A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  The act of reading establishes an intimate, physical relationship in which all the senses have a part: the eyes drawing the words from the page, the ears echoing the sounds being read, the nose inhaling the familiar scent of paper, glue, ink, cardboard or leather, the touch caressing the rough or soft page, the smooth or hard binding; even the taste, at times, when the reader’s fingers are lifted to the tongue (which is how the murderer poisons his victims in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose). All this, many readers are unwilling to share — and if the book they wish to read is in someone else’s possession, the laws of property are as hard to uphold as those of faithfulness in love. Also, physical ownership becomes at times synonymous with a sense of intellectual apprehension. We come to feel that the books we own are the books we know, as if possession were, in libraries as in courts, nine-tenths of the law; that to glance at the spines of the books we call ours, obediently standing guard along the walls of our room, willing to speak to us and us alone at the mere flick of a page, allows us to say, “All this is mine,” as if their presence alone fills us with their wisdom, without our actually having to labour through their contents.

  In this I have been as guilty as Count Libri. Even today, submerged as we are by dozens of editions and thousands of identical copies of the same title, I know that the volume I hold in my hands, that volume and no other, becomes the Book. Annotations, stains, marks of one kind or another, a certain moment and place, characterize that volume as surely as if it were a priceless manuscript. We may be loath to justify Libri’s thefts, but the underlying longing, the urge to be, even for a moment, the only one able to call a book “mine”, is common to more honest men and women than we may be willing to acknowledge.

  Pliny the Younger, sculpted on the façade of Como Cathedral. (photo credit 17.1)

  THE AUTHOR AS READER

  ne evening at the end of the first century AD, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (known to future readers as Pliny the Younger to distinguish him from his erudite uncle, Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79) left the house of a friend in Rome in a state of righteous anger. As soon as he reached his study, Pliny sat down and, in order to collect his thoughts (and perhaps with an eye to the volume of letters he would one day assemble and publish), wrote about that night’s events to the lawyer Claudius Restitutus. “I have just left in indignation a reading at a friend of mine’s, and I feel I have to write to you at once, as I can’t tell you about it personally. The text that was read was highly polished in every possible way, but two or three witty people — or so they seemed to themselves and a few others — listened to it like deaf-mutes. They never opened their lips or moved a hand, or even stretched their legs to change from their seated postures. What’s the point of all this sober demeanour and scholarship, or rather of this laziness and conceit, this lack of tact and good sense, which makes one spend an entire day doing nothing but causing grief and turning into an enemy the man one came to hear as one’s dearest friend?”1

  It is somewhat difficult for us, at a distance of twenty centuries, to understand Pliny’s dismay. In his time, authors’ readings had become a fashionable social ceremony2 and, as with any other ceremony, there was an established etiquette for both the listeners and the authors. The listeners were expected to provide critical response, based on which the author would improve the text — which is why the motionless audience had so outraged Pliny; he himself sometimes tried out a first draft of a speech on a group of friends and then altered it according to their reaction.3 Furthermore, the listeners were expected to attend the entire function, whatever its length, so as not to miss any part of the work being read, and Pliny felt that those who used readings as mere social diversions were little better than hoodlums. “Most of them sit around in the waiting-rooms,” he fumed to another friend, “wasting their time instead of paying attention, and ordering their servants to tell them every so often if the reader has arrived and has read the introduction, or if he has reached the end. Only then, and most reluctantly, do they straggle in. And they don’t stay long but leave before the end, some trying to escape unnoticed, others walking out with no shame.… More praise and honour are due to those whose love of writing and reading out loud is not affected by the bad manners and arrogance of their audience.”4

  The author too was obliged to follow certain rules if his reading was to be successful, for there were all sorts of obstacles to overcome. First of all, an appropriate reading-space had to found. Rich men fancied themselves poets, and recited their work to large crowds of acquaintances at their opulent villas, in the auditorium — a room built specially for that purpose. Some of these wealthy poets, such as Titinius Capito,5 were generous and lent their auditoria for the performances of others, but mostly these recital-spaces were for the exclusive use of their owners. Once his friends had gathered at the appointed place, the author had to face them from a chair on a dais, wearing a new toga and displaying all his rings.6 According to Pliny, this custom doubly hindered him: “he is at a great disadvantage by the mere fact of sitting down, even though he may be as gifted as speakers who stand”7 and he had the “two main aids to his delivery, i.e., eyes and hands” occupied with holding his text. Oratorical skills were therefore essential. Praising one reader for his performance, Pliny noted that “he showed an appropriate versatility in raising or lowering his tone, and the same dexterity in going from loftier subjects to baser ones, from simple to complex, or passing from lighter subjects to more serious ones. His remarkably pleasant voice was another advantage, and was improved by his modesty, his blushes and nervousness, which always add charm to a reading. I don’t know why, but shyness suits an author better than confidence.”8

  Those who had doubts about their reading skills could resort to certain stratagems. Pliny himself, confident when reading speeches but uncertain about his ability to read verse, came up with the following idea for an evening of his poetry. “I’m planning to give an informal reading to a few friends,” he wrote to Suetonius, the author of Lives of the Twelve Caesars, “and I’m thinking of using one of my slaves. I’ll be showing my friends no great civility, since the man I’ve chosen is not really a good reader, but I think he’ll be better than I’d be, as long as he’s not too nervous.… The question is: what should I do while he is reading? Should I sit still and silent like a spectator, or do as some people do and follow his words by mouthing them with my lips, eyes and gestures?” We do not know if Pliny gave that night one of the first lip-synch performances in history.

  Many of these readings must have seemed interminable; Pliny attended one that lasted three days. (This particular reading doesn’t seem to have bothered him, perhaps because the reader had announced to his audience, “But what do I care for the poets of the past, since I know Pliny?”)9 Ranging from several hours to half a week, public readings became practically unavoidable for anyone who wished to be known as an author. Horace complained that educated readers no longer seemed interested in the actual writings of a poet, but had “transferred all their pleasure from the ear to the shifting and empty delights of the eye”.10 Martial became so fed up with being pestered by poetasters anxious to read their work out loud that he complained:

  I ask you, who can endure these efforts?

  You read to me when I’m standing,

  You read to me when I’m sitting,

  You read to me when I’m running,

  You read to me when I’m shitting.11

  Pliny, however, approved of authors’ readings, and saw in them the signs of a new golden literary age. “There was hardly a day all throughout April when there wasn’t someone giving a public reading,” he remarked, very pleased. “I’m delighted to see literature flourishing and talent blooming.”12 Future generations disagreed with Pliny’s verdict, and chose to forget the names of most of these performing poets.

  And yet, if fame was to be one’s lot, thanks to these public readings, an author no longer had to wait till after death for consecratio
n. “Opinions differ,” wrote Pliny to his friend Valerius Paulinus, “but my idea of the truly happy man is one who enjoys the anticipation of a good and lasting reputation, and, confident in the verdict of posterity, lives in the knowledge of the fame to come.”13 Present fame was important to him. He was delighted when someone at the races thought the writer Tacitus (whom he much admired) might be Pliny. “If Demosthenes had the right to be pleased when the old woman of Attica recognized him with the words ‘That’s Demosthenes!’, I may surely be glad when my name is well known. In fact, I am glad and I admit it.”14 His work was published and read, even in the wilds of Lugdunum (Lyons). He wrote to another friend, “I didn’t think there were any booksellers in Lugdunum, so I was all the more pleased to learn from your letter that my efforts are being sold. I’m glad they retain abroad the popularity they won in Rome, and I’m beginning to think my work must really be quite good when public opinion in such widely different places is agreed about it.”15 However, he much preferred the accolade of a listening audience to the silent approval of anonymous readers.

  Pliny suggested a number of reasons why reading in public was a beneficial exercise. Celebrity was no doubt a very important factor, but there was also the delight of hearing one’s own voice. He justified this self-indulgence by noting that listening to a text led the audience to buy the published piece, thereby causing a demand that would satisfy both the authors and the bookseller-publishers.16 Reading publicly was, in his view, the best way for an author to acquire an audience. In fact, reading publicly was in itself a rudimentary form of publishing.

  As Pliny accurately remarked, reading in public was a performance, an act undertaken with the whole body for others to perceive. The author who reads in public — then as now — overrides the words with certain sounds and enacts them with certain gestures; this performance gives the text a tone which is (supposedly) the one the author had in mind at the moment of its conception, and therefore grants the listener the feeling of being close to the author’s intentions; it also gives the text a seal of authenticity. But at the same time the author’s reading also distorts the text, by improving (or impoverishing) it with interpretation. The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies brought layers and layers of characterization to his readings, acting out rather than reciting his fiction. The French novelist Nathalie Sarraute instead reads in a monotone that does no justice to her lyrical texts. Dylan Thomas chanted his poetry, striking the stresses like gongs and leaving enormous pauses.17 T.S. Eliot muttered his as if he were a sulky vicar cursing his flock.

  Read out to an audience, a text is not exclusively determined by the relationship between its intrinsic characteristics and those of its arbitrary, ever-changing public, since the members of that public are no longer at liberty (as ordinary readers would be) to go back, reread, delay, and to give the text their own connotative intonation. It becomes instead dependent on the author-performer who assumes the role of reader of readers, the presumptive incarnation of each and every member of the captive audience for whom the reading is being held, teaching them how to read. Authors’ readings can become thoroughly dogmatic.

  Public readings were not unique to Rome. The Greeks read publicly. Five centuries before Pliny, for instance, Herodotus read his own work at the Olympic festivals, where a large and enthusiastic audience was assembled from all over Greece, to avoid having to travel from city to city. But in the sixth century public readings effectively ceased because there no longer seemed to be an “educated public”. The last description known to us of a Roman audience at a public reading is in the letters of the Christian poet Apollinaris Sidonius, written in the second half of the fifth century. By then, as Sidonius himself lamented in his letters, Latin had become a specialized, foreign tongue, “the language of the liturgy, of the chancelleries and of a few scholars”.18 Ironically, the Christian Church, which had adopted Latin to spread the gospel to “all men in all places”, found that the language had become incomprehensible to the vast majority of the flock. Latin became part of the Church’s “mystery”, and in the eleventh century the first Latin dictionaries appeared, to help students and novices for whom Latin was no longer the mother tongue.

  But authors continued to require the stimulation of an immediate public. By the late thirteenth century, Dante was suggesting that the “vulgar tongue” — that is to say, the vernacular — was even more noble than Latin, for three reasons: because it was the first tongue spoken by Adam in Eden; because it was “natural”, while Latin was “artificial” since it was only learned in schools; and because it was universal, since all men spoke a vulgar tongue and only a few knew Latin.19 Though this defence of the vulgar tongue was written, paradoxically, in Latin, it is probable that towards the end of his life, at the court of Guido Novello da Polenta in Ravenna, Dante himself read out passages from his Commedia in the “vulgar tongue” he had so eloquently defended. What is certain is that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries authors’ readings were once again common; there are many instances in both secular and religious literature. In 1309, Jean de Joinville addressed his Life of St. Louis to “you and your brothers, and others who will hear it read”.20 In the late fourteenth century Froissart, the French historian, braved the storm in the middle of the night for six long winter weeks to read his romance Méliador to the insomniac Count du Blois.21 The prince and poet Charles d’Orléans, taken prisoner by the English at Agincourt in 1415, wrote numerous poems during his long captivity, and after his release in 1440 read them to the court at Blois during literary evenings to which other poets, such as François Villon, were invited. La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, made clear in its introduction of 1499 that the lengthy play (or novel in the form of a play) was intended to be read out loud “when some ten people get together to listen to this comedy”;22 it is likely that the author (of whom we know very little, except that he was a converted Jew and not anxious to bring his work to the attention of the Inquisition) had tried the “comedy” out on his friends.23 In January 1507, Ariosto read his unfinished Orlando Furioso to the convalescent Isabella Gonzaga, “causing two days to pass not only without boredom but with the greatest of pleasure”.24 And Geoffrey Chaucer, whose books are full of references to literature being read out loud, most certainly read his work to a listening audience.25

  The son of a prosperous wine merchant, Chaucer was probably educated in London, where he discovered the works of Ovid, Virgil and the French poets. As was common with children of wealthy families, he entered the service of a noble household — that of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, married to the second son of King Edward iii. Tradition has it that one of his first poems was a hymn to the Virgin, written at the request of a noble lady, Blanche of Lancaster (for whom he later wrote The Book of the Duchesse) and read out loud to her and her attendants. One can imagine the young man, nervous at first, then warming up to his task, stammering a little, reading out his poem much as a student today would read an essay in front of the class. Chaucer must have persevered; the readings of his poetry continued. A manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, depicts a man standing at an outside pulpit and addressing an audience of lords and ladies, an open book laid out in front of him. The man is Chaucer; the royal couple next to him, King Richard II and Queen Anne.

  Chaucer’s style combines devices borrowed from the classical rhetoricians with the colloquialisms and catch-phrases of the minstrel tradition, so that a reader following his words from across the centuries hears as well as sees the text. Because Chaucer’s audience were going to “read” his poems through their ears, devices such as rhyme, cadence, repetition, and the voices of different characters were essential elements of his poetic composition; reading out loud, he would be able to alter these devices according to the audience’s reaction. When the text was set down in written form, whether for someone else to read out loud or for someone to read silently, it was obviously important to retain the effect of these aural tricks. For that reason, just as
certain punctuation marks had been developed through silent reading, equally practical signs were now developed for reading out loud. For instance, the diple — a scribe’s mark in the shape of a horizontal arrowhead, placed in the margin to draw attention to some element in the text — now became the sign we recognize today as inverted commas, to indicate first quotations, and then passages of direct speech. As well, the scribe who copied out The Canterbury Tales in the late-fourteenth-century Ellesmere manuscript resorted to slashes (the solidus) to mark the rhythm of the verse spoken out loud:

  In Southwerk / at the Tabard / as I lay

  Redy / to wenden on my pilgrimage26

  By 1387, however, Chaucer’s contemporary John of Trevisa, who was translating an immensely popular epic, the Polychronicon, from the Latin, chose to render it into English prose rather than verse — a medium less adapted to a public reading — because he knew that his audience no longer expected to listen to a recitation, and would instead, in all probability, read the book by themselves. The death of the author, it was thought, enabled the reader to have freer commerce with the text.

  And yet the author, the magical creator of the text, retained an incantatory prestige. What intrigued new readers was meeting that maker, the body that lodged the mind that had dreamt up Dr. Faust, Tom Jones, Candide. And for the authors there was a parallel act of magic: meeting that literary invention, the public, the “dear reader”, those who for Pliny were well- or ill-behaved people of visible eyes and ears and who now, centuries later, had become a mere hope beyond the page. “Seven copies,” reflects the protagonist of Thomas Love Peacock’s early nineteenth-century novel Nightmare Abbey, “have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world.”27 To meet their allotted seven (and seven times seven, if the stars were lucky), authors started once again to read their work in public.