The Hunter

 

In retracing these details,

I am unsure if they are real,

or if I have dreamt them

Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie

 

The premise of this story, which does not exist, is rather simple: a man rides along a dusty road on the back of a merchant’s cart. He bears a message for the emperor. The countryside is cold and barren. Here and there, peasant’s huts dot the bleak landscape. Soon the party reaches a gate. A line of peasant-folk stand before it. “What brings you to the gate,” one asks, a hint of derision in his voice. “A message for the emperor,” comes the response. Silence follows. Interminable hours pass. Finally the gates are opened; the party pass through. The countryside gives way to a lesser hamlet on the outskirts of the imperial center. The peasants stare in awe at these new sights and are filled with joy; they feel as if they have already arrived at the emperor’s feet. Then comes another gate, another interminable wait, on and on for an eternity. In all likelihood they all die long before arriving at the palace; the narrator remarks dryly that it would have sufficed to walk around the gates, for no wall stood to bolster them.

            So goes the story, whose discovery I owe to a stranger, and whose content I have improved ever so slightly with the addition of one or two minor touches.  

            The story came to me, as I’ve said, from a complete stranger, who, armed with nothing but the most jaundiced summary, came to me for help identifying it. It was not, he said, An Imperial Message, which charts the exact opposite course—from the emperor to the most distant distance. Nor was it Before the Law, which charts the desired course but without the conceit of a messenger. It was not, in fact, any story by Kafka; my stranger insisted that it had been written by Borges. Skimming through the table of contents of the latter’s fictions, I suggested The Parable of the Palace, featuring an emperor and a series of towers each of whose color, to the eye, was identical, “but the first of which was yellow and the last was scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.” This, too, did not suffice.

I became desperate. I ran through all possible solutions. None satisfied this stranger, who remarked enigmatically that the voice was similar in certain places. Among those I suggested are the following tales, whose authors, it seems to me, are increasingly irrelevant:

 

-       The Great Wall of China – in which that famous and nigh-interminable wall is built piecemeal on the orders of a far-off and inaccessible emperor whose name and whose very existence are cast into doubt.

-       The Wall and the Books – in which the tale of the emperor to order the construction of the great wall is related, alongside his injunction to burn all books preceding his reign. The mysterious and incomprehensible grandiloquence required to order not one, but both acts is interpreted in various contradictory ways.

-       A Country Doctor – in which the titular doctor struggles to make his way to a patient on a snowy winter’s night. Suddenly he arrives; it is as if “the farmyard of my invalid opened up immediately in front of my courtyard gate.”

-       If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – in which a series of novels begin but never end.

-       Homecoming – in which a man arrives at the door to his childhood home, and, with fearful trepidation, refuses to knock, listening for voices and hearing only “the faint striking of the clock passing over from childhood days.” He feels that the inhabitants are keeping a secret from him, and wonders whether, if they were to open the door suddenly, he too would not act as if he wanted to keep his own secrets.

-       The Knock at the Manor Gate – in which a pair of siblings, passing through a village, knock on a manor gate and are mysteriously hounded by the law for this obscure crime.

-       The Next Village – in which a man remarks “that I scarcely understand how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without fearing that even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”

-       The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim – in which a man searches for the traces of another, holier man, only to discover, through a gradual approach which never quite dawns, that that man is himself.

-       The Secret Miracle – in which the last moment before a man’s death extends into an infinity, allowing him to complete his final poem, if only in his own mind.

-       On Exactitude in Science – in which an empire’s cartography becomes so detailed as to encompass the empire itself.

-       The Dialogues of Ascetic and King – in which various literary depictions of this type are related; “beneath the trivial surface of these tales beats a dark opposition of symbols; the magic in which the zero, the ascetic, may in some way equal or surpass the infinite king.”

-       The Hunter Gracchus – in which a long-dead hunter relates his fate: to wander aimlessly and eternally across the sea.

 

I am confident that none of these tales match the stranger’s story; and yet all of them seem to preempt it. I am confident that the story remains unwritten; and yet it has been all but written. It subsists in the space of the virtual; the space which is not actual but which is nonetheless real, and which exercises its ghostly powers, its unactualized potentials, on the firm and solid reality which stands before us.

Even this argument is prefigured by Borges, who writes of Kafka: “the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” So too does every writer write what he has not written.

 

(In moments of excessive despair, I sometimes pile up my books in patterns only I could understand. I like to imagine that my works, the ridiculous books which haunt my dreams and nightmares, are already written between the lines of resonance which I have thereby charted out.)