The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER XIII

NOVELS IN “LA NOVELA"

As Sweetheart and Maybegenius know from listening to conversations in the estancia (long Saturday conversations about art and science, with the President as friendly mediator), that he (the President) is preparing a novel. This is why they want to give him the argument about life in “La Novela,” since any day of this existence would make a charming tale.

The novel that the President is thinking of writing — and which, according to him, he’ll never write — would entail an original conception of “novelism of the consciousness” or “the worldless novel.” (So his passion for thinking alternates with his passion for creation.) Sweetheart and Maybegenius found these notes in his notebook:

The characters, who are not physical persons but consciousnesses, were living people, they lived in the World, or in the Dualism; they now inhabit the universe of events of consciousness, which is absolutely indeterminate (with inter-consciousness determinism: each time that someone experiences an intense mental state, it passes to the others; why does an intense mental state happen? Why does it work on the others? These “whys” do not exist: this is how it happens, and that’s all).

They live as consciousnesses operating causally among themselves; each one with its conscious phenomenology; they conserve the memory of their corporeal existences; but they are not only memory, they are actuality. (Except for Mnemonia, she’s only Memory.) Someone has a problem or forgets, has a fear or a confusion; the most powerful feeling sets the tone for the whole group of consciousnesses. The unfolding of consciousness is absolutely free; it is eventfulness, nothing more or less than how we can become dizzy without wanting to; in each consciousness the states come without reason; it’s ridiculous to say that some whirlwind of dust would cause fear or anger, because why was the whirlwind there? It is continuous spontaneity, which is to say: we are truly inhabiting the mystery.

Therefore the characters in this novel do not have physical bodies, sense organs, or cosmos. Their communications are direct, without words (which the author will have to invent and attribute); they are nothing but direct psychism operating from consciousness to consciousness; the nearness that one consciousness might feel to another is not distance but consciousness; causation between consciousnesses, which are connected among themselves but individually disconnected from the cosmos; a plurality of consciousness with immediate intercausality.

The characters must live on ideas and psychic states; they are psychic individuals. This “worldless novel” seeks to dissolve the supposed causality that the cosmos exercises over consciousness; that if without tigers we can feel that a tiger wounds and mauls us, we could feel what we feel without a cosmos: colors, sounds, odors. There is an original series of phenomena in conscious phenomenology: the first time they appear contiguously, and later they are voluntarily reproduced, they are copies; but an infinity of them are not — especially the ones that are truly the most important in themselves, like appetites, desires, affective phenomenology — the first ones are extrinsically important because of their supposed causality; the tiger appears as the cause of many destructive pains, but in themselves they are ineffective: colors, sounds, lines, noises — even though they cause subsequent events of a given intensity of pain or pleasure.

Put another way: The conscious effect that this novelism seeks is to delineate in the mind of the reader the mere conscious being, without a world, as an intelligible possibility. Now is not the time to discredit the entire library of novels, those that narrate gossip, of men acting on the world and acting in the world; consciousness without cause, with its own operability.

The current century isn’t apt for tales of events in the relation Cosmos-Person, but for the dream of consciousness, for the merely psychic Individual, liberated from the Cosmos.

The novel should take place in a climate without disturbances, brawls, jealousies — although the sorrows of life exist, as direct but nonspatial intercausal groupings (the other consciousnesses are the external “world” of each consciousness). These are beings who do not draw or write castles in the air; I play with a death that takes place, yet never kills: Where Everything Comes Back From Death. The characters are all returned from death a thousand times, from a self-death, from mere desire, without poison, or stabbing; they take death as sleep, without a schedule, not nocturnal. (Death is not the policing that we know, but a table always crowded with guests, from which one rises and says: I’m going to bed. This is death.)

The characters that the President has sketched for his novel up until now are:

Posthumia: She wants to be a dead beloved, to only be loved when dead.

Suicidia: She’s always dying “by her own hand” by a resort or conscious call to non-being that is instantaneous, which happens because of a lack of conscious simultaneity: when she’s in pain, there’s nothing else for her, and the automatisic evasion of pain executes the suicidal gesture.

Forgetful: The man who knows that woman’s secret is intolerance for the idea of being forgotten by man: he feigns forgetting, because he knows that this conquers feminine nature. And among his adventures, always triumphant, he meets Notawoman (you must not be a woman to stand being forgotten) and Forgetful instantly loses himself; she makes forgetting both absent and present. Forgetful despairs each time she sees him, and he falls in love; he falls in love with someone he can’t remember for more than a quarter of an hour; this is his punishment.

Bellamorticia: Beautiful because she exalts love, because of so much love lost.

Unforgettable: She never knows she is forgotten, not even in death of consciousness. (This death of consciousness, the only death that exists in the novel and which is procured by one’s own wish or by means of certain defensive reflexes, only signifies a suspension in consciousness. So it is that via mental exertion, on earth, we call existence in the mental present a memory that escapes us, so mere consciousnesses possess the means to self-paralysis. And these solutions of continuity in Unforgettable, obtained by the consciousness’s own impetus, are not capable of doing away with one feeling, the feeling of being unforgettable. In all of the psychic characters in the novel, the solution of conscious continuity which is death, leaves a conscious pulsation latent, a thread of conscious reality that never fails: in Unforgettable it is the inability to be forgotten; in Posthumia it’s the desire to be a dead beloved, and so on, with the others.)

Lost: She doesn’t know where she is; who she was; why she came; where she was going before; what she’ll be; if what she’s feeling is herself, or someone else. When she’s oppressed by sadness she exclaims: How sad Unforgettable is! Or How sad Retrograde is (her friends).

Volupta: Aspires to one kiss in a year, and to die.

Indifferent: Eternal consciousness or eternal death interest him equally. He makes everyone tremble with this sainted indifference.

Presentless: He feels everything on the border of the Past, as a species of past occurrence: “I was hungry” is “I am hungry.” His memory displaces his present: “I loved you” is “I love you.” He lives in the past, but with a present sensibility, and actually lacks both a present and past.

Aspires to Life: Wants to return to corporeal life, in which he must have been very happy — a rare exception.

Amnesia: Has no past. Yesterday never happened.

Sweetie: Hates to be deprived of affection: Material. She seeks tenderness, caresses.

Retrograde: Changes pasts. Someone asks for a happy past. Others, that their past be changed so that they are convinced they lived a different life than the one they actually lived.

Mnemonia: She only has memory, she has no current life or being. But she has a perfect memory: there’s no fact, no matter how fleeting or insignificant, that she can’t recall.

For Herself: She only loves the dead. She doesn’t want to be loved. She’s alarmed or repulsed by any care or interest shown her. She tells everyone: “I found Mydeath. How happy I am. But sometimes I’m not. Poor me, what would it be like if I died.” (She’s looking for a man whose expression shows that he’s lucky enough to die soon, the better to be happy beforehand; she doesn’t want anybody to die, but she’s looking for someone who will.)

Eterna: She knows no death; her consciousness is not suspended for an instant. She’s the maximum intensity of consciousness.

The Lover: Awaits Bellamuerte. He must obtain the resurrection of her consciousness, and prove to her that there is no happiness superior to the fullness of consciousness in his actual, which is to say eternal, passion.

No Return: Without personal eternity; does not return. Everyone knows that she only has one life and one death, and so she has earned the obsessive care of those who know that one fine day she’ll escape them. She must die for a reason, though; she can’t die without one. And since it isn’t known what the reason might be, they shower her with exquisite love and concern. But might it not be good fortune that kills her?

It’s not believed that in any of his conscious planes the President works on his novel for any reason other than to distract himself with the aforementioned annotations. If someone knew better than Sweetheart or Maybegenius how to spy on his consciousness, or maybe even his papers, they would find phrases dropped from who knows where, ideas to elaborate, names, situations, charged words. For example:

“While the author has a body and writes for readers with a body, writing the novel of this group of consciousnesses he uses the words that this group does not use for anything but which the readers need.”

“To exploit words in their excepted elements, in their irregular associations. To actualize or utilize words or nuclei of associations such as: The tick-tock of the clock on the night-stand — the whistle of the wind — thresholds-a glove — a small comb — distant thunder — a fresh gust of wind — a cat’s tread as it draws back its paw — the first whistle of a kettle on the fire — a head tossing on a pillow — the anger of a rose — a closed piano — a loose button — the carnation’s defiance — a suppressor of profiles — the gaze returned to its eyes — will there be another time?

To exploit the great ruptures and sweetness of family life.

The mnemonic context of the present: What position does any given present hold? I get up today, I think yesterday.

Within the generic matter of consciousness, to say for example: “It was sweetness that said yes;” ‘‘He spoke, and was sleeping;” “He felt that somebody was dying,” “Through the door by which the incorporeal, forgotten gentleman was not entering.”

Scenes: With the rose’s laughter — with the tick-tock sound of the little clock under the pillow — with a sleeper’s breath — on glances exchanged.

(Towards a metaphysics of inter- or intra-conscious novelism.)

Consciousness without a living person, not obligated to a “body.”

Plurality of all those who were not “existences” but “lives,” which is to say consciousnesses connected to material instruments.

The individual consists of memory: each one, in his differing mnemonic path; while still living at home, the feeling of he who feels the most is transmitted to the others, so that there’s no more than a single sentiment; the strongest state is like a tonic and it invades the other consciousnesses, to the point of weakening whoever feels it the most and unifying the surrounding field of consciousness. The individual sustains himself in these multiple memories of corporeal existence that each one has; plurality is only in the conscious existence in which they find themselves now.

The spontaneous apparition of conscious states in me, I attribute to their apparition in others. Now, I don’t know why these conscious intercommunications are established, their point of departure being the mind in which they first appear. Because I can conceive of being the only consciousness, and in this case nothing and no one else will be the cause of my states, neither other people, nor material existence. Why this plural world of consciousnesses? I don’t know where the series of states began, what person began this contagion to all other incorporeal consciousnesses, without obvious or direct communication. I truly believe that the only feeling in this life is that consciousness operates on bodies and never directly, never without these bodies’ mediation, which includes objects as well as bodies, which the World constitutes as temporal and spatial, and from which spatio-temporal constitution arises the illusion that we call Memory and the illusion of individual Identity, out of this memory, which seizes upon the external. Pure consciousness that has neither time nor space nor memory.

Are these beings equivalent to dreams, then? Is the dream-state equivalent to this state of pure consciousness? Is there nothing left over for daydreams? I think there is: a dream of the nearness of another consciousness.

An endearing insinuation: a pot of boiling milk (an earthly event) that makes these worldless beings shudder.

Francisco began to despair of his valet duties. Not even the unhinging of delirium saved him. “No,” he said to himself, pondering, “I am not made to be a valet in such a rowdy house full of people with bodies; I’m going to offer my services to a house of people who are only consciousness.” So he went looking for a Mystic who would assist him with a voluntary death. After an intermission in which this was effected, we have him here. “Someone’s coming, Francisco, answer the door,” he thinks, for example, now. Or: “Francisco, you must understand that things aren’t exactly like they were before.” And he goes for the door. He opens Nothing with a nothing key, and in an instant of immobile time later, he’s chatting with the Forgetter.

This is the climate of dreams in which the President operates. Will Art save him?

(The President goes off a ways, arguing with the Author, saying it’s in poor taste to talk so much about his projects and so little about Eterna. And they come to a compromise, which is that her name should appear on every page.)

And Sweetheart, who went away in the night accompanied only by her dog and a willow cane that Maybegenius has peeled for her today, thinks gently of the light of the little house during the moonlit night, just as at other times she had liked to contemplate the lighted house from the dark fields.

She remembers that in the afternoon, when she was walking in the garden, the President had made up a story for her about the gardener’s madness before the spectacle of the flowers, which presented to him an unlimited succession, each flower surpassing the last in beauty. Everything is possible in creation, there’s nothing that can’t be dreamed, that can’t come to pass. Being does not understand no. The President told her this in his favorite formula: the totalpossibility of occurrence, the liberty of Reality.

INSTANT IN WHICH THE DENIZENS OF "LA NOVELA" APPEAR

Maybegenius and Simple suspended their chores of cutting the grass around Sweetheart’s lodgings, an isolated, circular room with windows facing all four directions. Instead, they amused themselves with shared knowledge: Maybegenius says, “Signs kill things: widow’s weeds kill sorrow; going to mass kills faith; theology creates atheists.” Or “God made the world and I give it to you for study.” (He notices the influence of the President-in-diminishment, and he fights against it: Since Progress sticks to the Present like a shadow, God is in Being and in Passion; the Present takes nothing away from Passion.) Or he even goes deeper with his meditation on human conduct: “Humans close their eyes thousands of times without a thought of death.” Simple answers with his own thoughts, like “There are two truths that ugly women don’t want to know, two fidelities they hate: one is the mirror, and the other is the photograph.” Or: “Selflessness is possible, but not by throwing himself into the water to save a drowning fish.”

The Lover dreams, because meanwhile he dreams that he exists; and meanwhile his beloved smiles at him, since they are sure of a venturesome encounter via a love made beautiful by death. Or he says these enigmatic words aloud: “The Depths of Life. (There is pleasure in all pain.) The fast watch and the majesty of Life: white fingernails and the exact time and fingernails painted with the illusion of Life.”

From between their leaves Eterna picks violets for the little vase on the President’s nightstand, violets she leaves without anyone seeing her, with a little card on which she had written:

Violets…

Violets…

And an Eterna

And on whose back the President will write:

Love sealed with violets.

You freed your hand from my hand

And so captured my heart!

Or she sends him a paper flower, with ferns, and on each one of its six petals she has written a letter of her name; and he will respond on the stem of this flower:

He who lived without seeing her

Feels himself late

And now sees Eterna

(Even though one night he had confessed to her that someone who had lost everything in a long life would recover everything in finding Eterna.)

The President and Sweetheart returned from their walk to the swamp by the bank of the river, a grotto formed by six willows, an intriguing place because of its teruteru birds, ducks, and the occasional small snake, and whose profound mystery they hoped to one day penetrate. Sweetheart drove the carriage, the same one in which the President drove everyone to the train station every day, and she let herself be convinced by various ideas or observations.

“The two Murmers I’ve discovered,” the President says, “are Death and Old Age, or the Passing of Time. The inevitability of death and aging are as if time alone could make things slow down, and change. This involves two betrayals: Death, which I’ve already explained is no betrayal, and that the most intense form of old age, in a large number of cases, is young old age, which occurs between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, when a man must assume all the responsibilities and demands of life, leaving behind the life watched over by his mother and father, which he so enjoyed. Old age is simply not about the years but about the entire relationship of the life’s excessive charge with respect to the reactivity of an individual psyche.” And also the President made her see the ridiculousness of his life: that he’d studied the same biological time since he was thirty, which is to say, how not to die, and metaphysics, which is to say, how nobody dies.

Then Sweetheart said to the President, in an undertone:

“Why can’t we continue like this all of our lives, in this Carriage, without time passing, without losing appreciation for one another, all together, in ‘La Novela?’”

“Why not?”

And at this very instant the Traveler (Our Traveler does not go to museums; he looks at what’s alive, not at the Past) approaches the beach on the banks of the River Plate, facing the gates of the estancia. “And can you be happy now, Traveler, with your search at an end?”

“Maybe, because it’s an invented quest, it was not imposed.”¹

1 From here on the author continues alone. The last readers have dropped him. And, naturally, they plan to write.