And, a proceeding act of the Character’s Training as gesture of respect towards the Reading Public, thus guaranteeing that for once its efforts are fittingly rewarded.
DEDICATION TO MY CHARACTER ETERNA
In Eterna I have known the maximum impulse to piety without vice, nothing confused or demented in the act of abnegation and mercy. Nothing that can be published, spoken, or otherwise evoked can prepare the mind for her fulminous and total impulse, her Act of Pity. The most gallant Promptness of spirit moves in Eterna’s every step, a total and instantaneous impulse, an altruistic leap towards succor or engladdening or consolation.
In
A Flash
I encountered
The sublimely Swift
It was in Eterna; and nobody saw it.
Her light shone and nobody saw it, not in anything.
Reality and the I, or principally the I, the Individual (whether or not the World exists) only gives itself fully in the altruistic moment of mercy (and of satisfaction) without fusion, that is, in plurality. The end point of What Is, of World, and is its only ethic is the non-instinctive act of Mercy, keeping for itself the lucid discernment of plurality, without confusing the Other with Itself: to still be other, while living for another.
To
A Superlative Individual
Capable of stopping time. Of compensating for death. Of changing the past.
And, so obliging with her Self, to kill
With her No
With her forgetfulness
With her comicalness
With her reproach
But ever melancholy over her unrelinquished past, her unappeaseable past.
WHAT IS BORN AND WHAT DIES
Today we release to the public the last bad novel and the first good novel.1 Which one will be the best? In order to prevent the reader from opting for his preferred genre at the other’s expense, we’ve arranged that these two novels be sold as an indivisible set; considering that we’re unable to impose a mandatory reading of both novels, at least there remains the consolation of having devised an obligatory purchase of what one does not want, because it cannot be untangled from what one does. Therefore, the Obligatory Novel will either be the last bad novel or the first good novel, depending on the reader’s taste. There is one absurdity that must not be permitted: that the reader thinks the two novels are equally good, and congratulates us on such comprehensive “good fortune.”
The Bad Novel deserves its homage; this is mine. This way, nobody can say I don’t know how to do things poorly, that I didn’t have the talent for this novelistic genre; that is, the bad. Thus I’ll show the full scope of my capacities in the same day. It is true that I have run the risk of mixing up the bad thoughts of Adriana Buenos Aires with the good ones that constantly occurred to me for Eterna’s Novel, but it’s up to the reader to collaborate and sort out the confusion. Sometimes I found myself perplexed, especially when the wind blew the manuscript pages around the room. Then I wouldn’t know which page belonged in which novel because, as you know, I wrote a page of each novel per day; nothing could help me because the pagination was the same, the quality of ideas, paper, and ink were all equal — I had made an effort to be equally intelligent in each, to keep my twin novels from quarreling. How I suffered, not knowing if the brilliant page before me belonged in the last bad novel or the first good one!
Let the Reader take charge of my agitation and trust in my promise of a forthcoming goodbad novel, firstlast in its genre, in which the best of the bad of Adriana Buenos Aires and the best of the good of Eterna’s Novel will be allied, and in which I will recollect the experience gained in my efforts to convince myself that something good was bad, and vice versa, because I needed it in order to finish a chapter of one or the other…
1 Already in The Newcomers Paper and the Continuation of the Nothing (1944) these novels were so announced. As the Warning to Adriana Buenos Aires says, with its publication the original plan was restored, because although they were not sold as a set, the two novels have nevertheless appeared almost simultaneously. (Editor’s Note — Adolfo de Obieta)
PROLOGUE TO ETERNITY
When the world hadn’t yet been created and there was only nothingness, God heard it said: it’s all been written, it’s all been said, it’s all been done. “Maybe that’s already been said, too,” he perhaps replied out of the ancient, yawning Void. And he began.
A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old.
PERSPECTIVE
There’s nothing worse than sloppiness, unless it’s the facile perfection of solemnity. This book will be eminently sloppy, which is to say it will commit the maximum discourtesy possible to its readers — except an even greater and all too common discourtesy: the perfect, empty book.
I’ve done what I can to hide the seams in the patchwork passages of my novelistic prose, which brings with it inexhaustible swatches of revision; and I do myself the service of confessing what no one will notice, because if ever a book demanded hard work it’s this one, and I believe that all art is labor, and very arduous labor at that.
But I know that a highly personal, compensatory immortality awaits me: Generations of readers will pass the shop window, and nobody will stop to buy the book.
This will be the novel that’s thrown violently to the floor most often, and avidly taken up again just as often. What other author can boast of that?
A novel whose incoherencies of plot are patched together with transversal cuts that show what all the characters of the novel are doing at every moment.
An irritating read, this book will annoy the reader like no other, with its false promises and inconclusive and incompatible methodology; nevertheless it’s a novel that will not cause reader evasion, since it will produce an interest in the soul of the reader that will leave him allied to its destiny — it’s a novel that needs a lot of friends.
In the end, the final organization and revisions took me three frenzied days; happily, I wear detachable shirt cuffs, and I had kept all of the ink-stained ones ever since I began to conceive of the novel; about a thousand of them have all of my notes, in addition to twelve thousand composition books and notepads and loose pages: I threw it all into a corner of my room. Once I made it out of bed, I flung myself to the floor, where I stayed for three days; I raved and I cried, a hundred times over I howled: This is the last time I write for publication.