Macedonio Fernández & Borges

It is really great to read Macedonio Fernández for the first time because it is really like a fresh reading on many ideas and styles haunting Borges.  The first half of Museo de la novela de la Eterna is composed of prologues, consisting of about 134 pages of materials dealing with different facets of the literary thing.  One of my favorite tropes so far is in "Prólogo a mi persona de Autor", when Macedonio mobilizes the exhaustion of petroleum as a comparison to exhausting a text, calling the established readership (um.. the Academy, for example) la Corporación Universal de Lectores.


Yo había proyectado que esta novela se publicara después de los 22 años en que se sabe que se habrá ahotado totalmente el petróleo terrestre, porque una adivinaza me garantizó que estaba dispuesto en la providencia del mundo que simultáneamente se agotara la provisión de bostezos de lector con que se cuenta al presente.  Pero la Corporación Universal de Lectores se ha comprometido a vengarse de cierto escritor reservando para él--que anuncia próxima obra--todos los muy abundantes de que disponía para mi no menos anunciada obra.  (17)


There are at least two ways to read this idea.  We could dismiss Macedonio as naive, thinking that the excess of ground-up dinosaur bones would be comparable to the ineffable quality of an author's work (especially his, given his lack of engagement with a public, etc.).  A more interesting reading would situate this statement to re-think relationality as the point of departure for writing (among other things).  In academia there is a tendency to discuss an exhausted text, mined for all of its resources.  I have always found this persistent, nagging tendency to be tiresome itself.  What is that really has been exhausted: the text or the reader?  In Macedonio, there is a sense there is a corpus of writings - a collection of objects - that exists as a novel, as a thing without being in relation to a public. It is not yet in the arena of consumption. 

I find this interesting because it helps feed Borges' idea of the library.  We tend to set up an idea of the library as a thing built from relations, but as Timothy Morton mentioned in a recent lecture, perhaps there is some sense that a library is never summed up in the established relations.  The card catalog is only one way to begin mapping what is hiding there.  And this is a secondary moment, not a primary "plane of immanence" as some would have it.  There are always things lurking in the archive that might be lost, unread, unknown.  As I move into the dissertating phase of my graduate student career, this is a very motivating idea.