Once upon a time, in a kingdom which took words very seriously, there lived a great many scribes.
There were scribes in towers and scribes in basements.
Scribes in ministries.
Scribes in newspapers.
Scribes in think tanks, where, increasingly, much of the thinking appeared to concern tanks.
There were senior scribes and junior scribes, foreign scribes and native scribes, scribes who had won prizes and scribes whose principal achievement was knowing exactly when to nod during a meeting.
And there was one particular scribe who had come from another kingdom.
He made his living from words.
This would eventually cause trouble.
For the first rule of the Kingdom of Scribes was very simple: Words must belong to somebody.
At least, that was what everybody said.
The foreign scribe had not always been very good at remembering this.
Many years before, when he was still learning his trade, he had worked for an American called Glenn.
Glenn was an unusual man.
The foreign scribe remembers him now principally as a collection of cliches. Markets are like gravity, he would say, you can’t argue whether they exist or don’t.
Glenn knew how journalism should be done.
Glenn knew when a story was ready.
Glenn knew, with particular certainty, when the foreign scribe had got something wrong.
One day Glenn had obtained a rather good quotation.
The foreign scribe liked it.
So he used it. In a Czech newspaper. Surely no-one would notice, he thought.
Quite why he did this remains mysterious.
He possessed a telephone.
He had used telephones before.
There were people at the other end of them.
One could dial numbers and ask questions and, with luck, acquire one’s own quotations.
Yet there was Glenn’s quotation, sitting there already polished and useful.
So the foreign scribe took it.
Years later he would remember this with embarrassment.
But that was only the beginning.
In another kingdom, he was once commissioned to write about Nigerian politics.
There was an article in The Economist.
It was clear.
It was elegant.
It explained something the foreign scribe was also trying to explain.
And somehow – through haste, laziness, confusion, admiration, or the peculiar alchemy by which reading becomes writing – pieces of it migrated.
They crossed the border.
Nobody stamped their passports.
They arrived in his report.
The foreign scribe would later struggle to explain exactly how.
Perhaps he had been taking notes.
Perhaps he had copied a passage intending to rewrite it.
Perhaps the distinction between what the article said and what he now knew because he had read the article became blurred.
This distinction can become surprisingly difficult at three in the morning.
The scribes rarely mention this.
At three in the morning, sentences behave strangely.
They lose their owners.
A phrase which belonged unmistakably to Reuters at midnight may, by 03:17, begin to feel as though it has always lived inside your own head.
This was especially troublesome when the foreign scribe later worked in a large broadcasting castle where one of his duties was to rewrite the dispatches of other scribes.
The agency sent a sentence.
The scribe changed it.
Another scribe moved the second paragraph to the first.
A third removed three adjectives.
Somebody checked the spelling of the minister’s name.
Another inserted background from yesterday.
Then the story appeared beneath a new crest.
Whose words were they?
There were rules, naturally.
There are always rules in kingdoms with many scribes.
But the activity itself depended upon a strange proposition: Take these words and make them ours, but not too much ours, and certainly not still theirs.
Most nights this worked perfectly well.
Some nights it didn’t.
The foreign scribe made mistakes.
A phrase travelled too intact.
A sentence retained too much of its previous life.
He was told off.
He felt ashamed.
And, mostly, he became more careful.
Then came the book.
Books were different, he thought.
A book had an author.
His photograph appeared inside.
His name appeared on the cover.
Surely these words were his.
Except they weren’t.
Not entirely.
There were interviews.
Newspaper articles.
Books by other people.
Reports.
Things he had underlined.
Things he had copied into notebooks.
Things he had copied into files and forgotten that he had copied.
Things he had read so often that they seemed to have lost their provenance.
In one chapter he was writing about the way other people had written about something.
He quoted them.
He paraphrased them.
He interpreted them.
He disagreed with them.
And somewhere in this traffic between their sentences and his thoughts, the border disappeared.
A reviewer opened the book.
And found his own words looking back at him.
There is no elegant way out of this.
The foreign scribe could explain.
He could describe his notes.
He could explain what he had intended.
He could point to the argument and say that the thought was not exactly the same.
He could say the borrowing was accidental.
Some of that might even have been true.
But the reader does not read intention.
The reader reads the words on the page.
And there they were.
Someone else’s words.
Under his name.
There is a Frenchman named Barthes who once made matters worse by suggesting that writing itself is made from previous writing, a fabric woven from innumerable earlier voices. It is an attractive idea, particularly if you have just been caught borrowing somebody else’s sentences.
Ah, says the guilty scribe.
You see. There are no original words.
This is not a defence.
It is merely an interesting observation.
Foucault was also suspicious of the author. The name attached to a text does more than identify the person who held the pen; it gives the discourse a particular status and helps determine how it will be received.
Again, very interesting.
Again, not much help when the reviewer has found his paragraph in your book.
Eventually the foreign scribe arrived in the City of Mirrors.
The city was beautiful.
It had towers rebuilt from ruins, cafés full of arguments, ministries behind heavy doors and institutes containing clever people discussing the fate of Europe.
The City of Mirrors had a favourite story about itself.
In this story the city stood at the edge of civilisation holding back the darkness.
It knew the darkness well.
It had suffered.
It remembered.
It warned the comfortable kingdoms to the west that they did not understand what was coming.
Sometimes the city was ignored.
Sometimes events appeared to vindicate it.
And each time that happened the mirrors shone more brightly.
You see?
We told you.
We were right.
The foreign scribe found much of this convincing.
He was not outside the story.
He had lived in the city for years.
He spoke its language badly enough to remain foreign and well enough to become involved.
He had written books about it.
He had defended it.
Criticised it.
Loved it.
Left it.
Returned to it.
He had made his living explaining the kingdom to people elsewhere.
The kingdom, in turn, occasionally paid him for the explanation.
Complicity can be very comfortable.
There were celebrated scribes in the city too.
One of them was a prizewinning historian who had married a senior statesman of the kingdom.
The foreign scribe read her.
Sometimes he admired her.
Sometimes he became irritated.
What bothered him was not necessarily what she wrote, but what he imagined happening around the writing.
The applause.
The recognition.
The satisfying click as argument met national self-image.
Here, thought the foreign scribe, was the mirror functioning perfectly.
The kingdom looked into it and saw courage.
The mirror said: Yes. That is us.
Lacan might have smiled.
His famous mirror-stage account was concerned with the strange human tendency to identify with a coherent image of ourselves – an image more complete and unified than our lived experience actually feels.
Kingdoms can do this too.
So can journalists.
So can lovers.
So can foreign scribes who imagine themselves bravely puncturing everybody else’s illusions.
Beneath the celebrated scribes came the Keepers of the Words.
Every kingdom has them.
The foreign scribe encountered them in offices across the city.
There was Maria.
There was Jan.
There was Agnieszka.
There was another Maria.
There was always another Maria.
They had desks.
They had institutional email addresses.
They had documents called final_v7_corrected_FINAL2.docx.
They knew which formulation had been approved.
They knew which phrase must not be changed.
They knew that resilience was good.
They knew that nothing should merely happen when it could constitute an important step towards strengthening something else.
Their English was sometimes uncertain.
Their certainty was not.
And into these rooms came the native speaker.
The Native.
A curious creature.
He was required because the kingdom wished to speak perfect English.
He was resented because perfect English occasionally behaved differently from the English that the kingdom had already approved.
“This doesn’t really mean anything,” said the Native.
Silence.
“It is our institutional wording.”
“Yes, but nobody in English would actually say this.”
“It has already been accepted.”
“By whom?”
Another silence.
There were questions one did not ask in the Kingdom of Scribes.
The Native gradually learned.
His function was not always to write.
Sometimes it was to certify.
A sentence passed through him and became English.
His presence was a little wax seal at the bottom of the page:
A native has seen this.
He found this absurd.
He also invoiced for it.
There were institutes devoted to thought.
Their inhabitants were called thinkers.
They wrote papers explaining why the kingdom needed more weapons.
They held conferences about security.
They invited generals to speak about deterrence.
They produced reports about tanks.
Eventually the foreign scribe began to suspect that the tanks had conquered the think tanks from inside.
He found this joke very funny.
He repeated it too often.
At some of these institutes lived people who called themselves liberals.
They believed strongly in liberalism.
So strongly, occasionally, that anybody who questioned the approved version of liberalism seemed to them dangerously illiberal.
This puzzled the foreign scribe.
But he was no innocent.
He too had his approved words.
He too had people whose opinions caused his eyes to narrow before they had finished speaking.
He too confused disagreement with stupidity when tired.
He too had once imagined that education consisted partly in teaching other people to arrive at better conclusions, by which he generally meant conclusions closer to his own.
The kingdom was not uniquely foolish.
It merely had offices in which ordinary human foolishness acquired headed paper.
At the top of one small court sat a Head Girl.
Let us call her Karolina.
Every kingdom requires a Head Girl.
She knew important people.
She knew the right people.
She knew which people were becoming important and which important people it was becoming safer not to know.
Her politics were immaculate.
Her contacts were excellent.
Her language contained all the approved nouns.
Democracy.
Europe.
Values.
Security.
Resilience.
Solidarity.
Mirrors are irritating when they work.
Then one day the foreign scribe walked into a newsroom and heard himself say:
“This is bollocks.”
The word hung beautifully in the air.
One of the senior scribes was angry.
The senior scribe often sounded angry.
He used fuck in the manner other people use commas.
There was shouting.
There was performance.
Everybody in the room knew their role.
The Angry Editor.
The Difficult Correspondent.
The Important Expert.
The Exhausted Producer.
The Person Who Had Won Something.
The Person Who Had Once Interviewed Somebody Who Had Won Something.
The foreign scribe suddenly felt very tired.
The pay was poor.
The performance was exhausting.
He walked out.
This felt, briefly, like liberation.
But outside the building he still had words in his pockets.
He had been carrying them for thirty years.
Other people’s phrases.
Editors’ rhythms.
Wire-service constructions.
The cadences of books he admired.
Newspaper clichés.
Polish syntax creeping into English.
English syntax imposed upon Polish thought.
Things he had overheard.
Things he had stolen.
Things he had forgotten were stolen.
Whose voice exactly was supposed to emerge when all the others went quiet?
Then came the Machine.
The Machine was the greatest scribe the kingdom had ever seen.
It never slept.
It had read everything.
Or seemed to have.
You could give it an angry thought and it would smooth its hair.
The foreign scribe loved the Machine.
Naturally.
It did in seconds what he had spent a lifetime learning to do slowly.
“Make this tighter.”
The Machine tightened.
“Keep my voice.”
The Machine kept something resembling his voice.
“Less pompous.”
The Machine quietly removed several trumpets.
Then the foreign scribe read the finished paragraph.
It was good.
Sometimes disturbingly good.
And a question appeared.
Whose words are these?
His?
The Machine’s?
The millions of writers whose language had helped make the Machine possible?
The editor who had once taught him not to begin a sentence that way?
Glenn?
The Economist?
Reuters at three in the morning?
A reviewer whose words had once wandered into the wrong chapter?
Barthes would presumably have enjoyed the problem.
The author, already declared dead, had now acquired software.
But the foreign scribe remained inconveniently alive.
And his name still appeared at the top.
That was the part theory could not quite rescue him from.
The text may contain countless voices.
Meaning may escape its maker.
Authorship may be a function, a performance, a convenient fiction.
But there remains a small mundane fact.
At some point somebody presses Publish.
The Kingdom of Scribes continued.
The ministers spoke.
The institutes thought.
The tanks rolled through PowerPoint.
The Head Girls guarded the gates.
The prizewinners won prizes.
The middle managers corrected the English.
The native speakers complained about the middle managers.
The foreign scribe complained about everybody.
Then he went home and opened his laptop.
The blank page waited.
He looked at it.
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
He began to type.
And somewhere behind him stood Glenn, Reuters, The Economist, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, the angry editor, the dreary expert, Maria, Jan, Agnieszka, the Machine, every book he had ever read and every person who had ever corrected his grammar.
Quite a crowd.
The foreign scribe sighed.
“Could you all keep it down?”
Nobody moved.
So he wrote anyway.
For perhaps this was the final rule of the Kingdom of Scribes.
There are no words without other words behind them.
There is no perfectly uncontaminated voice.
There is no place outside the story from which the clever man can expose everybody else’s performance.
There are only degrees of attention.
Degrees of honesty.
The obligation to know, as far as one can, when another person’s words have become entangled with one’s own.
And the rather less glamorous obligation to say sorry when the border has been crossed.
The foreign scribe had crossed it more than once.
That was why he could no longer tell the story from the throne.
He had to tell it from among the scribes.
Where, inconveniently, he had been sitting all along.
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