Authors: Michal Ajvaz
For a time I tried to find the
Book
’s original layer, the first passage out of which the
Book
grew by insertion, transcription and erasure. It may be that such an undertaking was within the bounds of realizability, but it proved so difficult that I gave it up. It certainly was impossible to identify the oldest layer by its content; the constant modifying of the text meant that it was far from out of the question that the oldest passages were those which told of the latest technical discoveries, about which the islanders had learned from sailors. To begin with I imagined it would be possible to identify the oldest text by the level of insertion at which it appeared. The fact that the
Book
grew mainly through insertion encouraged the assumption that the manuscript was like an inverted Troy, where the oldest layers were on the surface (in the
Book
’s larger foldouts) and those which had been written and stuck in only yesterday were at the deepest level of insertion. The task of a textual archaeologist would be to monitor closely the surface while resisting the temptation to go beneath it.
But suddenly it hit me that this assumption was false. Certainly, the making of insertions was the main activity demanded by the
Book
, but there was no guarantee that individual passages of text would settle in one place; indeed, passages went up and down in the hierarchy of levels—they might fall sharply before embarking on a steep climb, as if riding a Ferris wheel. It was not uncommon for a passage to disappear and then reappear in modified form as an insertion on the second, fifth or sixth level, to be lost again without trace in the bowels of the
Book
before bobbing up on the first level in white pages which had lost their text in one of those periods when hatred of words was paramount. The
Book
was really a cyclical entity, a demented structure whose foundations were on its roof. It was probable that the beginning of the
Book
had long ago been lost through the regular batterings it took as it was transformed, yet it may have been the case that the beginning remained hidden at the bottom of the deepest pocket—a pocket that was so distant that the motions of constant change could not reach it, which was buried so deep that it would exceed the patience of the most persistent of insertion speleologists.
Once a foreigner (myself, for example) had grown used to the
Book
’s revolving-wheel nature, he was driven to distraction by the
Book
’s other whims. The
Book
constantly violated the seemingly obvious rule that the number of flights taken in its descent should correspond—if the action were to be returned to the original level—to the number of flights taken in its ascent. It might happen, for example, that the hero of Story A was also the narrator of Story B, while in Story B the narrator of Story C made an appearance; but the action would not, as one would expect, return to Level B once Story C was finished—instead it was Story A which continued on the pasted-in strip. It was as if by some dark magic Story B and the world it described had disappeared from the
Book
entirely; but later, once we had recovered from it, Story B would continue in some wholly unreasonable place, say at Level F or Level G. The hero of a story on Level A wrote the novel
Silver Cloud
, which was played out on Level B. Some way into the story a character from Level B stepped into a bar on Level A, where he struck up a conversation with the cousin of the author of
Silver Cloud
. I didn’t know whether such offences against logic occurred by intention or through negligence, but to begin with they so exasperated me that I felt inclined to seek out their authors so I could throttle them. Fortunately the authors of individual parts of the
Book
were so entirely anonymous, there was no chance of finding out their names. Besides, to ask around after the identity of an individual author was socially unacceptable. The sense of shame it would provoke might have something in common with that known by the island’s kings, who would have liked to remain every bit as anonymous as the authors of the
Book
.
But this was not all. At certain points the
Book
would bite itself in the tail, so that it was barely possible to ascertain the level on which a given passage was located. (When counting off the levels, one could start wherever one chose.) Let us say that a character appears in Story A who is the narrator of Story B, while one of the characters in Story B is the narrator of Story C; then one of the characters in Story C begins to narrate not Story D (as one would expect) but Story A. (Escher’s lithograph
Print Gallery
is folded into itself in a similar way (although it has a simpler A (A) form. (In a gallery a visitor is looking at an art print which portrays a town which contains the gallery in which the visitor is standing. (I would like the reader to consider what this lithograph would look like if—like a story in the
Book
—it had the form A (B(C(A)))?))).) (If that last sentence was written by one of the authors of the
Book
it is quite possible, dear reader, that you would count in it three left-hand and thirteen right-hand parentheses.)
Karael and I once sat on the jetty in the lower town discussing the way the
Book
folded in on itself. We had been bathing in the harbour and had taken the
Book
along with us. (As I have mentioned, it was not necessary to treat the
Book
with any great care; smudged letters and marks were taken as part and parcel of the
Book
’s transformation.) I argued that the form the
Book
took did not correspond to the arrangement of its contents, complaining that the rule was abused which stated that an insertion at the lowest level should be in an interior pocket; I also suggested how this might be corrected. It would be necessary to cut an opening into a pocket pasted on to Foldout A—the biggest, which contained Text B—and another into the pocket containing Text C which was inserted in the first pocket; a pocket could then be pasted on to the appropriate place on Text C. Where this new pocket was at its narrowest, it would be elongated so as to pass through both openings, only widening out once it had escaped the physical confines of the
Book
. The new pocket would need to be big enough to ensure that it could be turned back in towards Level A, closing this (and the whole
Book
along with it) inside itself. It would also be necessary to cut into this pocket an opening by which its beginning—which coiled out from pocket C—would be able to exit.
To my surprise, Karael understood my somewhat confused explanation; she quite liked the idea of a
Book
which absorbed itself, but straight away she objected that the observing of one rule would necessitate the violation of another—that by which nothing with its origins in a pocket should get out. We laughed about this. For a short while longer we thought up various fantastical forms the
Book
might take; as connectors of passages on various pages of the
Book
we imagined insertions like the kind of suspension bridge we had seen in adventure movies, and insertions that were like secret tunnels through the
Book
’s pages, and insertions crawling out of the
Book
like rootstock, themselves the seeds of new books. Then we gave up on this and jumped into the water. After a while we looked back to where we had been sitting, where the unfurled strips of the
Book
’s pages were fluttering in the wind like an ill-fated white jellyfish washed ashore by the incoming tide.
As I said, I never read the
Book
in its entirety; nor would anyone have been able to do so even had he wished to. (Besides, it is pointless to think of it as a whole
Book
as it will never be written to completion.) No one had ever known—except for the short time when it contained a few pages only—how long the
Book
was. The paper used for the innermost insertions was so thin that an epos greater in extent than everything I knew of the
Book
might have lain there undiscovered and unread, like an island Mahabharata, longer than the entire contents of the rest of the
Book
even though it was contained deep in a single pocket. It was impossible to read the
Book
from beginning to end for the simple reason that it was not apparent what was the beginning and what was the end. The system of insertions was so complicated and the paths were interwoven to such a degree that to take as the beginning the first word on the first page of the largest foldout would have been nonsensical.
I came across all manner of things in the insertions. After a while nothing would surprise me: I might pull out of a pocket a cookbook, a guide to what seemed to be an imaginary town (complete with detailed street-map), an exorbitantly long description of a sunset, a bizarrely distorted retelling of European history, or descriptions of animals (some real, some imaginary). I have noticed that a lot of literary critics are bothered by the mixing of genres; indeed, some of them are so easily offended in this regard that they experience distress when faced with trifles like the use in a passage of fiction of concepts of theory (as if there were some fundamental difference between stories of people, animals, plants and objects on the one hand and stories of concepts on the other). What a torture it would be for them to read the island’s
Book
, in which it is common for a lyrical passage to give way to several pages of description related in chemical formulae!
Yet it was the case that narratives of mythology, fairy tale and adventure were more numerous than other kinds. Kings, princes and princesses, sorcerers, dragons and demons…all these things featured frequently. It seemed to me curious that the islanders should choose such a cast of characters. I long failed to understand how it was that they kept writing about all-powerful wizards when they themselves had no interest in power; why it was that they wrote about kings, princes and princesses when the island had no aristocracy and its king was miserable and impotent. They did not appear to be in the grip of nostalgia for a feudal past. It was also curious to me that many of the stories of the
Book
featured violent passions when apparently the islanders themselves knew no passion or desire.
Then it came to me that these mysteries were not as insoluble as they seemed. Let us not forget that the
Book
was an insertion which had emerged out of amorphousness; it was an exposition of formlessness, an interpretation of subtle murmurs and whirls. But an exposition of formlessness cannot itself be formless, fuzzy and soggy: there are bound to be clearly-contoured shapes behind it. We should not interpret the weak whirls of reality (which undulate with the primordial tremor out of which later we make time) as the feeble gurgitation of a torpid will, but as a story which evolves in a desire and a passion coagulating with other desires and passions. To close in on the formlessness and forms the
Book
describes, bold gestures, pictures and stories were required; the nascent stories summon heroes—kings, generals and wizards—who have a power which enables them to the utmost extent to act, react and reign. The casts of aristocrats are in no way an expression of a conscious or unconscious desire for a hierarchical society: they are a means of ensuring the gyratory progress of the
Book
. As naturally the authors have no knowledge of such heroes and motifs from their own experience on the island, they seek them out in dispatches from our world delivered by visitors to the island. The
Book
is not a treatment of the islanders’ world but of ours; it is an ever-changing island dream of our world.
Whenever I came across characters and situations in the
Book
that were familiar to me from fairy tales, I found myself eagerly anticipating magical, poetic and fantastical images; in this I was always disappointed. Individual stories were governed by a strange mechanics which was only for show. The plot of a story often revolved around the need to solve some kind of task, and the characters performed this by either trying to construct a suitable mechanism or to find a natural phenomenon (animal, vegetable or mineral). In spite of their fairy-tale settings and magical props, the stories were reminiscent of mathematical equations or the assembly of complex machines. And as stories were entered at many levels and folded in on themselves, the
Book
behaved towards the intrepid reader as a monstrous machine with no function but many levels of cogged gearwheels.
Now, dear reader, is perhaps the time for me to present you with a story from the
Book
. I still don’t have much taste for this, and I have to admit that yesterday after I finished work on the last chapter I spent the entire afternoon walking the streets of Pankrác, Michle, and Vršovice. The spring mist was so fine that I could barely distinguish it from the foretaste of rain; I was bombarded with hundreds of different reeks and scents (I’m writing these chapters at the end of April). I was considering the pros and cons of embarking on the most pointless undertaking yet in the setting down of my recollections of the island. I was tempted by the thought of ending my writing here and now, thus leaving the stories of the
Book
to your imagination, not least because I realized I couldn’t remember that much about them and would have to piece them together from disconnected fragments, or else think up new connections. But I reached the conclusion that it would be unfair of me to wriggle out of this task; besides, as transformations of the text were part and parcel of the
Book
, would not a narrative transformed by forgetfulness and patched-up fantasy be truer to the
Book
than an exact representation of the
Book
as I knew it during my days on the island?
I was yet more afraid of the
Book
’s peculiar tendency to uncontrollable proliferation and expansion. I knew the
Book
well enough to realize that it was unlikely that the long period it had spent in a remote part of my brain had sufficed for its deactivation. I knew that once I began to bring extracts from the
Book
out into the light I would need to proceed with the caution of an experienced pyrotechnician—without careful handling any of them could explode, spraying over a wide area contents hitherto hidden. The light-minded narrator might have chosen a chapter from the
Book
and then found himself at the centre of a blast, with pages raining down on him by the hundreds.
But then I reached a point at which the dangers of the
Book
took on the aspect of a game of adventure—I told myself it would be cowardly to shirk the challenge this presented. I have some experience of the
Book
, after all; I know its tricks, where its dangers lie, the signals it gives, and to pay these due attention. I reached my decision as I was walking past the station at Vršovice. Since I like this place I went inside, bought myself some coffee in a plastic cup, went out on to the platform and sat down on a bench that rested against the wall of the station building. I watched the trains come and go and imagined you, dear reader, reading the tales of my travels. I wondered which part of the
Book
I should narrate from. As I have said, the texts that fight free of the
Book
’s pockets are from many different genres. Initially I thought of recounting what I could remember of the sections of the
Book
which seemed to me the most original. These were texts which had something in common with abstract painting, long passages in which no people, animals, plants or even objects appeared; the heroes of these passages were various kinds of smudges or stains, of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter. The islanders gave these smudges or stains special names. Admittedly, these texts are not exactly typical of the
Book
—the main motion present in the
Book
is a sweeping gyration in which formlessness gives way to form and vice versa. The stories of stains circulate only in a small wheel, in which the shapes brought forth do not trouble the material world.
These passages describe in detail how stains transform, how their positions change in an abstract two-dimensional space, and how the relations between these stains change. For example, one insertion describes over dozens of pages how the stain
puo
sprouts two
nest
protrusions (have I mentioned already that it is not only stains that have names but also parts of stains?) and how in time the ends of these stains begin to curl in towards each other. For a while all the indications are that the protrusions will join up, thus creating a rare kind of stain containing an island void, but as the protrusions appear to be about to meet, their progress is halted and they remain separate. From time to time—as if by way of contrast—a small stain approaches one of the protrusions, but it never gets close enough to bring any kind of influence to bear on the larger stain. So what is the shape to which the main stain aspires? The islanders find this kind of narrative quite thrilling; they devour it as we devour detective stories. If the island had television, the islanders’ equivalent of
Dallas
or
Dynasty
would probably be a daily episode of a never-ending series on the transformation of stains.
As the narrative progressed it seemed that the original
puo
stain was about to be transformed into a
ziud
stain. But the reader of experience smelled a red herring: the signs foretelling a transformation to
ziud
were too obvious, too stage-managed. Though they were hidden, this was done in such a way that the attentive reader could spot them. He began to understand that signs suggesting a transformation to
ziud
were scattered across the work to draw the reader’s attention away from the real—albeit hidden—focal point of the plot, and that this must be the suspiciously unobtrusive small stain near the
nest
protrusion. He became ever more certain that the moment was approaching when the small stain would enter the action; it might suddenly expand before swallowing the large stain so that the two of them formed a
mue
stain.
But in the end the reader was surprised to learn that his bluff had been called. His shrewdness and worldly wisdom had been shown up as naivety. The author had reckoned with his suspicions and exploited these with craft. The reader had overlooked the fact that there were two red herrings; his uncovering of the first deceit had prevented him from seeing the second, from deducing that two untruths made a truth. The small stain did not enter the action at all; its ostensible meaninglessness was a disguise for emptiness. There came a point in the action where the small stain unravelled and then disappeared. When the baffled reader returned to the large stain—having paid so little heed to the unobtrusive changes taking place on its left side, as he was preoccupied with tracking down a ruse on the part of the author—he realized that the original stain had gradually assumed the form of the
ziud
, the very outcome he had least reckoned with.
Of course, in describing these beautiful stories separately, I am not showing them to their full advantage; to give you a proper idea of their nature I would have to relate whole
stain
eposes and symphonies replete with heroes, crisscrossed networks and unexpected twists. But I think it likely you would not find this amusing. Indeed, I doubt you much enjoyed the tale of the
puo
stain. If you skipped a few lines or even the whole passage, you have nothing to be ashamed of: it took me a long time to get used to this literary genre.
If I were to retell some of the
stain
novels contained in the
Book
, I would struggle with the translation. This is another of the things I was thinking about at the station. As you know, the islanders have names for the different stains that have no equivalents in Czech, so these would have to remain in the original with the attachment of long explanatory footnotes, in which I would describe the shapes of the stains, the relationships among them, their durability and changeability, their tendency to different kinds of transformation and the effects of these transformations on other stains, both close and distant. To explain the name of a stain I would need to refer to the names of all the others; in the end we would have a network of explanatory footnotes in which each note referred to all the others, and this network would draw in the main text, which would become a commentary on its own commentary, a series of footnotes for footnotes.
So in the end I decided to retell a relatively closed episode from a part of the
Book
in which an unknown author describes over a great many pages (spangled with dozens of white insertion pockets like a meadow flush with mushrooms) the feud between two royal houses living in a mythical archipelago. This feud survived several generations—the crimes of fathers provoked acts of vengeance from sons which were also crimes which would have to be paid back. Interludes of peace allowed the heart to nurture memories of how it had been wronged, with the result that the unquiet hand groped for the dagger and new wrongs were wrought.