THE AUTHOR ALSO SPEAKS
I sometimes anxiously wonder how this sublime and difficult novel-difficult now for the reader, but first for me — could be forgettable, considering it contains a frightened General who’s hesitating in the darkness on the basement stairs of the house, called “La Novela,” while Eterna guides him, and his trembling prompts her to say: But General, take hold of my skirt and walk confidently, I won’t lead you astray.
Also you will read how it happened that Eterna, one windless day in Buenos Aires, sent a messenger — with one arm in a sling and a paralytic hand — to cross the whole city with a lighted candle pressed into a contraption in his hand. He was on the point of burning himself because nobody had volunteered to blow the candle out, and he didn’t have enough breath to blow it out himself because he was a character in this novel and was consequently exhausted by the “efforts” that the dignity and glory of appearing in such an indubitably sublime novel so imperiously demands. Reduced to heroic ashes, the messenger was left in a reliquary, not because the porteño (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are known) isn’t the most benevolent and pious of men, but because so many scholars, writers, journalists, politicians, capitalists, communists, religionists both old and new, and penicillinists, have the porteños so full of promises and so lacking in a sense of reality and sincerity that — they didn’t trust the messenger! They didn’t trust Eterna! And so they begrudged the most endearing messenger that ever lived even a breath of assistance.
Also it will be discovered that I gave life to the nonexistence of the Lover,1 just as Posterity has given life to such illustrious nonexistences as authors, making them out of nothing in the name of glory. Another nonexistence given life by operas, novels, and poems is unrequited love, which, if it is actually love, is a structural impossibility. Innumerable nonexistent things have been invented: today there is a whole other world of nonexistences (the Unconscious, duty, synesthesia, lots of “Gods” from various “religions”). Permit me just this one inexistence in my noveclass="underline" The Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist; it’s necessary to endow a work of art with such a character, so that the others can show off their existence. The one nonexistent character gives life to the others by contrast.
And the Lover agrees to put at our novel’s disposition all of his nonexistence, as long as it lasts, without the fear of putting it at risk by entering into a “life of art;” this life enchants him less than his nonexistence, and to this he prefers the “altruexistence:” existence for others, which is to say, love. The only thing he won’t risk is to live for the sake of living, or longevity, with birthdays.
With such rich elements I intend to make the first “novel,” and not only first of the day it appears, in the morning, the moment when all novels have their minute of primacy. I have tarried too long in Literature; I must urge myself to get up early, since the slow-footed are always hurrying towards something: that is, to get to a place that isn’t behind. It’s not yet late in the genre “noveclass="underline" ” I will start behind. I repeat: I aim to write the first genuinely artistic novel. It will also be the last of the protonovels: mine will make last of what came before it, since it no longer insists upon its own past.
For all this I believe, as Author, to have credited myself with the following novelistic specialties:
The Novel That Begins
The Frustrated Novel (a manufacturing defect)
The Novel That Went Out In The Street, with all its characters, to write itself.
The Prologue-Novel, whose story plays out, concealed from the reader, in prologues.
The Novel Written By Its Characters
The Inexpert Novel, which sets itself the task of killing off its “characters” separately, ignorant that creatures of literature always die together at the End of a reading.
The Novel in Stages
The Last Bad Novel — The First Good Novel — The Obligatory Novel.
1 In Índice de la nueva poesía americana (The Anthology of New American Poetry) (1926) there appears a “Salutation from the Lover to the Non-Existent Gentleman-Novel of Hope,” included in Miscellany (volume VII of the Complete Works). The Lover appears again in Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness, which bears precisely this subtitle: “A Compilation of the Papers Left by a Novel Character Created By Art, the Lover, the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, the Student of His Hopes;” in “Solution” and “Conclusion” the aforementioned persona explicates his metaphysical doctrine, which correlates with that of the present novel. (Editor’s Note-Adolfo de Obieta)
TO THE CRITICS
Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he’s able to achieve that sobering “second edition:” making his a suicide that waits until it’s justified. But I’ve taken more precautions against true suicide, which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that’s what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus, this novel, started at age thirty, continued at fifty and at seventy-three, has finally achieved supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author "and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I’ll be the author of a letter to the critics, a sort of “open letter” but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out.
LETTER TO THE CRITICS
I’m the only one who understood you, gentlemen; the first who grasped your basic vocation: those eternally in hope of Perfection, who are daily reduced to eulogizing book binding, driven to it by the continual failure of the poem, the novel, the printed word, one after the other and day after day; you, gentlemen, are the only lovers and connoisseurs of Perfection. No such thing for the writers, the publishers of sketches, hasty books, opportune books, party books; someday Perfection will come in the form of a book, just as you rightly hoped and planned: until now Perfection has only been seen in the grace and moral power of certain men and women, known to all of us, who will never gain either historical or name recognition.
But it’s good that you wait, and I’m sure the day Perfection appears as a Book you will all applaud, unanimously and immensely gratified.
Writers have always understood that for some time now we should have been in compliance with this critical attitude. But knowing how terribly fatiguing it is to construct a novel according to strict artistic standards, and what little hope there is of getting it right, not only do we suffer, but we also waste our talents since we don’t write the Book, and in waiting to write, we forget the nicety of waiting to find perfection in the efforts of others.
I didn’t find an easy way to execute my own artistic theory. My novel is flawed, but I would like to be recognized as the first who has attempted to use that prodigious instrument, the commotion of consciousness — that is, the novelistic character in its proper efficiency and virtue. By this I mean the total commotion of consciousness of the reader, and not the trivial occupation of the attention with a particular, precarious, ephemeral topic: itself. With this and some other thoughts formulated in the course of the book, I approach this Perfection you gentlemen expect, and set an example as welclass="underline" a rigorous doctrine of the literary art.