The Museum of Eterna's Novel

PROLOGUE OF AUTHORIAL DESPAIR

The disorder of my book is the same disorder of all apparently well-ordered lives and works.

Congruency, or an executed plan, in a novel, in a psychological or biological work, in a metaphysics — in all cases it’s a trick of the literary world, and perhaps the entire artistic and scientific world.

Congruency, or a planned-out work, is mystification in Kant, in Schopenhauer, almost always in Wagner, and in Cervantes and Goethe.

That there should be a continuity or congruency outside of some text or other treatment is just as fantastic as consistency in the reader or student of such works.

I would be remiss if I did not at the same time declare that there is nothing more delicious, yet maddening, than the integrally congruous work. I mean unity, continuity not by means of repetition but by development, by incessant variation in a kind of permanence (of a thought, of a feeling). The supreme specimen of this development in unity, in my judgment, is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

In a complete mystification of unity, Schopenhauer presents us with the three volumes of The World As Will and Representation, with many chapters, each numbered and in apparent order. This thinker, perhaps the greatest metaphysician, published a draft of his research as if it were a great book, solid and definitive. Kant’s argument in the complex Critique of Pure Reason is like the rattle of magazines inside a paper bag. Perhaps Spencer was able to write true books without an interrupted reasoning, without a single useless word. Perhaps today Husserl is more methodical?

Although I said otherwise in the opening, I don’t have anything to apologize for.