Whitman didn’t stay long at the lawyer’s office; before the end of the year he had become an apprentice printer at the Long Island Patriot, learning to work a hand-press in a cramped basement under the supervision of the paper’s editor and author of all its articles. There Whitman learned of “the pleasing mystery of the different letters and their divisions — the great ‘e’ box — the box for spaces … the ‘a’ box, ‘I’ box, and all the rest,” the tools of his trade.
From 1836 to 1838 he worked as a country teacher in Norwich, New York. Payment was poor and erratic and, probably because school inspectors disapproved of his rowdy classrooms, he was forced to change schools eight times in those two years. His superiors cannot have been too pleased if he taught his students:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.10
Or this:
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.11
After learning to print and teaching to read, Whitman found that he could combine both skills by becoming the editor of a paper: first the Long Islander, in Huntington, New York, and later the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Here he began developing his notion of democracy as a society of “free readers”, untainted by fanaticism and political schools, whom the text-maker — poet, printer, teacher, newspaper editor — must serve empathically. “We really feel a desire to talk on many subjects,” he explained in an editorial on June 1, 1846, “to all the people of Brooklyn; and it ain’t their ninepences we want so much either. There is a curious kind of sympathy (haven’t you ever thought of it before?) that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves.… Daily communion creates a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood between the two parties.”12
At about this time, Whitman came across the writings of Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an extraordinary personality: the first full-time book reviewer in the United States, the first female foreign correspondent, a lucid feminist, author of the impassioned tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Emerson thought that “all the art, the thought and nobleness in New England … seemed related to her, and she to it”.13 Hawthorne, however, called her “a great humbug”,14 and Oscar Wilde said that Venus had given her “everything except beauty” and Pallas “everything except wisdom”.15 While believing that books could not replace actual experience, Fuller saw in them “a medium for viewing all humanity, a core around which all knowledge, all experience, all science, all the ideal as well as all the practical in our nature could gather”. Whitman responded enthusiastically to her views. He wrote:
A passionate reader, Margaret Fuller. (photo credit 11.1)
Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
Is it not just as great, O soul?16
For Whitman, text, author, reader and world mirrored each other in the act of reading, an act whose meaning he expanded until it served to define every vital human activity, as well as the universe in which it all took place. In this conjunction, the reader reflects the writer (he and I are one), the world echoes a book (God’s book, Nature’s book), the book is of flesh and blood (the writer’s own flesh and own blood, which through a literary transubstantiation become mine), the world is a book to be deciphered (the writer’s poems become my reading of the world). All his life, Whitman seems to have sought an understanding and a definition of the act of reading, which is both itself and the metaphor for all its parts.
“Metaphors,” wrote the German critic Hans Blumenberg, in our time, “are no longer considered first and foremost as representing the sphere that guides our hesitant theoretic conceptions, as an entrance hall to the forming of concepts, as a makeshift device within specialized languages that have not yet been consolidated, but rather as the authentic means to comprehend contexts.”17 To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being as a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the reader’s craft.
Such metaphors are very ancient ones, with roots in the earliest Judaeo-Christian society. The German critic E.R. Curtius, in a chapter on the symbolism of the book in his monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, suggested that book metaphors began in Classical Greece, but of these there are few examples, since Greek society, and later Roman society as well, did not consider the book an everyday object. Jewish, Christian and Islamic societies developed a profound symbolic relationship with their holy books, which were not symbols of God’s Word but God’s Word itself. According to Curtius, “the idea that the world and nature are books derives from the rhetoric of the Catholic Church, taken over by the mystical philosophers of the early Middle Ages, and finally become a commonplace.”
For the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Fray Luis de Granada, if the world is a book, then the things of this world are the letters of the alphabet in which this book is written. In Introducción al símbolo de la fé (Introduction to the Symbol of Faith) he asked, “What are they to be, all the creatures of this world, so beautiful and so well crafted, but separated and illuminated letters that declare so rightly the delicacy and wisdom of their author? … And we as well … having been placed by you in front of this wonderful book of the entire universe, so that through its creatures, as if by means of living letters, we are to read the excellency of our Creator.”18
“The Finger of God,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, recasting Fray Luis’s metaphor, “hath left an Inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of Letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joyned together, do make one word that doth express their natures.”19 To this, centuries later, the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana added, “There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.”20
Our task, as Whitman pointed out, is to read the world, since that colossal book is the only source of knowledge for mortals. (Angels, according to Saint Augustine, don’t need to read the book of the world because they can see the Author Himself and receive from Him the Word in all its glory. Addressing himself to God, Saint Augustine reflects that angels “have no necessity to look upon the heavens or read them to read Your word. For they always see Your face, and there, without the syllables of time, they read Your eternal will. They read it, they choose it, they love it. They are always reading and what they read never comes to an end.… The book they read shall not be closed, the scroll shall not be rolled up again. For You are their book and You are eternal.”)21
Human beings, made in the image of God, are also books to be read. Here, the act of reading serves as a metaphor to help us understand our hesitant relationship with our body, the encounter and the touch and the deciphering of signs in another person. We read expressions on a face, we follow the gestures of a loved one as in an open book. “Your face, my Thane,” says Lady Macbeth to her husband, “is as a book where men may read strange matters,”22 and the seventeenth-century poet Henry King wrote of his young dead wife:
Dear Loss! since thy untimely fate
my task has been to meditate
On Thee, on Thee: Thou art the Book,
The Library whereon I look
Though almost blind.23
And Benjamin Franklin, a great book-lover, composed for himself an epitaph (unfortunately not used on his tombstone) in which the image of the reader as book finds its complete depiction:
The Body of
B. Franklin, Printer,
Like the cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be lost;
For it will, as he believ’d,
Appear once more
In a new and more elegant Edition
Corrected and improved
By the Author.24
To say that we read — the world, a book, the body — is not enough. The metaphor of reading solicits in turn another metaphor, demands to be explained in images that lie outside the reader’s library and yet within the reader’s body, so that the function of reading is associated with our other essential bodily functions. Reading — as we have seen — serves as a metaphoric vehicle, but in order to be understood must itself be recognized through metaphors. Just as writers speak of cooking up a story, rehashing a text, having half-baked ideas for a plot, spicing up a scene or garnishing the bare bones of an argument, turning the ingredients of a potboiler into soggy prose, a slice of life peppered with allusions into which readers can sink their teeth, we, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of finding nourishment in it, of devouring a book at one sitting, of regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage, of rolling a poet’s words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, of living on a diet of detective stories. In an essay on the art of studying, the sixteenth-century English scholar Francis Bacon catalogued the process: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”25
By extraordinary chance we know on what date this curious metaphor was first recorded.26 On July 31, 593 BC, by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, Ezekiel the priest had a vision of fire in which he saw “the likeness of the glory of the Lord” ordering him to speak to the rebellious children of Israel. “Open thy mouth, and eat what I give you,” the vision instructed him.
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;
And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.27
Saint John, recording his apocalyptic vision on Patmos, received the same revelation as Ezekiel. As he watched in terror, an angel came down from heaven with an open book, and a thundering voice told him not to write what he had learned, but to take the book from the angel’s hand.
And I went unto the angel, and said unto him. Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.28
Eventually, as reading developed and expanded, the gastronomic metaphor became common rhetoric. In Shakespeare’s time it was expected in literary parlance, and Queen Elizabeth I herself used it to describe her devotional reading: “I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie them up at length in the seate of memorie … so I may the lesse perceive the bitterness of this miserable life.”29 By 1695 the metaphor had become so ingrained in the language that William Congreve was able to parody it in the opening scene of Love for Love, having the pedantic Valentine say to his valet, “Read, read, sirrah! and refine your appetite; learn to live upon instruction; feast your mind, and mortify your flesh; read, and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth, and chew the cud of understanding.” “You’ll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet,” is the valet’s comment.30
Saint John about to eat the Angel’s book, depicted in a seventeenth-century Russian broadside. (photo credit 11.2)
Less than a century later, Dr. Johnson read a book with the same manners he displayed at the table. He read, said Boswell, “ravenously, as if he devoured it, which was to all appearance his method of studying”. According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson kept a book wrapped in the tablecloth in his lap during dinner “from an avidity to have one entertainment in readiness, when he should have finished another; resembling (if I may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else which has been thrown to him.”31
The ravenous reader, Dr. Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. (photo credit 11.3)
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven’t yet grasped. That is why — as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again — no reading can ever be definitive. In 1867 he wrote, by way of explanation:
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.32
POWERS
of the
READER
One must be an inventor to read well.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The American Scholar, 1837
A five-thousand-year-old reader, the Sumerian scribe Dudu. (photo credit p3.1)
BEGINNINGS
n the summer of 1989, two years before the Gulf War, I travelled to Iraq to see the ruins of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It was a journey I had long wanted to make. Reconstructed between 1899 and 1917 by the German archeologist Robert Koldewey,1 Babylon lies about forty miles south of Baghdad — a huge maze of butter-coloured walls that was once the most powerful city on earth, close to a clay mound which the guidebooks say is all that is left of the tower God cursed with multiculturalism. The taxi-driver who took me there knew the site only because it was near the town of Hillah, where he had once or twice gone to visit an aunt. I had brought with me a Penguin anthology of short stories, and after touring the ruins of what was for me, as a Western reader, the starting-place of every book, I sat down in the shade of an oleander bush and read.
Walls, oleander bushes, bituminous paving, open gateways, heaps of clay, broken towers: part of the secret of Babylon is that what the visitor sees is not one but many cities, successive in time but simultaneous in space. There is the Babylon of the Akkadian era, a small village of around 2350 BC. There is the Babylon where the epic of Gilgamesh, which includes one of the earliest accounts of Noah’s Flood, was recited for the first time, one day in the second millennium BC. There is the Babylon of King Hammurabi, of the eighteenth century BC, whose system of laws was one of the world’s first attempts at codifying the life of an entire society. There is the Babylon destroyed by the Assyrians in 689 BC. There is the rebuilt Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, who around 586 BC besieged Jerusalem, sacked the Temple of Solomon and led the Jews into captivity, whereupon they sat by the rivers and wept. There is the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar’s son or grandson (genealogists are undecided), King Belshazzar, who was the first man to see the writing on the wall, in the fearful calligraphy of God’s finger. There is the Babylon that Alexander the Great intended to be the capital of an empire extending from northern India to Egypt and Greece — the Babylon where the Conqueror of the World died at the age of thirty-three, in 323 BC, clutching a copy of the Iliad, back in the days wh
en generals could read. There is Babylon the Great as conjured up by Saint John — the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, the Babylon who made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. And then there is my taxi-driver’s Babylon, a place near the town of Hillah, where his aunt lived.
Here (or at least somewhere not too far from here), archeologists have argued, the prehistory of books began. Towards the middle of the fourth millennium BC, when the climate of the Near East became cooler and the air drier, the farming communities of southern Mesopotamia abandoned their scattered villages and regrouped within and around larger urban centres which soon became city-states.2 To maintain the scarce fertile lands they invented new irrigation techniques and extraordinary architectural devices, and to organize an increasingly complex society, with its laws and edicts and rules of commerce, towards the end of the fourth millennium the new urban dwellers developed an art that would change for ever the nature of communication between human beings: the art of writing.
A History of Reading Page 18