The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE NOVEL IN STAGES

The artistic school that shall soon dominate, to reign over art’s maximum severity, will only tolerate the novel in stages, a kind of melody without music in which it unfolds in stages that mirror the chapters, like a metaphor of what is felt in each moment of the novel.

Prose will be like music: a succession of states without being long-winded in motivation, which can be understood by reflecting on a Beethoven sonata. In a quarter of an hour we hear the totality of the feeling in a four-hundred-page novel, which we would need many hours to read.

In what follows, I give a summary example, using my own novel as a first attempt.

This is the same novel you just finished reading, in stages.

— There was a human plurality that lived in mutual sympathy (Estancia “La Novela”).

— They appear without a past: faced with a happiness that they never dreamed they could hope for but considered impossible, they cut off their pasts so as to feel it was more real, and made themselves dreams; family bonds and memories were forgotten.

— In the midst of the sorrow of forcing this oblivion, they were as happy as they could be, without passion. The President, who had gathered them there, urged them on.

— A stasis of the happiness of cohabitation, which was the first moment in which insecurity insinuated itself

— To escape from this first tremor in their fragile happiness, everyone— the President, Eterna, Sweetheart, Maybegenius, the Lover, Father, Simple, the Andalusian — all threw themselves crazily (and at the orders of the President) into training for happiness, a rare act of rehearsal in active withstanding.

— Everything is concluded; the characters have proven themselves, and they return to live in the estancia with high hopes.

— But happiness did not entirely return. They worried as the President worried, whether they should throw themselves into Action.

— The plan is to suffocate the long and obstinate battle between the Jubilants and Romantics in which Buenos Aires has been destroyed, a blind discord that the President believes was engendered by Ugliness’s long reign in the city.

The President and his friends dominate in the engagement and abolish civil ugliness.

— So it is done and accomplished, all by means of novelistic miracle.

— The melancholy satiation from a triumph that was erroneously believed powerful enough to return happiness to the inhabitants of “La Novela.”

The happiness in Friendship that the President gave them was real, but it delicately did not allow itself to be felt. But there were unhappy shadows that made Action necessary for him; later, again discontented, he will invite them to disperse, to die simultaneously.

He was unhappy because he couldn’t be what he should have been, a Thinker alone, and he made Eterna unhappy that he was what he should have been. And that obliged him to be a writer and reader of the melancholy.

— Backs, which are the curves of a Deathless pain, fade away in the distance.