If Eterna had seen me, she would have laughed so hard it would have almost made her sick. It’s unhealthy to laugh when you don’t want to laugh, and this is the way she laughed in the face of this Hysteria. She never understood Hysteria — what a hopeless creature! — and I appreciate it so much, and it’s so essential to me that I procured for her an expensive and extremely ornamental cigarette holder made of vinagrol, a material whose discovery I commissioned. When it solidifies, it may be made into cigarette holders for smoking hysterics. It is this characteristic of Hysteria, so typical of the male of the species, that particularly excites the fatal explosion of Laughter in Eterna. “My my, what a tantrum!” she exclaims, and thus can’t help but make it worse. One could be on the point of death, choked with passion by the dexterity and patience with which, during a long telephone call that she herself initiated and which began with words of soothing kindness, one has been brought to the ultimate in ridiculous desperation, making one feel he had indeed been quite intemperate.
This is the mystery of Eterna that only I know: she finds more goodness in the sentiment of men than in the soul of women, yet she would like to correct this defect in the male character. There are therefore two Mysteries of Eterna: her felicity in turning a distant phrase; her felicity in her perception of the Ridiculous, to the point of making not only herself but others ill with her own Laughter. Thus she is a Mystery I have never grasped.
Later:
All human suffering, without a father and son having to fall in love with the same woman, without desire between a brother and sister, without kinship, or aberration, or blindness, or madness — all human suffering makes Tragedy and
All the blessings of human life, without the millionaire marrying the factory girl, without a happy marriage between a blind man and an ugly woman; without power or glory, but for Passion, the only certainty.
PROLOGUE TO MY AUTHORIAL PERSONA
The greatest risk one runs in publishing a novel at this stage in life is that nobody knows your age; mine is 73, and I hope that it will rescue me from a potential judgment such as: “For the First Good Novel, it isn’t bad at all, and since it’s the author’s first novel, we predict a brilliant future, if he perseveres in his aesthetic conjurings with strong will and discipline. In any case, we’ll await his future work before rendering a definitive judgment.” With this kind of postponement, I’ll be left out of posterity, and prematurely at that. It’s not flattery at every age when the critics postpone the judgment reserved for novices and squander all confidence on our future.
Moreover, I had planned to publish this novel twenty-two years after the earth completely exhausts its supply of petroleum, because a fortune teller once told me that at the same moment the world will run out of the ample supply of readerly yawns on which we presently rely. Unfortunately, the World Readers Union has promised to take revenge on a certain writer, reserving for him — he just announced his forthcoming work-all the abundant yawns at its disposal and thus severely limiting the available supply for my no less anticipated novel. So you see what good luck it is to be a writer. With this guarantee— which nobody until now has enjoyed — who wouldn’t happily hurl himself into the public eye?
Also I’ve noticed, since becoming an author, how grateful I am to the man who says, “I’ve read everything.” I’m counting on him to come through at an opportune moment, as this melancholy item just appeared in La Razon: “On The Impossibility of Reading Everything.” I’m hurrying to publish my novel so that it may appear before the commencement of this exasperating impossibility.
ONWARD
This is a celebrated novel in press, so often promised that the author himself isn’t willing to bet on when it will come out.
Nobody dies in it — although the book itself is mortal — since as people of fantasy, the characters all die together at the end of the story: it’s an easy extermination. Just as the sacristan puts out the candles at the end of mass, authors run the risk of forgetting things and repeating someone’s death, because they take upon themselves the unnecessary task of meting put a little expiration to each protagonist — so as not to leave the fish out of water, the “character” out of the novel.
What’s more, I’m sure no living man was ever in a narrative, since physiological characters, besides being hampered by fatigue and various indispositions — which is why one never sees protagonists falling ill and taking cures, because their job is only to represent falling ill, and to continue with an active performance of illness and death — are of a realist aesthetic, and our aesthetic is creative.
This is a work of the imagination not lacking in plot — so much so that it runs the risk of exploding out of the binding — and it’s such a precipitous plot that it’s already started in the title, to allow time to fit everything in; the reader comes late if he comes after the cover.
In this novel everything is known, or at least confirmed, so no character is forced to publicly display his ignorance, that is, that he doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that the author doesn’t know what is happening to him, or that he is maintaining the character’s ignorance out of a lack of trust. You never see our protagonists exclaim: “Dear Lord, what is this? What should I think? What do I do now? When will this suffering end?” The reader doesn’t know what to answer; distressed, he gets it wrong, and restricts himself to giving notice.
This must be what happens to authors:
1) They haven’t publicized their novel enough.
2) They don’t know how to render “the unsayable” with “ineffable” style.
3) They still believe that sonatas, paintings, verses, and novels all need titles.
In this Novel, the Impossibility of situations and characters, that is, the sole criterion in classifying something as artistic (without the complications of History, or Physiology), has been so cultivated that nobody — no one versed in daily impossibilities, or anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the impossible — could, by alleging that facts or characters were as familiar as their neighbors, deny the relentless fantasy of our tale.
It would be even better if I had put into action the “novel that went out in 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 believe 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 scenes. But we would need another theory in addition to the one we just sustained, that of Impossibility as the criterion for Art.
This novel’s very existence is novelesque, thanks to having been so often announced, promised, and then dropped, and any reader who understands it is novelesque, too. Such a reader would make himself known by the label of fantastic reader. This reader of mine would be very well-read among all the many reading publics.