No mortal parents smiled upon thy birth:
No nuptial joy thou know’st, no feast on earth.23
Traditionally, prophecies were held to be infallible, so it was easier to change the historical circumstances than to alter the words of a prophecy. A century earlier, Ardashir, the first Sassanian king, had rearranged historical chronology to make a Zoroastrian prophecy benefit his empire. Zoroaster had prophesied that the Persian empire and religion would be destroyed after a thousand years. He had lived about 250 years before Alexander the Great, who had died 549 years before Ardashir’s reign. In order to add two centuries to his dynasty, Ardashir proclaimed that his reign had begun only 260 years after Alexander. Constantine chose to alter neither history nor the prophetic words; instead he had Virgil translated into Greek with an elastic poetic licence that achieved his political purpose.
Constantine read out passages from the translated poem to his audience, and now everything the Good Book chronicled was here, in Virgil’s ancient words: the Virgin, the long-desired Messiah King, the righteous elect, the Holy Spirit. Constantine discreetly chose to forget those passages in which Virgil mentioned the pagan gods, Apollo, Pan and Saturn. Ancient characters who couldn’t be omitted became metaphors of Christ’s coming. “Another Helen shall other wars create, / And great Achilles urge the Trojan fate,” Virgil had written. This, said Constantine, was Christ “proceeding to the war against Troy, understanding by Troy the world itself.” In other cases, Constantine told his audience, the pagan references were devices by which Virgil fooled the Roman authorities. “I suppose,” he said (and we can imagine him lowering his voice after the loud declamation of Virgil’s verses), “he was restrained by a sense of danger which threatened one who should assail the credit of ancient religious practice. Cautiously, therefore, and securely, as far as possible, he presents the truth to those who have faculties to understand it.”
“Those who have faculties to understand it”: the text became a ciphered message that could be read by only a select few who possessed the necessary “faculties”. It was not open to any number of interpretations; for Constantine, only one reading was the true one, and to that reading he and his fellow believers alone held the key. The Edict of Milan had offered freedom of faith to all Roman citizens; the Council of Nicaea limited this freedom to those who held Constantine’s creed. In barely twelve years, people who had in Milan been granted the public right to read as they pleased and what they pleased were now, under pain of lawful punishment, told in Antioch and again in Nicaea that only one reading was true. To stipulate a single reading for a religious text was necessary in Constantine’s conception of a unanimous empire; more original and less comprehensible is the notion of a single orthodox reading for a secular text such as Virgil’s poems.
Every reader imparts to certain books a certain reading, albeit not as far-fetched nor as far-reaching as Constantine’s. To see a parable of exile in The Wizard of Oz, as Salman Rushdie does,24 is very different from reading into Virgil a foretelling of the coming of Christ. And yet something of the same sleight of hand or expression of faith takes place in both these readings, something that allows the readers, if not to be convincing, at least to show themselves convinced. At the age of thirteen or fourteen I developed a literary longing for London, and I read the Sherlock Holmes stories with absolute certainty that the smoky Baker Street room, with its Turkish slipper for tobacco and its table stained with foul chemicals, faithfully resembled the lodgings I would someday have when I too was in Arcadia. The obnoxious creatures Alice found on the other side of the looking-glass, petulant, peremptory and constantly nagging, foreshadowed so many of the adults of my adolescent life. And when Robinson Crusoe began building his hut, “a Tent under the Side of a Rock, surrounded with a strong Pale of Posts and Cables”, I knew he was describing the one I would build myself one summer, on the beach in Punta del Este. The novelist Anita Desai, who as a child in India was known in her family as a Lese Ratte or “reading rat”, a bookworm, remembers how, when she discovered Wuthering Heights at the age of nine, her own world “of an Old Delhi bungalow, its verandas and plastered walls and ceiling fans, its garden of papaya and guava trees full of shrieking parakeets, the gritty dust that settled on the pages of a book before one could turn them, all receded. What became real, dazzlingly real, through the power and magic of Emily Brontë’s pen, were the Yorkshire moors, the storm-driven heath, the torments of its anguished inhabitants who roamed thereon in rain and sleet, crying out from the depths of their broken hearts and hearing only ghosts reply.”25 The words Emily Brontë wrote to describe a young girl in England in 1847 served to illuminate a young girl in India in 1946.
Using random passages of books to foretell one’s future has a long tradition in the West, and, well before Constantine, Virgil was the preferred source for pagan divination in the empire; copies of his poems were kept for consultation in several of the temples dedicated to the Goddess Fortune.26 The first reference27 to this custom, known as sortes Vergilianae, appears in Aelius Spartianus’s life of Hadrian, which says that the young Hadrian, wishing to know what the Emperor Trajan thought of him, consulted Virgil’s Aeneid at random and found the lines in which Aeneas sees “the Roman king whose laws shall establish Rome anew”. Hadrian was satisfied; indeed, it came to pass that Trajan adopted him as his son and Hadrian became the new emperor of Rome.28
In encouraging a new version of the sortes Vergilianae, Constantine was following the trend of his time. By the end of the fourth century, the prestige attached to spoken oracles and soothsayers had shifted to the written word, to Virgil but also to the Bible, and a form of divination known as “gospel cleromancy” had developed.29 Four hundred years later, the art of divination, which had been proscribed as “an abomination unto the Lord”30 in the time of the prophets, had become so popular that in 829 the Council of Paris had to condemn it officially. To no avail — writing a personal memoir in Latin, published in 1434 in a French translation, the scholar Gaspar Peucer confessed that as a child he had “made a book out of paper and written therein the principal divinatory verses of Virgil, from which I’d draw conjectures — in play and merely as entertainment — about everything I found pleasing, such as the life and death of princes, about my adventures and about other things, in order to better and more vividly impress those verses in my mind.”31 Peucer insisted that the game had a mnemonic and not a divinatory intention, but the context makes it hard to believe his protestations.
In the sixteenth century the divinatory game was still so firmly established that Rabelais could parody the custom in Pantagruel’s advice to Panurge on whether or not to marry. Panurge, Pantagruel says, must resort to the sortes Vergilianae. The correct method, he explains, is this: a page is chosen by opening the book at random; then three dice are thrown, and the sum of them indicates a line on a page.32 When the method is put into practice, Pantagruel and Panurge come up with opposing and equally possible interpretations of the verses.
Bomarzo, the vast novel on the Italian Renaissance by the Argentinian Manuel Mujica Láinez, alludes to how familiar seventeenth-century society was with divination through Virgil: “I would trust my fate to the decision of other gods, more sovereign than the Orsini, by means of the sortes Vergilianae. At Bomarzo we used to practise this popular form of divination, which trusted the resolution of difficult or trivial problems to the fortuitous oracle of a book. Did not the blood of magicians run through Virgil’s veins? Do we not, thanks to Dante’s charm, consider him a wizard, a soothsayer? I’d submit to what the Aeneid decreed.”33
Perhaps the most famous example of the sortes is that of King Charles I visiting a library in Oxford during the Civil Wars, at the end of 1642 or the beginning of 1643. To entertain him, Lord Falkland suggested that the king “make a trial of his fortunes by the sortes Vergilianae, which everybody knows was an usual kind of augury some ages past.” The king opened the book to a passage in Book IV of the Aeneid and read, “May he be harried in war
by audacious tribes, and exiled from his own land”.34 On Tuesday, January 30, 1649, condemned as a traitor by his own people, Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall.
Some seventy years later, Robinson Crusoe was still availing himself of a similar method on his inhospitable island: “One Morning,” he wrote, “being very sad, I open’d the Bible upon these Words, I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee; immediately it occur’d, That these Words were to me, Why else should they be directed in such a Manner, just at the Moment when I was mourning over my Condition, as one forsaken of God and Man?”35 And just over 150 years after that, Bathsheba still turned to the Bible to find out whether she should marry Mr. Boldwood in Far from the Madding Crowd.36
Robert Louis Stevenson astutely noted that the oracular gift of a writer such as Virgil has less to do with supernatural gifts than with poetry’s mimetic qualities, which allow a line of verse to signal, intimately and powerfully, to readers across the ages. In The Ebb Tide one of Stevenson’s characters, lost on a faraway island, seeks to know his fortune in a tattered copy of Virgil, and the poet, replying from the page “with no very certain or encouraging voice”, stirs in the outcast visions of his native land. “For it is the destiny of those grave, restrained and classic writers,” wrote Stevenson, “with whom we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and become native in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student’s own irrevocable youth.”37
Constantine was the first to read prophetic Christian meanings into Virgil, and through his reading Virgil became the most prestigious of all oracular writers. From imperial poet to Christian visionary, Virgil assumed an important role in Christian mythology, enabling him, ten centuries after Constantine’s encomium, to guide Dante through hell and purgatory. His prestige even flowed backwards; a story preserved in verse in the medieval Latin Mass tells that Saint Paul himself travelled to Naples to weep over the ancient poet’s tomb.
What Constantine discovered on that distant Good Friday, and for all time, is that the meaning of a text is enlarged by the reader’s capabilities and desires. Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a message that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or to its author. This transmigration of meaning can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the circumstances of the reader. Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
“Hospice de Beaune” by André Kertész. (photo credit 14.2)
THE SYMBOLIC READER
n 1929, in the Hospice de Beaune, in France, the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who had trained himself in the craft during his service with the Austro-Hungarian army, took a picture of an old woman sitting up in her bed, reading.1 It is a perfectly framed composition. In the centre is the diminutive woman, wrapped in a black shawl and wearing a black night-cap that unexpectedly reveals the gathered hair at the back of her head; white pillows prop her up and a white coverlet drapes her feet. Around and behind her, white bunched-up curtains hang among the bed’s black wooden columns of Gothic design. Further inspection reveals, on the top frame of the bed, a small plaque with the number 19, a knotted cord dangling from the bed’s ceiling (to call for assistance? to draw the front curtain?) and a night-table bearing a box, a jug and a cup. On the floor, under the table, is a tin basin. Have we seen everything? No. The woman is reading, holding the book open at a fair distance from her obviously still keen eyes. But what is she reading? Because she’s an old woman, because she’s in bed, because the bed is in an old people’s home in Beaune, in the heart of Catholic Burgundy, we believe that we can guess the nature of her book: a devotional volume, a compendium of sermons? If it were so — close inspection with a magnifying glass tells us nothing — the image would somehow be coherent, complete, the book defining its reader and identifying her bed as a spiritually quiet place.
But what if we were to discover that the book was in fact something else? What if, for instance, she was reading Racine, Corneille — a sophisticated, cultured reader — or, more surprisingly, Voltaire? Or what if the book turned out to be Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles, that scandalous novel of bourgeois life published the same year Kertész took her picture? Suddenly the commonplace old woman is no longer commonplace; she becomes, through the tiny act of holding one book in her hands instead of another, a questioner, a spirit still burning with curiosity, a rebel.
Sitting across from me in the subway in Toronto, a woman is reading the Penguin edition of Borges’s Labyrinths. I want to call out to her, to wave a hand and signal that I too am of that faith. She, whose face I have forgotten, whose clothes I barely noticed, young or old I can’t say, is closer to me, by the mere act of holding that particular book in her hands, than many others I see daily. A cousin of mine from Buenos Aires was deeply aware that books could function as a badge, a sign of alliance, and always chose a book to take on her travels with the same care with which she chose her handbag. She would not travel with Romain Rolland because she thought it made her look too pretentious, or with Agatha Christie because it made her look too vulgar. Camus was appropriate for a short trip, Cronin for a long one; a detective story by Vera Caspary or Ellery Queen was acceptable for a weekend in the country; a Graham Greene novel was suitable for travelling by ship or plane.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users. Tools, furniture, clothes — all have a symbolic function, but books inflict upon their readers a symbolism far more complex than that of a simple utensil. The mere possession of books implies social standing and a certain intellectual richness; in eighteenth-century Russia, during the reign of Catherine the Great, a certain Mr. Klostermann made a fortune by selling long rows of binding stuffed with waste paper, which allowed courtiers to create the illusion of a library and thereby garner the favour of their bookish empress.2 In our day, interior decorators line walls with yards of books to give a room a “sophisticated” atmosphere, or offer wallpaper that creates the illusion of a library,3 and TV talk-show producers believe that a background of bookshelves adds a touch of intelligence to a set. In these cases, the general notion of books is enough to denote lofty pursuits, just as red velvet furniture has come to suggest sensual pleasures. So important is the symbol of the book that its presence or absence can, in the eyes of the viewer, lend or deprive a character of intellectual power.
Simone Martini’s Annunciation in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. (photo credit 15.1)
In the year 1333 the painter Simone Martini completed an Annunciation for the central panel of an altarpiece for the Duomo of Siena — the first surviving Western altar dedicated to this subject.4 The scene is inscribed within three Gothic arches: a high arch in the centre containing a formation of angels in dark gold, encircling the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove, and a smaller arch to each side. Beneath the arch on the viewer’s left a kneeling angel in embroidered vestments holds an olive branch in his left hand; he raises the index finger of his right hand to indicate silence with the rhetorical gesture common in ancient Greek and Roman statuary. Beneath the right arch, on a gilded throne inlaid with ivory, sits the Virgin in a purple cloak fringed with gold. Next to her, in the middle of the panel, is a vase of lilies. The immaculately white flower, with its asexual blooms and lack of stamens, served as a perfect emblem of Mary, whose purity Saint Bernard compared to the “inviolate chastity of the lily”.5 The lily, the fleur-de-lis, was also the symbol of the city of Florence, and towards the end of the Middle Ages it replaced the herald’s staff borne by the angel in Florentine Annunciations.6 Sienese painters, arch-enemies of the Florentines, could not entirely delete the traditional fleur-de-lis from depiction
s of the Virgin, but they would not honour Florence by allowing the angel to carry the city’s flower. Therefore Martini’s angel bears an olive branch, the plant symbolic of Siena.7
For someone seeing the painting in Martini’s time, every object and every colour had a specific significance. Though blue later became the Virgin’s colour (the colour of heavenly love, the colour of truth seen after the clouds are dispelled),8 purple, the colour of authority and also of pain and penitence, stood in Martini’s day as a reminder of the Virgin’s coming sorrows. In a popular account of her early life, in the apocryphal second-century Protoevangelion of James9 (a remarkable bestseller throughout the Middle Ages, with which Martini’s public would have been familiar), it is told that the council of priests required a new veil for a temple. Seven undefiled virgins from the tribe of David were chosen, and lots were cast to see who would spin the wool for each of the seven requisite colours; the colour purple fell to Mary. Before starting to spin, she went to the well to draw water and there heard a voice that said to her, “Hail thou art full of grace, the Lord is with thee; thou art blessed among women.” Mary looked right and left (the protoevangelist notes with a novelist’s touch), saw no one and, trembling, entered her house and sat down to work at her purple wool. “And behold the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour in the sight of God.”10 Thus, before Martini, the herald angel, the purple cloth and the lily — representing in turn acceptance of the word of God, acceptance of suffering and immaculate virginity — marked the qualities for which the Christian Church wanted Mary to be honoured.11 Then, in 1333, Martini placed in her hands a book.
Traditionally, in Christian iconography, the book or scroll belonged to the male deity, to either God the Father or the triumphant Christ, the new Adam, in whom the word of God had been made flesh.12 The book was the repository of God’s law; when the governor of Roman Africa asked a group of Christian prisoners what they had brought with them to defend themselves in court, they replied, “Texts by Paul, a just man”.13 The book also conferred intellectual authority, and from the earliest representations Christ was often depicted exercising the rabbinical functions of teacher, interpreter, scholar, reader. To the woman belonged the Child, affirming her role as mother.
A History of Reading Page 22