The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE CHARACTERS' NOVEL

I have entrusted the execution of my novel to the following characters, having selected them carefully based upon their conduct in other novels. I have indoctrinated them in everything a “character of art” should know, I’ve made them read my prologues, which are studies in Aesthetics. If the novel turns out badly, don’t blame me. I did everything that as an author it was incumbent upon me to do: to prove the characters’ discipline by means of their previous conduct, and give them a theory that they didn’t have before, of the character of art.

Every character only halfway exists, because none was ever introduced who wasn’t taken by half or more from “real life” people. That’s why there’s a subtle discomfort and agitation in every character’s “being,” since there are several humans wandering the world that a novelist used partially for a character and who feel a discomfort in their “being” in life. Something of them is in a novel, fantasized in written pages, and it can’t truly be said where they really are.

All the characters are under obligation to dream of being, which is their proper way of being, inaccessible to living people, and the only genuine stuff of Art. To be a character is to dream of being real. And the magic of them, what possesses us and enchants us about them, and what only they know as the form of their being, is not the author’s dream, but the dream of being, in which they avidly participate, that makes them act and feel. Only realist art — which is not Belarte — the art of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Quixote, Mignon, lacks “characters,” which is to say, these characters don’t dream of being, because they think they are copies.

What I don’t want and what I’ve tried to avoid twenty times over in my pages is that a character seems to live, and this happens any time the reader hallucinates the reality of an event: the truth of life, the copy of life, which is my abomination, and certainly, isn’t that the genuine failure of art, the worst, perhaps the only frustration or abortion of a character, that he appear to live? I can admit that they want to live, that they attempt life and even covet it, but I cannot admit that they appear to live, in the sense that events seem to be real; the abomination of all realism.

For my pages, I want constant fantasy, and faced with the difficulty of avoiding a hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art, I have created the only character ever born whose consistent fantasy is the guarantee of the firm irreality of this novel, which is irreducible to the real: the character who does not appear, whose existence in the novel makes him fantastic with respect to both the novel and the world, being — he seems real to us because daydreams exist. To him I have entrusted the vouchsafing of fantasy here, if all else fails; to the Traveler who in life itself perhaps never existed, since I don’t believe in Travelers; the two sentiments that define the Traveler of quality are the faculty and desire to forget, and the desire to be forgotten. The magnificent Forgetter, complete with this latter faculty of indifference to being forgotten and even the valor and knowledge to want his image to die in the mind of others, a death more fearful than personal death, perhaps because we all sense that personal death does not exist. The death that exists in oblivion is what leads us to the error of believing in personal death. But this belief is very weak, that’s why we do a lot more to avoid being forgotten than to avoid dying.

— And so, where does our Traveler wander and sojurn?

— My Traveler lives there, across the way. And he doesn’t come out of his house except at the end of a chapter.

He functions exclusively as the extinguisher of the hallucination that menaces the story with realism.