He was a creole Socrates, a New World Socrates, a founder of a new Argentine literature. Borges had spent his adolescence in Europe, and felt ill at ease, perhaps, in his homeland, which seemed backwards by comparison with the cafés of Madrid and Geneva. Macedonio, he writes, seemed to command a uniquely Argentine point of view on “certain eternal things.” The humbleness of his surroundings, his fraternization with the prostitutes and confidence men with whom he shared his lodgings, and his age all contributed to this romantic image.
In his classic book of Buenos Aires essays, The Man Who Is Alone and Waits (El hombre que esta solo y espera), Raul Scalabrini Ortíz writes: “Buenos Aires’s first metaphysician and its only authentic philosopher is Macedonio Fernández.” As the creole Socrates, then, Macedonio re-founded metaphysics and philosophy in an Argentine context. He’s an archetype, a kind of distillation of what it is to think like an Argentine, of the particular poetics and mournful solitude of the South. That Macedonio is the only authentic philosopher of Buenos Aires implies that many others may pretend to the title. His reported disdain for publication and fame underpin that authenticity and add to his mystique. An authentic porteño philosopher discusses his ideas over a cortado in one of the city’s cafés or bars, or over a mate in his home, at the kitchen table, on the porch of a country estancia while the eucalyptus trees rustle in the hot pampas wind. He disdains the pomposity of writing for publication, for he writes, as Borges once said of himself, for himself and his friends — as an afterthought to these cordial, lazy, endless hours of conversation.
In Argentina, Macedonio’s people prefer to trade stories about his eccentricities rather than read his difficult books: how he gave his guitar away to a busboy who was passing on the street, how he founded an anarchist colony in Paraguay but gave up after one night of mosquitoes, how he slept in his clothes and fed sweets to the ants in his boarding house rooms. Very few of these stories are biographically true, or at least they cannot be verified — though what is known does support the image of an eccentric and a recluse. As his son and literary executor, Adolfo de Obieta once wrote, Macedonio’s life is one of those “about which more will always be unknown than known,” a quality that lends itself to literary gossip.
Borges wrote that “writing was no trouble for Macedonio Fernández. He lived (more than any other person I have ever known) to think. Every day he abandoned himself to the vicissitudes and surprises of thoughts as a swimmer is borne along by the current of a great river.” The writing may have been easy, but reading Macedonio is often very challenging. Perhaps because they trace the errant line of his thoughts, his jokes and ideas and images are all presented at once, in rambling sentences with loose syntax and utterly chaotic diction. His ideas are complex, and they are stated in a complicated, ironic, and often contradictory way. He is consciously trying to make the reader uncomfortable and confused, and he was trying to publish at a time when postmodern literature was not yet a genre. As a visionary, his lot was to remain unrecognized in his time, except by a handful of avant-gardists who shared his vision. It may have suited him best — a man with more than his fair share of anxiety who became increasingly reclusive with age- to cultivate his mystique and work on his manuscripts in solitude.
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In the mythology, Macedonio’s role is not only as Socrates, but as grieving widower. His poem, “Elena Bellamuerte” (Elena Beautiful Death) is one of his few non-posthumous publications. It is a gorgeous, keening lament and celebration of the innocent, childlike quality of his dead beloved — she the occulted, the awaited. He likens himself to Poe, who also had a dead child wife at the center of his poetics. Here, too, was the motionless metaphysician, the prophet of artistic-non-being and the nothingness of death, the champion of oblivion and the prince of thought: a man utterly stunned by grief, overwhelmed by guilt, confused and frightened and unable to come to terms with life.
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, however, was written during a second chapter in this story, one that has long remained hidden, mostly because both protagonists wanted it that way. Sometime in 1925 Macedonio met and fell in love with a wealthy widow named Consuelo Bosch de Sáenz Valiente. They spent the next twenty-seven years as an artistic and romantic couple, though they kept this relationship a secret and never married. Twenty years his junior, Consuelo also died in 1952, meaning that the partnership lasted for the remainder of both of their lives.
Consuelo gave Macedonio back the experience of love and the desire to create. She gave him back his life and allowed him to reshape it to better suit him — an artist’s life, a thinker’s life, not the life of a lawyer and family man. She came from a very old and wealthy family, and this position allowed her to support him financially. He lived on her country estate and also in her house in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, she called him the Maestro and always used formal address when speaking to him in public, as he did to her. She deferred to him as an artist and creator, thus easing the awkwardness, for a man of his generation and background, of her financial patronage. Instead, she was the muse and the benefactress, and the secretary. She copied out by hand — largely from his dictation — the entire first manuscript of The Museum of Eterna’s Novel.
“The death asked for love’s
initiation is not
the death lovers fear.
Day through night,
not night through day.”
Borges remembers: “Two fears throbbed in back of Macedonio’s smiling courtesy and somewhat distant air; the fear of pain and of death. The latter led him to deny the self, so there could be no self to die.” The fear of death, or perhaps more accurately the inevitable encounter with death, is the core of The Museum of Eterna’s Novel The President gathers together his friends at an estancia in the countryside outside of Buenos Aires called “La Novela.” This President is more like a spiritual leader, for he assembles his characters for the purpose of helping them see that they are only characters: their only death is artistic (at the end of the novel), their only being, novelistic. He gives them training maneuvers to practice this “artistic-non-being.” Non-existence and persona are the principle tools with which The Museum of Eterna's Novel builds this theme. In addition to the President, other persona are obviously stand-ins for Macedonio himself.
The Gentleman Who Does Not Exist, The Lover, and the Author are all characters in the novel and are used to express different elements of his theory of artistic non-being. The Reader appears frequently as well, voicing his concerns and confusions, yet all the while also drawn into the net of non-being and recognizing the “character-like” nature of his being — that is, his non-being, his inability to die. The characters, meanwhile, demand to live and seek various escape routes from the novel.
Even as the novel denies the self and, by extension, death, it also despises novelistic pretention, particularly realism or what Macedonio calls “the novel of hallucination.” Why should we want to dream the same dull things that happen in the real world? Novels are for novelistic non-being; they are also tools to elicit in ordinary people the sense of their own non-being. Thus the structure is mutually determining: the novel writes us, and we write the novel, and in this way death is transformed.