In the construction of my novel, my fervent hope was to make of the novel a home for non-existence, for the non-existence necessary to The Lover, the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, to effect his very real hope, by putting him in some region or locale worthy of the subtlety of his being. His exquisite aspiration is to have a place somewhere in my novel while he waits for his love to return from the other side of death…
In his Museum, Macedonio Fernández invents a laboratory for investigating whether every philosophical question can be observed through the condition of falling in love. “Sexual love,” wrote Freud in his paper “Observations on Love in Transference,” “undoubtedly has a prime place among life’s experiences… Everybody knows this, apart from a few weird fanatics, and arranges his life accordingly…” But Fernández knew this already. In his novel, he tests the possibility that all philosophical questions are only meaningful in relation to human relations: that all questions of infinity are really questions about love. Eterna is the beloved, after alclass="underline" and she is also the eternal itself. “In other words, my novel has the sacred vocation and the allure to be the Where from which the Beloved will come, fresh, returned from a death that couldn’t best her…”
And who else is a novelist in love with, if not the absent reader?
5.
And so it is that the process called fiction, the object called a novel, the entities called characters, will all be entreated to undergo various transformations.
And the playfulness of this novel is identical to its sadness. If Macedonio could truly carry out these experiments, if he really could make the reader doubt his own reality, then maybe he would have a chance to create the conditions for his happiness. But, of course, he can’t. And yet the experiments are enchanting.
A character can be discontinuous (“this novel resembles life more than the ‘bad’ or realist novel, that is, the conventional novel. Continuity (identity) of the characters makes sorcerers out of the bad or conventional novelists: this continuity was never shown in a novel nor does it exist in life. .”). There can be extra characters (“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.”). There can be characters borrowed for a single use and then kept on for fun. There can be a character who appears fleetingly in the novel before her official first appearance. And through the prologues, a proleptic novel will take place in hints, in the background—“a frightened General hesitating in the darkness on the basement stairs of the house, called ‘La Novela,’ while Eterna guides him, his trembling prompting her to say: But General, take hold of my skirt and walk confidently, I won’t lead you astray.” Yes, this novel will contain “loose pages, a total novelty for novels, as well as a model page and an exhibition of a day in the estancia ‘La Novela,’ a cast of discarded characters and a sort of character internship, and an absent character…”
As for the novel itself, Macedonio thinks that it should take place in the street:
It would be even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out into 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 dream 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 themes.
And I think this fantasy is important. It is one of the oldest avant-garde wishes, after all, to make a novel which is in fact a reality: that art only has a value in so far as it stops being art. And Macedonio Fernández was an anarchist. He believed in transformative action.
The way in which the novel does indeed go out into the street, where the characters are sent out by the President to undertake a succession of small practical jokes—“the deployment of jokes as conquest”—is reminiscent of Borges’s comic homage to Fernández, “The Man Who Will be President,” with its plot to create a nervous breakdown generally in Buenos Aires, to multiply annoyances: “barrel organs wouldn’t ever finish a melody, cutting it short halfway through; the whole city would be filled with useless objects, like barometers; the handrails on trams would be loosened, etc.” And so lead to the election of Fernández as President.
The novel that goes out into the street is an ideal of artistic suicide: of a novel that suddenly stops being a novel at all.
All his technique is designed to improvise confusion between what is fictional and what is real. So that one of his characters can discuss with another character a scheme for making them live: to write their own story about characters within the noveclass="underline" “‘It’s a story about ‘novel characters,’ not living persons, and it was conceived this way because in it I found a magical method for you and I to have life and be people, because it seems to me that the moment a character appears on a novel’s page narrating another novels, he and all the characters listening to him assume a reality, and they only feel themselves to be characters that are narrated in the other noveclass="underline" whether the reader likes it or not.’” And once the characters’ reality is doubted, then Macedonio can then doubt his own: “It seems the author has had a fright; he thinks he’s a character, trapped by his own invention. Will he recover? What if he stayed that way forever! This is the tenth time it’s happened to him: for two years running, he’s been thinking more or less every day about these characters, and sometimes he’s known the sweat and suspension of feeling himself to be no more than a character! Is he really more real than they are? What is it to be real?”
But Macedonio needs more than his own self to become unreal. He needs the readers to help.
This novel itself, he writes, must be finished by its readers, who will then become characters, unreal, in their turn: “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.” For the reader is a character in a deeper way, too. Every reader, after all, is a skipreader: a “Skip-Around Reader.” No one reads in order. But since this novel is itself not written in order, the Skip-Around Reader becomes an Orderly Reader. Freedom turns out to be manipulation: we are always in the grip of a higher power-prevented in our assumptions by the novelist. Which is another way of saying that we might be a dream: “you are so uncomfortable with the disorder I brought you with my prologues, in which the disorderly author makes you a figure of art and dreams, that you have flipped and are now a continuous reader to the point that you doubt the inveterate identity of the disorderly self.”
6.
And I love this, the grandeur of the experiment, but I am still not sure.
In a very early essay, “The Nothingness of Personality,” Borges wrote that “Life is truthful appearance”—there is no deeper reality: “Reality has no need of other realities to bolster it.” And as further proof he quoted a line of Macedonio’s: “Reality works in overt mystery.”