The Museum of Eterna's Novel

TO WHOEVER WANTS TO WRITE THIS NOVEL (FINAL PROLOGUE.)

I leave it an open book: perhaps it will be the first “open book” in literary history. Which is to say that the author, wishing it were better or even decent, and convinced that with its demented structure he has committed a terrific blunder with the reader, but also convinced that it is rich and suggestive, authorizes any future writer who is so inclined and who enjoys circumstances favorable to intense labor to liberally edit and correct it, with or without mention of the book, or his name. It won’t be easy. Surpass it, amend it, change it, but please, leave something of the original behind.

By offering this opportunity I insist that the true execution of my novelistic theory can only be achieved by various people, who have gotten together to read a different novel, to write it — so that they are reader-characters, readers of the other novel and characters in this one, will incessantly create themselves as existing persons, not “characters,” as a counter-shock to the figures and images in the novel that they themselves are reading.

This plot of characters who are reading and read with characters who are only read, will, if systematically developed, achieve a uniform and consistent doctrine. The plot of the double novel.

A dialogue to confess that my book is very far from the formula of belarte of written characters. There’s this, too, the “open venture.”

I thus leave the perfect theory of the novel, an imperfect execution thereof, and a perfect plan for its future execution.

Notice that there’s real possibility in the adhesion of the double plot, for someone who is able to give life to a character-reader, by means of an alchemy of consciousness — thus invigorating the existential nothingness of the read-character, who becomes much more of a character because of this accentuation of his frank non-being with an emphasis on nonexistence, which purifies him and carries him far from any promiscuity with reality; and in his own time the reading character’s existence will resonate for the real reader, who writes himself out of existence as a counter-figure to the character.

This deliberate confusionism is probably the result of a fertile urge towards liberation in the consciousness; it’s a genuinely artistic labor; artificiality is fertilized by the consciousness in its attempt to undermine the notion and the certainty of being, from which follows the universal intimidation of the equally absurd and vacuous verbal notion of non-being. There is nothing more than not-being; the character’s non-being, the non-being of fantasy, or of what’s imagined. He who imagines will never know non-being.