— They appear without a past: faced with a happiness that they never dreamed they could hope for but considered impossible, they cut off their pasts so as to feel it was more real, and made themselves dreams; family bonds and memories were forgotten.
— In the midst of the sorrow of forcing this oblivion, they were as happy as they could be, without passion. The President, who had gathered them there, urged them on.
— A stasis of the happiness of cohabitation, which was the first moment in which insecurity insinuated itself
— To escape from this first tremor in their fragile happiness, everyone— the President, Eterna, Sweetheart, Maybegenius, the Lover, Father, Simple, the Andalusian — all threw themselves crazily (and at the orders of the President) into training for happiness, a rare act of rehearsal in active withstanding.
— Everything is concluded; the characters have proven themselves, and they return to live in the estancia with high hopes.
— But happiness did not entirely return. They worried as the President worried, whether they should throw themselves into Action.
— The plan is to suffocate the long and obstinate battle between the Jubilants and Romantics in which Buenos Aires has been destroyed, a blind discord that the President believes was engendered by Ugliness’s long reign in the city.
The President and his friends dominate in the engagement and abolish civil ugliness.
— So it is done and accomplished, all by means of novelistic miracle.
— The melancholy satiation from a triumph that was erroneously believed powerful enough to return happiness to the inhabitants of “La Novela.”
The happiness in Friendship that the President gave them was real, but it delicately did not allow itself to be felt. But there were unhappy shadows that made Action necessary for him; later, again discontented, he will invite them to disperse, to die simultaneously.
He was unhappy because he couldn’t be what he should have been, a Thinker alone, and he made Eterna unhappy that he was what he should have been. And that obliged him to be a writer and reader of the melancholy.
— Backs, which are the curves of a Deathless pain, fade away in the distance.
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Macedonio Fernández is considered one of the greatest Argentine writers of the twentieth century. He was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, and Macedonio’s metaphysical and aesthetic ideas greatly influenced Borges’s generation. The mythical life of Macedonio is almost as interesting and fun as his books. Some of the stories about his life include: his campaign for president, which consisted of leaving notecards with the word “Macedonio” on them throughout Buenos Aires’ cafes; his attempt to found a utopian society, only to be thwarted by pesky mosquitoes; and his belief that he shouldn’t publish, instead allowing his work time to “age.” He passed away in 1952, and the first edition of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna was released in 1967.
Margaret Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She was a Fulbright fellow in Argentina in 2004, during which time she researched the life and work of Macedonio Fernández. In addition to translating and teaching, she is also developing a book based on her dissertation, which analyzes representations of the embalmed corpse of Eva Peron.
Adam Thirlwell’s first novel, Politics, was translated into thirty languages. In 2003, Granta chose him as one of the Best Young British Novelists. His much-praised book The Delighted States won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2008. He lives in London.