The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE MAN WHO FEIGNED TO LIVE (THE ONLY CHARACTER WHO NEEDS EXPLAINING. HE’S ALREADY BEEN EXPLAINED TWICE:¹ HE LACKS EXISTENCE, BUT HE ABOUNDS IN CLARIFICATIONS.)

1 It could be that I’ll only give him two explanations, though I’ve promised two. Yet another inconsistency! But I already said, or I’ll say so later on, that I use any recourse, including inconsistencies, to confront the artistic or verisimilitude, childish verisimilitude, and I will signal each recourse and justify them all. It’s a more frank way of proceeding and a great labor that I undertake on the public’s behalf, much greater than the comfortable and overdone practice of putting lunatics in novels. Quixote, Sancho, Hamlet, these are all characters who are admittedly insane, like Dostoevsky’s idiot, and one of Hamsun’s protagonists (they awarded a madman to this writer, if during a single page he behaves with any sort of logic he doesn’t get the crazy man and we say that the author has failed: the lunatic gains the author an exemption from taking care with his absurdities). And nevertheless these authors continue to believe that they are realists; to make a novel or a play with lunatics in it is like doing science by negating causality, it’s to opt for as little work as possible since everything is explained by dementia, as if it were the novel’s coordinator, which makes realism impossible to verify for the reader, since the disjointed and absurd are in fact a verisimilitude of dementia. Insanity in art is a realist negation of realist art. The effects, consequences, and influences of insanity for the sane characters might be realist art, but the conduct and character of the lunatic character, which is what principally happens in these comfortable, pseudorealist novels, amounts to an outrageous practical joke. Analogously the sensory (the pleasures and pains of eating, smoking, of sexuality and physiology, etc) is not a possible topic for art; the effects of sensuality on the non-sensuality of a character, yes. Example: Bovary, whose life is entirely despicable for its sensual despair, which does not interest art except as desperation, not sensuality. I don’t give you insane characters, I give an insane book, and with the precise goal of persuading by artistic, not realist means.

In this novel the man who feigns to live is not seen, nor does anyone allude to him. He’s not in the novel. He’s a character “like that,” idiosyncratic; “he’s like that,” and so characteristically that no one notices that he doesn’t appear in the novel. He would have liked to appear more prominently, if he still could fit; to give him an importance worthy of a non-existent; to say, for example, that he carried off an artistically rendered Absence, an Absence finally realized in symbols and taking up space.

Or we could blame him for everything bad that happens to the characters, or for the style or lack of elegance in the idea and composition of our novel. Or use him as if he accumulated, in his inconceivable reality as a “absent character,” all of the impossibilities which are openly used in all novels and films and, from there, the impossibility of the author’s knowing what’s going to happen in the future, what the characters think but don’t say, and other small impossibilities that happen in stories.

But I will restrict myself to honestly saying that what’s impressive about this person is that he shows such satisfaction in the simple detail that the first page dealing with him is the only one, and the only one he requires. This wasn’t done intentionally, but by means of a rare strategy: a subtitle in parenthesis and a long footnote. Stories and poems are full of things that are much harder to explain than what happens here, which is the influential action of a character’s absence, thus typographically signaling the efficiency and the substantiality of this nonexistent protagonist.

As I said, nobody would know — this is how the author would have it — that this character isn’t in the novel, if it weren’t for the character (who before this prologue had not yet kindly agreed to be called Maybegenius) (since the man who may or may not be a genius tends to get confused with the Man who Feigned to Live), asking questions, being surprised and demanding his presence, even though he’s already been told that, because of his role, making him appear would be the end of him (not because he’d be bad company for the rest of the characters, but because with him Absence, which is one of the most lauded qualities of verse, would not communicate its enchantment in a novel).

This not-yet-named Maybegenius’s obstinance has obliged us to seek out and finally locate the explication that would have the most eloquence for the Man who Feigned to Live. Each time that Maybegenius asks for him, the reply is that the Man who Feigned to Live is busy with the only thing left in the world today that is shameful, or that could cause someone to hide: he’s tearing apart a box of matches to get to the Victoria Matches Company coupon. Maybegenius is entirely calmed by this news, and he sympathizes with the Man who Feigned to Live. He truly believes that this task is pleasant, but risky, and thus the only serious reason to keep oneself out of sight.

The Man who Feigned to Live does not appear because he thinks that a novel that itself failed to appear for such a long time must celebrate him, and he runs the risk of finding nobody who will praise him if he doesn’t retain, in the novel’s publicity, something of his invisibility, some trace of a future thing; it makes a novel which has waited a long time to be written, to exist — which rarely happens; a book’s non-existence is obtained between its being promised and its being published; a book that is not announced lacks non-existence — to maintain such a character in the state of being partially realized. But it also is convenient for the rigidity of the absolutely fantastic that we want to reign in this novel, that the services of a person with unassailable inexistence are guaranteed.

All of the events and characters in novels are pleasantly impossible, they are fantastic with respect to reality. The Man who Feigned to Live, in his pleasant inexistence, which is how he will gain the public’s respect, is fantastic with respect to the novel: it’s not only that he doesn’t appear in life; he also doesn’t appear in the book.

The reader will say if he and I are happy with the conduct of all the characters, and we don’t know how to thank him for sticking with us until the end, which he’s done so marvelously, running some of the characters over to whichever page the reader was on, so that they could be read. The Man who Feigned to Live has tirelessly attended to his nonexistent role, showing a real flair for non-being and a quite endearing proclivity towards absence; he must have had a lot of previous experience. Once the novel was finished, the ban on his being was lifted and he came to visit us like a newborn, weak and grateful and incipient, without a mark on him. It’s lamentable that this prodigal visit wasn’t part of our lovely novel, but it was already finished. It doesn’t have the talent of always continuing the way the reader would like and the way the Sunday editions of La Nation and La Prensa do. There’s no defect that shows his nonexistence, not even the smallest detail, nothing to run the risk of existing at every moment, of being a failed non-being, the type of nonexistent character that so many books have expelled from their pages.