The Museum of Eterna's Novel

A PREFACE FOR MACEDONIO FERNÁNDEZ BY ADAM THIRLWELL

1.

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, written but never published by Macedonio Fernández, is a novel that is half made up of prologues.

These prologues can inspire contradictory conclusions. It is a novel which does not want to begin. Or, perhaps, it is really a novel which does not want to end. Then again, it is a novel which does not want to be a novel at all. It will not become its own future. And yet if a novel exists as its own museum, then the reader must in some way presume that it has once existed, in the past.

Here are some usual facts involving time. Macedonio Fernández was born in 1874; he died in 1952. He began this novel around 1925, and worked on it in five drafts until he died. And this novel was a machine to prove that none of these facts had any sense at all.

Yes: Macedonio Fernández’s novel would like to refute the ordinary ideas of time. And this is complicated. This is an invention whose conclusions have not yet all been noted.

2.

In Argentina, in the early part of the twentieth century, experiments were made with fictional reality. It is Macedonio Fernández’s friend and protégé, Jorge Luis Borges, whose investigations are most famous. But it doesn’t really matter about the provenance of the investigations. The consequences are more important; and the consequences are still unstably active. And I think of two moments where more recent Argentine novelists, writing on Borges, have tried to define this new relationship to reality. In his book The Borges Factor, Alan Pauls comments that for Borges “to lose is not a fatality but a construction, an artefact, a work.. ” It forms, in fact, writes Pauls, the basis of his style. And Pauls goes on to relate this sensation to Borges’s technique of inventing his works as immediate and imaginary classics: “to put in practice in the interior of his work the mechanisms of a process (access to the category of a classic) which are traditionally exterior to the work. .” This is one way of approaching the new relation to reality. While in his essay The Last Reader, Ricardo Piglia writes that “Borges’s greatest lesson is perhaps the certainty that fiction doesn’t only depend on the person who constructs it but also on the person who reads it.” And he adds: “What is particular to Borges (if such a thing exists), is the capacity to read everything like a fiction and believe in its power. Fiction as a theory of reading.”

3.

Late in his novel, Macedonio Fernández interrupts with a dialogue between Reader and Author. And the Author laments: “ ‘Reader, sometimes your presence is requested in my pages and you are absent: your face comes close, and mirrors the dreaming in these pages, and you are absent. What bothers me is the reader: you’re my problem, your existence is invincible; the rest is just a pretext to keep you within earshot of these proceedings.’” Macedonio Fernández was the first novelist for whom the problem of writing was so explicitly the problem of the reader. This is the basis of his discoveries. He developed techniques to dissolve the reader’s invincible existence as a continuous entity. The aim of Macedonio Fernández’s novels is to convert all reality into fiction (or the other way round): and the only way of doing this is if the reader is converted into fiction first. “It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to this Effect of disidentification, the only thing that would justify its existence…” This technique of disruption has a precise aim: the real conclusion is immortality: “If in each of my books I have two or three times achieved an instant of what I will call in homespun terms a ‘suffocation,’ an ‘upset’ in the certitude of personal continuity, a slippage of the reader’s own self, then that’s all I wanted as a means; the end towards which I’m working is liberation from the idea of death: evanescence, mutability, rotation, and spinning of the self make it immortal, which is to say, release its destiny from the body.”

This is the grandest aim of Macedonio’s fiction. In fact, it is only through fiction that such an aim, he believed, could be realised. He just wants, he says of the reader, to “win him over as a character, so that for an instant he believes that he himself does not live.” And this is only possible through the elastic techniques of novel-writing — only the novel has this ontological power: “It seems to me that there isn’t any one else who has used this method, or that it would be applicable to any other genre but the novel.”

4.

It is possible, however, to look at this another way. The pressure under which this novel is written is the infinite, the eternal. “This novel is not content to be separate from eternity; it wants to feel the breeze of the eternal on its face…” A novel written from the perspective of infinity will contain some unusual premises: everything is repetition (“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”); which means there is no such thing as death; which means there is no such thing as the self; and so it is impossible to distinguish between different levels of reality—“they’re all real; any image in a mind is reality, and lives…”

But the eternal, of course, is not quite true. The infinite is an invention. And Macedonio knows this too. With the metaphysical, he is trying to console himself. He is intent on the construction of “an interior world so strong that no Reality can have the power of sadness or impossibility or limitation for him that it has over someone who hasn’t managed to construct thought-fascinations to accompany him always.”

Macedonio’s formal play with the idea of the novel has a void, a melancholy, which is its movement. Because what is the eternal a compensation for? What is the pressure which leads to the invention of the eternal? The answer, dear mortal reader, is obvious.

The only things that can’t die are the things that haven’t begun. This is true of novels; and it is true of humans, too. And because this is true, there is a related hurt. Love, being an attachment to a mortal animal, is an irrational pleasure. It can only lead to pain. Transience invalidates all happiness: “suicide occurs in the moment of pleasure.” And yet we carry on living, and loving.

Against this, Macedonio performs this manic, grief-stricken experiment with fiction: because if he can turn the reader into a fiction, if he can deny that anything really lives and dies, then he can save love as a meaningful emotion.

The real subjects of this lightly playful novel are the grave ones of death and love.

In one of the prologues to the novel, “The Essential Fantasmagoricalism of the World,” Fernández writes: “You believe that death awaits us, a termination of our persons and our love, and I don’t believe that totalove can flourish in beings who believe that they are fleeting.” This is the novel’s sad centre. Just as the President “doesn’t believe in Death, but he can’t love what he believes to be mortal, or what he does not know to be immortal…” And so using the game of fiction, Macedonio Fernández tries to invent a place of non-existence, where death no longer has meaning:

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…

In his Museum, Macedonio Fernández invents a laboratory for investigating whether every philosophical question can be observed through the condition of falling in love. “Sexual love,” wrote Freud in his paper “Observations on Love in Transference,” “undoubtedly has a prime place among life’s experiences… Everybody knows this, apart from a few weird fanatics, and arranges his life accordingly…” But Fernández knew this already. In his novel, he tests the possibility that all philosophical questions are only meaningful in relation to human relations: that all questions of infinity are really questions about love. Eterna is the beloved, after all: and she is also the eternal itself. “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…”

And who else is a novelist in love with, if not the absent reader?

5.

And so it is that the process called fiction, the object called a novel, the entities called characters, will all be entreated to undergo various transformations.

And the playfulness of this novel is identical to its sadness. If Macedonio could truly carry out these experiments, if he really could make the reader doubt his own reality, then maybe he would have a chance to create the conditions for his happiness. But, of course, he can’t. And yet the experiments are enchanting.

A character can be discontinuous (“this novel resembles life more than the ‘bad’ or realist novel, that is, the conventional novel. Continuity (identity) of the characters makes sorcerers out of the bad or conventional novelists: this continuity was never shown in a novel nor does it exist in life. .”). There can be extra characters (“The reader should not entertain himself with the aforementioned security guard; he isn’t ours; the one that belongs in our novel is standing on the opposite corner.”). There can be characters borrowed for a single use and then kept on for fun. There can be a character who appears fleetingly in the novel before her official first appearance. And through the prologues, a proleptic novel will take place in hints, in the background—“a frightened General hesitating in the darkness on the basement stairs of the house, called ‘La Novela,’ while Eterna guides him, his trembling prompting her to say: But General, take hold of my skirt and walk confidently, I won’t lead you astray.” Yes, this novel will contain “loose pages, a total novelty for novels, as well as a model page and an exhibition of a day in the estancia ‘La Novela,’ a cast of discarded characters and a sort of character internship, and an absent character…”

As for the novel itself, Macedonio thinks that it should take place in the street:

It would be even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out into 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 dream 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 themes.

And I think this fantasy is important. It is one of the oldest avant-garde wishes, after all, to make a novel which is in fact a reality: that art only has a value in so far as it stops being art. And Macedonio Fernández was an anarchist. He believed in transformative action.

The way in which the novel does indeed go out into the street, where the characters are sent out by the President to undertake a succession of small practical jokes—“the deployment of jokes as conquest”—is reminiscent of Borges’s comic homage to Fernández, “The Man Who Will be President,” with its plot to create a nervous breakdown generally in Buenos Aires, to multiply annoyances: “barrel organs wouldn’t ever finish a melody, cutting it short halfway through; the whole city would be filled with useless objects, like barometers; the handrails on trams would be loosened, etc.” And so lead to the election of Fernández as President.

The novel that goes out into the street is an ideal of artistic suicide: of a novel that suddenly stops being a novel at all.

All his technique is designed to improvise confusion between what is fictional and what is real. So that one of his characters can discuss with another character a scheme for making them live: to write their own story about characters within the novel: “‘It’s a story about ‘novel characters,’ not living persons, and it was conceived this way because in it I found a magical method for you and I to have life and be people, because it seems to me that the moment a character appears on a novel’s page narrating another novels, he and all the characters listening to him assume a reality, and they only feel themselves to be characters that are narrated in the other novel: whether the reader likes it or not.’” And once the characters’ reality is doubted, then Macedonio can then doubt his own: “It seems the author has had a fright; he thinks he’s a character, trapped by his own invention. Will he recover? What if he stayed that way forever! This is the tenth time it’s happened to him: for two years running, he’s been thinking more or less every day about these characters, and sometimes he’s known the sweat and suspension of feeling himself to be no more than a character! Is he really more real than they are? What is it to be real?”

But Macedonio needs more than his own self to become unreal. He needs the readers to help.

This novel itself, he writes, must be finished by its readers, who will then become characters, unreal, in their turn: “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.” For the reader is a character in a deeper way, too. Every reader, after all, is a skipreader: a “Skip-Around Reader.” No one reads in order. But since this novel is itself not written in order, the Skip-Around Reader becomes an Orderly Reader. Freedom turns out to be manipulation: we are always in the grip of a higher power-prevented in our assumptions by the novelist. Which is another way of saying that we might be a dream: “you are so uncomfortable with the disorder I brought you with my prologues, in which the disorderly author makes you a figure of art and dreams, that you have flipped and are now a continuous reader to the point that you doubt the inveterate identity of the disorderly self.”

6.

And I love this, the grandeur of the experiment, but I am still not sure.

In a very early essay, “The Nothingness of Personality,” Borges wrote that “Life is truthful appearance”—there is no deeper reality: “Reality has no need of other realities to bolster it.” And as further proof he quoted a line of Macedonio’s: “Reality works in overt mystery.”

This collapse of the fictional and the real, the appearance and depth, is what was discovered in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, in the early part of the twentieth century: and it is still not clear what conclusions should follow. We still, for instance, believe that a novel is a description of the world. But if Macedonio is right, then every novel is simply a construction.

And yet, I sadly want to say: this world, however, is not a construction. A character is not a person. The conditions for each are different. But I love the fervour and the patience and the melancholy with which Macedonio Fernández tried to prove this wasn’t true: with the full weight of his grief at the world, the gravity with which he tried to be precise to the trauma of love. And in trying to prove this impossible truth, he discovered the limits of fiction.

7.

Early on in The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, Macedonio Fernández credits himself with the invention of certain novelistic specialities:

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.

It is such a witty, and noble, list. It makes me, in homage, want to invent my own list of possible futures for the novel — possible experiments with the ideas of the real and the reader:

The Novel with Only One Copy

The Novel as a Rewrite of Someone Else’s Novel

The Novel with Only One Reader

The Infinite Novel

They seem, I have to admit, unlikely experiments. And then I remember Borges’s own description of the problem of infinity as the problem of fiction within fiction, where he refers to the 602^nd Arabian Night: “On that strange night, the king hears his own story from the queen’s lips. He hears the beginning of the story, which includes all the others, and also — monstrously — itself. Does the reader have a clear sense of the vast possibility held out by this interpolation, its peculiar danger?” And it strikes me that one homage is always possible, one immediate experiment.

Yes, everyone can write their own preface to Macedonio’s great novel of prefaces.

London, 2009