The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER VII (LIFE TRIES TO FORCE ITS WAY INTO THE NOVEL)

Sweetheart: “What do we have today in the novel?”

Maybegenius: “Today we have Suicide.”¹

Sweetheart: “Oh, tell me about it right away.”

Maybegenius: “It’s a story about ‘novel characters,’ not living persons, and it was conceived this way because in it I found* a magical method for you and I to live and be people, because it seems to me that the moment a character appears on a novel’s page narrating another novel, he and all the characters listening to him assume a reality, and they only feel themselves to be characters that are narrated in the other novel: whether the reader likes it or not. There’s another recourse that gives ‘life’ to ‘characters,’ and I’ll ask the novelist that’s writing us to use it with us if what we’re going to do does not procure for us, Sweetheart, life, that will be happy for us both, since we love each other so. This other method (I hope our author is listening, that he learns it and uses it with us wisely) consists in the authors of novels (they aren’t necessarily indifferent to their characters’ suffering) depicting a novel bursting out in this sort of vehement exclamation (only in the last line of the novel, therefore, are there ungrateful ‘characters’ who take advantage of this instance of life they’re given and go away to live it without staying for even a line longer in the novel)…”

Sweetheart: “I don’t know that I wouldn’t do the same, although our poor author inspires my sympathy…”

Author: “What’s got my characters so piqued that I find them in conversation giving themselves alternate functions?”

Maybegenius: “Poor author!”

Sweetheart: “I don’t know anything about him, but I sense him, vaguely, as a directionless soul, perhaps an unhappy one.”

“I didn’t hear anything good or bad and the only thing bothering me is that there’s something envious about him, and now he’s spying on me because of these two magnificent ideas that I’ve communicated to you. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t make him happy to see the President set out to write a book and he criticizes his eloquent and moving letters. Who knows how he’d look upon the happiness that your love might give me in Life. As for me, I’m about to burst out with the exclamation that I’ve prepared. I’ll take your hand and run away with you to Life, since I can assure you that this is a Life-giving elocution.”

“Yes, let’s flee, take me away this minute, say the word and I’ll be yours.”

“When I say, we’ll both recite at the same time: ‘Oh, unhappy me’—you’ll use the feminine pronoun, of course—‘with this Horror that we all must bear, sadness upon sadness for always, oh how it plagues us not to be alive, to only be a ‘character’ in whatever novel, when before we read, enchanted, believing that only in novels was there misfortune, desperation.’”

“Oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here, from this nothing; I feel. . I am. . Oh, Maybegenius, could it be true, could we. . hold to this feeling. Repeat it, speak always, Maybegenius.”

“I’m confused, I don’t know… what a horrible pain… ay, Sweetheart! We could have done it!… I must weep! Please, Sweetheart, tell me again what you’re feeling! What did you say, Sweetheart?”

“Speak, for God’s sake, say it again, say it quickly.”

“Oh no, there it is again!”

The author:² “I’ve got goosebumps! I want to give them every word they ask for. What pain! Have these words ever given them what they hoped for? Luckily it’s not Eterna who’s asking me for life! If in her personal majesty and tones she had demanded, clamored as these poor young people do, if she had asked for a life that until today she has not seemed to desire, that in the frustration of her love’s destiny she disdains! How could I reply? If this love is fulfilled and, in the privileged happiness that only souls’ long suffering can give, she had begged to be made a living being, by means of the magic of the artist’s words, would my talents be worthy of placating her?”

Maybegenius: “What’s happened to us, Sweetheart? What dizziness did you feel?”

Sweetheart: “Nothing… nothing.”

“Oh, these were birth pangs, but we’re stillborn. Let me rest a bit, later I’ll tell you that story.”

“Better not to try anything more today; this suffocation is horrible. Better to know nothing of life!”

“Have faith in Maybegenius, don’t despair so soon.”

The author, rushed and curt in his speech: “How difficult is to write on one’s own account something that one has thought so much about.”

Maybegenius: “I’m a good man, Sweetheart — and maybe a genius— but, before all of my goodness, you must have patience with what you know to be my weakness, which is to appear not as a character but ruled by the author’s formulas. I beg of you, consent that I present you with the story I promised, that’s on its way now, as if the reader had sent it my way, and with these introductory parentheses, although the only thing that matters to me is to be with you, even when you listen to me only distractedly.”

Sweetheart: “This is the first time, Maybegenius, that I’ve ever noticed even a drop of acrimony in you.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t even notice. Consider that I have accepted a life without hope; sometimes this gets to me.”

(Pardon, if you will, a versifier who wants to switch to storytelling and, like all men of letters, will end up procuring for himself some theatrical failure — a ruinous finale, like the one met by musicians in the musical tonnage of “opera,” punishing themselves with those clamorous denunciations of their little faith, for not having always been conscientious artists of powerful arts with instrumental purity like Prose or the Sonata, with their printed letters, modest and discolored, or with frugal octaves that any throat can muster — allow me to warn you that all of my stories lose their thread just as quickly as they brush up against some truth or scientific mystery, forcing the author, who cannot vanquish its scientific delicacy to — what did I tell you! — when, as you see here, the author bumps up against two problems: Integral Automatism, or the development of the Consciousness by the Automatism of Longevity, the only imperative in life whose final outcome is to supplant the anarchic, fatiguing vital pluralism with a singular Cosmos-Personage, the monad-being at last liberated from its subjection to the perfidious relation of Externality, and, to come to the other problem, that of Longevity’s return game which makes it the eternal anti-eternalizing Evasion Reflex (self-destruction), guessing each fault in longevity’s plan, thus making it the Monad-Consciousness of Negative Affect, that is, the instant of a singular consciousness occupied by a single mental state which is pain, over which instance of monad-consciousness the Evasion Reflex reigns, omnipotent and instantaneous…

“If this is really about something so tremendous, the reader will surely say that he accepts the story’s digression.”

“Very well — here it is.”

“Although Science appears to me ever more pedantic and sterile— since it reflects the horrible state of humanity — neither does the Story appear to me to be such a serious thing as a literary genre; it’s juvenile, and proscriptive. But here comes the story, come what may.”

“You offend me, taking this as resignation.”

“Then I won’t wait any more, I’ll go.”

“No, no, it all goes at once. A reader’s a reader. Although I once had a back-talker who was certainly unacquainted with a single form of applause.)

SUICIDE

Any state of pleasure or pain that occupies the whole consciousness at any given moment (to say it in turgid language) has at its disposition the full automatism of action (to again put it with little rigor, since the psyche does not casually determine automatism, rather it is at the disposition of the latter and of its sensory peripheralism or centripedalism).

This automatism is instantaneous and always the same: fleeing from pain, clinging to pleasure, conservationist with pleasure, destructivist with pain.

If this happens, therefore, in a child, who has lived enough to know from experience³ that an organism is destructible, and by what means, that is, a pain that violently seizes the psyche — from here automatism must proceed instantaneously to bodily destruction. Or it’s refuted that there can be moments of a singular state in the psyche, which I don’t think has been alleged here, or that from the first bad headache a being will proceed to its self-destruction, with the same interior coercion that would lead him to flee a burning building. Would anyone be surprised by this frightened and immediate flight from the flames? Then no one should be surprised that at the first headache a human being with experience of corporeal destructibility, and the means by which it is obtained, would immediately eliminate himself. What’s more, whoever affirms this does not believe that there’s a hedonistic law in life, which is to say that life has a hedonistic value because of the mere fact of existence, which is of course more hedonistic than not-being. These pages are not made for conventionalisms: we’ve all known many moments and even long years of total misery, and we’ve done so because of our slavery to Automatic longevity without which Consciousness would have some power to tyrannize this automatism and order the act of annihilation. I must speak coarsely here, where I relate the death of Suicide.

Let’s see. Life has no more value than not feeling. In life there’s pain as well as pleasure. Consciousness or Sensibility has no power over the living body, but it senses, inevitably, certain changes in this body, although not all. And Consciousness experiences states coinciding with the beginnings of many actions, and their consequences. The physiological body has an ineluctable power over consciousness. The body dedicates itself exclusively to persisting in its corporeal organization; whether or not the consciousness that is annexed to it dies is of no concern. In any complicated series of actions, the body will never take the path towards its own destruction. Would it proceed towards its own destruction in the first moment of a series of actions corresponding to a pain in the consciousness, that is, the fundamental, congenital reflex to flee from pain would be the only possible self-destructive movement possible, under automatic longevity? What’s the response to all this? That if Consciousness is susceptible for even an instant to being totally and exclusively occupied by pain, it’s because there’s a moment in the physiological processes of automatism in which its ultimate drive towards longevity fails. There is, therefore, salvation: to die with opportunistic hedonism, when life is worth nothing, despite Automatism’s tyranny.

I think of all this when I evoke the details of the death of Suicide. It will already be supposed that I’m aware that 10 % of all mortality is suicide-related, without counting the 50 % of tentative suicides that failed, but which are, if viewed intelligently, clearly authentic expressions of a wish to not exist. But I believe, as many do, that a man doesn’t succeed at suicide unless he’s in a demented state, even if it’s only a momentary, but total dementia. These successful suicides are not the result of an immediate pain, probably also not an adverse hedonic imbalance in the past. They are, undoubtedly, the result of a malfunction in longevity’s empire, which we call life. How could Automatism consent to a mental illness such as suicidal mania? Automatism cannot wish for any death, neither of mutual extermination, illness, or suicide arising from mental chaos. The push towards longevity operates out of certain congenital appetites, which are never mistaken, and by means of action which is always automatic, whether or not the consciousness is aware of it. If the individual dies, it’s never because of a mistake in appetites but because the Cosmos, Externality, allows or disallows the satisfaction of that appetite. So it is that Automatism must resign itself to the fact of death, and demented longing for death. These dementias and devastating instants of monad-consciousness of negative affect are, in a certain way, triumphs of hedonism over automatism, of the desire for happiness (even the negative happiness of not suffering) over mere, irrational longevity, which is the business of automatism, and which does not profit the consciousness.

But what is it that automatism mysteriously proposes that obligates us to live even when it isn’t to our advantage? I ask again: Is it that automatism cannot discount even a single life among billions, that it cannot allow a single one to be truncated because in each one of these is potentially encrypted the hope of achieving the Immortal Organism? This must be why every life matters to automatism.

I return to Suicide, and I remember that in her there was not even the slightest trace of mental instability. Thus I must ask whether the total occupation, however brief, of the Consciousness by a single, painful state was even possible in the “psychic person.” Her destiny kept this lapse in Automatism secret: it was victim of her consciousness’s aptitude for total occupation, at least for a moment, by a mental state. And when this mental state was one of pain, the reflex to avoid pain was cleverly triggered, and with it her life ended.

What one deplores is that she seemed to be a person who, apart from her many charms, seemed predestined for all possible human happiness. Life’s universal Automatism blew the life of her being through this blind alley, which was constituted by the combination of the evasive reflex to Pain and her Consciousness’s rare aptitude for being occupied exclusively by one mental state in the briefest of instants.

Bride, wife, mother, grandmother, four chapters of life both ancient and regulated; these will not live on in her: she was eighteen when the aforementioned congenital reflex and the Monad-Consciousness of a few seconds… it’s true she was named Suicide, but it’s also the case that she was happy, a contented person.

It’s certain that I’ve not made myself understood, and that I’ve failed to convince. But the reader must put himself in the position of this psychological case so as to conceive or represent to himself the moment in which a consciousness is nothing more than pain. If this consciousness in pain is intelligent, if it’s true that we are rational beings, then it should opt at once for the act of destruction.

This is axiomatic: to allege that there are future pleasures is futile, not only because it’s not certain nor even proximate most of the time, but also because the tyranny of the evasive reflex operates without reason. Moreover, the notion of a past pain must be at work in the future pleasures, if the claim is that in a present pain the notion of a future pleasure is at work. So it is that suicide occurs in the moment of pleasure. This could be a mistake, my only one: I could be wrong in affirming that when the personal, psycho-physical world, when the “person” is only two things — a Pain and a base automatism of pain evasion — the notion of a possible future Pleasure has no purchase, and thus there is no possibility to interpose between the instant of this painful monad-consciousness and the flaring of this Evasion Reflex. If this imposition were possible, we would already have another hypothesis; but since experience is not influenced by hypotheses, and my decency and passion for clarity make the notion of first principles repugnant — which fool no one but which confer celebrity and populate universities — I submit myself to the totalpossibility of Experience and I accept its petition for inclusion. In this case, suicide would occur in a moment of Pleasure, but this doesn’t make a difference: since what I’m claiming is that the base reflex only triumphs, inflexibly, over an affective monad-consciousness.

It appears I won’t find my way out of this thicket. But I know that I’m right in essence; only I won’t stray too far from the point because another theory of mine, Integral Automatism, which includes automatism of the intelligence, strips all interest from my clarifications about Suicide’s last earthly psychic state. In keeping with my systemization of Automatism, it is very likely that Suicide felt nothing, not before nor during this moment in which my narrative lingers, the moment of her self-destruction.

I believe that Hodgson’s perception, his investigation of automatism was one of the most lucid moments in human thought. But under the stimulus of this formidable lesson, I believe I was able to integrate its truth and the problem of an automatism that fully and independently dominates all of life’s action; the difficulty is: how can Activity have a longevistic orientation, without perception, which is the mental accumulation and selection of causal sequences (purified by Accident, that is, by non-causal immediate sequences that are masked by the apparent “accidental” quality of causal sequences once they are purified, and thus fixed). It’s certain that congenital appetites are not in error, but how and where they can be satisfied is a matter of totally experiential, phenotypical knowledge. How, without having seen the cat that scratched us, can we elude, again unseen, the scratch of another? Very well, we need not see nor hear psychic states; we only require that the neural trajectory of the auditory or visual signal to transmit the vibration of light or sound properly and that there has been an anterior association with pain (that is, physiological harm, not the pain of this harm, since we supposed that Consciousness, the psychic Sensorium, is abolished or not yet established) with the presence and attack of a howling cat (a present attack, and physical, not psychic howling). The alteration introduced in the optic and phonic field by the presence of a new but identical cat will provoke physical evasion, connecting the earlier harm with its associated cerebral imprint.

The difficulty was therefore nonexistent and the rigor and comprehensiveness of Longevistic Automatism is achieved. There’s no recourse to the alternative, declaring Consciousness a mere witness to all perceptive phenomena, since consciousness is affected only insofar as it’s not a cause of anything, no matter what life brings.

If I’ve finally convinced you by now, it won’t take much to add that each seed among a billion seeds is capable of absorbing the entire Cosmos, all Materiality, in the individual form that belongs to it alone, to the point of constituting the Cosmos-Persona. Like me, like a grape seed or a grain of wheat, suicide may be that seed which takes root and grows, which makes the cosmos of a person and overcomes odious plurality, externality — and with it, death — Automatism— that requires that neither I nor the seed dies — and which uses us to give itself some measure of Rest.

But even as Automatism is Total Truth, we can never know if the person we see living is also feeling. I saw Suicide live happily, but I don’t know if she felt anything.

If she felt anything, we don’t know it. And since the reader doesn’t like us to exhibit her as an “example,” wasting the well-known “readerly compassion,” on an unfeeling character, we won’t go on to find out, thus guaranteeing that Suicide suffers as much as the reader and author, since we’re all now living with the shame of having conceived of the hypothesis of her unfeeling nature.

Hodgson, who knew that all knowledge is phenotypic, was baffled, perhaps by a residual survival of the impression of Intelligence’s spirituality, which “remained” in his mind, resisting his radical “critique of consciousness,” perhaps because of a moment of confused synonymy in his mind between the words “automatic” and “unconscious;” in summary, our dear Hodgson felt it would be too much to affirm the total automatism of Knowledge or Understanding, which, nevertheless, is merely the automatic purgation of the accidental quality of invariable sequences, a purge that takes place for itself alone, only because what is frequently repeated leaves a deeper impression than mere coincidences of contiguity or succession. This unnecessary purge of the miraculous “reasoning” suffices…

But Maybegenius is unfazed when he notices Sweetheart sleeping, and carefully wakes her.

Sweetheart: “It seems like this Hodgson you mentioned is a bad friend. You shouldn’t go around with him if he’s the one who betrayed Suicide.”

Maybegenius: “Oh, if I had thought you were listening, I would have talked about ‘ablation of the consciousness,’ and I would have emphasized that in clarifying what remains of the integral automatism I profess, I have clarified nothing of the essential Mystery of the All; no explanation, either Mechanical or Psychological, can ever be reduced to the Mystery.”

But since one never knows if the reader is sleeping. . and it should be known that Sweetheart is not someone to feign sleep while listening to a story. She’s so charming in her innocence that she’s made me a non-irritable author who, on the contrary, sympathizes with the reader when he falls asleep on him; consequently the reader gives no thought to correcting his own behavior.

Once Sweetheart sympathizes with Suicide, she won’t rest until someone finds her, consoles her, and ends her story, since Sweetheart so identifies with sadness and a “character abandoned in the telling” is the misfortune she most fears for herself and others.

I will rectify the situation (as the author or as Maybegenius) by saying that I don’t admit a difference between suicide under conditions of mono-consciousness in the demented instant of pain and suicidal dementia: the first is a chronic state, a hunger for suicide, and it comes with a constant pre-representation of the pleasure of the destructive act itself. Demented is the same as anti-vital, not the same as anti-hedonic.

1 “Suicide” appeared in the journal Columna (1938) and reappeared in A Novel Begins(Santiago de Chile, 1941), as a preview of:

“The new, soon-to-be-published literary work whose cover will read:

Novel of Eterna

And the

Child of melancholy Sweetheart of an undeclared lover

Dedicated to the Skip-Around Reader

By

Macedonio Fernández

(Of the three existing types of applause—

the one for calling a ‘waiter,’

the one for shooing chickens in the yard,

and the one for catching moths,

which will be the one for this Novel?)

The novel will contain the following ‘short story’ that the author has been kind enough to send us for insertion in Columna. A joke of a story in a joke of a novel, both are working at the extreme margins of Art, revising with a grave, desperate feeling and anxious but honorable investigation the limits of the aesthetic in the disinterested service of an Art most rigorous, stripped of all conventionality and sensuality. This is what Macedonio Fernández tells us of his aspirations, telling us also that he finds himself recently but assuredly rescued from artistic negation. Not so, however, for the ‘natural aesthetic.’

We predict that his novel will provoke the most powerful impulse to the investigation and discussion of Art that has ever been felt in our rocky literary field, where trial and initiative are considered a pleasure.” (Editor’s note)

2 It seems the author has had a fright; he thinks he’s a character, trapped by his own invention. Will he recover? What if he stayed that way forever! This is the tenth time it’s happened to him: for two years running, he’s been thinking more or less every day about these characters, and sometimes he’s known the sweat and suspension of feeling himself to be no more than a character! Is he really more real than they are? What is it to be real?

3 Corporeal; sensory or psychic experience does not exhibit causality, and as a result shows nothing of itself in the Living Body’s skills or purposes in carrying out its tasks.