The Museum of Eterna's Novel

FIRST: POSTPROLOGUERY NOTE; AND SECOND: PRENOVELISTIC OBSERVATIONS

Useful postprenotes here occupy four or five pages, replacing the same pages that, because they were blank, said nothing in this common tome of the “marked out — traditional — structure — of — literary— binding” which the Editors have imposed. I hope that my Editor will not rob me of what I'm owed in universal ridicule by inserting the five blank pages — which I am here replacing — and then inserting the present critique of said practice. If there is a Critique for the written, I’ll write the critique of the blank; this way I get both the editors’ publicity and their criticisms, which are all homage for the written. These blank pages, texts that disdain the literary, are the pages with which in every book the non-authors and the always-unedited editors disguise themselves as poligraphers.

I repudiate all the blank pages published here as forgeries, that is, originals bearing my signature; actually I don’t know if they are authentic, although they do partially contain something ingenious or some thought, and some editor would even have you think that one of them sprang from my own pen in correlation with certain moments of mental “blankness.”

Consider then that these are: four or five pages at the beginning of the novel — the Editor is about to start his own — four or five more after the End, as if the Novel had to continue, if only in blanks; there are various pages between chapters; there’s another with the title of the book; another that bears a repetition of the cover; and all sorts of abuses of margins — about twenty pages, then, where the author isn’t publishing a thing and the continuous reader has purchased nothing at the bookstore.

Editor’s Observation: Permit me to assert the response that, in effect, the great novelist that I edit here, and whose talents of genius and facile extension of paragraphs the public has known from afar (with our marketing, he’ll get closer), has necessitated (I'm not talking here of monies) at times, when I was fed up with his literature, the insertion of a few blank pages, bound in folio, from some short story, and we understood that this constituted an extra-contractual practice.