The early proposal of a fragmentary writing in Cuadernos de todo y nada by Macedonio Fernández

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, Maurice Blanchot, driven by the revolutionary spirit of the emerging intellectuals of the French May of 1968, proposed a classification of fragmentary writing into four categories based on the idea that there is an already existing universal whole. Inside of that, literature itself constitutes the last of the steps: to name that whole. The author, therefore, is not the owner of what he writes but only an intermediary. Blanchot defines fragmentary writing as totalizing and irreducible at the same time, a new order of literature that places the reader at the same level as the author in the creative process. Despite how innovative his proposals seemed at the time, they were already, for some time, an everyday and inherent form of writing for the Argentine Macedonio Fernández. It is observed in texts such as: No toda es vigila la de los ojos abiertos  or Papeles de recienvenido and his posthumous work: Museo de la novela de la Eterna, Epistolario or Cuadernos de todo y nada. In the present study we will establish a relationship between Blanchot's theses on fragmentary writing and Fernández's compilation Cuadernos de todo y nada, which materialized Blanchot's ideals well in advance. We will demonstrate that Macedonio Fernández in Cuadernos de todo y nada not only premonizes the vanguard of the fragmentary in literature, but also proposes his own poetics.