In that sitting-room, under a Piranesi engraving of circular Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several entries of the Brockhaus German encyclopedia, verses of Marino, of Enrique Banchs, of Heine (but these last ones he knew by heart, so I would barely have begun my reading when his hesitant voice picked up and recited from memory; the hesitation was only in the cadence, not in the words themselves, which he remembered unerringly). I had not read many of these authors before, so the ritual was a curious one. I would discover a text by reading it out loud, while Borges used his ears as other readers use their eyes, to scan the page for a word, for a sentence, for a paragraph that would confirm a memory. When I read he’d interrupt, commenting on the text in order (I think) to take note of it in his mind.
Stopping me after a line he found side-splitting in Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (“dressed and painted to represent a person connected with the Press in reduced circumstances” — “How can someone be dressed like that, eh? What do you think Stevenson had in mind? Being impossibly precise? Eh?”), he proceeded to analyse the stylistic device of defining someone or something by means of an image or category that, while appearing to be exact, forces the reader to make up a personal definition. He and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares had played on that idea in an eleven-word short story: “The stranger climbed the stairs in the dark: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Listening to my reading of Kipling’s story “Beyond the Pale”, Borges interrupted me after a scene in which a Hindu widow sends a message to her lover, made up of different objects collected in a bundle. He remarked on the poetic appropriateness of this, and wondered out loud whether Kipling had invented this concrete and yet symbolic language.18 Then, as if scouring a mental library, he compared it to John Wilkins’s “philosophical language” in which each word is a definition of itself. For instance, Borges noted that the word salmon does not tell us anything about the object it represents; zana, the corresponding word in Wilkins’s language, based on pre-established categories, means “a scaly river fish with reddish flesh”:19 z for fish, za for river fish, zan for scaly river fish and zana for the scaly river fish with reddish flesh. Reading to Borges always resulted in a mental reshuffling of my own books; that evening, Kipling and Wilkins stood side by side on the same imaginary shelf.
Another time (I can’t remember what it was I had been asked to read), he began to compile an impromptu anthology of bad lines by famous authors, which included Keats’s “The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold”, Shakespeare’s “O my prophetic soul! My uncle!” (Borges found “uncle” an unpoetic, inappropriate word for Hamlet to utter — he would have preferred “My father’s brother!” or “My mother’s kin!”), Webster’s “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls” from The Duchess of Malfi and Milton’s last lines in Paradise Regained — “he unobserv’d / Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” — which made Christ out to be (Borges thought) an English gentleman in a bowler hat coming home to his mum for tea.
Sometimes he’d make use of the readings for his own writing. His discovery of a ghost tiger in Kipling’s “The Guns of ’Fore and ’Aft”, which we read shortly before Christmas, led him to compose one of his last stories, “Blue Tigers”; Giovanni Papini’s “Two Images in a Pond” inspired his “August 24, 1982”, a date which was then still in the future; his irritation with Lovecraft (whose stories he had me start and abandon half a dozen times) made him create a “corrected” version of a Lovecraft story and publish it in Dr. Brodie’s Report. Often he’d ask me to write something down on the endpaper pages of the book we were reading — a chapter reference or a thought. I don’t know how he made use of these, but the habit of speaking of a book behind its back became mine too.
There is a story by Evelyn Waugh in which a man, rescued by another in the midst of the Amazonian jungle, is forced by his rescuer to read Dickens out loud for the rest of his life.20 I never had the sense of merely fulfilling a duty in my reading to Borges; instead, the experience felt like a sort of happy captivity. I was enthralled not so much by the texts he was making me discover (many of which eventually became my own favourites) as by his comments, which were vastly but unobtrusively erudite, very funny, sometimes cruel, almost always indispensable. I felt I was the unique owner of a carefully annotated edition, compiled for my exclusive sake. Of course, I wasn’t; I (like many others) was simply his notebook, an aide-mémoire which the blind man required in order to assemble his ideas. I was more than willing to be used.
Before meeting Borges, either I had read silently on my own, or someone had read aloud to me a book of my choice. Reading out loud to the blind old man was a curious experience because, even though I felt, with some effort, in control of the tone and pace of the reading, it was nevertheless Borges, the listener, who became the master of the text. I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven, for whom there was no other responsibility than that of apprehending the country outside the windows. Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before. I began by making assumptions about the stories Borges chose for me — that Kipling’s prose would be stilted, Stevenson’s childish, Joyce’s unintelligible — but very soon prejudice gave way to experience, and the discovery of one story made me look forward to another, which in turn became enriched by the memory of both Borges’s reactions and my own. The progression of my reading never followed the conventional sequence of time. For instance, reading out loud to him texts that I had read before on my own modified those earlier solitary readings, widened and suffused my memory of them, made me perceive what I had not perceived at the time but seemed to recall now, triggered by his response. “There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings,” remarked the Argentinian writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. “This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.”21 Borges disbelieved in systematic bibliographies and encouraged such adulterous reading.
Aside from Borges, a few friends, several teachers and a review here and there have suggested titles now and again, but largely my encounters with books have been a matter of chance, like meeting those passing strangers who in the fifteenth canto of Dante’s Hell “eye one another when the daylight fades to dusk and a new moon is in the sky”, and who suddenly find in an appearance, a glance, a word, an irresistible attraction.
I first kept my books in straight alphabetical order, by author. Then I began dividing them by genre: novels, essays, plays, poems. Later on I tried grouping them by language, and when, during the course of my travels, I was obliged to keep only a few, I separated them into those I hardly ever read, those I read all the time and those I was hoping to read. Sometimes my library obeyed secret rules, born from idiosyncratic associations. The Spanish novelist Jorge Semprún kept Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar among his books on Buchenwald, the concentration camp in which he had been interned, because the novel opens with a scene at Weimar’s Elephant Hotel, where Semprún was taken after his liberation.22 Once I thought it would be amusing to construct from such groupings a history of literature, exploring, for instance, the relationships between Aristotle, Auden, Jane Austen and Marcel Aymé (in my alphabetical order), or between Chesterton, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Borges, Saint John of the Cross and Lewis Carroll (among those I most enjoy). It seemed to me that the literature taught at school — in which links were explained between Cervantes and Lope de Vega based on the fact that they shared a century, and in which Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y yo (a purple tale of a poet’s infatuation with a donkey) was considered a masterpiece — was as arbitrary or as permissible a selection as the literature I could construct myself, based on my findings along the crooked road of my own readings and the size
of my own bookshelves. The history of literature, as consecrated in school manuals and official libraries, appeared to me to be nothing more than the history of certain readings — albeit older and better informed than mine, but no less dependent on chance and on circumstance.
One year before graduating from high school, in 1966, when the military government of General Onganía came to power, I discovered yet another system by which a reader’s books can be arranged. Under suspicion of being Communist or obscene, certain titles and certain authors were placed on the censor’s list, and in the ever-increasing police checks in cafés, bars and train stations, or simply on the street, it became as important not to be seen with a suspicious book in hand as it was to carry proper identification. The banned authors — Pablo Neruda, J.D. Salinger, Maxim Gorky, Harold Pinter — formed another, different history of literature, whose links were neither evident nor everlasting, and whose communality was revealed exclusively by the punctilious eye of the censor.
But not only totalitarian governments fear reading. Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. Almost everywhere, the community of readers has an ambiguous reputation that comes from its acquired authority and perceived power. Something in the relationship between a reader and a book is recognized as wise and fruitful, but it is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and excluding, perhaps because the image of an individual curled up in a corner, seemingly oblivious of the grumblings of the world, suggests impenetrable privacy and a selfish eye and singular secretive action. (“Go out and live!” my mother would say when she saw me reading, as if my silent activity contradicted her sense of what it meant to be alive.) The popular fear of what a reader might do among the pages of a book is like the ageless fear men have of what women might do in the secret places of their body, and of what witches and alchemists might do in the dark behind locked doors. Ivory, according to Virgil, is the material out of which the Gate of False Dreams is made; according to Sainte-Beuve, it is also the material out of which is made the reader’s tower.
Borges once told me that, during one of the populist demonstrations organized by Perón’s government in 1950 against the opposing intellectuals, the demonstrators chanted, “Shoes yes, books no.” The retort, “Shoes yes, books yes,” convinced no one. Reality — harsh, necessary reality — was seen to conflict irredeemably with the evasive dreamworld of books. With this excuse, and with increasing effect, the artificial dichotomy between life and reading is actively encouraged by those in power. Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluous luxuries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.
And so I ambitiously proceed from my history as a reader to the history of the act of reading. Or rather, to a history of reading, since any such history — made up of particular intuitions and private circumstances — must be only one of many, however impersonal it may try to be. Ultimately, perhaps, the history of reading is the history of each of its readers. Even its starting-point has to be fortuitous. Reviewing a history of mathematics published sometime in the mid-thirties, Borges wrote that it suffered “from a crippling defect: the chronological order of its events doesn’t correspond to its logical and natural order. The definition of its elements very frequently comes last, practice precedes theory, the intuitive labours of its precursors are less comprehensible for the profane reader than those of the modern mathematicians.”23 Much the same can be said of a history of reading. Its chronology cannot be that of political history. The Sumerian scribe for whom reading was a much-valued prerogative had a keener sense of responsibility than the reader in today’s New York or Santiago, since an article of law or a settling of accounts depended on his exclusive interpretation. The reading methods of the late Middle Ages, defining when and how to read, distinguishing, for instance, between the text to be read aloud and the text to be read silently, were much more clearly established than those taught in fin-de-siècle Vienna or in Edwardian England. Nor can a history of reading follow the coherent succession of the history of literary criticism; the qualms expressed by the nineteenth-century mystic Anna Katharina Emmerich (that the printed text never equalled her experience)24 were even more strongly expressed two thousand years earlier by Socrates (who found books an impediment to learning)25 and in our time by the German critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger (who praised illiteracy and proposed a return to the original creativity of oral literature).26 This position was refuted by the American essayist Allan Bloom,27 among many others; with splendid anachronism, Bloom was amended and improved by his precursor, Charles Lamb, who in 1833 confessed that he loved to lose himself “in other men’s minds. When I am not walking,” he said, “I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”28 Neither does the history of reading correspond to the chronologies of the histories of literature, since the history of reading one particular author often finds a beginning not with that author’s first book but with one of the author’s future readers: the Marquis de Sade was rescued from the condemned shelves of pornographic literature, where his books had sat for over 150 years, by the bibliophile Maurice Heine and the French surrealists; William Blake, ignored for over two centuries, begins in our time with the enthusiasm of Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Northrop Frye, which made him obligatory reading on every college curriculum.
Told that we are threatened with extinction, we, today’s readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Our future — the future of the history of our reading — was explored by Saint Augustine, who tried to distinguish between the text seen in the mind and the text spoken out loud; by Dante, who questioned the limits of the reader’s power of interpretation; by Lady Murasaki, who argued for the specificity of certain readings; by Pliny, who analysed the performance of reading, and the relationship between the writer who reads and the reader who writes; by the Sumerian scribes, who imbued the act of reading with political power; by the first makers of books, who found the methods of scroll-reading (like the methods we now use to read on our computers) too limiting and cumbersome, and offered us instead the possibility of flipping through pages and scribbling in margins. The past of that history lies ahead of us, on the last page in that cautionary future described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, in which books are carried not on paper but in the mind.
Like the act of reading itself, a history of reading jumps forward to our time — to me, to my experience as a reader — and then goes back to an early page in a distant foreign century. It skips chapters, browses, selects, rereads, refuses to follow conventional order. Paradoxically, the fear that opposes reading to active life, that urged my mother to move me from my seat and my book out into the open air, recognizes a solemn truth: “You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over,” writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in The White Castle, “but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand that book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.”29
ACTS
of
READING
Reading means approaching something
that is just coming into being.
ITALO CALVINO
If on a winter’s night a traveller, 1979
Teaching optics and the laws of perception in a sixteenth-century Islamic school. (photo credit p2.1)
READING SHADOWS
n 1984, two small clay tablets of vaguely rectangular shape were found in Tell Brak, Syria, dating from the fourth millennium BC. I saw them, the year before the Gulf War, in an unostentatious display case in the Archeological Museum of Baghdad. They are simple, unimpressive objects, each bearing a few discreet marki
ngs: a small indentation near the top and some sort of stick-drawn animal in the centre. One of the animals may be a goat, in which case the other is probably a sheep. The indentation, archeologists say, represents the number ten. All our history begins with these two modest tablets.1 They are — if the war spared them — among the oldest examples of writing we know.2
Two pictographic tablets from Tell Brak, Syria, similar to the ones in the Archeological Museum in Baghdad. (photo credit 2.1)
There is something intensely moving in these tablets. Perhaps, when we stare at these pieces of clay carried by a river which no longer exists, observing the delicate incisions portraying animals turned to dust thousands and thousands of years ago, a voice is conjured up, a thought, a message that tells us, “Here were ten goats,” “Here were ten sheep,” something spoken by a careful farmer in the days when the deserts were green. By the mere fact of looking at these tablets we have prolonged a memory from the beginnings of our time, preserved a thought long after the thinker has stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of creation that remains open for as long as the incised images are seen, deciphered, read.3
Like my nebulous Sumerian ancestor reading the two small tablets on that inconceivably remote afternoon, I too am reading, here in my room, across centuries and seas. Sitting at my desk, elbows on the page, chin on my hands, abstracted for a moment from the changing light outside and the sounds that rise from the street, I am seeing, listening to, following (but these words don’t do justice to what is taking place within me) a story, a description, an argument. Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word “text” unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?
A History of Reading Page 3