The Museum of Eterna's Novel

TO THE AUTHOR (OF THE NOVEL) HAS NOTHING HAPPENED TO YOU?

I’ll tell you, Sweetheart, about the “reader’s accident.”

Anyone who comes impetuously or unprepared to a precipice falls, violently: an author must take care not to excite the interest of the reader when he has already chosen where to situate the end of his tale. In a novel of such intense, sustained interest as ours, the author has been careful not to destroy the reader with a precipitous fall. Rather, he prefers to slow down the narration close to the end — so much so, and I fear you’ll see this, reader — that he will finish the book smoothly, that is, asleep.

Not every author takes such precautions. I won’t let the reader be so surprised by the limit-end of the novel, when his passionate interest is most fired by the devilish skein of the book, that he falls headlong from the fullness of the novel into an attention-vacuum.

Since nothing happens to the author of the novel, it seems right to me, Sweetheart, that nothing should happen to the reader, except for the violent mental accommodation that he must employ just to enter into such a great novel, an accommodation of unique intensity, considering that he must first divest himself of this bulk of bloodless prologues.

(I make the readers love the characters in the prologues so as to spare the latter any bitter reaction on the part of the incredulous and discontented reader, when they first appear before him in the story.)