by Michal Ajvaz
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.
At the station in Vršovice
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.
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nbsp; 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.
The queen’s illness
The story of the feuding families was written on a strip of paper folded into one of the Book’s pockets; this pocket was inserted into a story about the adventures of an island prince, a character reminding one of Odysseus and Sinbad. One night a wicked jinni steals into the bedroom of his beloved wife and spirits her away. The prince spends twenty years at sea in a fast boat called the Dark Desperation, searching sinister islands and ill-boding coastlines. The end of this long section is rather strange even by the standards of the Book. After twenty years of roaming the prince finds his wife on a distant island of rock. She has been living here for many years alone in an empty palace by the shore: the jinni lives with each of his women for one year only, and he left her long ago.
In the beginning the woman is desperate with longing for her husband and her homeland. But over the years spent in seclusion on the island, she develops a love of solitude; she spends hour upon hour watching the ever-changing surface of the sea until she believes that she understands its script. These are the most beautiful letters in the world, and she never wearies of reading their wonderful messages. And so she spends her days on the shore in a state of rapture. The sudden appearance of her husband is unpleasant to her, as are the constant, noisy perambulations of his retainers on the paths and in the gardens of the palace. She is torn from her contemplations, dislocated from her dialogue with the ocean. She sulkily prepares her departure. But when the Dark Desperation is about to sail, she tells the prince she will be staying on the island. And the prince does not attempt to talk his wife out of her decision: for the several days of his stay on the jinni’s island he has found her indifference and eccentricity hard to bear. He realizes that he is glad to be leaving the island without her. Thus ends a twenty-year pilgrimage.
As the wife stands on the shore watching the boat disappear over the horizon, it seems that the prince is quitting the pages of the Book for good. After several days of unpleasantness, confusion and discomfort she is happy to return to her reading of the great manuscript of the sea. She whispers a declaration of love and a promise of fidelity to the sea; this Lautréamontesque ode to the ocean tells of the beauty of her lonely, husbandless, childless, friendless death on the moist sands amid the murmur of the waves. (Perhaps there is a direct influence at work here, but I am at a loss to identify it. It is not inconceivable that Isidore Ducasse stopped off on the island as he voyaged between Uruguay and France.) To the anti-social, solitary islanders this ending is far less scandalous than it would be to us.
But the story of the feuding families is set sometime earlier than the curious ending of the quest for the lost wife; the prince is still dreaming of reunion with his beloved, still scouring every coastline he can find. Most of the islands where he drops anchor are populated by monsters, cannibals or walking machines in metal coats which glow in the sun. Only once does he come across an amicable people with a welcoming, shaded palace. As he rests here a while the prince tells the island’s ruler and his family—in the manner of Odysseus in the palace of the Phaiakians or Aeneas in Carthage—of his homeland and his travels. The prince is descended from one of the warring families, so his story includes an account of the feud. The Book states: “For three days and three nights he recounted to the king and the queen the long, sad tale of the warring families.” Those readers who chose to let this sentence be and not to open the thick pocket which was inserted here, learned nothing about the feud; they spent two weeks on the hospitable island in the company of the hero, learned of his further adventures and then of their bewildering end. But those who did choose to open the pocket, as I did, were given the history of the feuding families of the archipelago. It includes an episode I would like, dear reader, to retell.
There are two islands, Illim and Devel. On the first there lives a king called Tana, on the second a king called Taal. There exists an enmity between the two royal houses. When Tana and Taal are still children, their fathers begin to tire of the same old naval battles joined in the cold of dawn, invasions mounted on sandy beaches (which memory makes an ongoing, dreamlike struggle), punitive expeditions to the humid jungles of the hills in search of guerillas (goaded to do so by the enemy)—and so they negotiate a tired peace. With time weariness and resignation give way to a kind of tolerance and respect, and so it comes to pass that Taal and Tana spend their youth together at the court of a Gallic king and become friends. But it seems that the ill-will has neve
r dissolved, just lain dormant in the blood; once roused, it takes sustenance from an ages-old, bounteous source—love for a woman and the jealousy and abasement with which this is imbued. Perhaps the hatred awakes of its own accord, finds a woman to please it and stage-manages a drama in which it resumes the reins of power, makes itself joyfully manifest in words and gestures and streams into all thoughts and acts. Tana and Taal fall in love with the Gallic princess Nau, who hesitates between them for a while before expressing a preference for Tana. Tana takes her with him to Illim. When some time later his father dies, Tana becomes the island’s ruler and Nau his queen.
Taal returns to Devel, where shortly he marries the beautiful Uddo, whom he also knows from Gaul and who rumour has it was implicated in a poisoning affair when she was only fourteen. Such a spare characterization is of little use for my retelling. In this part of the Book the unknown author says nothing more about Uddo, although in the scenes in which she appears lengthy descriptions of the patterns and fabrics of her clothing and of her jewels are provided. These descriptions are made in the shadows of pockets whose contents relate the history of the lands where the fabrics are woven and give details of the lives of the artists who chiselled the jewels. (Have no fear, dear reader—I will exclude these descriptive passages from my retelling.) The faces of all the figures in the Book are veiled in a fog; around this void fabrics flutter, scents waft and jewels twinkle. I considered painting faces on the characters of the tale before deciding not to force masks on them and so conceal the emptiness they are used to.