The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE WINDOW-SHOPPING READER

After long experience in beginning polygraphy, preceded by an A-plus silence, the kind of authoritative silence or encyclopedic clamming-up that touches on everything and that everybody welcomes, I have come to suspect that the Reader has a very fragile disposition. But his evanescence is not so extreme that Titles and Covers, at the very least, cannot reach him. From this reflection was born my innovation: title-texts. This is how I want to explain the length of my novel’s title.

Since the circulation of covers and titles is at the mercy of window-dressers, newspaper stands, and warning labels, the ideal Reader of Covers, Reader in the Doorway — Minimal Reader, or Unsought Reader, will finally here stumble across the author who had him in mind, the author of the cover-book, of the Title-Novel. And consider that “the hooked reader” must be the title of the Title that we’re presenting of our novel, since the first plot point already happened on the cover, where the Minimal Reader is solidly hooked by the only thing that the booksellers (ever stingy with their time) have read: the title page, the only page that for most books anyone bothered to edit; truly Posterity, which everyone worships and which no one has met in person, will recognize this.

The Sunday editions of La Nación and La Prensa perhaps suggested to me the cover-text, since they are a species of Sunday edition, a Sunday edition of titles and, despite their length, a holiday of titles. As I have also observed, after a long time believing that these editions never ended — and that’s a warning to everyone who leafs through these editions, thinking them endless — they do indeed end: you have to have a Sunday as desperate as I did during the times when I read them in their entirety, just to extricate myself from the error of believing them infinite, a belief that no thinking person should ever have about anything.

The origin and plan of my inauguration of the title-read is thus proved: to take advantage of the better circulation procured for the title by the shop window, compared with the bulk interior of the book. That part is later circulated by a cordial character, the man of letters, who operates like the match that lights more than one cigarette. One man alone, if he is able to obtain a pension from the “Promotors of the Book” and longevity from tonics (these are the only religion left to us, besides those two great Argentine religions: the faith that whoever goes to Paraguay will return with a parrot, and the faith that people come from the North bring Tafi cheese. Without these tokens no one will believe that they’ve really returned; you can’t bring back another bird, like the way rich gentlemen and ladies bring back philosophers from Europe, taking advantage of the sales) — one man, then, can make a whole edition from a single book, and the buyer won’t even notice when sales fall off, since the borrower leaves him far behind with his invisible trajectory. A hundred title-readers are calculated for each book reader; text-titles and cover-books do not mistake the reader; they are often brilliant Literature’s only hope for a wide radius of influence, since these titles are not content with the modest title of cherished and secret Literature.

I therefore prevent my book from continuing on after those who have finished reading my title withdraw, since it does not belong to that species of facsimile books in wood that simulate full library shelves. This way if the reader does not continue reading, no one will blame me for not warning him. It’s already too late for the author who doesn’t write and the reader who doesn’t read to come to an agreement: now I am decidedly writing.