If the reader still finds any imperfection in this compensatory passage, I ask him to appreciate in the present explication the tranquility of reading that my efforts have spared him until this page. At the moment, these forces are focused on keeping the Boy with the Long Stick out of the novel, and we wouldn’t want to beg because that would make everything uncomfortable. We can’t let him drop into some quiet passage of this story, brandishing the long stick of catastrophe in this scenic place, making a drag race of the story, his very apparition clearing out all my characters. He’ll throw himself on the sofa in the end and, observing our frown, will ask nicely, indicating the stick: Would you let me whack it every once in a while? He’ll ask your forgiveness for not having come sooner and your permission later to leave, as if this were all very necessary; he’ll act very solicitous, with promises to get in the way somewhere else; after you give him permission he’ll stick around just the same, he’ll straighten some picture frame that he had knocked with his stick. You would have left during all this, since generally wherever he goes, everybody leaves, who knows why.
His being-in-the-world bruises, but on this planet we haven’t yet found a not-being-in-the-world for him. His not-being-in-the-world is still too near. Places where he can’t be found — very sought after places — can’t be gotten even from the resellers of his absence, and it’s doubtful whether it’s even possible for him to be absent. And he used to depart with such velocity, as if leaving quickly were somehow leaving more, and would thus diminish the time he spent somewhere; this left him so drained that what was left over ended much earlier. His “far away” lasts for no time at all, and meanwhile what you had to put up with from him increased exponentially. He needs to learn to stay somewhere quickly; everyone wants to figure out how to do this, and then teach him how; his retreat isn’t leaving so much as still leaving. And there’s even hurried bruises left by his absence. His is a most occupying presence.
We do not condemn his brusque departure as inopportune; let’s be indulgent: it must be attributed to when he realized “all of a sudden” that there was one wall in the town from which he had yet to fall, and he ran off to occupy himself with falling off of it. The world suffers when he’s near and there’s not a place far enough to throw him. But he has found a new space in this doubling of the world that is the fantasy of a novel. I figure that if I let him come in to my novel, people will suspect that I value him only as a nuisance deployed to distract the reader from an imperfect passage. Moreover I know that in not coming, or wherever he isn’t, he’s well behaved. That’s why my advertisement says: “the only novel where boys with long sticks are not allowed,” and, “it’s the novel that holds the boy at bay.”
It would behoove a novel that wants a readership — my novel is currently bored with me, it would like some guests to come, to have a bit of conversation, it would like to be read — to begin its narrative with an accident, or a good screeching of brakes. The public gathers at such places in such numbers that nowadays lots of books would like to have the same readership as the average fender-bender.
Ever since I’ve been an author I’ve looked on in envy at the audience there is for auto accidents. I sometimes dream that certain passages in the novel had such a throng of readers that they obstructed the progression of the plot, running the risk that the difficulties and catastrophes of the interior of the novel would appear in the forward, among the mangled bodies. You will understand that if the novel had stopped for even an instant, I would have at that point inserted a new prologue in the hole thus produced in the narration. And I would make that prologue with dignity, which is to say with so many decorative ruckuses, rushes, insults, orders, chases, bells, breaks, guards, and inspectors, plus a security guard who comes to read about the accident in front of the window of the passenger who’s reading my novel. In short, with proper homage to the inverisimilitude of the event, which will be entirely dissimulated, like they do in those “Companies” that never admit to the verisimilitude of their tram accidents, a sticking point at this late date in the locomotive narrative. Moreover, I’ll stick my arm out of the window of my novel as a signal to the other novels coming after mine, so they don’t hit it. The reader should not entertain himself with the aforementioned security guard; he isn’t ours; the one that belongs in our novel is standing on the opposite corner.
Let’s bid farewell to the boy, adding that if he has any absence it is so diminished that his first arrival is already frequent and in its fifth edition of presence.
1 “The best dessert is often tasted but never served.” “He who stays in the kitchen is both guest and regrets at table.” “Hardworking guest, invisible yet.”
Some of my own ingenious refrains, designed to irritate the disorderly reader who goes around saying that he can read my novel halfway, and stop reading the disorderly middle, which nobody can resist doing with my lethargic and prolonging novel. I have so dominated the disorderly reader that he will be the first of his kind to read disorder itself.
2 There’s no lack of texts more difficult than mine: which is to say, there are those that are found lacking. Nevertheless, ever since this morning I’ve been listening to Maruca singing while she combs her hair, and now this afternoon it seems that both things are coming to an end: it isn’t only difficult things that remain undone.
A NEW PROLOGUE TO MY AUTHORIAL PERSONA
This is what I imagine here: non-death; also the artistic work involved in the transformation of the self, routing the stability of each person in his self.
I’m working with various persons here, which is to say, I’m tempted in every book to transformation: Ella, Eterna, William James, The Lover, and the Author. In my humorous writing, I attempted the irrationality of the author and of his identity.1
“Ella” is the most radical decentering: here and in “La Eterna” I work in contradictions on her decentering: not the minor kind, to be one living being instead of another, or one dream figure instead of another, but the radical decentering, to be pure image, to be and to appear not to be real, and vice versa. Eterna is also fully decentered, because she is the one with the power to change others’ pasts (Sweetheart will come asking to change her past, since hers is the most unfortunate). She hasn’t the power to change her own past, before she met the President, as she wishes. The Lover is the suspension, the caesura of identity, and Sweetheart is the expectation of being. She suffers from that tendency, the poor girl.
I take credit for having lived to construct a metaphysics of the total-lover, without interesting myself in my own metaphysics: as I am, I don’t deserve either explanation or eternity; I don’t deserve Ella or a metaphysics; The Lover deserves both Ella and metaphysics.
It’s very subtle and patient work, getting quit of the self, disrupting interiors and identities. In all my writing I’ve only achieved eight or ten minutes in which two or three lines disrupted the stability, the unity of someone, even at times, I believe, disrupting the self-sameness of the reader. Nevertheless, I still believe that Literature does not exist, because it hasn’t dedicated itself solely to this Effect of dis-identification, the only thing that would justify its existence and that only Belarte can achieve. Perhaps Painting or Dance could also attempt it.
I don’t believe that Metaphysics is the direct pleasure of an exegesis: it’s a task that brings second-hand pleasure only gained from a position of power; it’s a power one seeks out: the direct power of love. If this power were a first cause (since if it were mediated, all virtue and aspiration would be frustrated because the intermediate links can also be frustrated) in the mechanical world, it would bring total presence (visual, tactile, audible, thermal) of the beloved to any present in time, to the same present in time, to the same present of this desire, and with it the details of an actual state of perception. The mechanical world is the world in which material appears: only the body of the beloved appears as a first cause, the sole apparition in a psyche of fervent hope, of desire.