An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Incomprehensible Book in the World

We have all encountered a book sometime that is fairly much incomprehensible. Very comprehensible invective may be directed at this book, or nervous laughter, or shrug of the shoulders. What to do. The book is left to talk its incomprehensible language and we are left to pursue our own. Incomprehensibility is usually due to a book being written in the language of the tribe, whether scientific jargon, humanistic gobbledegook, zoological zippiededoodah.  Much modern poetry seems deliberately composed to make understanding impossible, rather than for experiential clarity. We each have a book that, though intended to be understood, is the most incomprehensible thing we have ever seen in our lives. And that’s just in English. The Voynich Manuscript is not like that, a work that has kept cryptographers in a state of incomprehension for centuries. Almost every year a new reader of this mysterious medieval book publishes a fresh theory that serves mainly to reconfirm its incomprehensibility. There are Voynich watchers, people whose lives pendulum between amusement that yet again the text denies access to a world expert, and dread that in fact the code of their favourite conundrum may finally be cracked. A carbon reading by the University of Arizona in 2009 dates the vellum between 1404 and 1438. That much is certain. The work is illustrated throughout with flora, humans, and cosmological features, leading us to think it may be some kind of encyclopedia (pictured); pages of herbs and plant roots suggest it may be a pharmacopeia, or even a wacky recipe book. Pages of nude women bathing in pools raise other theories. But it is the text, covering all 240 pages, that plunges us deep into incomprehensibility.  James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ is written in an invented literary language called Wakese and, likewise, our Manuscript is written in Voynichese. Wakese is a poetic hybrid, still generally comprehensible if we have English, that creates multiple levels of meaning in the story-telling. Voynichese is not like that. At least, it might be, if only we knew what it was saying. The alphabet of this unknown script has something like 20 to 25 invented characters that have yet to be matched meaningfully with any known language. Cryptography, computers, kitchen sinks – everything has been thrown at it. Wikipedia lists these language hypotheses, amongst those offered over time: the text could be cipher, code, shorthand, stenography, glossolalia, a transferred natural language, or a constructed language, perhaps even a Wakese before the fact. Some enthusiasts have strained every fibre of their being to prove it might be a hoax, but then what kind of hoax? Each new breakthrough with the Voynich Manuscript serves mainly to affirm the universal view that it is incomprehensible. It is an enigma of human ingenuity. If you wish to start up your own theory about the Manuscript, the work can be found here at its home in the Beinecke Library of Yale University: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046