A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  Lessing also drew attention to the similarities between the book’s parallel iconography and that of the stained glass in the windows of the Hirschau cloister. He suggested that the illustrations in the book were copies of those in the windows; he also dated the windows from the time of Abbot Johan von Calw (1503 to 1524), almost half a century before the Wolfenbüttel copy of the Biblia Pauperum was executed. Modern research indicates that it was not a copy,26 but whether the iconography of both the book and the windows merely followed a fashion that had gradually established itself over several centuries is impossible to say. Lessing, however, was right in noting that the “reading” of the pictures in the Biblia Pauperum and on the stained-glass windows was essentially the same act, and that both were different from reading a description in words on a page.

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. (photo credit 7.5)

  For the literate Christian of the fourteenth century, a page of an ordinary bible had a multiplicity of meanings through which the reader could progress according to the guiding gloss of the author or the reader’s own knowledge. A reader would pace this reading at will, over an hour or a year, with interruptions or delays, skipping sections or devouring the whole page at one sitting. But the reading of an illustrated page in the Biblia Pauperum was almost instantaneous, since the “text” was offered iconographically as a whole, without semantic gradations, and the time of the narration in pictures necessarily coincided with that of the reader’s own reading. “It is relevant to consider,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, “that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots.”27

  For me, centuries away, the two kinds of reading converge when I go over the morning newspaper: on the one hand, there is the slow progress through the news, continued sometimes on a distant page, related to other items hidden away in different sections, written in varying styles from the apparently unemotional to the blatantly ironic; on the other, the almost involuntary grasping of the ads read at a single glance, each story told within precise and limited frames, through familiar characters and symbols — not the tormented Saint Catherine or the dinner at Emmaus, but the vicissitudes of the latest Peugeot or the epiphany of Absolut Vodka.

  A 1994 ad for Absolut vodka. (photo credit 7.6)

  Who then were my ancestors, these distant picture-readers? The great majority, like the authors of the pictures they read, were silent, anonymous, unsung, but from those shifting crowds a few individuals can be rescued.

  In October 1461, after being released from prison by the chance passing of King Louis XI through the town of Meung-sur-Loire, the poet François Villon composed a long poetic medley which he called his Testament.28 One of the pieces, a prayer to the Virgin Mary written (so he tells us) at his mother’s request, put in his mother’s mouth these words:

  I am a woman poor and aged,

  I know nothing at all; letters I never read;

  At my parish monastery I saw A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,

  And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:

  One gave me fright; the other, joyfulness.29

  Every article of the religious service displayed a story. The faithful would be able to follow the terrors of the Last Judgement when the priest turned his back to pray (as on this fifteenth-century Italian chasuble, opposite page) or as they passed behind the altarpiece (right, painted panels by Jorg Kandel of Biberach c. 1525). (photo credit 7.7)

  Villon’s mother would have seen images of a serene and musical heaven, and a fiery, bubbling hell, and she would have known that, after her death, her soul was destined to enter one or the other. Obviously she would not, in seeing these images — however dextrously painted, however long her eyes busied themselves on the many excruciating details — have recognized in them the arduous theological arguments developed by the Church Fathers over the past fifteen centuries. She probably knew the French version of the popular Latin maxim Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo (“Few are saved, many are damned”); she probably did not know that Saint Thomas Aquinas had determined that the proportion of those to be saved was equivalent to that of Noah and his family in relation to the rest of humankind. Church sermons would have glossed some of those images, and her imagination would have done the rest.

  Like Villon’s mother, thousands of people lifted their eyes to the images that adorned the church walls and later the windows, columns, pulpits, even the back of the priest’s chasuble as he was saying mass or the panels at the rear of the altar where they sat during confession, and saw in those images myriad stories or a single, never-ending story. There is no reason to think that it was otherwise with the Biblia Pauperum. But several modern scholars disagree. According to the German critic Maurus Berve, for instance, the Biblia Pauperum was “absolutely unintelligible to illiterate people”. Instead, Berve suggests that “they were probably intended for scholars or clerics who could not afford to purchase a complete Bible or who being ‘poor in spirit’ [arme in Geiste] lacked a more demanding level of education and contented themselves with these extracts.”30 Consequently the name “Biblia Pauperum” would not have meant “Bible of the Poor” but would have stood instead for Biblia Pauperum Praedicatorum, or Poor Preachers’ Bible.31

  Whether these images were intended for the poor or for their preachers, it is certain that they stood open on the lectern, in front of the flock, day after day throughout the liturgical year. For the illiterate, excluded from the realm of the written word, seeing the sacred texts represented in a book in images they could recognize or “read” must have induced a feeling of belonging, of sharing with the wise and powerful the material presence of God’s word. Seeing these scenes in a book — in that almost magical object that belonged exclusively to the learned clerics and scholars of the day — was very different from seeing them in the popular decorations of the church, as they always had in the past. It was as if suddenly the holy words which had until then appeared to be the property of a few, to share or not with the flock at will, had been translated into a language that anyone, even an uninstructed woman “poor and aged” like Villon’s mother, could understand.

  Reading in public fulfilled a social function in eighteenth-century France, as depicted in this contemporary engraving by Marillier. (photo credit 7.9)

  BEING READ TO

  he pictures of medieval Europe offered a syntax without words, to which the reader silently added a narration. In our time, deciphering the pictures of advertising, of video art, of cartoons, we too lend a story not only a voice but a vocabulary. I must have read like that at the very beginning of my reading, before my encounter with letters and their sounds. I must have constructed, out of the water-colour Peter Rabbits, the brazen Struwwelpeters, the large, bright creatures in La Hormiguita Viajera, stories that explained and justified the different scenes, linking them in a possible narrative that took every one of the depicted details into account. I didn’t know it then, but I was exercising my freedom to read almost to the limit of its possibilities: not only was the story mine to tell, but nothing forced me to repeat the same tale time after time for the same illustrations. In one version the anonymous hero was a hero, in another he was a villain, in the third he bore my name.

  On other occasions I relinquished all these rights. I delegated both words and voice, gave up possession — and sometimes even the choice — of the book and, except for the odd clarifying question, became nothing but hearing. I would settle down (at night, but also often during the day, since frequent bouts of asthma kept me trapped in my bed for weeks) and, propped up high against the pillows, li
sten to my nurse read the Grimms’ terrifying fairy-tales. Sometimes her voice put me to sleep; sometimes, on the contrary, it made me feverish with excitement, and I urged her on in order to find out, more quickly than the author had intended, what happened in the story. But most of the time I simply enjoyed the luxurious sensation of being carried away by the words, and felt, in a very physical sense, that I was actually travelling somewhere wonderfully remote, to a place that I hardly dared glimpse on the secret last page of the book. Later on, when I was nine or ten, I was told by my school principal that being read to was suitable only for small children. I believed him, and gave up the practice — partly because being read to gave me enormous pleasure, and by then I was quite ready to believe that anything that gave pleasure was somehow unwholesome. It was not until much later, when my lover and I decided to read to each other, over a summer, The Golden Legend, that the long-lost delight of being read to came back to me. I didn’t know then that the art of reading out loud had a long and itinerant history, and that over a century ago, in Spanish Cuba, it had established itself as an institution within the earthbound strictures of the Cuban economy.

  Cigar-making had been one of Cuba’s main industries since the seventeenth century, but in the 1850s the economic climate changed. The saturation of the American market, rising unemployment and the cholera epidemic of 1855 convinced many workers that the creation of a union was necessary to improve their conditions. In 1857 a Mutual Aid Society of Honest Workers and Day Labourers was founded for the benefit of white cigar-makers only; a similar Mutual Aid Society was founded for free black workers in 1858. These were the first Cuban workers’ unions, and the precursors of the Cuban labour movement of the turn of the century.1

  In 1865, Saturnino Martínez, cigar-maker and poet, conceived the idea of publishing a newspaper for the workers in the cigar industry, which would contain not only political features but also articles on science and literature, poems and short stories. With the support of several Cuban intellectuals, Martínez brought out the first issue of La Aurora on October 22 of that year. “Its purpose,” he announced in the first editorial, “will be to illuminate in every possible way that class of society to which it is dedicated. We will do everything to make ourselves generally accepted. If we are not successful, the blame will lie in our insufficiency, not in our lack of will.” Over the years, La Aurora published work by the major Cuban writers of the day, as well as translations of European authors such as Schiller and Chateaubriand, reviews of books and plays, and exposés of the tyranny of factory owners and of the workers’ sufferings. “Do you know,” it asked its readers on June 27, 1866, “that at the edge of La Zanja, according to what people say, there is a factory owner who puts shackles on the children he uses as apprentices?”2

  But, as Martínez soon realized, illiteracy was the obvious stumbling-block to making La Aurora truly popular; in the mid-nineteenth century barely 15 per cent of the working population of Cuba could read. In order to make the paper accessible to all workers, he hit on the idea of a public reader. He approached the director of the Guanabacoa high school and suggested that the school assist readings in the working-place. Full of enthusiasm, the director met with the workers of the factory El Fígaro and, after obtaining the owner’s permission, convinced them of the usefulness of the enterprise. One of the workers was chosen as the reader, the official lector, and the others paid for his efforts out of their own pockets. On January 7, 1866, La Aurora reported, “Reading in the shops has begun for the first time among us, and the initiative belongs to the honoured workers of El Fígaro. This constitutes a giant step in the march of progress and the general advance of the workers, since in this way they will gradually become familiar with books, the source of everlasting friendship and great entertainment.”3 Among the books read were the historical compendium Battles of the Century, didactic novels such as The King of the World by the now long forgotten Fernández y González and a manual of political economy by Flórez y Estrada.4

  Eventually other factories followed the example of El Fígaro. So successful were these public readings that in very little time they acquired a reputation for “being subversive”. On May 14, 1866, the Political Governor of Cuba issued the following edict:

  1. It is forbidden to distract the workers of the tobacco shops, workshops and shops of all kinds with the reading of books and newspapers, or with discussions foreign to the work in which they were engaged. 2. The police shall exercise constant vigilance to enforce this decree, and put at the disposal of my authority those shop owners, representatives or managers who disobey this mandate so that they may be judged by the law according to the gravity of the case.5

  In spite of the prohibition, clandestine readings still took place for a time in some form or other; however, by 1870 they had virtually disappeared. In October 1868, with the outbreak of the Ten Years War, La Aurora too came to an end. And yet the readings were not forgotten. As early as 1869 they were resurrected, on American soil, by the workers themselves.

  The earliest known sketch of a lector, in the Practical Magazine, New York, 1873. (photo credit 8.1)

  The Ten Years War of Independence began on October 10, 1868, when a Cuban landowner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and two hundred poorly armed men took over the city of Santiago and proclaimed the country’s independence from Spain. By the end of the month, after Céspedes had offered to free all slaves joining the revolution, his army had recruited twelve thousand volunteers; in April of the following year, Céspedes was elected president of the new revolutionary government. But Spain held strong. Four years later Céspedes was deposed in absentia by a Cuban tribunal, and in March 1874 he was trapped and shot by Spanish soldiers.6 In the meantime, anxious to disrupt Spain’s restrictive trade measures, the U.S. government had loudly supported the revolutionaries, and New York, New Orleans and Key West had opened their ports to thousands of fleeing Cubans. As a result, Key West was transformed in a few years from a small fishing village into a major cigar-producing community, the new Havana-cigar capital of the world.7

  The workers who immigrated to the United States took with them, among other things, the institution of the lector: an illustration in the American Practical Magazine of 1873 shows one such lector, wearing glasses and a large-brimmed hat, sitting with legs crossed and a book in his hands while a row of workers (all male) in waistcoats and shirtsleeves go about their cigar-rolling with what appears to be rapt attention.

  “El lector” by Mario Sánchez. (photo credit 8.2)

  The material for these readings, agreed upon in advance by the workers (who, as in the days of El Fígaro, paid the lector out of their own earnings), ranged from political tracts and histories to novels and collections of poetry both modern and classical.8 They had their favourites: Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, for instance, became such a popular choice that a group of workers wrote to the author shortly before his death in 1870, asking him to lend the name of his hero to one of their cigars. Dumas consented.

  According to Mario Sánchez, a Key West painter who in 1991 could still recall lectores reading to the cigar-rollers in the late twenties, the readings took place in concentrated silence, and comments or questions were not allowed until the session was over. “My father,” Sánchez reminisced, “was the reader in the Eduardo Hidalgo Gato cigar factory in the early 1900s until the 1920s. In the mornings, he read the news which he translated from the local newspapers. He read international news directly from Cuban newspapers brought daily by boat from Havana. From noon until three in the afternoons, he read from a novel. He was expected to interpret the characters by imitating their voices, like an actor.” Workers who had spent several years at the shops were able to quote from memory long passages of poetry and even prose. Sánchez mentioned one man who was able to remember the entire Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.9

  Being read to, as the cigar workers found out, allowed them to overlay the mechanical, mind-numbing activity of rolling the dark scented tobacco l
eaves with adventures to follow, ideas to consider, reflections to make theirs. We don’t know whether, in the long workshop hours, they regretted that the rest of their body was excluded from the reading ritual; we don’t know if the fingers of those who could read longed for a page to turn, a line to follow; we don’t know if those who had never learned to read were prompted to do so.

  One night a few months before his death circa 547 — some thirteen centuries before the Cuban lectors — Saint Benedict of Nursia had a vision. As he was praying by his open window, looking out into the darkness, “the whole world appeared to be gathered into one sunbeam and thus brought before his eyes”.10 In that vision, the old man must have seen, with tears in his eyes, “that secret and conjectural object whose name men have seized upon but that no man has ever beheld: the inconceivable universe”.11