To my surprise, Karael understood my somewhat confused explanation; she quite liked the idea of a Book which absorbed itself, but straight 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.
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?