The Golden Age (16 page)

Though indifferent to art, the islanders had their literature, and this literature was contained in the
Book
. The
Book
existed in a single copy only, and this was passed from hand to hand. There was no rule which determined how long a reader might hold on to the
Book
and no one ever recalled it or asked for it to be moved along to the next reader, nor was it anywhere stated who the reader should pass it on to. Usually the
Book
arrived unexpectedly, and whoever received it might choose to pass it on immediately or to keep it. It was typical for the
Book
to remain in the possession of one reader for several days or weeks. I can’t imagine that anyone ever tried to read the
Book
from beginning to end; readers tended to choose one of the
Book
’s sections and wander around in it. Nor did I read the
Book
in its entirety, even though it came into my possession several times. I looked into the
Book
on the day of my departure from the island, and even then I found in it quarters completely unknown to me, places which I would never have the chance to get to know.

When the
Book
came into the possession of an islander who chose to hold on to it, he or she would read several passages. Sometimes it was passed on in the form in which it had been received; more commonly, the text was modified somehow. The islanders considered the act of writing in the
Book
a natural part of the process of reading it. Cases when the reader made no alteration to the text were regarded as exceptions, phases in the endless metamorphosis the
Book
was subject to, in which the powers of transformation were concentrated while new forms matured beneath the surface. Like the other islanders, Karael knew that books in Europe were generally read without the reader’s writing into them, but she was amazed by this European custom and struggled to imagine what such reading was like. It seemed to her as absurd and eccentric as watching a film with the same shot in every frame; the islanders studied our books with an expression of confusion we might compare to that of the novice cinema-goer confronted with a film by Andy Warhol where all that appears on screen for several hours is a view of a New York skyscraper.

So it is true to say that in most cases the reader passed on a book which differed from the one he had received. As the
Book
circulated, the written-over was written over—and so the reader never encountered the same work twice. He discovered that since his last reading the characters he had introduced into the plot had acquired virtues and vices of which he had had no inkling, that dark events from the lives they had led before had come to light. And so it was that the
Book
was always a fragment: at any given moment no one knew it in its entirety.

There were three ways of making a change in the
Book
: insertion, overwriting of the text and deletion. The most significant and most common changes were made by insertion; indeed, the
Book
itself was a kind of insert, a pocket containing a corrugated reality. Probably the
Book
was born at the moment its first author noticed a crack emerge in the roar of the sea or the rustling of leaves; out of this crack the pictures and the words gushed forth, just as the strips of paper forced their way out of the
Book
’s pockets. The ongoing proliferation of insertions was the main event in the endless metamorphosis which was the life of the
Book
: the most remarkable aspect of its transformation was the expansion brought about by the insertions made on its many levels.

I know something about the history of the
Book
from the
Book
itself: in one of its pockets I found a contribution which told of the life and origins of the
Book
—the rest I have imagined and invented. It seems that the
Book
has transformed itself from the very beginning, although in the distant past it was more similar to our books in that insertions were written in gaps between lines and the margins of the page. But as the insertions became longer and longer and other insertions were inserted in them, it became more and more difficult to find unoccupied space for new text. Lettering became smaller and smaller; new sentences were woven around pre-existing text and other insertions, continuing bottom up as they wrapped around the line and proceeded back the way they had come before making another swift turn so as to proceed in the original direction; if, for example, in the corner of a page they found unoccupied space, they would contort themselves into a spiral. Text written thus gradually became illegible and assumed the character of a picture—a fantastical word-drawing. Then there was no longer any space at all for new words; it was necessary to tear out the pages, to write out on new sheets everything that was still legible. The new sheets were stuck into the
Book
to make a text which—initially, at least—was easy to read. But over time this, too, changed into an impenetrable jungle of letters.

Later some reader who was searching in vain for a blank space in which to make his insertion, and who did not wish to transcribe a whole page, came up with the idea of writing his contribution on a new sheet, which he would then stick—by means of a thin strip of paper—to the word or sentence in the pre-existing text to which his insertion was related. In this way it became the practise to paste insertions in the
Book
; on to the pasted-in sheets other pasted-in sheets were added, others on to these, and so on. When I imagine what the
Book
must have looked like in those days, I see its covers as the cracked shell of a wounded crab; spilling out of confinement there are strips of paper, upon which at various points have been stuck other strips of paper, which themselves sprout yet more such strips. All this paper either lies limply on a table or flutters in the wind and rustles. Periodically someone tries to stuff it within the covers as one would try to stuff heaps of underwear into an under-sized suitcase.

It is out of these beginnings that today’s relatively simple and convenient use of the
Book
has developed. In terms of its form the
Book
is like a foldout picture-book; this form recurs on all its levels. Whenever someone wishes to make an addition to the
Book
, he does not violate the pre-existing text, nor does he transcribe the page in question; he writes his contribution on any long strip of paper and folds it into a concertina. Should he choose to make a longer insertion, all he needs to do is paste a second folded strip on to the end of the first. Once the reader-author has finished his contribution, he tucks it into an ear-shaped pocket, which he pastes in using the juice of the berries of one of the island’s trees; the pocket is stuck by the same agent above the word or term in the pre-existing text to which it refers and whose content it develops. (But the hidden content of every object is the rest of a universe, tied up in that object; and so the
Book
has erased the difference between the explanatory note and the digression, or rather it has revealed that the distinction was always an illusory one. The hidden content of every part of such an insertion/explanation/digression constitutes a whole universe, making it something very large, which is not at all what it seems.) We might describe the ear of an insertion as a three-dimensional bracket. The pocket is easy to unstick: should another reader-author wish to write an insertion to an insertion, all he needs to do is repeat the whole process and to paste another, smaller ear at the appropriate place on the first insertion.

This bulking of the
Book
from the inside is possible because the paper used is extraordinarily light and thin but also very tough. This paper is produced from reeds which grow on the banks of the lower reaches of the river. It is made by the islanders during the periods they spend in the lower town. And here their journey to work rarely takes much longer than it does when they are living in their homes in the upper town, where it is their custom to stop off in the family mine on the way from bedroom to pantry. There is no shortage of reed in the lower town. Reed has swallowed up the statues and obelisks which stand along the river. Like a mighty but patient army it has advanced along the streets that lead from the river to the edges of town, has penetrated the courtyards of the palaces and the entrance halls of mansions and apartments alike. I saw town-centre apartments which brought together reed from the riverside and sand from the outskirts. Nor is there any shortage of demand for the paper-makers’ wares: the interest of the bibliophiles of Europe in light but tough paper never wanes. Paper is the island’s third article for export, after gemstones and fruit jellies. (I once discovered in an Amsterdam bookshop an annotated edition of the collected works of Nietzsche printed on the island’s paper. It had been possible to contain these in a single volume, which included all the letters, drafts and notes of Nietzsche’s estate—those on the forgotten umbrella, too—and an extensive commentary by the publisher.)

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
.

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 wings 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.