The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE AUTHOR ALSO SPEAKS

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,¹ just 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.

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)