With such raptures in mind, readers have often been portrayed as prey to these imaginary beings, as victims of unreal happenings, as devourers of books who are, in turn, themselves devoured by literary monsters. Seen from the perspective of those who do not read or inordinately care for books, the passionate engagement with the page seems vacuous and unhealthy, resulting, as in Grandville’s cartoon, in a creature not of flesh and blood but of paper and ink. Every reader, past and present, has at least once heard the injunction: “Stop reading! Go out and live!”—as if reading and life were two separate states of being, as if the admonisher feared that the reader might no longer know the difference between what is solid flesh and what is not. The Book Fool, a figure who first appears as such in the sixteenth century, in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, is the incarnation of this ubiquitous reproach. Whether skimming through his books in a belled fool’s cap (as in Albrecht Dürer’s illustration to Brant’s book), or in the guise of a studious donkey (in Olearius’s satire De fide concubinarum of 1505), or as a librarian occupied only with the dust gathered on books (in Abraham a Sancta Clara’s Hundred Distinguished Fools of 1709), the Book Fool became an established icon of the literary world.
The Book Fool is, among other things, the omnivorous reader who mistakes accumulation of books for the acquisition of knowledge, and who ends up convinced that the events narrated between covers are the events of the real world. He or she: here the humanists were disposed to include both sexes. Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, taking his cue from the Book of Proverbs, depicted the Book Fool as female. “If it should happen that a woman should wish to appear wise, she will only succeed in being twice as foolish,” Erasmus wrote. “Because a vice is doubled when it is disguised as virtue, going against nature and all innate tendencies. . . . A woman is always a woman: that is to say, a fool.”⁴
“The Book Fool.” From Sebastian Brant, The ship of fooles: wherein is shewed the folly
of all states, trans. Alexander Barclay Priest (London: lohn Cavvood, 1570).
Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The Book Fools are the women and men who “love all devouring words” (as the psalmist has it), and devour in turn volume after volume, but are (again, according to the psalmist) “like a broken vessel” because they cannot retain instruction. In most cultures of the written word, they have been compared to one of those small, hungry creatures who have, since before the days of Alexandria, been the scavengers of libraries: in Spanish, mice, in German and French, rats, in English, worms, after the Anobium pertinax. The actual bookworm (the larva of the Anobiaum) was first described by Richard Hooke in 1665, who compared its voracious, elongated form to “one of the teeth of Time.”⁵ An Anglo-Saxon riddle from the ninth century describes the creature’s habits:
A teaching ass. From Paul Olearius [Jacob Wimpfeling],
De fide concubinarum in sacerdotes (1505).
Johann Christoph Weigel, “Book Fool.”
From Abraham a Sancta Clara, Centi-folium stultorum (Nuremberg: Weigel, 1709).
A worm had swallowed some man’s lay, a thief
In darkness had consumed the mighty saying
With its foundation firm. The thief was not
One whit wiser when he ate those words.⁶
Probably an imitation of an earlier Latin poem, the Anglo-Saxon riddle makes explicit the voracious reader’s fault: to swallow the words without benefiting from the meaning, translating the text not into grounded experience but into wishful thinking. The bookworm, in spite of all the devoured books, remains a fool.
No doubt behind this depiction lies a deep, dark unease: the mistrust societies have always had toward that which can be created out of words, a mistrust of the intellectual act itself. This mistrust, this superstitious fear, is perhaps born from the fact that in a number of mythologies the world is created through an utterance, so that words, or the Word, give birth to the universe and to everything in it. Fear of the word can therefore be understood as fear of the magical power of words, and it is tempting to see in most textual censorships, book burnings, mockeries of the reader’s craft, an exorcising attempt to defeat the suspected wizardry of language itself.
Robert Hooke, “A bookworm.” From Micrographia, or, Some physiological descriptions
of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses: with observations and inquiries thereupon
(London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665). Courtesy the University
of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
It may be that a society, defining itself through the erecting of walls, nurtures at the same time the suspicion that within those walls something will be born that will contest its definition, will seek to alter its identity. And even though our societies grow in the give-and-take between that which we exclude and that which we include, we are more wary of the critical and inventive force of language than we are proud of its power to preserve. Consequently, we attempt to restrict or deride its imaginative efforts.
Exemplary in this sense is the very first scene of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir. Julian’s father, seeing his son reading instead of tending to the mill, tears the book out of the boy’s hands and flings it into the river. Similar scenes are repeated in a number of novels and biographies, from the life of Jean Racine to Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and have become emblematic of society’s attitude toward the reader. Since the days of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian scriptoria, the reader’s craft has been suspected of being magically dangerous. Anachronistically, we might ask whether there was an implied Book Fool mockery in the Egyptian representation of the god of scribes as a baboon.
In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the identity of the Book Fool was created to deride and undermine certain aspects of the reader’s power. His features were exaggerated, his attitude ridiculed, in order to associate him, not with the wise fool, not with “Christ’s Fool” described by Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians,⁷ but with the “sot” of popular stories and plays, the dullard, the ignoramus who, like the worm, devours books but remains foolish.
The distinction between the serious reader, the scholar, and the mere devourer of books is of the essence. Already in the sixth century, Boethius, in his Consolation of Philosophy, made a clear distinction between the Book Fool and the serious reader. When Lady Philosophy appears to him in a vision, as he sits sick and despondent in his prison cell, she insists that the Muses of Poetry who have been inspiring him (and whom she calls “scenicas meretriculas,” or, as David Slavitt freely translates it, “chorus girls”)⁸ should leave immediately, since they have nothing to offer a scholarly mind. “Now, were it some common man whom your allurements were seducing, as is usually your way, I should be less indignant. On such a one I should not have spent my pains for naught. But this is one nurtured in the Eleatic and Academic philosophies. Nay, get ye gone, ye sirens, whose sweetness lasteth not; leave him for my muses to tend and heal!”⁹
The Muses of Poetry (or the Muses of Bestsellerdom, we might say today) stuff the boorish reader with foolishness; the Muses of Philosophy nourish the inspired reader with healing fodder for the soul. These two opposing notions of how we ingest a text derive, as we have seen, from the Book of Ezekiel¹⁰ and the Apocalypse. When Saint John is commanded to “take it, and eat it up,” he tells us that “It was in my mouth sweet as honey and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.”¹¹ Because he has eaten the Holy Book, Saint John must now go beyond the delicious taste of his reading; he must profit from the text’s bitter learning and go out and “prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.” As wise readers know, eating the book eventually leads to speaking the book.
Eventually, the distinction between the gluttonous and the ruminating reader, both of whom obediently “ate” words, became unclear, and the depiction of the indiscriminating Book Fool came to overshadow that of his wise counterpart and stand for any reader. Even if Sebas
tian Brant and his fellow humanists understood and insisted on the differences between ingesting carefully and indiscriminate snacking, between reading in depth and superficial reading, the powerful image that served as frontispiece to The Ship of Fools imposed itself almost everywhere.
Still today, glasses are the emblem of the egghead, of the nonsexual being. Dorothy Parker’s ditty is still rooted in the popular imagination:
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Marilyn Monroe echoed this in How to Marry a Millionaire, where she refused to wear glasses in order to find a husband. Or, in the male version, Tony Curtis, in Some Like It Hot, did wear glasses so that Marilyn would believe that he had no sexual drive—a Book Fool indeed.
Eventually, the Book Fool acquired all the negative connotations that society projected onto the reader: a creature lost in a wilderness of words, with no hold on everyday reality, living in a world of make-believe that is of no practical use to his fellow citizens. “Why read the Princesse de Clèves?” asked the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2009 on discovering that civil servants were meant to study this classic seventeenth-century novel for their entrance exams.¹² What he meant was: how can reading fiction possibly help an administrator of the Republic, someone commissioned to deal with facts and figures and the serious reality of politics? Hélène Cixous wisely asked: “Why this fury against French language and literature? This resentment? This frenzy? Because here is a world on which he cannot pull the old trick of the law of the strongest. He doesn’t know how to seduce thought, how to reduce it, dominate it, make it crawl.”¹³ This is the resentment of many of those in power, those who oppose political and economic forces to intellectual drive, and find that they cannot eliminate the human capacity to imagine the world through language. For this very reason, Plato would banish poets from his ideal Republic: because poets make things up in order to understand the world, they deal with images of reality, not with incomprehensible reality itself.
These negative qualities associated with the reader as Book Fool extended also to the book itself. In the early Middle Ages, the book, as object, could elicit reverence and even fear. It appears enthroned as God’s Word in numerous representations: both as the roll, the rotulus or volumen, representing the laws of the Old Testament, and as the codex, representing the laws of the New. Gradually, the notions of old and new, applied to containers of the text, acquired connotations of value. Contaminated perhaps by a false etymology, rotulus and volumen became pejorative words. Rotulus evoked not only what was old but also what was “deceitful,” “rolled up upon itself,” “coiled like a worm” (as in Grandville’s depiction).¹⁴ And volumen was mistakenly associated with vulpes or volpes, the fox, which medieval bestiaries explained was called volpes because it walked “with its paws turned backwards,” “volvere pedibus,” a sure sign of its treacherous nature.¹⁵
The codex, however, depending on whether it was represented as open or as closed (and in what manner opened or closed) could carry either a positive or a negative value. For instance, the lion of Saint Mark, the ubiquitous beast chosen as the emblem of Venice, was represented, from the last decades of the thirteenth century onward, either as a positive emblem, with an open book displaying the words with which the angel announced to the Evangelist that Venice would be his final resting place, or as a negative one, with a closed book to signal a time of war or pestilence. The variations on these symbols are many. The open book displayed by the lion in times of peace and prosperity suggested that the activity of reading was one of leisure, a becoming and scholarly occupation, part of cultured otium (Hamlet’s studious melancholy) as opposed to the business of state. Or it may be seen as a warning, reminding readers that the Word of God, like his eye, is always watching, threatening to withdraw the present moment of grace. During evil times, the closed book might have meant that once grace was withdrawn, comfort was no longer offered. Now it was too late to read, study, learn. The community of readers should have acted better on their acquired wisdom, descended from their respective towers, and instructed the unlettered how to live harmoniously. War is no time for books, the lion and his closed volume seemed to say. We will return to the sanity of words when the madness is over.
The Bewitched Reader
Here Doctor, cry’d she, pray sprinkle every Creek and
Corner of this Room, lest there should lurk in it some
one of the many Sorcerers these Books swarm with,
who might chance to bewitch us.
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1:6
Like the Venetian lion caught between the prestige of intellectual power and mockery at the inefficiency of words, the reader became trapped in a double bind. The book lover became the Book Fool, and the devourer of books became the bookworm, both parodies of the enraptured reader. “In short, he became so immersed in his books that he spent the night reading from dusk to dawn, and the days from dawn to dusk, until at last, from little sleeping and much reading, his brain dried up, and he came to lose his wits.” This is how, in 1605, Cervantes defined the Book Fool we know as Don Quixote. And yet, when Cervantes portrayed his brave knight, he was not quite defining the reader rendered mad by his books. Rather, Cervantes was defining a society madly afraid of its own untruths. No doubt, as we are told in the opening chapter, Alonso Quijano believes in the factual reality of the stories he reads. But then, throughout the novel, it becomes clear that Don Quixote’s conception of the world is something more complex than mere delusion. On several occasions, on the verge of allowing himself to be swept away by the fantasy concocted from his readings, Don Quixote negotiates the chasm between what is real in the world and what is real to his imagination, with lucid intuition. Many times he allows the fantasy to overwhelm him, as in the famous scene of the windmills, and suffers the consequences with his battered bones. But at other times he enters the fantasy consciously, like a reader who knows that the story is fiction and yet believes in its revealed truth, as when Don Quixote forbids Sancho to peep under the blindfold and see whether or not the wooden horse is truly carrying them through the skies; or when the enamored knight refuses to show the muleteers a portrait of Dulcinea as proof that she is the most beautiful woman on earth, “for what good would it be to swear, if you need proof in reality.”
Francisco Goya, “Don Quixote” (c. 1812–1820). British Museum, London.
Courtesy Alinari / Art Resource, NY.
In counterpoint, neither is the hold of the “real” world all that strong on those who deem the knight to be mad. The curate and the barber, who cull Don Quixote’s library in order to rid it of “pernicious” titles, preserve however from the flames a fair number of volumes that they believe to be important (for themselves) both as entertainment and as means of knowledge. The innkeeper who holds public readings of novels of chivalry tells how for each of his listeners—reapers, farmhands, prostitutes, youngsters—the story acquires a personal meaning and gives a private delight, helping them bear the hardships and sorrows of daily life. And the aristocrats who make fun of the poor old knight and play cruel jokes on him live in a world in which they transform their fantasies into realities and their whims into a parody of justice. This play between the explicit imaginary world of the protagonist and the unconscious world of those around him places the reader of Don Quixote uncertainly between both, as one of the solitary creatures who find in books the experience of reality, and also as a member of the society that derides reading and wishes to impose its own views of what is and is not collectively worthy.
In Plato’s seventh (and perhaps apocryphal) letter, the philosopher states that there are certain truths that cannot be put into writing. And even if they can be written of, they cannot not be learned by merely perusing the page: they must be discovered by the readers themselves after much toil and experience, when suddenly the knowledge springs like a spark into the soul, allowing it to feed itself.¹⁶ This argument, repeated over the centuries, suggests that
reading cannot teach us the truest, deepest things, and that to pretend to supplant life with reading is folly.
And yet, putting into writing words that describe experience has a prestige far greater than that of intuitive learning. In the early fourteenth century, Rabbi Sem Tob de Carrión, in his Moral Proverbs, noted what was by then a commonplace:
The word pronounced / is by and by forgotten,
But writing remains / for ever preserved.
And the arguments not / set down in writing,
Are like arrows / that will not reach their goal.¹⁷
In spite of Plato’s warning, writing (and therefore reading) became a means of instruction and knowledge. Even if the reader knew that the stories were made up and the characters only lived in the imagination of their author, this stuff made of dreams acted upon the minds of readers as models of the world in which we still attempt to survive.
“As manifest experience shows, the weakness of memory, consigning to oblivion not only those deeds made old by time but also the fresh events of our own era, has made it appropriate, useful, and expedient to record in writing the feats of strong and courageous men of old. Such men are the brightest of mirrors, examples and sources of righteous instruction, as we are told by the noble orator Tully.”¹⁸ Thus begins Tirant lo Blanc, the novel of chivalry that the barber and the priest, intent on burning Don Quixote’s library, decide to save from the bonfire as “the best book of its kind in the world.”¹⁹ Even within a story that appears to condemn the reading of such books as folly, it is stated that certain of these books lead us to the contrary of folly, and grant us “mirrors, examples and sources” of ancient righteousness and illustrious behavior.
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