But even then the wholesome influence seemed to be coupled with a threat. As the law did not omit any facts of a case, insisting on one variation of the premise after another, and was also not at liberty to omit any variation, for otherwise it would not be a law, anywhere near a just one, I was correspondingly tempted to add to each detail in my story a further one, and yet another, all those that in my eyes pertained to the matter at hand, as if I could do it justice only in this way.
In that compilation of old Roman law, for instance, a distinction was made, in the case of one person’s striking another, on the basis of whether the blood “fell on the ground” or not. For if the blood dripped onto the ground, the penalty had to be more severe. And it also made a difference under the law whether the blood ran down to the ground from a blow on the head or from a blow lower down, and even whether blood flowed only after the third blow or sooner, and whether the blow was administered with a flat hand or with the fist or with a whip, and whether the act was committed by a freeman, a slave, a “Frank,” or a barbarian, which also applied vice versa to the victim. And the provisos for women who were beaten this way were different from those for men, so that the paragraph or “title” on hitting and bleeding, in order to be halfway comprehensive, expanded into subparagraphs and sub-subparagraphs. Likewise the determination of the penalty for someone who had cut off a boy’s hair without his parents’ permission could not make do with a single sentence but, as a law, had to have variants, at least depending on whether the child was long-haired or not, and so on, and in the eyes of the law at that time it was also not all the same if a native (Roman) man “squeezed” a native (Roman) woman’s arm or “grabbed” it, and whether he committed this offense against the arm below or above the elbow. (Then a completely contradictory form of justice in the paragraphs on setting fire to others’ houses “with people sleeping inside,” which differentiated according to whether the sleepers were natives or not, and in the last section extended likewise to setting fire to cattle barns, and in its final variant to pigsties, for which, I imagine, it imposed the same penalty as for arson involving non-Roman sleepers.)
Be that as it might: what attracted me so much, even on a first reading of the code, was, I now think, not any particular model of justice but rather a kind of ordering, a fanning-out, illuminating, an airing-out of chaos or of so-called reality, both in ancient Rome — which, at the time when these laws were codified, had already collapsed quite a while earlier and was probably supposed to be revived as an empire by this means — and in the present, my own reality, both internal and external; as I spelled out the pandects (digests), paragraph by paragraph, subparagraph by subparagraph, no matter how different the topics treated in them were from contemporary concerns, confusion and obscurity vanished from my world. Even distinctions that appeared at first to be hairsplitting organized this world more precisely and accurately, and at the same time widened the larger picture.
Was that a paradox? The more possible conflicts the law carved out of formlessness, the denser its net; the more chiseled and discrete the vicissitudes it illuminated, the more spacious the world appeared to me as I read on, and also the clearer and more open — linguistic form, whose deciphering, detail by detail, had the effect of unlocking, enlarging, completing, complementing me?
And another paradox connected with my reading of the laws, the most curious of all? That these laws, focused on everyday misdeeds and atrocities, of which they treated exclusively and on which they rang the changes exhaustively, gave me, the decipherer, more than a millennium after their compilation, fresh certainty under my feet, something like rootedness, simply on the basis of their language, generally applicable and binding, which first named stabbing, killing, ripping out limbs, raping, exhuming corpses, pillaging in all conceivable degrees — that in itself created order and tranquillity! — then organized them, and in such a way that even the most deviant and malicious act was, to put it briefly, “provided for.”
Because the legal dicta provided for every possible turn of events, I was no longer threatened by chaos, and the unreal — than which there was nothing more catastrophic in my eyes — evaporated. A legal work that catalogues crimes and punishments comprehensively does not merely order them, but, as I still feel when reading this text, also welds the world together and validates it. What then emerges at times is indeed something like an empire; not a vanished Roman one, but rather one that again brings to mind the phrase “New World”; I experience in this case the very opposite of a trance.
I also became rooted in another sense through the language of these laws: even while I was a student in various capital cities, whether in Vienna or in Paris, the occurrences circumscribed by the Latin paragraphs were always transferred in my mind to the rural area from which I came. Although, as far as I knew, violations of the law had hardly ever occurred there, at least no criminal offenses — there was just one person in the village who was constantly in litigation with his neighbors, as probably happens everywhere — I thought I recalled, as I worked my way through even the smallest subparagraph, a corresponding situation in and around Rinkolach. Such a memory would shoot through me, brightly outlined, an oscillating, vibrating image, electric in quality. What flashed by me as I pored over my texts were fragments of narrative images such as I had never seen in any actual narrative from my native region. The village tales told by my grandfather, who everyone agreed was a “born storyteller,” never aroused any memories, nor did the novels of Filip Kobal, he, too, as people said, made of “epic bedrock.” Memory, marvelous in quality, did come to me, however, by way of the generalizations and ramifications of those long since inoperative prescriptions.
As recently as this morning, when I was trying, with my now fairly faded Latin, to decipher the paragraph in the digests about stealing flour from a mill — and it mattered for the penalty whether the flour belonged to the miller himself or to a customer — I found myself transported, with the force of a hallucination, to the Jaunfeld mill, deep down in the already dark rift valley, furthermore on a gloomy rainy day, sacks of grain under the tarpaulin outside on the ladder wagon on which I had been sitting only moments before, facing backward, while now I was standing inside the deserted mill, surrounded by the shrieking and roaring of the millrace, high above me the guttering light of a naked bulb.