The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz

  Owing to the extraordinary thinness of the paper, insertions could be made in the Book on many levels. Each series of insertions reached a different depth; I don’t know which were the deepest because I didn’t open all the Book’s pockets (and I didn’t reach the bottom of all those I did open). It was impossible to determine the number of levels of insertion by the thickness of the pocket: some of the more swollen pockets had only one or two levels, as the stories recounted in them were long. The deepest I ever reached into a pocket was the eleventh level—but I’m not saying that it went no further than this. As the case may be, the island’s Book had more levels of insertion than the nine counted by Michel Foucault in Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa.

  The life of the pages

  Although parenthetic pockets are a very practical arrangement, their main significance is to enable a reading of the Book in a great variety of ways; at any given moment the Book is equivalent to many books of different kinds. The reader might ignore the pockets altogether (the story-lines and situations they punctuate remain self-contained without reference to the pockets); he might explore the contents of a single pocket, reaching right down into its depths; he might overlook some of the pockets and delve into others; he might read only the text at—let’s say—the third or fourth level of insertion; with reference to some numerical key, he might determine beforehand the number of interior pockets he is going to open and read.

  It was common practise for readers of the Book to alternate and combine all these approaches. Reading became a labyrinthine journey whose directions were various. It twisted and turned, it drove backwards and forwards; it might follow one direction for a long time before plunging down to the deepest dungeon (built by the king of Babylon in playful protest that the building of a tower was forbidden to him), then rising upwards like a fanciful staircase. Also subject to constant change was the character of the energy coursing through these journeys; sometimes reading proceeded at a stampede, while at others it was like a furious digging, a systematic underground exploration, or an abstracted tumble into parenthetic holes followed by a disoriented crawling back out of them; it might skate lightly on a smooth surface, step indecisively or gingerly on cracking ice, circle lethargically, panic and submerge itself, reel first one way, then the other. Reading was always a kind of ballet, a source of both joy and torment.

  All these rhythms and routines were born out of a tension between two basic forces and two kinds of longing that corresponded to these forces. In their purest form both kinds of longing became an unhealthy obsession. I knew this better than the islanders; the islanders knew how to float in the maelstrom created by the clash of these two currents while I was always swept towards the source of one or the other. The initial longing was the quest for the very bottom of every insertion, for the Book’s very lowest point amid its many branches; it demanded the inspection of the Book’s maze of dungeons in the hope of finding treasure there. (The reader was sure that a complicated labyrinth such as this was hiding some kind of treasure.) Then there was the second longing—to skate lightly over all pockets, refusing to be seduced by their depths with their promised delights otherwise only to be found in dreams; this was the desire not to descend to the evil of the utterance (which dulls the glow of simplicity), the desire not to betray the magical stories that flutter in the murmur of the void, stories replete with bright-coloured gemstones shining in the dark, dancing on terraces and night-time gardens by the sea.

  If left to their own devices, each of these longings would eventually wreck the process of reading and bring about the collapse of the Book. The reader who started on the insertions would never reach the end; indeed, at the moment he entered the first he was signing himself over to the devil of the deep, and as such was lost. This vigorous, crafty devil would draw him in ever deeper until he was a prisoner of insertion hell, a dark, cruel subterranean world of text from which there was no escape. And the devil would chuckle to himself as the quest for an illusory bottom made the reader more and more feverish.

  There was no stopping place. Not even the final inscription in the innermost pocket could provide salvation, as this, too, sprouted a multitude of insertions which became visible only as they were reached; although these insertions were as yet textless, their intention was plain—the phantom blossoms of parenthetic pockets of the future were hovering over the paper. The poor reader wished to read on, but though he sensed the proximity of the next word it eluded his grasp. There it was, shimmering on the shore, promising salvation—but he just couldn’t get through to it. It eluded him as the tortoise eludes Achilles: between this next word and the last there opened up a bottomless gulf of real and imaginary insertions. The Book collapsed in on itself; it became a weeping wound in which were gathered words visible and invisible, words wriggling like maggots. To stop reading, thus escaping the undertow of the gulf, was not an option. One knows that the Book itself is a kind of insertion: once inside the Book, it is impossible to resist this dark surrender. Once the wound in the Book is opened, the constellations begin to quake and then the cosmos caves into the oozing depths.

  Although the second longing—to skip all the insertions—spares the reader the hell of subterranean text, it, too, bears along in its wake the collapse of reading and the disappearance of the Book and the world. There is no satisfaction in skimming the surface, leaving all pockets sealed. As I have said, the Book itself is one big insertion: it was born when the hum of calm was fractured and words began to stream out of it; the entire Book is enclosed in an invisible pocket. The reader feels a longing to change this imaginary pocket into a real one made of the island’s paper and to seal the whole Book inside it so that the obscenity and disgrace of words are covered up. In this way the Book would disappear, but not even this would satisfy the yearning for the simplicity of undispersed radiance. Whoever encountered the Book as an insertion would realize that the substance into which the Book was inserted was itself only an insertion—an insertion inserted into other insertions—and that as such it was a text of dubious character in which words gloss over what is important, its splendid emptiness.

  Now the colours into which the white light had dispersed could be a cause of great anguish to the reader, just as the words into which the truth of the hum had dissolved had caused him great anguish previously; he would search the plain of colours as if it were a coat of loathsome splashes and slops befouling the radiant white of the void; he longed to erase the shame of colour and return to the original whiteness. All shapes would seem to him a needlessly long and rather banal interpretation of a number of basic geometric figures, but as soon as he restored these figures to the world of perception he would again be overcome by a sense of dissatisfaction; he would realize that they had originated through straight lines succumbing to the temptation to pursue various courses, that their potentialities were trembling within. Only after the discontented reader had rendered all figures into straight lines could the final act commence, and then it would dawn on the reader that the straight line itself—still, and inadmissibly—brings forth two courses which ought to remain folded within, in the blissful embrace of non-dimensionality. And here he would conclude his work (which had begun in the distaste for the contents of the Book’s pockets) by pushing back into the non-dimensional point the straight line into which the whole world of shapes had been reduced.

  Now to the changes which were made to the Book by transcription and overwriting. The island reader always thought of the Book as a palimpsest, a manuscript written over another manuscript; the surface text always evoked the original, which insinuated itself between the letters—sometimes forcefully, sometimes more subtly—in an attempt at restoration. Over time, I, too, came to view the Book in such a light, and now it is impossible to for me to rid myself of the urge to look at books as I looked at the Book—when I read these days, another tale, the translucent pages of another book rise gently to the surface of the open pages of the actual book, before subsiding like the wing
s of a great, ghostly butterfly. This is how words and sentences came to be expunged and replaced by other words and sentences. It was easy to wash characters written in fruit juice from the reed paper before replacing them with others. Indeed, it was perhaps too easy; in the upper town, where water was forever streaming from various directions and the reader sometimes carried the Book through a wall of water, it was not an infrequent occurrence for a whole passage to be erased.

  The islanders understood words blurred into smudges as still readable text; the last way in which the Book transformed was not a washing clean of the paper but an erasure by which the text disappeared and was not replaced. There were three ways in which erasure could occur: a page or pages were pulled out and the violated foldout was resealed; or pockets of insertions were removed; or written words were washed away without their being replaced by new words or figures. I remember a time when readers were going through the Book like mushroom-pickers through the woods, plucking out insertions so that very few remained. The Book became a thin volume which might have dwindled away to nothing; I imagined an isolated scrap of paper bearing its last remaining sentence, its last remaining word as it was carried away by the island wind. (But this paper flake might be the seed out of which a new Book could grow; in this new Book the contents of the old Book would return as a dream.)

  There was also a time when the pages and pockets of the Book remained in place while they shed words and sentences, leaving a blank space on a page or even a whole page which was blank. This disappearance was quite different in kind from that given by the pulling out of pages and insertions, and the Book did not become any thinner. The whiteness spread rapidly and it seemed possible that soon the reader would have only white pages to leaf through, that he would open pocket after pocket to find nothing but blank pages. As you can see, the Book led a rich existence thanks to the several ways by which it could approach nothingness.

  Looking for the beginning

  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 strai
ght 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.