"Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes".

—Macedonio Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (1925-1952)

1

Mount Parnassus, near Delphi, Greece, has two summits. Back in the ancient days, when the gods still roamed the earth seeking sexual partners among humans, one summit of Mount Parnassus was consecrated to Apollo and the Muses, while the other belonged to Bacchus.

The mountain acquired its name from Parnassus, a son of Neptune. Allegedly, Deucalion's ark came to rest there after the flood. Owing to its connexion with the Muses, Parnassus came to be regarded as the seat of poetry and music; hence To climb Parnassus is "to write poetry".

I’ve been musing about muses, great and small, worshipped or banished. Gratuitously, a “muse” is one who inspires art. Given the gender hierarchy elicited by this word (the Muses served the men’s creations), ‘muse’ has been read as a trope for male supremacy in art. The man needs his muse to make art; the woman is responsible for keeping him inspired and excited. She is whatever he makes her, as Alberto Moravia demonstrated across various fictions.

2

Anna Akhmatova’s poem “The Muse,” was written or published in 1924. It is given to us below in English as translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.

She answers: “Yes.”

I want to leave the riddle of this poem aside for a minute and read it against its grain, as a framing device for the muse.

If you stand near the left side and look at the ellipsis in the center, “she” is there. She is the one whom the speaker attends. She is “her whom no one can command.” She is, obviously, also known as Inspiration. But as you stand here, peering at the poem from the left, following the ellipsis down to the definitive and final yes, there is something else you notice about the muse, apart from her gender.

By closing this poem with a confirmation from the muse, Akhmatova (perhaps unintentionally) plays into emptiness of that affirmation. For, she remains nameless. She is simply the titular whose yes issues from a cloud of fury, flute in hand, “serene and pitiless,” but still anonymous and unknowable. We can’t grasp or hold Akhmatova’s muse. We can supplicate and placate her, but we cannot control her. This romanticized notion of the Muse as female spirit informed even the Surrealist conception of gender: Breton’s novel could not exist without its Nadja.

3

To scat a bit, or to follow the sonic thread into its less ‘intelligible’ modulations, amusement is an affective response to an encounter with the muse, whether real or imagined. A museum is where the muses are collected for others to admire. A curator is the boss who elects what gets preserved and displayed for posterity; the curator is the cleric of reigning muses. Author Macedonio Fernández engaged these varying velocities with his anti-novel, The Museum of Eterna's Novel, that imagined itself as a museum for nostalgia. Make no mistake: it is the imagining that matters to Macedonio, who began writing the book in 1925, and continued wandering through his imaginary museum until his death in 1952.

The novel or museum or nostalgia is a thing that he never entirely finished, and so Museum was published posthumously, 15 years after the death of the author in Argentina (a decade or so before the death of the author in continental philosophy). 

Jorge Luis Borges named Macedonio as one of his muses. But, unlike other modernists, Macedonio had no intent of founding a school or a manifesto party. His refusal of chronology and linear progression was necessitated by his own neo-Pythagorean talismans against hypochondria and constant worry. Where other modernists used stream-of-consciousness as an ornamental facade that guised how the plot was ‘getting to the point’ and drawing us along the arc that peaks in the usual climax, Macedonio diverted, discoursed, meandered, dreamt, reconsidered, and shifted through the ether plotlessly. He made sure to preface this plotlessness with more than 50 potential prologues, preambles, prolegomena, and provocations served to the reader prior to the main course of the text.

Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, 'projected novels', and George Steiner's 'unfinished books' bobbed through my mind like ducks in a bathtub mind when I returned to the Museum of Eterna this weekend (particularly since Joycean stream-of-consciousness has returned to the discourse). 

My marginalia from prior readers included questions (What happens to time and duration in the present? What is time in the museum where one's relationship to time is transformed by conversation with objects? Who is the speaker of the book the author ghosted? ) as well as a note about a character that I snuck into a short fiction that I never submitted for publication, partly because the reference felt too obscure, but mostly for the usual reason known as self-doubt. The character note —- use her song in that story that plays with Eliade — is scribbled next to this passage by Macedonio:

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.

One could say I, too, have mused Macedonio. The way he literally imagines his characters as separate from him, as shadows released into the world by the author’s imagination, was a formative fictional influence for me. What do characters do when the author is sleeping or failing to submit his draft on time? How do they deal with our extraordinary self-doubt that translates into a penchant for fiddling which refuses to commit the text to closure, just in case another character should pop in and make sense of the madness?

Macedonio says of the characters:

It’ll be necessary that some of them have altercations and even become enemies, as is obvious, considering the close quarters they share, living in the same novel: characters destined to be permanent rivals, or those who are so only for a moment, must both conduct themselves as people who nevertheless share the same death, at the same place and time: the end of the book.

The text is a museum but also a novel, which Macedonio defines as a formal expression of the imaginary. “Author: I shouldn’t say to the reader, ‘Come into my novel,’ but rather save him from life indirectly,” he writes. “My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out.”

In its layers of frenzied avowals, the novel vacates the reader. We read to become nothing, or to relish the author’s preference for a gnostic plenitude of nada. Subtitled "the first good novel", the Museum makes deploys injunctions until the syntax, itself, begins to resemble a literary manifesto. Macedonio demands "constant fantasy" of his words, a stream of half-conscious phantastes that protect the reader from the horror of embodied reality, a horror that the author refuses the status of reality. The pages must “avoid the hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art.” 

Borges lost faith in his muse as his own fame grew. In this, Borges meets the countless writers and thinkers who abandoned viscosity for a more respectable, orderly cosmogony in their later years. To Borges' chagrin, Macedonio never really changed his tune on relativism: the only real world was the one in our heads. His commitment to modernism refused the industrialized Progress implied by GNP and GDP. He lived his aversion to productivism as praxis rather than theory. Perhaps most notably, he managed not to avoid modernism's tendencies to indulge in literary neocolonialism. 

Modeling our plethoras of swank and messianic pragmatism, American authors have disavowed most of that relativist namby-pamby, which is to say, we have privatized it as a locus of magic that only exists between the patient and their therapist. But Macedonio looks up from his hermetic cave and points to the indescribable images on the wall. He cannot remember drawing them. Is he the author or the interpreter? Who will explain what he imagines?

Privileging the act of thinking and imagining over existing inside the terms defined by others, Macedonio's commitment to the imaginary can be read alongside critical theory's focus on literature as a space where the world of the future might (and must) appear.

On a funnier note, rumor has it that Macedonio was a descendant of the Macedonio family of Naples, Italy who claimed descent from the Macedonian dynasty of Eastern Rome and Philip II of ancient Macedonia. “Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes,” as Macedonia wrote.

Turning directly to the reader with his cavernous You, Macedonio promises: "You will be the one who changes Thought to Love and I will be the pause or the anticipation during which time cannot change things.” One is undone by such preposterous, metaphysical intimacy.