The Museum of Eterna's Novel

FOURFOLD PROLOGUE?

I hope that my numerous prologues — a kind of “Complete Works of Prologuery”—and my novel will be considered so good that it will be as if Posterity itself, which decides what is good, had commissioned them.

And I seriously believe that Literature is precisely the belarte of: artistically carrying out something that others have already discovered. This is the law for all belarte and it means that the “subject matter” of art lacks any intrinsic artistic value or that the whole value of art is in the execution. To classify subjects, deciding that some are better or more interesting than others, is to speak of ethics: aesthetics as such is the artistic rendering of any subject. Everyone can easily find subject matter, it’s superabundant: artistic pages are extremely scarce, and manufactured with desperation, with Labor’s tears and rages.

Maybe this suffering and constant failure annexes the artistic urge, it’s the punishment for whoever prefers dreaming to living, art to life, when life has for us an Eterna in whom all beauty finds expression, heartbeat, breath; so that to look towards art is like using flashlights during the Day.

And if, having Eterna, we still pursue inventive art, we’re all the more blind and we walk as though guided against our better selves, carried away by baseness, since persisting in invention despite having found a living Eterna is a horrible option contrary to our nature.

In Eterna’s orbit invention is meaningless.

Observe that my novel is corpulent, and very mouthy; it has three outlets (the characters’ training, the conquest of Buenos Aires, and the final separation), two resumptions of the beloved quotidian: life in “La Novela” (after the Training, after the Conquest); the presence of the Traveler at the end of each chapter; Sweetheart and Maybegenius are in charge of the beginning of each chapter. There is also the entire prehistory of the novel’s existence in two, very different forms: first, ten years of reiterated promises of its future publication, and second in the seventy prologues designed for it; it also features loose pages, a total novelty for novels, as well as a model page and an exhibition of a day in the estancia “La Novela,” a cast of discarded characters, a sort of character internship, and an absent character; moreover, it expands to include the merit of never having been accomplished before.

Thanks to a flippancy, even a fraternity, with inexistence that permeates the novel’s tone, this bodily robustness, this substance on which the novel prides itself, does not result in a suffocating excess of atmosphere for the Lover’s slim figure, despite his aversion to existence.

Since I felt that there’s a good Literature to come and that Literature, or Novelism, had been bad up until now, with all of the publicity that I got thanks to my friends at the newspapers, who repeatedly lobbied me to announce my projected, great, and genuine novel—“Eterna and the Child of Melancholy, the Sweetheart of an Undeclared Lover”—as an inauguration of Good Literature, I proposed an entertainment for the reading public, that they indulgently continue reading the bad literature, relieved by the knowledge that the good stuff was on its way, since I know that it’s the virtue of dedicated readers to read while they wait; but if they don’t read they might abdicate readership altogether, which is to say, for my novel too.

This is how the period of promising my novel began, and it soothed me to note that people kept reading the bad — for which I thank the bad authors — and awaiting the good — for which they should be thanking me: We’ve cooperated, you could say, but we parted ways decidedly when I began to write. The only explanation is that since the new novelism is so good, no one knows when it will be fully realized.

Thus I justify my repeated promises of the Good Novel and also the confection of my Bad but final Novel: to keep the reader waiting, and yet still in good condition.

We’ll make a spiral so twisted that it will make even the wind tired winding inside it, and it will come out the other end dizzy, and forgetting which way to blow; we’ll make a novel that for once isn’t clear, isn’t a faithful, realistic copy. Either Art has nothing to do with reality, or it’s more than that; that’s the only way it can be real, just as elements of Reality are not copies of one another.

All artistic realism seems to arise from the coincidence that there are reflective surfaces in the world; therefore Literature was invented by store clerks, which is to say, copyists. What is called Art looks more like the work of a mirror salesman driven to obsession, who insinuates himself into people’s houses, pressuring them to put his mission into action with mirrors, not things. In so many moments of our lives there are scenes, plots, characters; the mirror-artwork calls itself realist and intercepts our gaze, imposing a copy between reality and ourselves.

Art begins only on the other side of truth-telling, which is itself science’s justified hard work, but it’s an ungainly intruder in art. Let our characters remain ignorant of whether we are bringing them to the estancia “La Novela” or to the novel itself. I want to know what it is that scenic actors are pretending to be. Are they pretending that they are people and not characters, which imitate men and aren’t alive? But their personal lives still are happening to them; whatever they are on paper, they are not paper characters, that is, they are not written. I don’t want my characters to resemble either people or “actors,” I want the enchantment of being “characters” to be enough for them.