The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE MODEL PROLOGUE

The model prologue is the best prologue, and I’m only abandoning it because I fear my originality is not up to the task, since it’s already worn out.

Even Cervantes, Dante, and Manzoni begged the indulgence that their work be considered perfect, which it would have been if it weren’t for “the miseries and privations of prison,” or because with “long study and great love” they were poorly done, or because their contemporaries didn’t know how to judge: “ai posteri l’ardua sentenza.”

Under cover of reticence and disguises, therefore, the perfect prologue — that is, the prototype of the bad prologue — may claim:

1. Lack of stimulation, of ample time and accommodations for writing well.

2. Recommend itself to the indulgence of the reader of bad books, like the carpenter who builds an unbalanced chair, and then recommends it for the acrobats in the family.

3. That in my childhood nobody told me that I had talent, and nevertheless, after trying everything, with the present literary system I have here my book. Just as the advertisements for drugs and other longevity systems intone: “I was delicate, with poor appetite, irascible, pale, no one believed I would live, but I used the Kühne system (or vegetalism) and today I can withstand considerable tasks: I effortlessly read Dante’s Paradiso and the wisdom of Baltasar Gracián without the slightest fatigue.”

What pains me is to see Cervantes put forth excuses with the deep cunning of one who knows that he’s written an immortal work. Nevertheless I’m recommending to everyone who wants to write a perfect book that moments before setting to work he should rob or kill someone, so that he can be in a dank jail with rats, humidity, hunger, and cold.

Now, I recommend for whoever wants to write a perfectly bad work a long treatment, if he can stand it, of Gracián reading, and the frequent recitation, while writing, of the entire poem (it’s the only one of his that I know) that begins “¡Estosi, Fabio, ay dolor, que veis ahora!” Fabio, these, o sorrow, you see before you! Even better would be, following the counterexample of Cervantes, to live a long life of excess, luxury, liberties, strolls, and relaxation and to later sit oneself down one fine day to write. If in the most uncomfortable situation Cervantes wrote best, he who writes in complete comfort will produce a terrible book.