The Museum of Eterna's Novel

ONWARD

This is a celebrated novel in press, so often promised that the author himself isn’t willing to bet on when it will come out.

Nobody dies in it — although the book itself is mortal — since as people of fantasy, the characters all die together at the end of the story: it’s an easy extermination. Just as the sacristan puts out the candles at the end of mass, authors run the risk of forgetting things and repeating someone’s death, because they take upon themselves the unnecessary task of meting put a little expiration to each protagonist — so as not to leave the fish out of water, the “character” out of the novel.

What’s more, I’m sure no living man was ever in a narrative, since physiological characters, besides being hampered by fatigue and various indispositions — which is why one never sees protagonists falling ill and taking cures, because their job is only to represent falling ill, and to continue with an active performance of illness and death — are of a realist aesthetic, and our aesthetic is creative.

This is a work of the imagination not lacking in plot — so much so that it runs the risk of exploding out of the binding — and it’s such a precipitous plot that it’s already started in the title, to allow time to fit everything in; the reader comes late if he comes after the cover.

In this novel everything is known, or at least confirmed, so no character is forced to publicly display his ignorance, that is, that he doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that the author doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that he is maintaining the character’s ignorance out of a lack of trust. You never see our protagonists exclaim: “Dear Lord, what is this? What should I think? What do I do now? When will this suffering end?” The reader doesn’t know what to answer; distressed, he gets it wrong, and restricts himself to giving notice.

This must be what happens to authors:

1) They haven’t publicized their novel enough.

2) They don’t know how to render “the unsayable” with “ineffable” style.

3) They still believe that sonatas, paintings, verses, and novels all need titles.

In this Novel, the Impossibility of situations and characters, that is, the sole criterion in classifying something as artistic (without the complications of History, or Physiology), has been so cultivated that nobody — no one versed in daily impossibilities, or anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the impossible — could, by alleging that facts or characters were as familiar as their neighbors, deny the relentless fantasy of our tale.

It would be even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out in the street” that I had proposed to a few artist friends. We would have really increased impossibilities in the city.

The public would have seen our “scraps of art, ” novelistic scenes unfolding by themselves in the streets, catching glimpses of one another among the ‘‘scraps of the living” in sidewalks, doorways, domiciles, bars, and the public would believe it saw “life; ” it would dream the novel but in reverse: in this case, the novel’s consciousness is its fantasy; its dream the external execution of its scenes. But we would need another theory in addition to the one we just sustained, that of Impossibility as the criterion for Art.

This novel’s very existence is novelesque, thanks to having been so often announced, promised, and then dropped, and any reader who understands it is novelesque, too. Such a reader would make himself known by the label of fantastic reader. This reader of mine would be very well-read among all the many reading publics.