A Clue Hidden in an Unreadable Book

The strange Proustian fragment inside the Codex Seraphinianus.

A passage from the Codex

The Codex Seraphinianus cannot be read, only experienced, except for a single sentence. The whole book is written in an unknown language. It looks beautiful, cohesive, organic, but it’s not readable. There were attempts, of course, since 1981, but none succeeded. The author, Luigi Serafini ended up confirming that the seraphinian language has no intrinsic meaning.

It’s not random, but the words don’t bear meaning. That’s not to say that the book is meaningless. The book has some sort of story. Or rather a direction. It has every aspect of an encyclopedia for a surreal world. Most of the understanding comes from the illustrations, full of wonder and weirdness.

There’s a single sentence in the whole codex that is actually readable, and it’s in French. It’s from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and it goes like this:

Fille orgiaque surgie et devinée, le premier jour sur la digue de Balbec. (An orgiastic girl who had risen up and been surmised on that first day on the Balbec pier.)

For a while, it was speculated that this oddly specific sentence was means to decipher the language. Some Rosetta Stone included in the book so we can finally read it as a true encyclopedia. It’s not, of course, but it still doesn’t mean it’s not a means to understand what the book is about. In fact, the inclusion of this sentence does a bit more than that.

The sentence can be found in The Fugitive (Albertine disparue), book 6 of Marcel Proust’s novel. At this point of the story, the narrator has already lived quite a lot. He’s been through a lot of human tragedies of different scales. One of them is his love story with Albertine.

The sentence is on the left page

Albertine is a formidable character. Not only is she beautifully depicted, but what her character means in the whole story is eye-opening. The narrator, despite even effort to seduce and be with Albertine, fails continuously. Their relationship is a long oscillation between possession and disappearance. He wants to hold her still, to freeze her into a definite form, but Albertine keeps slipping away. Even when she is physically present, he never truly knows her.

When she finally leaves him, and later dies, offstage, almost casually, the shock is both emotional and epistemological. He is confronted with the idea that the person he loved most was a construction in his own mind, a fiction he kept trying to make real. That’s the context of the sentence Serafini borrowed. In the novel, it describes the way the narrator sees Albertine for the first time: as a “fille orgiaque surgie et devinée”, a girl who appears in a flash, guessed more than perceived.

Here goes the entire sentence:

In short, if what Andrée said was true and at first I did not doubt it, then the real Albertine I was discovering after having known so many different appearances of Albertine differed very little from the orgiastic girl who had risen up and been surmised on that first day on the Balbec pier and who had successively offered me so many aspects, just as the layout of a city alters the arrangement of its buildings one after another as one approaches, until these new constructions crush and obscure the single major monument one first saw alone in the distance, although in the end, when one knows the city well and judges it accurately, its true proportions are those indicated by the perspective of the first glance, the rest, through which one passed, being only that successive series of defensive lines that every being raises against our vision and that one must cross one after the other, at the cost of so much suffering, before reaching the heart.

The narrator could never decipher Albertine. He was blinded by passion, possessiveness and trauma. Their relationship was molded by the narrator’s toxic traits, and because of this twisted vision that we readers see building up from the very first sentence, Albertine disappears. It’s only after her death that the narrator gets new perspectives. Like Andrée’s.

In the same fashion, our vision of the Codex is twisted by building up expectations. Just like Proust’s narrator who desperately wants to see something he understands in Albertine, we readers seek meaning in a sea of undecipherable signs. We convince ourselves, picture after picture, that the book has a fixed story, a coherent narrative, a real text that we might one day read out loud.

It’s only when the book is set aside, when we give up on meaning the same way the narrator lets go of Albertine, that we go back to our initial judgment and finally accept that the book isn’t meant to mean something, but anything.

The sentence, lost in the middle of the Codex, is not a means to decipher, but to understand. It’s only when we read the full sentence, from the actual book, that things can get clearer. Albertine, compared as a city that is clearer from afar, is the Codex itself. The book is the city we unfortunately dwelled into despite having no hope of understanding.

The Codex reenacts, with us, Albertine’s story with the narrator. We dive with big hopes, but with no means to have a healthy relationship. There will be no understanding, and the book will be wiped out from the cosmos before anyone can strip some narrative out of it.

The sentence is the focal point of both books. It’s only after ‘reading’ the Codex that I noticed how important the sentence was for In Search of Lost Time. It didn’t strike me before. Now, I can’t unsee how well it summarizes Proust’s vision and message.

We believe that we understand things, but we don’t. Our mind and feelings get in the way. The people we meet are fabrications of the fragments they let us see. Our relationships are as healthy as they can get.

Marcel Proust, by Otto Wegener — http://enlenguapropia.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/marcel-proust.jpg, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1388934

Both Proust’s masterpiece and the Codex remind us that clarity is always provisional. We look at people, at books, at memories, and we mistake our projections for truth. What we call understanding is often just a temporary alignment between what we see and what we hope to see.

Maybe that is why Serafini placed Proust’s sentence in the middle of his unreadable encyclopedia. Not to guide us, but rather to warn us. To say: you will not decipher this world, just as the narrator never deciphered Albertine. You will circle it, imagine it, misread it, and in doing so you will reveal more about yourself than about the text.

If something shines through the Codex, it is not meaning, but the pleasure of looking. If something survives Albertine, it is the knowledge that every vision is fragile.

We read, we guess, we invent. That is all we ever do.