the only lovers and connoisseurs of Perfection. No such thing for the writers, the publishers of sketches, hasty books, opportune books, party books; someday Perfection will come in the form of a book, just as you rightly hoped and planned: until now Perfection has only been seen in the grace and moral power of certain men and women, known to all of us, who will never gain either historical or name recognition.

But it’s good that you wait, and I’m sure the day Perfection appears as a Book you will all applaud, unanimously and immensely gratified.

Writers have always understood that for some time now we should have been in compliance with this critical attitude. But knowing how terribly fatiguing it is to construct a novel according to strict artistic standards, and what little hope there is of getting it right, not only do we suffer, but we also waste our talents since we don’t write the Book, and in waiting to write, we forget the nicety of waiting to find perfection in the efforts of others.

I didn’t find an easy way to execute my own artistic theory. My novel is flawed, but I would like to be recognized as the first who has attempted to use that prodigious instrument, the commotion of consciousness — that is, the novelistic character in its proper efficiency and virtue. By this I mean the total commotion of consciousness of the reader, and not the trivial occupation of the attention with a particular, precarious, ephemeral topic: itself. With this and some other thoughts formulated in the course of the book, I approach this Perfection you gentlemen expect, and set an example as well: a rigorous doctrine of the literary art.

If I’m wrong, I won’t be the first, or the last. You may give me the maximum sentence.

I know very well that my work will keep you waiting in your quest for

Perfection, but perhaps I may succeed in whetting your appetite. If your appetite is whetted, then my book was good enough.

I realized that all you really know is what Perfection is not.

— M.F.

Hesitation.

I’ve had some days of my own like those winter days of storm and sunshine, tremulous days that bum out for moments at a time and make the world a spectacle of the turn of Indecision’s screw. After I first met Eterna I wandered in such darkness and depression that I vacillated between her, Art, and Mystery. Now resolved to be unlost, I have since lived for discovery.

Even when I was able to achieve faith in myself, only faith in her was always ready at hand.

And I write this unnecessary book simply because she wants to smile at her lover from outside this love, from the space of Art.

The book is not hard to write at all if it is of little importance. I already did it a long time ago, as an initiate in skepticism, not in art but that which would conserve for us some kind of reference for Art.

The storm birds will not hover over our love, they will not cross its path.

But a certain shadow of the End, of concealing…

When it comes we’ll narrow ourselves, drawing in our bodies and our clothing so that the pale terror that surrounds us cannot touch them.

All that is sad in her eyes is exalted in my being, my being of hope. And the instant passes. And passes again, and I did it, I had to split open this shadow, so it never returns.

You still don’t believe it. I didn’t see you coming either. The impossibility that you are. The impossibility of an Answer to death, yet I have it. The all-love that you are; the all-knowing that was mine.

Whether you exist or not, I dedicate this work to you; beauty eternal, you are at the very least what is real in my spirit.

In the construction of my novel, my fervent hope was to make of the novel a home for non-existence, for the non-existence necessary to The Lover, the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, to effect his very real hope, by putting him in some region or locale worthy of the subtlety of his being. His exquisite aspiration is to have a place somewhere in my novel while he waits for his love to return from the other side of death, the one he named Bellamuerte, beautiful death, she who made death beautiful when she smiled at its coming. Only her Beauty died: a beauty made of separation and concealing, for death engenders all the beauty of Reality: it separates lovers, there is no other death. One does not die for oneself, nor is there death for he who has not loved; nor is there beauty that does not proceed from death, nor death that does not proceed from love, since death is what accounts for the exaltation of the Idyll-Tragedy, the idyll exalted because of a fear of death and the tragedy made of the deep sorrow of an idyll destroyed. 1

In other words, my novel has the sacred vocation and the allure to be the Where from which the Beloved will come, fresh, returned from a death that couldn’t best her, that didn’t need Her to purify itself. It only needed her to worry the Lover, which is why she’ll come fresh from death, not resuscitated but reborn, smiling just as she did when she left, as if her years-long absence lasted only an instant. 2