The Museum of Eterna's Novel

FOR READERS WHO WILL PERISH IF THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THE NOVEL IS ABOUT

(In which it is observed that the readers who skip around in a book are nevertheless complete readers. Moreover, when something like skip-around literature is inaugurated — as it is here — they should exercise caution, and read in order, if they want to continue being skip-around readers. Equally, the author is surprised to discover that although he is an out-of-order man of letters, he likes skip-around readers just as much as the ones who read in order, and to persuade the reader he has found this good argument: he who reads everything to the end (since it’s lazy to read out of order and disrupt the frame) will be mortified by this novel, saying to himself: “I read it in bits and pieces; very good novel, but a little disjointed, very truncated.”)

Disorderly reader, I do not ask you — unconfessed — to read all of it, or to stop reading all of my novel, what with the pagination having been unraveled in vain for you, but you should know that in the book in which the reader will finally be read, Biography of a Reader it disconcertingly happened that with such a trench-riddled book the disorderly reader had no other recourse than to read in order, so as to maintain the disorder of the text, since the book was out of order before… I do not ask your forgiveness for giving you an out-of-order book that, as it is, would be an interruption for you, because you interrupt yourself on your own and 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.

If you have to read all of it, a bit of forewarning. Don’t go around trying a little bit of my novel here and there to see if it’s finished, if it needs sugar or if it’s too cold; you’d do better to do as my butler does when he ties on a napkin and takes up knife and fork “just for a taste,” as he meekly tells the cook.¹ I’ve made you an orderly reader thanks to a work full of prefaces and such vague titles that you have finally been trapped by the unexpected continuity of your reading.

Now I can’t keep you happy any longer. I’ve already advanced you all the postponements that I’ve been able to cook up: I don’t have any more prologues until after the novel. How it oppresses me, this artistic endeavor to which I have committed myself! I still don’t have any true comprehension of the theory of the novel, let alone an aesthetic or plan for my own.²

Very well, as for the point of the title of this prologue, which is to say, as for the reader who is bothered because he doesn’t know everything in the novel:

It’s true that “the Traveler then uttered a few words, inaudible from this novel, and, waving goodbye, went away” (travelers tend to do that). My novel also waves, but it is mortified that one of its characters hasn’t finished reading everything. It’s curious about the story it’s going to tell, a reading of itself, or better a narrative of itself, since self-love is inherent in Art (for Art, and to Art). Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression. As an author, I despair of my novel every time I am slow to finish a scene. The novel is enamored (and Eterna is not) of itself (Eterna’s not in love with herself, either: in a disregard of self that is immensely beautiful and which fills me with sadness and reverence, she also disregards my daily pleas that she love herself. Is it that neither she nor I should love ourselves or love at all, or is it a supreme error that clouds her vision of herself and of the grandeur of her destiny? I’m not uncertain about this: Eterna, our passion is as plain as can be; but you don’t care that passion exists, you don’t admit it is even possible in this phase of your life; and despite all this, you love Art, without loving yourself)…

This novel is enamored of itself and it is the sort of novel where mishaps and adventures happen, artistic indecisions, whether to get lost in art, to be silent, to be ignorant; even as it relates events it is swept away by others; it contains accidents and it is the victim of accidents. We see it today, in streetcars with internal warnings in the form of drawings of transients being run over, even as the machine metes out shock and alarm. It is curious about itself, like children in costumes who shout “Trick or treat!” and ecstatically run away. What is disguised is that they are children with an audience. Going around in costume is for them a disguise: the mask is the disguise. I, the author, am principally public even now, in publicity. I am always searching, and I’m missing knowledge and living because there’s a kind of living that I’d still like to experience even though I think I already understand it: the finality of Art as the end of life, of the individual aspect of life: the Tragedy-Idyll that is Love, which is itself made from Beauty by Death which makes of love as much tragedy as idyll, since the certainty, along the path of life, of the personal destruction of lovers (also there are those who aren’t in love who, although they have death they don’t have the Beauty of life, an individual matter) exalts, makes love just as it makes its tragedy. Death is only death of love; there is only the death of the other, her concealment, since for oneself there is no concealment. But there is much for me to learn about love in its execution, about how to slake its daily thirst, about its delicate and implacable congress.

So it is that even as I write, I inquire and hope for things to happen, just like the reader. And when I think of the unruly skip-around reader, I notice that I’m obliged to imagine what I should have the Traveler feel after what’s just happened, in order to deduce what he likely said — since it was inaudible. What he would have said would be what I just told you. It’s not improbable either that he would have said, “I’m a Traveler in a Novel, in a story that’s already underway: I shouldn’t dally then, I’ve been in this scene too long already. Let the reader always see me boarding a train or setting sail; he has to see me leave so many times that I don’t even know what it’s like to be around, and now I fear I’ll have to leave the novel in a flurry of departure.”

In reality, the Traveler was still finishing up with his sticking around when, at first sight of the reader, he took off. In the interval, that moment that remained before he had finished sticking around, he got an urge to stay, but the reader — never inopportune — intervened.

I think the latter will be happy with the phrase I put in the Traveler’s mouth as if he had just learned it: it’s all that he thought, and yet he said nothing about it that anyone could hear.

With that, I think the passage complete, and thus I make good on the promise I made to my novel that I would relate everything, even what I don’t know, which I do sometimes in the novel, and sometimes skirting away from it, to which effect I have arranged these ample outskirts, these suburbs: my prologues.

This Traveler character, whose arrival is always awaited during the novel, garners me more and more sympathy. The words I attribute to him show that he occupies himself above all with his role, sacrificing his own desires (that people hear everything he says, and stay in one place) just to obey me. He was recommended to me for his obedience, and his practicality, and because of a lack of personnel I gave him the job of traveling constantly; there has been so much hurry in the preparation of this book that even delays in returning, arriving, answering, coming to a resolution — which figure in the entire story, and which do so much to move it along, have had to be invented in a hurry. So we’ve given the role of always going away in the book to a character who, just because he sticks around, is stuck with nothing. This frustration in vocation is just as true in life as it is in novels that, in striving to contain even a little truth, offend with its mere mention.

If the reader still finds any imperfection in this compensatory passage, I ask him to appreciate in the present explication the tranquility of reading that my efforts have spared him until this page. At the moment, these forces are focused on keeping the Boy with the Long Stick out of the novel, and we wouldn’t want to beg because that would make everything uncomfortable. We can’t let him drop into some quiet passage of this story, brandishing the long stick of catastrophe in this scenic place, making a drag race of the story, his very apparition clearing out all my characters. He’ll throw himself on the sofa in the end and, observing our frown, will ask nicely, indicating the stick: Would you let me whack it every once in a while? He’ll ask your forgiveness for not having come sooner and your permission later to leave, as if this were all very necessary; he’ll act very solicitous, with promises to get in the way somewhere else; after you give him permission he’ll stick around just the same, he’ll straighten some picture frame that he had knocked with his stick. You would have left during all this, since generally wherever he goes, everybody leaves, who knows why.

His being-in-the-world bruises, but on this planet we haven’t yet found a not-being-in-the-world for him. His not-being-in-the-world is still too near. Places where he can’t be found — very sought after places — can’t be gotten even from the resellers of his absence, and it’s doubtful whether it’s even possible for him to be absent. And he used to depart with such velocity, as if leaving quickly were somehow leaving more, and would thus diminish the time he spent somewhere; this left him so drained that what was left over ended much earlier. His “far away” lasts for no time at all, and meanwhile what you had to put up with from him increased exponentially. He needs to learn to stay somewhere quickly; everyone wants to figure out how to do this, and then teach him how; his retreat isn’t leaving so much as still leaving. And there’s even hurried bruises left by his absence. His is a most occupying presence.

We do not condemn his brusque departure as inopportune; let’s be indulgent: it must be attributed to when he realized “all of a sudden” that there was one wall in the town from which he had yet to fall, and he ran off to occupy himself with falling off of it. The world suffers when he’s near and there’s not a place far enough to throw him. But he has found a new space in this doubling of the world that is the fantasy of a novel. I figure that if I let him come in to my novel, people will suspect that I value him only as a nuisance deployed to distract the reader from an imperfect passage. Moreover I know that in not coming, or wherever he isn’t, he’s well behaved. That’s why my advertisement says: “the only novel where boys with long sticks are not allowed,” and, “it’s the novel that holds the boy at bay.”

It would behoove a novel that wants a readership — my novel is currently bored with me, it would like some guests to come, to have a bit of conversation, it would like to be read — to begin its narrative with an accident, or a good screeching of brakes. The public gathers at such places in such numbers that nowadays lots of books would like to have the same readership as the average fender-bender.

Ever since I’ve been an author I’ve looked on in envy at the audience there is for auto accidents. I sometimes dream that certain passages in the novel had such a throng of readers that they obstructed the progression of the plot, running the risk that the difficulties and catastrophes of the interior of the novel would appear in the forward, among the mangled bodies. You will understand that if the novel had stopped for even an instant, I would have at that point inserted a new prologue in the hole thus produced in the narration. And I would make that prologue with dignity, which is to say with so many decorative ruckuses, rushes, insults, orders, chases, bells, breaks, guards, and inspectors, plus a security guard who comes to read about the accident in front of the window of the passenger who’s reading my novel. In short, with proper homage to the inverisimilitude of the event, which will be entirely dissimulated, like they do in those “Companies” that never admit to the verisimilitude of their tram accidents, a sticking point at this late date in the locomotive narrative. Moreover, I’ll stick my arm out of the window of my novel as a signal to the other novels coming after mine, so they don’t hit it. 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.

Let’s bid farewell to the boy, adding that if he has any absence it is so diminished that his first arrival is already frequent and in its fifth edition of presence.

1 “The best dessert is often tasted but never served.” “He who stays in the kitchen is both guest and regrets at table.” “Hardworking guest, invisible yet.”

Some of my own ingenious refrains, designed to irritate the disorderly reader who goes around saying that he can read my novel halfway, and stop reading the disorderly middle, which nobody can resist doing with my lethargic and prolonging novel. I have so dominated the disorderly reader that he will be the first of his kind to read disorder itself.

2 There’s no lack of texts more difficult than mine: which is to say, there are those that are found lacking. Nevertheless, ever since this morning I’ve been listening to Maruca singing while she combs her hair, and now this afternoon it seems that both things are coming to an end: it isn’t only difficult things that remain undone.