Context

Reading Michal Ajvaz
Jonathan Bolton

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Imagine an indecipherable script that gradually overruns all the books in your library. Imagine a text that disappears as you read it, “like old frescoes in a catacomb, when the fresh air penetrates to them.” Imagine an epic poem carved in the ice of a frozen pond (and imagine the thaw). Imagine discovering a new key on your typewriter. Imagine a death sentence written in shellfish.

The texts of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz (pronounced EYE-voss) are evidence not only of a clever imagination, but also of a mind that savors the difficulty of reading—a mind for which language is not merely a vehicle for the delivery of information, but an integral part of the very world it is trying to communicate. Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you. Consider an image from “The Beetle,” the leadoff story in Ajvaz’s 1991 collection The Return of the Old Komodo Dragon. The narrator’s friend, an archaeologist investigating a vanished Asian empire, finds its constitution engraved on the side of a cathedral in the flooded ruins of the capital city. He climbs the cathedral to read.

He moved over the wall on narrow, slippery ledges, where he could stand only on the tips of his toes, and clutched onto other outcroppings with his hands. The main difficulty was that there was a footnote in almost every sentence. My friend, however, was not lazy; every time he reached an asterisk hovering above the end of a word, he would climb down the wall and submerge himself in the icy waters of the lake, for the footnotes were deep below the surface. Seaweed and mollusks were stuck to the wall, and as he removed them in order to read the hieroglyphic text, he heard a noise resembling the clatter of castanets. It was the chattering teeth of innumerable carnivorous fish, swimming round him and closing in on him in an ever-tightening circle. Then he would climb back up the steep wall, soaking wet, draped with seaweed that waved in the cold mountain wind, bitten by predatory fish, to continue reading the text in the place where he had broken off.

Reading, for Ajvaz, is often an allegory for perseverant obsession—and yet his own hypnotically flowing prose is not difficult to read at all. This paradox, in fact, embodies one of the basic oppositions of his fiction. In his latest novel, Empty Streets (2004), we meet a painter whose personality is split between “the surrendering gaze that leaves things as they are, and the obsession to continuously decipher things, as if they were secret hieroglyphs.” These two extremes identify two Ajvazian archetypes, figures we might call the observer and the interpreter. Ajvaz’s interpreters, like the archaeologist climbing up and down his text, are stubborn decipherers, determined to discover the secret code that underlies and explains the world around them. To an American reader, they might recall the “paranoid school” of American literature, the foggy conspiracies of a Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo; in fact, the narrator of Empty Streets sets out on a quest to determine the meaning of a wooden symbol he trips over in a junkyard, a “double trident” in which any fan of Pynchon will hear a faint echo of the muted post horn from The Crying of Lot 49.

Unlike Pynchon or DeLillo, however, Ajvaz has faith that the hidden universes whose traces we glimpse shimmering in and out of our daily lives are ultimately benign. Ajvaz combines the semiotic habits of the paranoid with a laid-back view of our world and the worlds it hides, as well as trust in the purpose and power of storytelling. This strange feeling of security underlies the other archetype in Ajvaz’s fiction, the figure of the observer, who simply surrenders to the flow of the world and inspects its endless metamorphoses with pleasure. One ever-varying image of this surrender is the ocean—Ajvaz may be the first writer from this landlocked nation to make the ocean such an integral part of his stories, and the shipwrecked castaway, at the mercy of the currents, is one of his recurring motifs. But the observer appears in other manifestations. In “The Typewriter,” an ebony statue depicts a writer typing; engraved on the ebony page in his ebony typewriter, there is another story, narrated by someone lying in a flat boat that carries him along the sluice of an aqueduct. He floats through rooms and cities, describing everything he sees overhead, and his horizontal drifting forms a counterpart to the strenuous vertical reading of the archaeologist. This sluice-bound storyteller belongs to a whole class of Ajvazian narrators, carried on ski lifts, sailing through the air on skates and rays, drifting on the ocean waves—all of them aimless wanderers. Their most common incarnation is simply a man walking through Prague, a flâneur surrendering himself to the chance meetings and crooked streets of the Czech capital.

Any Prague pedestrian knows how easy it is to get lost there, and how rewarding it can be to follow chance bends in the road or step into half-hidden entryways. Ajvaz claims that the space of Prague exhibits a “resistance to order” that is nevertheless different from chaos. His narrators take their place in a long tradition of “Prague walkers,” stretching all the way from the pilgrim in Jan Amos Comenius’s seventeenth-century allegory The Labyrinth of the World to the twentieth-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Vítezslav Nezval, and Vladimír Holan. This tradition was famously described in Angelo Maria Ripellino’s magisterial study Magic Prague in the 1960s, but Ajvaz breathes new life into it. Visitors who have gotten their fill of the golems, witches, and Kafka caricatures that populate Prague’s postcard stands will find in Ajvaz a new mythical geography; in his 1993 novel The Other City, a lovely hymn to his hometown, Ajvaz repopulates Prague with his own ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and statues, and he moves in the peripheries—the gray housing developments and forlorn, yet somehow cozy, pubs on the city’s edges—as much as over the tourist-beaten paths of the Old Town. On his wanderings, Ajvaz’s first-person narrator begins to notice more and more chinks in his familiar surroundings, until a whole “other city” begins to open up, overlapping our workaday world but invisible to us. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisibility, reminding us that we see least clearly what is most familiar. Only when we remove objects from “the network of purposes” that entangle them will we awaken to the possibility of seeing them anew; only then will libraries turn into jungles, only then will we notice hatchways leading inside statues and ocean waves lapping at our bedspreads. Prague’s “other city” becomes for Ajvaz an emblem of all the worlds we are blind to because we are caught in our own habits of seeing.

Ajvaz was born in 1949, and began publishing late. He graduated from Charles University in 1974, studying Czech Literature and Aesthetics, and then wrote his Ph.D. on the great interwar writer Richard Weiner (whose fascination with French literature and narrative experimentation Ajvaz shares). During the 1970s and 1980s Ajvaz worked at various jobs, and did not publish his first book, a poetry collection called Murder in the Hotel Intercontinental, until 1989. Currently he is a researcher at Prague’s Center for Theoretical Studies—in addition to fiction, he has published an essay on Jacques Derrida, as well as a book-length meditation on Jorge Luis Borges called The Dreams of Grammars, the Glow of Letters, and a philosophical study, Jungle of Light: Meditations on Seeing.

The years before Ajvaz published his first works are transmuted in his fiction in an unusual way. In Czechoslovakia, the repressive 1970s and 1980s are generally referred to as the period of “normalization,” when the government cracked down on free expression following the Soviet invasion of August 1968. This was a difficult time for Czech literature; many authors emigrated, others suffered severe persecution from the government, and still others began to collaborate assiduously with the new regime. Ajvaz’s fiction touches on a different kind of fate. In Empty Streets, there are a number of characters who simply opt out of public life, neither opposing nor supporting the regime, but attempting to ignore it as much as possible. There is a night watchman, for example, who spends contented hours in his guard’s booth at a typewriter factory, studying Byzantine history and pre-Socratic philosophy. Speaking in 1999, the narrator describes the people who have executed this retreat from the visible world:

Thirty years ago, when reality in this country changed into a strange dream, when hope disappeared from the world, they went off quietly into an emptiness that could take various forms. They couldn’t live anywhere in the world that was coming into existence, and so they found a no-place and settled there, living nowhere for long years; and when the dream dissolved ten years ago, they were so used to the emptiness they lived in, they had fallen so much in love with their nowhere place, they knew so well its magic charms and had adapted so closely to its flora and fauna, that the world seemed to offer them horribly little. During all those years, while they had been drinking the wonderful nectar of nothingness, they had become choosy, and now no other food tasted good, no structure was equal to the brilliant palace of emptiness. And so they remained there.

Whether or not this is autobiographical, it is a type of biography that Ajvaz has made his own. Indeed, one of the many interesting things about his fiction is how he evokes the experience of Communism without invoking it. Ajvaz has submerged the gray years of normalization into his own more intimate mythology, which sidesteps the traditional Cold War storylines of a nation and culture suffering under the knout of Communism. In other words, just as he has remapped Prague according to his own mental geography, so has he recalibrated the national timeline according to his own private histories. But this is not to say that Ajvaz is an apolitical writer; indeed, he is constantly exploring the strange and unpredictable bonds between power and the language it uses to dominate others. To understand this, however, we must consider in more detail Ajvaz’s own relationship to language, its scripts and its stories.

One of Ajvaz’s narrators yearns to write a novel that would be a cross of Lautréamont’s proto-surrealist Songs of Maldoror, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Another populates Captain Nemo’s submarine with characters from Proust and Kafka. And a third complains of literary critics who don’t like theoretical passages mixed in with their fiction, “as if there were any substantial difference between stories of people, animals, plants, or things and stories of concepts.” Indeed, Ajvaz is strange sort of storyteller, who often seems to value concepts more than characters. We might say more accurately that he is a fabulous second-order fabulist—which is another way of saying that his own characters tell better stories than he does. Ajvaz’s longer works, like Empty Streets or the 1997 novellas “The White Ants” and “Zeno’s Paradoxes,” are really just concatenations of stories gathered by nameless first-person narrators. This gathering can be somewhat mechanical, and this is Ajvaz’s greatest weakness: his characters are at their worst, their most artificial, when they are doing something or going somewhere. When a Czech professor of aesthetics chases a jewel thief across the roofs of Paris, there is something workmanlike about the writing; it is only when he catches her, and she tells him why she stole his wife’s necklace, that the story—now her story—comes alive again. Ajvaz’s characters are at their best when they are telling stories, or listening to them, preferably over a beer or glass of wine (but, if necessary, while hanging from a neon sign above a Paris department store). In fact, many of them seem to switch on, like carnival automatons, when the narrator enters the room, and to switch off again as soon as he leaves. They all speak in about the same voice, and their personalities are generally one-dimensional; Ajvaz seems uninterested in motivations and psychological realism; unlike most of us, his characters exist primarily to tell their stories.

But oh, what stories! Imagine an underground cathedral lit solely by luminous fish swimming in glass statues. Imagine wasps that buzz behind your bathroom mirror and sting you while you’re shaving. Imagine a species of white ants that scare off predators by condensing into the statue of a tiger, whose eyes turn green and emit teardrops, which alone can cure an unfortunate sickness that keeps its victims asleep most of the time, such that their brief moments of wakefulness begin to seem like dreams, or nightmares. Imagine an afterlife whose inhabitants argue about whether they are in heaven or in hell; imagine that the doodles in your tenth-grade math notes had infuriated the queen of a distant land, whose top spy lures you into her clutches with a floating puppet theater. Ajvaz shakes ideas like these out of his sleeve, several to a page, extravagantly and effortlessly, with the generosity of a genuinely abundant imagination. His stories effortlessly digress from one involved plot to another; in a typical work, the narrator meets someone who begins to tell him a story, in which one of the characters eventually begins to tell a story, in which another character re-tells the plot of a novel she found in a hotel room, and so on and so on, until the reader loses track of which narrative level he or she is on and simply surrenders to the flow. Ajvaz builds many beautiful examples of these mutli-storied metafictional mansions, but the most stunning of all is surely “the Book” described in The Golden Age.

This 2001 novel, Ajvaz’s most brilliantly complicated, is a fictional travelogue, part philosophical ethnography and part potboiling fairy tale. It tells of an island “about twenty kilometers in diameter, lying in the Atlantic Ocean on the Tropic of Cancer between Cape Verde and the Canary Islands.” The narrator spent three years there (he now lives in Prague) and has decided to write about the islanders—not as a way of commenting obliquely on European society, for the island’s inhabitants “were, fortunately, unusable for the expression of ideals; among their virtues was the impossibility of making them citizens of some Utopia”—but rather because “this wandering has value in and of itself.” The islanders are Ajvazian observers par excellence, devoted to the surfaces of their world and barely interested in what lies beneath. They draw no ontological distinction between reality and its representations, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and a person seems as insubstantial as a mirror image). They can spend hours considering the creeping evolution of a water stain on the wall, or listening to the infinite variations of watery music that sound throughout their largest city, built like “a vertical Venice” into an island cliff down which numerous springs and rivulets flow.

About half of The Golden Age describes subtle entertainments like these, in sometimes excruciating detail. The novel’s second half, by contrast, is devoted to the islanders’ one artistic pastime, called simply the Book, a sort of handwritten hypertext novel. The islanders pass the Book from hand to hand; anyone is free to write in it, adding their own stories, crossing out the stories of others, or simply blurring the ink, creating the spots and blots they so love. Above all, anyone is free to interpolate text by gluing a paper pocket to the page and filling it with his or her own story, a footnote, as it were, explaining various details of the main text (for example, the life story of a minor character, or the “family psychopathology” of the rulers of a distant land). And of course there are pockets within pockets, akin to the story engraved on the statue of a typewriter, or the tales told by characters in other people’s stories; the whole sprawling creation is like a pre-Gutenberg internet, impossible to read “in order,” where any sub-story can lead off into infinitely many new directions. The narrator, getting into the spirit of the thing, proposes cutting holes in the pages and interleaving them into a kind of Mobius strip or Piranesian prison-house of fictions.

Despite the islanders delight in one-dimensional surfaces and the glacial movements of stains spreading across a wall, the Book is, to put it mildly, action-packed and plot-driven. The long section retold by the narrator, which makes up the last twenty-five chapters of The Golden Age, deals with two feuding royal families. The sorceress queen Uddo uses her “murderous chemistry” to turn her rival, Queen Nau, into a metallic statue, “entombed in her own body,” with only her eyes left mobile, “two larvae twitching in terror” on the motionless surface of her face. Nau’s son Gato infiltrates the enemy court to steal the antidote; its secret is hidden in a gelatinous green statue full of carnivorous fish (more effective than a safe for storing valuables), whose creation is explained in a long subplot contained in another pocket of the Book. And so the levels multiply; there is a lovelorn prince who becomes obsessed with a sentence he finds written on a scrap of paper (“Deep in thought, the king scrutinized the radish”) and writes a long novel (contained in another pocket) to explain its existence; there is a telescope through which a man watches a world light years away—a miniature panopticon all of whose characters died eons ago—and falls in love with one of its inhabitants. Lover after lover is betrayed, and each transmutes disappointment into obsessions both murderous and world-creating, all salted with palace coups, reigns of terror, lots of poison, and even a giant squid.

These dazzling stories of driven artists and murderers, wonderfully inventive and entertaining in their own right, also form a kind of panorama of morality tales set over and against the relaxed Epicureanism of the islanders, whose greatest pleasure is to sit back and let life take its course. The island’s credo might be a line from the Odyssey that recurs in The Golden Age: “Let go of the raft, let the winds carry it away.” This is the advice of Ino, the sea nymph “of the charming ankles,” who comes to Odysseus after his ship is destroyed and advises him to surrender himself to the waves that will ultimately carry him home. It is as if the peaceful islanders are sublimating their secret yearning for plot and passion in the Book, whose stories of obsession and paranoia struggle secretly against their receptive passivity—and again we see the interpreter-observer paradigm.

Let go of the raft: this credo of the castaway also underlies Empty Streets, Ajvaz’s latest and longest novel, and yet its narrator, too, is constantly struggling against the opposing impulse, to search actively for meaning. We cannot abandon this search, Ajvaz seems to tell us, but we will make the most progress when we forget our goal and surrender ourselves to the indicators of chance. After literally stumbling upon the wooden “double trident” on a shortcut through a junkyard, the narrator begins to find the symbol everywhere—as a screen saver, a company logo, a torture device, a tattoo on a girl’s stomach. It becomes tied up with the disappearance of the daughter of a once-prominent Communist literary critic—a socialist realist whose reviews, “soaked in the threats of power,” denounced “any art in which he glimpsed even a glimmer of imagination, play, and freedom.” As if hypnotized, the narrator stubbornly tries to explain the occurrences of the symbol, which gestures toward mysterious sects and a buried treasure, but the search ultimately becomes an end in itself—or rather a story in itself, whose ending dances farther away every time it seems within reach. Ajvaz does not deprive us of the key to these mysteries, but the key is itself another story, which ultimately points to further quests. Ajvaz’s theme is not simply that the journey is the goal, but also that we can only draw near to our goal when we liberate ourselves from it, just as we can only truly see familiar objects when “they have slipped loose from the purposes that bound them to this world.”

Like many of Ajvaz’s scripts and symbols, the double trident is both a sign and part of the world it signifies; it draws our attention to a meaning beyond itself, without letting us forget its own materiality. (It even draws blood, piercing the narrator’s foot when he first stumbles upon it.) Signs both mean and are; they evoke insubstantiality and yet persistently insist on their own substance; they imagine another world, and yet remind us how reality resists our imaginings. In Empty Streets, this conflict, yet another version of the observer-interpreter paradigm, is at one point laid out in “the battle between the Axis and the Labyrinth,” a subplot of a French novel written by a Lautréamont-loving perfume manufacturer, in which a South American junta of generals tries to remap the winding streets of their capital city according to their own strictly linear dreams. And it appears again in one of Ajvaz’s very best set pieces, from the 1997 novella “The White Ants,” about an ancient Indian civilization that harbors an obsessive hatred toward any kind of lasting script, and so invents one that disappears when read. Or eaten, rather: their alphabet is made up of edible shellfish; each taste corresponds to a different sound. Books and newspapers are laid out by teams of “typesetters” on rows of ebony plates on long tables in the monasteries. (The monks, as guardians of the word, must know how to cook.) Ajvaz is fascinated with such transient texts, as well as with our stubborn attempts to recover them. Thus, a fear of transience incites an underground sect of heretics, who reconstitute permanent (and visible) texts by using shells instead of shellfish. The regime hunts them down and executes them by means of an ingenious death sentence: brought before a tribunal, they must read (eat) a text containing the letter V. This letter is a foreign borrowing in the shellfish language; it occurs in just a single word, the name of a sea god. (The civilization itself came from the interior and absorbed the coastal tribes who were the land’s original inhabitants; the sea god is borrowed from their pantheon, its name from their language.) V is signified by a poisonous shellfish, whose taste is thus known only to those unfortunates executed for trying to fix its form—a variation on the ancient theme of a god whose name must not be pronounced.

Usually the dialectic of form and change is not so drastic. Thus, in Empty Streets, there is a book written in ink that permanently disappears after a month, to live on only in the fragmented memories of its few readers. To really appreciate this image, we may have to discard the Kunderan lens that has shaped so much reading of Central European literature in the West. Ever since Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we have been accustomed to think of lost stories in terms of the fragility of history, its vulnerability in the face of power; we frame disappearing books in the larger story of the war of ignorant rulers against writers and libraries. Lost histories evoke forgotten nations and erased identities. But for Ajvaz, the permanent script is a utopia, and the impulse to preserve history, while necessary and even laudable, is a utopian fantasy. History is instead a hypertext and palimpsest, retaining links to and traces of all its varied scripts; like the stories of the Book, no text can entirely obliterate another one. (Hence the conquered coastal tribes live on, at least in their one poisonous letter V.) Signs are stubborn. Their material form persists even as their meanings shift, employing generations of observers (who limn the forms) and interpreters (who guess at the meanings). No text lasts forever, but none is ever completely destroyed.

Here we return to the relationship between power and language. Power yearns to obliterate some texts and make others permanent. Especially in his later work, Ajvaz often imagines bloody attempts to realize these yearnings, palace coups and crackdowns, underground terrorists and paramilitary guards, various efforts to seize control of history. But power invariably begins to rot as soon as it ripens; fragments of the defeated scripts shine through the official narrative; the imagination searches out chinks in the armor of power and slips through them into another world. In one of his early poems, Ajvaz wrote that “the dreams of the defeated are fulfilled in the achievement of the victors.” This is a recurring plot line in his stories; the European colonists who settle the island of The Golden Age, “experts on power and violence,” are gradually harried and seduced by the subtle, whispering world of the islanders, and the South American generals who try to rebuild their city along the ground plan of the double trident find the labyrinth seeping back into their linear world through tunnels, arcades, and secret passageways. In Ajvaz, the desire to surrender to impermanence is always struggling with the desire to create and fix meaning, but in the end a gentle humility prevails in his interweaving, overlapping, shape-shifting narratives. Without exactly inviting us to forget, he asks us to remember the sight of things passing, to follow the world’s metamorphoses, and to listen attentively to the music of rivers we can never step into twice.