The adventure of letters
At the same time, I got to know the islanders’ script from their Book (of which I have much to tell in the chapters to come). I had the impression that it was a mixture of fragments from various other scripts. There was a group of characters that gave the appearance of small, schematic pictures of objects, animals, people, and figures; then there were the letters which bore no similarity to objects or living forms, and these could be divided into several groups, including one of simple signs made up of two or three straight lines, another of complicated tangles of wriggling curves that reminded one of a bird’s nest, and another of letters composed of clusters drawn from many barely ascertainable points that increased in density before becoming looser again. My first impression was that the creator of the islanders’ script had composed it in haste; he had borrowed letters hurriedly from many sources without in any way attempting to integrate them into the whole, and afterwards this ill-assorted mix endured by the simple force of habit.
Yet I found this explanation unsatisfactory, and as questions pertaining to the script’s strange diversity continued to tantalize me, I began to pay visits to the royal palace in the hope of discovering in its old papers something about the script’s history. I remember the afternoons I spent seated on the floor of the one of the empty chambers, digging out old documents from under the hot sand and reading them through. No matter where I sat, the crumbling facade of the uninhabited building was always visible in the windows on one side of the room, while the windows on the other side were filled with the splendid blue of the sky; whenever I stood up, the sparkling, azure canopy of the sea was raised to half the height of the windows, as though drawn up by some miraculous pulley. In a distant room I could hear the steps of the queen as she paced, deep in thought; sometimes I would spot her standing in the empty frame of the door, one of dozens of empty frames that playful perspective made into a grooved ornament, a row of characters in the shape of the letter pi, each enclosed in the next, each smaller than the last. Sometimes the siren of a ship sounded in the harbour.
These quiet afternoons taught me that the chaotic heterogeneity in the letters was not brought about by habit and inertia; indeed, there was a restlessness in the script that caused its constant transformation. It was as if it were running away from itself while trying to catch up with itself; it seemed to me that it dreamed of a long-lost past or a magnificent future, of a script ages old or else an idealized one yet to come, full of perfect, resplendent letters, seeking these in endless transformation, following a great variety of mysterious clues, setting out in many different directions at once, but in the end always failing in its efforts.
Even after this it was a long time before I was in a position to appreciate the true nature of the island’s script. Having abandoned the hypothesis that symbols from a variety of systems had been stitched together and the whole then maintained by inertia, there was a time — after I succeeded in uncovering the pictograms from which most of the island’s letters were derived — I supposed I had indeed discovered the script’s origin; how great my surprise, then, when, delving deeper in the drifts of sand in the royal palace, I discovered some documents written in a script older still! I learned that what I had assumed to be an early pictographic script had itself originated in the interpretation of puzzling symbols which represented absolutely nothing.
It seemed that changes washed over the script in waves, and that these waves had no single direction. Apparently the pictographic script had changed many times to form more abstract symbols — by the simplification of the figures into outlines in which it was no longer possible to read the model, or else by the in-growth of tangles of lines — and many times, too, the abstract symbols turned back into pictures, once their outlines began to live and grow, the tangles of lines yielding the figures of humans and demons, animals, birds, and monsters, which till then had been present only in the shapes of the letters as distant dreams or reflected reflections — as memory and suggestion. It seemed to me that the present-day letters of the island were on the cusp of just such a transformation into a pictographic script: a few of the characters had already taken on the form of a bird or an animal. Though the majority had yet to begin forming pictures, I saw shapes trembling in the letters, preparing to break through: nascent, hitherto veiled faces of strange creatures whose cunning eyes blinked or beaks obtruded impatiently from their tangles of lines; unsettling, to say the least. I soon realized that all the letters were exuding the same sort of anxiety — as if they contained a secret message, unknown but foreshadowed; every text is a palimpsest, every letter a secret cipher.
The transformation of pictures into abstract symbols and abstract symbols into pictures wasn’t the only way in which the script developed, however; evidently there were times, for example, when their lines frayed into ever-thinner threads, or when the lines ran into one another, forming square, solid shapes, or when the lines stretched out like the stalks of climbing plants and had to bend their tips into spirals or arch into sine curves so that they could fit into the spaces between the lines. Then there were times when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, crumbled into ever-smaller pieces until they became cloudlets of ink dust; the documents of these eras look like pictures of a white sky studded with black constellations. There were times too when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, became so complicated that it would take several hours to write just one of them; so, of course, very little was written, although it doesn’t seem that anyone on the island was too concerned by this. Indeed, I believe the writer was actually pleased if, on his way across the line, he struck upon such a letter; he could then take a break from his narrative and immerse himself joyfully in the writing of a single character.
Nor was it possible to read this kind of laboriously written script in a single, fleeting glance; it was necessary to go through it collecting distinguishing features — and there were a great many of these, hidden in its knotty network of lines. (It might be that two letters had twenty-nine distinguishing features in common, differing only in the thirtieth.) Hence, a reader could wade around in the bliss of a single letter, and the reading of a single letter of this labyrinthine script might take him one whole afternoon. It rarely happened, in the process, that the reader attained the meaning of the word of which this letter was a part, but he was certainly not concerned by this: his compensation was his encounter with the meaning of a single letter — which always far surpasses the reference point of speech, and its mysterious capacity for communication.
Having decided to write this book, I considered how it should look. For a time I wondered whether it might not be best to produce a book which, instead of a narrative about the island, was made up of nothing more than a few of these complicated letters, thus allowing readers to read into it what they would. To the objection that my readers wouldn’t know the sounds to which the letters refer, the islanders’ riposte would surely be, “All the better!”