10/28

First I want to talk about the Museum of Eterna's Novel, because I'm thoroughly confused by it - not so much the syntax or the format, but why Fernandez chose to write a book this way. In response to our discussion in class on Tuesday, I don't consider this to be a novel, not just because of my own thoughts on what a novel should be, but because the book itself (which is also a character in the book) poses so many paradoxical questions about the nature of things, and spends so much time talking about the novel that will be, that has been, that is being built up, that contains all of these mentioned characters... it's almost as if it's admitting that it isn't what it says it will be. And I'm just confused about why someone would even want to write that. But I guess that's the sort of question that drives avant-garde work, isn't it?

At the same time, I feel like I'm just not reading into it enough to realize exactly what it is the book says it should be, not just because of how circular the thinking is but also because of how vague the characters are. Since the book, the reader, the author, the Lover, Eterna, the President, the Traveler, Maybegenius, all of these characters could almost be any character ever written. Which makes sense, since earlier on in the book we've got things like "Things do not begin; or they don't begin when they are created," which kind of brings us to the issue of the title. Saying that this is the museum of a novel rather than the novel itself implies that it existed before the novel was written, which is why I say that maybe the characters existed before also and that is what he's trying to say about borrowed characters and whatnot.

This is interesting in juxtaposition to the idea of Creationism in poetry. On that note, Huidobro's poetry is absolutely beautiful; it has the kind of imagery that you feel guilty for analyzing because it exists just for you to feel it as you read it, not necessarily because you're supposed to immediately find some underlying meaning. I do notice, though, that he seems to center around the theme of death quite often; even when he doesn't say it, his poems give you this pretty obvious sense of time running out. Especially in the second poem, partly because of the format - first, there's relatively short stanzas; they get longer; there are a couple of very short ones; then there's a HUGE block of text that is just one thing after another. The inconsistency makes you nervous, it kind of makes you feel like you have to hurry through the bigger chunks because there were smaller ones. But he also says blatant things like "there's no time to lose" (which is repeated) and "hurry up hurry up" etc. It also seems as if, as the poem (2nd) goes on, not only does the format/length of the stanzas change, it seems as if the form is gradually lost altogether, ending with "oooheeoo ooheeoohee, tralalee tralala, aheeaah ahee ahee aaheeah ee ee." I feel that he is probably making a bigger statement about the underlying concepts there, but I'm not entirely sure that it's actually about death since really, he mentions it so little. That's just kind of the feeling I get from it, and that the form of the poem is supposed to be a comment on losing your mind/losing memories/images as you get old, ie, as you run out of time.