Mr Melville and mr melvill

On Lazslo Krasznahorkai's "Spadework for a Palace"

Not writing, or the production of non-writing, is well-tread territory in these parts, but rarely do you see writing for nobody, that is, a writing made for no audience and in fact resistant of any audience at all. It would be a perfectly personal text, one made for no one but its author, but then again this is an almost impossible dream, as writing something down necessarily makes it legible to others, and perilously interpretable, and, in so many words, accessible. Oh, the horror! To be seen! To be read! Only a text that existed only in the head or orally would suffice, and that wouldn’t even be a text.

The site of that paradox - to write without being read - is the site and also the goal of Laszlo Kraszknahorkai’s entry into New Directions’ “Storybook” series, Spadework for a Palace, which follows a man writing a book that he doesn’t want anyone to read while also trying to construct a library with no access. Having both is the only way to ensure posterity without having someone else - god forbid - actually read the book, but of course you’re reading the book, and so the project is charmingly asymptotic, forever straining towards a perfect inviolate space where it will not be perceived.

The book is subtitled "Entering the Madness of Others”, and the other whose madness we enter is one mr herman melvill, (no relation), just a grubby gray librarian with flat feet and an obsessive streak. mr herman lives in Manhattan – “a nightmare come to life, dreamed up by evildoers on a rampage, yes, I am referring to that nightmare created by a malevolent fate, or everything ending up in the hands of the real estate people, the slimiest gang in the history of human scum” – and works at the New York Public Library, or at least works there until he is summarily fired for, essentially, dreaming of the library’s total closure, “even if you are alone in one of the staff lavatories and happen to mumble to yourself, something about, say, a Permanently Closed Library Palace, anything like that, you are already doomed, you must not even breathe a word about such things or you’ll find yourself in a split second out of the street, without any health insurance, in other words, condemned to death, this is America!!”