By Rafael Hernández
There are books that can be held in the hand and others that can only be held in the imagination. There are titles that were never written, that were lost amid wars, fires or indifference, and that nevertheless go on breathing among us. They are the books that do not exist: the absent ones, the mythical ones, the ones invented by other books. Works so powerful that they did not even need to be written in order to become unforgettable.
The silence of lost texts
The history of humanity is also the history of its absences. The second part of Aristotle's Poetics, devoted to comedy, has been the subject of rumours, theories and false discoveries for centuries. We know it existed because the philosopher himself mentions it, but it vanished at some point in antiquity, and with it, perhaps, a key to understanding laughter in Western culture.
The same happened with almost all of Sophocles' dramatic work: of the 120 tragedies he wrote, only seven have reached us complete. The others can be glimpsed in fragments, in secondary references, in echoes that float like golden dust through the Greek tradition.
And then there is the fire at the Library of Alexandria: that mythical wound in civilisation, that black hole where centuries of thought evaporated. What exactly did that library contain? We do not know. What hurts is not only the loss of knowledge, but the awareness that we will never know.
Metalibraries: books within books
In fiction, invented books have a special magnetism. Their very non-existence makes them desirable, as if the fact that we cannot read them activated a purer, more obsessive form of reading: imaginary reading.
In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco built a labyrinth of learning around that very lost volume by Aristotle on comedy, poisoned to prevent thought from laughing. Eco knew that imaginary books are most effective when they too closely resemble real ones.
Jorge Luis Borges raised this strategy to a major art. His Necronomicon is a fake book of demonology attributed to a supposed mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. But his true feat was another: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which describes an encyclopaedia that creates an entire world — Tlön — through its entries. Borges understood that an invented book does not need pages: it is enough for the reader to believe that it could have them.
In Cortázar's Hopscotch, Morelli's notebook acts as a secret book, a guiding book and a mirror book: a piece of writing within another piece of writing that dismantles the main narrative. And in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, the very book we are reading contains another book — that of Auryn — capable of altering reality itself. Reading becomes, once again, a magical act.
Impossible books
Not all the books that do not exist are lost or fictitious. Some are, quite simply, impossible.
In The Library of Babel, Borges imagines an infinite structure containing every conceivable book: every possible combination of letters, signs, errors and silences. In some remote corner lies the exact biography of your life, and beside it, another with a misplaced comma. That book exists, says Borges, but it is lost in an ocean of noise.
In If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino composes a novel made up of the openings of other novels: ten perfect beginnings, with no endings. The book plays with the anxiety of reading and never reaching the end, with the desire for a story that refuses to be caught.
In House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, we find a novel in the form of an archive, a commentary on another text (a film that may not exist), which is in turn glossed by another narrator. A dizzying palimpsest that turns the reader into the detective of a book that rewrites itself as it is read.
The desire for the unreadable
What attracts us to these phantom books? Perhaps the desire for the unattainable, the nostalgia for absolute knowledge, or the awareness that everything that has been lost — or that was never written — defines us as much as what we have kept.
The books that do not exist remind us that there is literature in the absent too, in what cannot be touched, or quoted, or underlined. They are a form of pure literature, one that lives only in the imagination, in speculation, in the play of mirrors that every good story is.
And perhaps, in some corner of a forgotten library, someone is dreaming right now of writing one of those books. One that, by its very nature, does not need to be written.