by Lev Grossman
“The second fragment is very short. It begins with the lord returning home. We don’t know what happened to him on the black page, or what happened afterward, only that time has passed. His companions are now gone, presumed dead, and his quest for the Rose Chapel appears to have failed. As for the Holy Grail, he’s forgotten all about it. He is a shell of his former self, a skeleton rattling around in his full-chested armor.
“What’s more, his castle has been razed in his absence. When he left, one of his enemies apparently saw an opportunity and besieged it. It’s nothing but a field of rubble, scorched earth and tumbled stones. His wife and child are dead. The invader was preparing to ravage the lord’s wife when an angel appeared and slew her.”
“What?” Edward practically did a spit-take with his wine. “Why?”
“To spare her from sin.”
He swallowed. “That’s insane. What about killing the invaders? That would have been a little more helpful.”
“The medieval God is mysterious.”
Edward snorted. “That’s one word for it. What happens next?”
“The lord gears up for an extravagant display of grieving, but we’re spared the details, because the fragment ends there.
“Part three picks up on the theme of divine judgment. It’s the most academic and theoretical of the five fragments, and it’s also the longest, longer than the other four put together. It’s similar in some ways to Dante’s Paradiso—it’s less a narrative than an attempt to sketch the outlines of the author’s Weltanschauung. The fragment begins with the lord wandering the countryside, homeless and penitent. He believes himself cursed by God. He has been living outside, sleeping on pine needles and swimming in cold rivers. He is joined in his wanderings by the stag knight, of all people, who is still limping from the wound the lord gave him. This time the two get along like old friends. They’re like two old soldiers who served with opposing armies in the same war. Now that the war’s over, they’re the only ones who really understand each other.
“They retire together to a hermit’s hut on top of a mountain, where they keep the dialogue going in quasi-Socratic mode. There’s a long excursus on the proper interpretation of dreams, largely quoted wholesale from Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio—medieval writers didn’t have any real scruples about plagiarism. As they talk the stag knight changes form at will, from stag knight to knight stag and back again as the mood strikes him. They cover a lot of ground: cosmology, theology, hermeneutics, and in particular eschatology, the theoretical discourse that deals with the end of the world. If the world were to end, how would we know it had ended? Is it possible that the world has already ended, and we are living in the aftermath? Is this hell? Or worse, is this heaven? The stag knight is the authority here, being something of a mystical entity, but the lord gets in some good licks of his own. At one point he remarks—bitterly, but with a very eighteenth-century wink at the reader—that if he were a character in a romance he wouldn’t care how his story ended, because no ending, not even the final reward of heaven, could recompense him for the loss of his wife and his child.”
Edward was starting to enjoy watching her talk. It was all so different from what he was used to: This was somebody who spent all her time just reading and thinking about what she read. In a way it seemed like a ridiculous waste of time; and in another way it seemed so much more urgently important than what he did all day. Or used to do.
“The fourth fragment is the most problematic, and the most written about, although I don’t think the commentaries have done much to make it clearer. The tone is different from the rest of the Viage. It’s more like a dream, or a hallucination, or one of Bosch’s grotesques. It hardly seems to be by the same person—its repetitions and violence seem to reflect the mind of an infant, or a pathological grown-up. If an adult wrote this, he or she was very close to mental illness.
“The lord resumes his adventuring, though no longer with any quest at all in mind. He’s just lost...” Margaret broke off, apparently at a loss as to how to continue coherently. She sighed and puffed aside her bangs, an uncharacteristically girlish gesture. “The text becomes very repetitive, almost obsessively so: The lord slays one monster after another, giants, demons, dragons, on and on, over and over again. Sometimes he seems to kill the same monster twice or three times. Time circles around and doubles and triples back on itself. In places the verse degenerates into nothing more than a catalog of who or what the lord has fought or killed or saved, simple lists, stripped of any narrative or meaning.
“At one point we’re told that the lord has remarried and rebuilt his castle, and he has raised a new son. He grows old and contented, and the narrative branches and follows the adventures of his son, who goes off on a quest of his own. But the son gradually grows up to become his father, who meets the stag knight and gives chase all over again, and soon the whole narrative has turned back on itself. Time swallows its own tail. Except that this time the lord succeeds in his quest—he completes the quest, finds the Rose Chapel and is accepted into heaven on the spot.
“But it doesn’t last. The lord gets kicked out of heaven on some theological technicality that makes no sense, as far as I can tell. Back on earth he becomes a bitter man, and takes his revenge by hunting down the stag knight and killing him and eating his flesh.” Edward made a face. “From this point on the text itself appears to go mad. People die and come back to life without rhyme or reason. The lord himself commits suicide, disemboweling himself with a misericord—a kind of slim dagger—only to be forcibly resurrected by a spiteful, sarcastic angel. The stag knight reappears, too, sounding a little petulant at having been killed off earlier, and he warns the lord that life is just a dream, that heaven is the only true reality, that he shouldn’t take everything so seriously. Huge hosts assemble and do battle for no reason, described in minute detail. The narrator is like a little boy with a chest full of army men, lining them up and knocking them down over and over again. We catch glimpses and echoes of a landscape devastated by war and plague.
“Finally the narrative loops back around once again, time curls in on itself, and we return to the fateful chase after the stag knight, exactly as before. In fact whole passages from the first fragment reappear verbatim, and the poem becomes a pastiche of itself. Just as before the stag knight is trapped in the blind canyon and rushes out in a state of panic. The lord appears to be aware that all this has already happened, but he is helpless, powerless to change its course. Just as before, the knights enter the canyon. But again, we never see what’s inside, because that’s where the fragment ends.”
“Curses,” said Edward. “Foiled again.” He glanced at his watch. It was getting on toward six. It crossed his mind that if this went on much longer she could charge him for another hour. “On to fragment five.”
Unflappable as ever, Margaret continued.
“It begins with the lord adrift on the open ocean in a boat. He has no oars, no sail, no rudder. He trusts in God to bring him safely to shore. Some time has passed. He’s very far north, and there are icebergs all around him. Exotic Arctic whales breach and dive around him, belugas and bowheads and narwhals. Coleridge borrowed a few lines from this passage for ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ‘And through the drifts the snowy clifts/Did send a dismal sheen:/Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—/The ice was all between.’
“Medieval authors often insert stories from classical works into their own, and here the narrator takes the opportunity to retell a couple of episodes from The Odyssey, the Sirens and the Lotus-Eaters. I can’t really say why. He also retells the story of Paolo and Francesca, about a woman and her brother-in-law who become lovers while reading a book together. The woman’s husband walks in and kills them both. It was a popular enough tale—Dante and Boccaccio both have their own versions of it—but Gervase’s version is oddly bastardized: He gives it a happy ending, in which the literary lovers escape together and live happily ever after.
“The lord finally
drifts onto the shore of a desolate country. All he can see from the beach is drift after drift of sand spotted with patches of snow. The sand is the color of iron, ‘withouten toun, or hous, or tree/or bush, or grass, or eryd lond.’ He walks inland for a while. Gervase takes a whole paragraph to describe the curious quality of the light—there’s something about it that bothers him, it’s pale and weak and a little unearthly. Eventually he comes to a place where people are living. They introduce themselves as the Cimmerians of the book’s title.
“In Cimmeria, they tell him, it’s twilight all the time—neither day nor night. It’s a cold, hard, depopulated country. The lord wanders through the landscape, and we see it through his eyes. The inhabitants subsist on root crops and herds of shaggy sheep. The countryside is criss-crossed with icy streams, and he stumbles on the frozen corpse of a woman in a ditch. He walks through the ruins of a town, collapsed huts and stone walls that have been scattered and dispersed. He passes a field where the furrows are filled with snow, and he compares the alternation of black earth and white snow to lines of writing on a page.
“And that’s where the last fragment ends. It’s a very stark passage. Like the others, it’s suffused with a sense of melancholy and longing, but with no obvious object. Parts of it are almost certainly allusions to Dante’s Inferno. Which incidentally is another reason to think that it couldn’t have been written by Gervase of Langford, because as far as I know the only man in England who had read Dante at that time was Chaucer.”
Margaret stared into her half-empty glass. Edward toyed with what was left of the cake. A heavy truck lumbered past outside, wheezing along the narrow street, its brakes snorting, temporarily blocking out the sun.
“What do you think it all means?” he said.
“What does it mean? I don’t know. Read as the product of a medieval mind the Viage would probably be a religious allegory. The progress of the soul from sin toward grace. It might have had political overtones—usurpation, the plight of the agricultural laborer. And Gervase’s psyche must have been profoundly affected by the spectacle of the Death. He may have lived with unbearable guilt and shame at having survived when so many others died, as well as with fear that the plague would come back to claim him.”
“How about the Cimmerians? Who are they?”
“Nobody special. They have a basis in fact, if it matters: They were a nomadic tribe who invaded Asia Minor somewhere around 1200 B.C.”
“So they really existed?”
“Of course they did.” Margaret smiled thinly. “The modern Crimea derives its name from Cimmeria. But the historical reality isn’t nearly as interesting as the literary one. In the classical tradition the Cimmerians were thought to be a legendary tribe who lived in a land where it was always twilight.
“Ovid mentions them in the Metamorphoses, and Ulysses visits the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. In the cosmology of classical myth the world was encircled by a river called Oceanus. The Cimmerians lived on the far side of Oceanus, and beyond Cimmeria there was only Hades. Pliny thought Cimmeria was in Italy, where there was supposedly an entrance to the underworld, but whoever wrote the Viage seems to be combining or conflating Cimmeria with Ultima Thule, the legendary northernmost land in the world.”
An argument broke out at the door between the maitre d’ and a man who wanted to bring his dog in. Margaret watched Edward steadily. He wondered if she were simply waiting for him to say she could go.
“So if I were looking for this book—just supposing for the sake of argument that it exists—what do you think it would look like?”
“Well, as far as the format goes,” she said, steepling her fingers, “it would be a codex. It would probably be written on parchment, not paper. The covers would be wood covered with leather. It would be a manuscript—printing wasn’t invented for another hundred years—and the writing would be Gothic book-hand. Very difficult to read for the nonexpert. Beyond that, it could look like almost anything. Making a book back then was like making a movie now: It took a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of people with many different skills. You had to purchase the parchment and the pens and the ink. You had to have the text written out by a scribe, then it was illustrated by an illustrator, then bound by a binder, and so on.”
A waiter passed by and discreetly slipped the check onto the table between them.
“Could Gervase have done that? Could he have afforded it?”
She shrugged.
“It’s possible. A young man from an upper middle-class family, serving a noble house. It’s possible. But as for the text itself—I’m sorry, I don’t know how I can convince you, and it’s obvious you’re not interested in being convinced, but it’s simply not the product of a medieval mind.”
Edward pursed his lips and nodded. She believed what she was saying, and she was probably right. She had no reason to mislead him; if anything, she had a financial interest in leading him on, in prolonging these sessions. He was disappointed. At some point, without fully realizing it or knowing why, he’d really started wanting the book to be real. He took out his wallet.
“So what do you think happened to those knights? I mean, at the end of the first part, in the blind canyon?”
“Much ink has been spilled over that black page, no pun intended.” Margaret swirled the dregs of her coffee. She didn’t stop him from paying. “There’s at least one entire book about it, Capshaw’s Darkness Visible. The Freudians think it’s a womb, or an anus, or a grave, or all three. The Marxists talk about the rise of capitalism in England and the commodification of the novel. It’s especially popular among the deconstructionists. I’ve seen it called a printer’s error and a map of Africa and a protest against the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I have no opinion.” All at once Margaret’s flat affect returned. “It’s not my field.”
“All right. Okay.” The woman was starting to wear him out. He needed to go somewhere and think. Or better yet, go somewhere and not think. At the next table a young couple who looked like two lawyers were fighting in clipped whispers. “Why don’t we wrap this up for now? Are you headed back to Brooklyn?” She shook her head. “Well, wherever you’re going, take a taxi and keep the receipt. Next time I’d like you to come look at the collection, assuming that the Wents are amenable. How would you feel about that?”
“Fine,” she said, exhibiting neither reluctance nor enthusiasm. She stood up, and he followed her to the door and out onto the sidewalk. It was almost six thirty, but it was a long summer afternoon, and it was still broad daylight outside.
“Can I—?” Should he? He gestured vaguely in the direction of the East Side while at the same time looking out for a cab.
“I’m going uptown,” she said. “To Columbia.”
She turned away in the direction of the subway, her bag bouncing on her hip. Edward called after her.
“One more thing. You said before that the book would be a codex. What does that mean?”
“A codex—” She stopped and half turned. She seemed nonplussed at having to define so basic a concept. “A codex is just—it’s a codex. As opposed to a scroll, or a wax tablet, or a rock with words chiseled on it. A codex is a set of printed pages, folded and bound with a spine between two covers. It’s what someone like you would call a book.”
8
FOR THEIR NEXT appointment, two days later, Edward met Margaret on the sidewalk in front of the Wents’ building. It was a warm day, overcast and muggy. Thunder hung in the air. The handle of an umbrella stuck up out of her leather bookbag, though it hadn’t actually rained yet. Her hair was clipped back neatly in a tortoiseshell barrette. Pale and skinny as she was, he thought, she could have had a Goth thing going on without much trouble, but she didn’t take the trouble. He ushered her inside past the doorman, who recognized him now and nodded them inside.
“Come and go!” he said, smiling under his bushy mustache.
Riding up in the elev
ator, Edward cleared his throat.
“I probably should have warned them you were coming today,” he said. “But don’t worry about it. Just be nice to Laura. You’ll meet her—she’s the Wents’ Girl Friday.”
“Thanks,” Margaret said dryly. “I wasn’t worried.”
The doors opened onto a silent, empty apartment. They saw no one as they walked through the halls toward the spiral staircase that led upstairs. The light coming in through the windows was muted and gray, like moonlight.
He’d never really noticed the spiral staircase before, but it was a real wonder—maybe with Margaret here he was seeing it through her observant eyes. It was a genuine piece of old New York art nouveau glory, solid iron, cast all in one piece and dripping with serpentine Aubrey Beardsley ornaments. It must have weighed at least a ton. She followed him up it unquestioningly and waited in the dark while he unlocked the door and then fumbled around in the darkness for the one standing lamp.
It was oddly like bringing a girlfriend home to meet the parents—something he had done as rarely as possible when he was in college. Edward was relieved to see that he’d left the books in a reasonably orderly state. They filled the long wooden table in close rows of tall, neat, many-colored stacks, like a model city of miniature skyscrapers. As he pried open the computer and started it up she went over to them and took the first book off the first stack on the nearest corner. It was a mossy green hardcover that looked fairly modern. She inspected it closed, all six surfaces, turning it over expertly in her pale, slender fingers, then she let the book fall gently open in her palm and studied a few of the pages. She bent her head and gave the central fold a delicate sniff with her long, elegant nose.
“It’s been washed,” she said, making a face. “Scrubbed with detergent. Disgusting French practice, ruins the paper. Should be illegal.”
She scanned the spines of each stack in order, carefully and without hurrying. She seemed to have forgotten he was even in the room. She stopped when she came to the wooden case that held the ancient book he’d unwrapped on his first day there. It was at the bottom of a tall stack of books, but before he could offer to help she picked them up and shifted them to the floor in one practiced motion. The books left a ladder of dusty smudges up the front of her dress, but she didn’t seem to notice. She opened the case and looked inside.
