A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  Several chapters, in different parts of the book, address the duties of fiction as opposed to what the reader accepts as fact. The chapters on reading fact are a touch dry, ranging from the theories of Plato to the criticisms of Hegel and Bergson; even though these chapters feature the possibly apocryphal fourteenth-century English travel writer Sir John Mandeville, they are somewhat too dense to lend themselves to summary. The chapters on reading fiction, however, are more concise. Two opinions, equally prescriptive and utterly opposed, are set forth. According to one, the reader is meant to believe in and act like the characters in a novel. According to the other, the reader must dismiss these characters as mere fabrications with no bearing whatsoever on “the real world”. Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, voices the first opinion when he interrogates Catherine after the breaking off of her friendship with Isabella; he expects her feelings to follow the conventions of fiction:

  “You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy. Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of them without her is abhorrent. You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world. You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficulty, you could rely on. You feel all this?”

  “No,” said Catherine, after a few moments’ reflection, “I do not — ought I?”13

  The reader’s tone and how it affects the text are discussed in Chapter Fifty-one, through the character of Robert Louis Stevenson reading stories to his neighbours in Samoa. Stevenson attributed his sense of the dramatic and the music of his prose to the bedtime stories of his childhood nurse, Alison Cunningham, “Cummie”. She read him ghost stories, religious hymns, Calvinist tracts and Scottish romances, all of which eventually found their way into his fiction. “It’s you that gave me the passion for the drama, Cummie,” he confessed to her as a grown man. “Me, Master Lou? I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.” “Ay woman,” he answered. “But it was the grand dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.”14 Stevenson himself did not learn to read until the age of seven, not out of laziness but because he wanted to prolong the delights of hearing the stories come to life. This our author calls “the Scheherazade syndrome”.15

  Reading fiction is not our author’s only preoccupation. The reading of scientific tracts, dictionaries, parts of a book such as indexes, footnotes and dedications, maps, newspapers — each merits (and receives) its own chapter. There is a short but telling portrait of the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who every morning reads a couple of pages of a dictionary (any dictionary except the pompous Diccionario de la Real Academia Española) — a habit our author compares to that of Stendhal, who perused the Napoleonic Code so as to learn to write in a terse and exact style.

  The topic of reading borrowed books occupies Chapter Fifteen. Jane Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle’s wife, and a celebrated letter writer) leads us through the intricacies of reading books that don’t belong to us, “like having an illicit affair”, and of taking out from libraries books that might affect our reputation. One afternoon in January 1843, having chosen from the respectable London Library several risqué novels by the French writer Paul de Kock, she brazenly entered her name in the ledger as that of Erasmus Darwin, the dry-as-dust invalid grandfather of the more famous Charles, to the astonishment of the librarians.16

  Here also are the reading ceremonies of our own era and previous times (Chapters Forty-three and Forty-five). Here are the marathon readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday, the nostalgic radio readings of a book before bedtime, the library readings in big crowded halls and in far, empty, snowbound places, the readings by the bedsides of the sick, the ghost-story readings by the winter fire. Here is the curious science of bibliotherapy (Chapter Twenty-one), defined in Webster’s as “the use of selected reading materials as therapeutic adjuvants in medicine and psychiatry”, by which certain doctors claim they can heal the sick in body and spirit with The Wind in the Willows or Bouvard and Pécuchet.17

  Here are the book-bags, the sine qua non of every Victorian voyage. No traveller left home without a suitcase full of appropriate reading, whether travelling to the Côte d’Azur or to Antarctica. (Poor Amundsen: our author tells us that, on his way to the South Pole, the explorer’s book-bag sank under the ice, and he was obliged to spend many months in the company of the only volume he was able to rescue: Dr. John Gauden’s The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings.)

  One of the final chapters (not the last) concerns the writer’s explicit acknowledgement of the reader’s power. Here are the books left open for the reader’s construction, like a box of Lego: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, of course, which allows us to read it any which way, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a novel built out of interchangeable chapters whose sequence the reader determines at will. Sterne and Cortázar inevitably lead to the New Age novels, the hypertexts. The term (our author tells us) was coined in the 1970s by a computer specialist, Ted Nelson, to describe the nonsequential narrative space made possible by computers. “There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks,” our author quotes the novelist Robert Coover as saying, describing hypertext in an article in The New York Times, “as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics”.18 The reader of a hypertext can enter the text at almost any point; change the narrative course, demand insertions, correct, expand or delete. Neither do these texts have an end, since the reader (or the writer) can always continue or retell a text: “If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer?” asks Coover. “If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in so many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?” In brackets, our author questions the freedom implicit in such an obligation.

  The History of Reading, fortunately, has no end. After the final chapter and before the already-mentioned copious index, our author has left a number of blank pages for the reader to add further thoughts on reading, subjects obviously missed, apposite quotations, events and characters still in the future. There is some consolation in that. I imagine leaving the book by the side of my bed, I imagine opening it up tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after that, and saying to myself, “It’s not finished.”

  NOTES

  I have not provided a separate bibliography since most of the books that I drew upon are mentioned in the following notes. In any case, the vastness of the subject and the limitations of the author, would make such a list, gathered under the prestigious title of “Bibliography”, seem both mysteriously erratic and hopelessly incomplete.

  THE LAST PAGE

  1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955). Lévi-Strauss calls societies without writing “cold societies” because their cosmology attempts to annul the sequence of events that constitutes our notion of history.

  2. Philippe Descola, Les Lances du crépuscule (Paris, 1994).

  3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 2 vols., ed. Celina S. de Cortázar & Isaías Lerner (Buenos Aires, 1969), I: 9.

  4. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974).

  5. Miguel de Unamuno, untitled sonnet in Poesía completa (Madrid, 1979).

  6. Virginia Woolf, “Charlotte Brontë”, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London, 1987).

  7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris, 1964).

  8. James Hillman, “A Note on Story”, in Children’s Literature: The Great Excluded, Vol. 3, ed. Francelia Butler & Bennett Brockman (Philadelphia, 1974).

  9. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My Kingdom”, A Child’s Garden of Verses (London, 1885).

  10. Michel de Montaigne, “
On the Education of Children”, in Les Essais, ed. J. Plattard (Paris, 1947).

  11. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978).

  12. Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (London, 1912).

  13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, in Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944).

  14. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (London, 1889).

  15. Quoted in John Willis Clark, Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods (Cambridge, 1894).

  16. Traditio Generalis Capituli of the English Benedictines (Philadelphia, 1866).

  17. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York, 1988).

  18. At the time, neither Borges nor I knew that Kipling’s bundled message was not an invention. According to Ignace J. Gelb (The History of Writing [Chicago, 1952]), in Eastern Turkestan, a young woman sent her lover a message consisting of a lump of tea, a leaf of grass, a red fruit, a dried apricot, a piece of coal, a flower, a piece of sugar, a pebble, a falcon’s feather and a nut. The message read, “I can no longer drink tea, I’m pale as grass without you, I blush to think of you, my heart burns as coal, you are beautiful as a flower, and sweet as sugar, but is your heart of stone? I’d fly to you if I had wings, I am yours like a nut in your hand.”

  19. Borges analysed Wilkins’s language in an essay, “El idioma analitico de John Wilkins”, in Otras Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1952).

  20. Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”, a chapter in A Handful of Dust (London, 1934).

  21. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Leer y escribir (Mexico, D.F., 1969).

  22. Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris, 1994).

  23. Jorge Luis Borges, review of Men of Mathematics, by E.T. Bell, in El Hogar, Buenos Aires, July 8, 1938.

  24. P.K.E. Schmöger, Das Leben der Gottseligen Anna Katharina Emmerich (Freiburg, 1867).

  25. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton, 1961).

  26. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “In Praise of Illiteracy”, in Die Zeit, Hamburg, Nov. 29, 1985.

  27. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987).

  28. Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”, in Essays of Elia (London, 1833).

  29. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (Manchester, 1990).

  READING SHADOWS

  1. This is not to say that all writing has its roots in these Sumerian tablets. It is generally accepted that Chinese and Central American scripts, for example, developed independently. See Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (London, 1984).

  2. “Early Writing Systems”, in World Archeology 17/3, Henley-on-Thames, Feb. 1986. The Mesopotamian invention of writing probably influenced other writing systems: the Egyptian, shortly after 3000 BC, and the Indian, around 2500 BC.

  3. William Wordsworth, writing in 1819, described a similar feeling: “O ye who patiently explore / The wreck of Herculanean lore, / What rapture! Could ye seize / Some Theban fragment, or unrol / One precious, tender-hearted scroll / Of pure Simonides.”

  4. Cicero, De oratore, Vol. I, ed. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), II, 87: 357.

  5. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), X, 34.

  6. M.D. Chenu, Grammaire et théologie au XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1935–36).

  7. Empedocles, Fragment 84DK, quoted in Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, 1992).

  8. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus”, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 10, quoted in David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics (London, 1983).

  9. Ibid.

  10. For a lucid explanation of this complex term, see Padel, In and Out of the Mind.

  11. Aristotle, De anima, ed. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1943).

  12. Quoted in Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago & London, 1990).

  13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 8–11.

  14. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine.

  15. Kenneth D. Keele & Carlo Pedretti, eds., Leonardo da Vinci: Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, 3 vols. (London, 1978–80).

  16. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

  17. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, 1984).

  18. Sadik A. Assaad, The Reign of al-Hakim bi Amr Allah (London, 1974).

  19. These rather elaborate explanations are developed in Saleh Beshara Omar’s Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics: A Study of the Origins of Experimental Science (Minneapolis & Chicago, 1977).

  20. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Oxford, 1976).

  21. Émile Charles, Roger Bacon, sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines d’après des textes inédits (Paris, 1861).

  22. M. Dax, “Lésions de la moitié gauche de l’encéphale coincidant avec l’oubli des signes de la pensée”, Gazette hebdomadaire de médicine et de chirurgie, 2 (1865), and P. Broca, “Sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé”, Bulletin de la Societé d’anthropologie, 6 337–393 (1865), in André Roch Lecours et al., “Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3): A Contribution to the Study of Speech and Language Disorders in Illiterates with Unilateral Brain Damage (Initial Testing)”, Neuropsychologia 26/4, London, 1988.

  23. André Roch Lecours, “The Origins and Evolution of Writing”, in Origins of the Human Brain (Cambridge, 1993).

  24. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York, 1985).

  25. Roch Lecours et al., “Illiteracy and Brain Damage (3)”.

  26. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1965).

  27. Personal interview with André Roch Lecours, Montreal, Nov. 1992.

  28. Émile Javal, eight articles in Annales d’oculistique, 1878–79, discussed in Paul A. Kolers, “Reading”, lecture delivered at the Canadian Psychological Association meeting, Toronto, 1971.

  29. Oliver Sacks, “The President’s Speech”, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York, 1987).

  30. Merlin C. Wittrock, “Reading Comprehension”, in Neuropsychological and Cognitive Processes in Reading (Oxford, 1981).

  31. Cf. D. LaBerge & S.J. Samuels, “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading”, in Cognitive Psychology 6, London, 1974.

  32. Wittrock, “Reading Comprehension”.

  33. E.B. Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York, 1908), quoted in Kolers, “Reading”.

  34. Quoted in Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler.

  THE SILENT READERS

  1. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), V, 12.

  2. Donald Attwater, “Ambrose”, in A Dictionary of Saints (London, 1965).

  3. W. Ellwood Post, Saints, Signs and Symbols (Harrisburg, Penn., 1962).

  4. Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 3.

  5. In 1927, in an article titled “Voces Paginarum” (Philologus 82) the Hungarian scholar Josef Balogh tried to prove that silent reading was almost completely unknown in the ancient world. Forty-one years later, in 1968, Bernard M.W. Knox (“Silent Reading in Antiquity”, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 9/4 [Winter 1968]) argued against Balogh that “ancient books were normally read aloud, but there is nothing to show that silent reading of books was anything extraordinary.” And yet the examples Knox gives (several of which I quote) seem to me too weak to support his thesis, and appear to be exceptions to reading out loud, rather than the rule.

  6. Knox, “Silent Reading in Antiquity”.

  7. Plutarch, “On the Fortune of Alexander”, Fragment 340a, in Moralia, Vol. IV, ed. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972): “In fact it is recorded that once, when he
had broken the seal of a confidential letter from his mother and was reading it silently to himself, Hephaestion quietly put his head beside Alexander’s and read the letter with him; Alexander could not bear to stop him, but took off his ring and placed the seal on Hephaestion’s lips.”

  8. Claudius Ptolemy, On the Criterion, discussed in The Criterion of Truth, ed. Pamela Huby & Gordon Neal (Oxford, 1952).

  9. Plutarch, “Brutus”, V, in The Parallel Lives, ed. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1970). It doesn’t seem odd that Caesar should have read this note silently. In the first place, he may not have wanted a love-letter overheard; secondly, it may have been part of his plan to irritate his enemy, Cato, and lead him to suspect a conspiracy — which is exactly what happened, according to Plutarch. Caesar was forced to show the note and Cato was ridiculed.