The Golden Age

Fo’s return

The plot of the novel written by Fo in the cabin in the woods is gradually shifted to the other planet. Dru, erstwhile king of Vauz, comes into the story less and less, until he features only in connection with the description of scenes from the telescope. Now events are described to which Dru’s telescope does not have access, events which he is surely imagining. Also described are the feelings and thoughts of the extra-terrestrials, whom Dru learns to read better and better from their facial expressions, gestures and words. And so the extra-terrestrial passages, which to begin with were somewhat reminiscent of the nouveau roman, gradually assume the nature of a traditional, omniscient author. (But the right to get right into a particular space or the thoughts of a character, which the authors of the nineteenth century considered theirs for the taking, is in this case paid for by Dru’s agonized solving of clues as his gaze wanders about the dumb surface of objects and faces, a surface that remains resolutely closed to him.)

And as visible worlds grow out of invisible worlds and carry their hidden spaces and secrets within, as what is close to the surface illumines depths, backs and interiors, the world in which Dru lives has from the very beginning its own depth, in which there are very few gaps. Because of this Dru is all the more exasperated when he comes up against a genuine blind spot. For example, the main square of the capital city is entered by a mighty river, screened from view at a certain point by the city hall; the river does not re-emerge on the far side of this building. Dru’s gaze is well-trained in looking for clues of the hidden, and he studies carefully the reflections flickering across the smooth sides of sleighs that emerge from behind the city hall. But the sleighs move too quickly and the reflections on their warped surfaces are too misshapen to read. Once mirrored in a metal tray carried by a waiter in a restaurant at the back of the square, he sees something pulsating, which may be natural or may be mechanical; after this his gaze follows the waiters of this establishment for several nights, but never again do they hold their trays at the correct angle.

By this time only one sentence in every hundred pages reminds the reader of the eye resting against the eyepiece to observe a planet in a distant galaxy; now the people of Earth are figures from a strange planet. Then at last the eye disappears from the text entirely — in his cabin, Fo forgets all about it, and the novel becomes a saga of Umur. The gaze is free of the constraints imposed by the eyepiece and able to travel about Umur at will; all coverings are demolished, objects are no longer made up of fronts and backs, surfaces and insides. The gaze that sweeps the planet, sniffs into hollows and joyfully orbits objects like a dog, belongs to no one in particular; its drunken course leaves in its wake a continuous trail of words. A life form appears on the square behind the city hall that is half-plant, half-mountain, that drinks in the water of the river and transforms this water into translucent, coloured crystals that travel through steep caves into glowing underwater lakes. The pressure of gases in the lakes occasionally throws these crystals high above the Umurian city like magnificent fireworks. The gaze follows Nus into rooms in the most secret depths of her house, pushes through walls and curtains, walks about with her in a vast gold cellar Dru never knew existed.

The tale of Dru’s wanderings and the description of how — once in his new world — he forgets about Isili entirely, is no doubt an echo of Fo’s own fate. Mii’s face has disappeared entirely from Fo’s thoughts, but it returns unrecognized in the masks of his characters. The similarity between Fo’s story and the story of his heroes is so great that the unknown author of this part of the Book—perhaps Fo himself in the cabin — several times confuses Mii with Isili and inserts the wrong name. (“If you wish to find something exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.”) It might be expected that Fo’s projecting his own trauma in his work would be a kind of therapy for him, allowing him to exorcize the demons of despair and restlessness. I was imagining that once his imagination had given his demons new bodies, he would find the courage to drive them from his thoughts; but in fact all that happens is that the demons gain new nourishment, which makes them stronger and more aggressive. They control the world of Fo’s novel just as earlier they controlled the world of Fo’s real life; they unify both these regions under their rule, and in this new empire they begin to flaunt the rituals of their power.

Fo is lying on his front on the palliasse, writing in ever smaller letters on sheets he lays on the floor. He is worried that the store of paper in the cabin will not suffice, and thus he will not be able to describe everything that is happening and has happened on Umur — its celebrated history, the grandeur of its court, the glory of its celebrations, the beauty and magnificence of its nature. When he has filled the last sheet in the cabin and placed it atop the pile next to the palliasse, he turns this pile over and begins to write on the other side of the pages, in the gaps between lines recording numbers of felled trees. The letters become so small that Fo himself is not able to read most of them, but it is enough for him to know that the pages are being filled. He has long been recording dialogue in the Umurian original, not bothering to translate it, and on top of this — in the manner of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who in War and Peace switched from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Roman for the writing of dialogue in French — Fo does this in the hieratic script of Umur (composed of monstrous letters he has thought up in the cabin). In the end he is writing the rest of the text, too, in the hieratic script; whether or not it is in the Umurian language, no one will be able to determine. Thus on the floor of a small building in the woods are scattered many sheets of paper filled with small, illegible characters written between the lines of a forester’s record-keeping.

It was not just Fo’s book that was written in the script of Umur: the part of the Book that described Fo’s work, which I read on the island, quoted from it in the original. I really believe the islanders read these pages, and that they even derived pleasure from doing so in spite of not knowing the meaning of Fo’s characters and thus not being able to understand what they were reading. But unlike the islanders I was not so good a student that I could take pleasure from symbols without meaning. When I noticed that the last two thirds of Fo’s work were written in Umurian characters only, I carefully folded the strip of paper back into itself, returned it to the pocket it belonged in, and went back to Fo’s cabin. I still hadn’t finished with the pocket whose contents described the origination of the statue in jelly, which itself — as no doubt you remember, dear reader — was to be found in the pocket that contained the seafarer’s tale of a feud between two families in an archipelago, itself inserted into a description of twenty years’ worth of this seafarer’s travels.

Fo’s fall into another world is perhaps the result and also the cause of a sickness that has taken hold of his mind and body owing to the hardships suffered on his solitary journeys and the harshness of his life in the cabin; these come immediately after the burn-out of his unrequited love, and are exacerbated by the draining tension and compulsive ecstasy created in him by his writing. When at last Fo is discovered by one of the units searching the island for him at Taal’s command, the crown prince, who has by now covered both sides of every sheet of paper he can find, is lying in the cabin trembling with fever; he has used the last of his strength to carve some strange letters into the floorboards. News of Fo’s discovery reaches the palace before he does: the king, Uddo, Hios and the whole court are standing in the courtyard when the unit delivers him home. What they see is a delirious, emaciated figure being borne through the palace gates on a stretcher; the figure does not see them. Fo’s parents and sister are a constant presence at his bedside, but Fo does not recognize them. They have Mii brought to him in the hope that the sight of the woman he loved will clear his mind, but Fo babbles to her something about how happy he is that she managed to escape the squid’s tentacles, and he seems to be telling her how sorry he is about the dreadful illness that so changed her golden, diamond-spangled face. Then he whispers something in an unknown language and retreats into himself. By dawn of the third day his separation from the world is complete.