Centuries later, Kafka suggested that, faced with Odysseus’s expectations, the Sirens kept still, either because they wished to defeat him with their silence or because they were themselves seduced by the powerful gaze of the hero, and that the clever Ulysses only pretended to hear the magic song which they denied him. In this case, we might add, it was neither the sound nor the words that Ulysses perceived but a sort of blank page, the perfect poem, taught between writing and reading, on the point of being conceived.
Later still, Jorge Luis Borges, attempting to define his ars poetica, wrote,
They say that Ulysses, tired of astonishments
Wept for love at once again seeing his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is like that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of mere astonishments.
We too can imagine — why not?—that Ulysses, like Dante in Purgatory, was able to transform, through his amorous desire, the Sirens and their song. We can imagine him, “tired of astonishments,” reading the apparition, and its voice or its silence, as something uniquely personal. We can imagine him translating the Sirens’ universal language into a singular and intimate tongue in which he then composes an all-encompassing autobiography, past, present and future, a mirrored poem in which Ulysses recognizes, and also discovers, his true self.
Perhaps this is the way in which all literature works.
PART FIVE
The Ideal Reader
At last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-Glass
book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass,
the words will all go the right way again.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1
Notes Towards a Definition
of the Ideal Reader
“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all
the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that
haven’t been invented just yet.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6
THE IDEAL READER IS THE writer just before the words come together on the page.
The ideal reader exists in the moment that precedes the moment of creation.
Ideal readers do not reconstruct a story: they re-create it.
Ideal readers do not follow a story: they partake of it.
A famous children’s book program on the BBC always started with the host asking, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin.” The ideal reader is also the ideal sitter.
Depictions of Saint Jerome show him poised over his translation of the Bible, listening to the word of God. The ideal reader must learn how to listen.
The ideal reader is the translator, able to dissect the text, peel back the skin, slice down to the marrow, follow each artery and each vein, and then set on its feet a whole new sentient being. The ideal reader is not a taxidermist.
For the ideal reader all devices are familiar.
For the ideal reader all jokes are new.
“One must be an inventor to read well.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. The ideal reader has an unlimited capacity for oblivion and can dismiss from memory the knowledge that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are one and the same person, that Julien Sorel will have his head cut off, that the name of the murderer of Roger Ackroyd is So-and-so.
The ideal reader has no interest in the writings of Bret Easton Ellis.
The ideal reader knows what the writer only intuits.
The ideal reader subverts the text. The ideal reader does not take the writer’s word for granted.
The ideal reader is a cumulative reader: every reading of a book adds a new layer of memory to the narrative.
Every ideal reader is an associative reader and reads as if all books were the work of one ageless and prolific author.
Ideal readers cannot put their knowledge into words.
Upon closing the book, ideal readers feel that, had they not read it, the world would be poorer.
The ideal reader has a wicked sense of humor.
Ideal readers never count their books.
The ideal reader is both generous and greedy.
The ideal reader reads all literature as if it were anonymous.
The ideal reader enjoys using a dictionary.
The ideal reader judges a book by its cover.
Reading a book from centuries ago, the ideal reader feels immortal.
Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after their first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on. One love does not exclude the other.
Ideal readers do not know they are ideal readers until they have reached the end of the book
The ideal reader shares the ethics of Don Quixote, the longing of Madame Bovary, the lust of the Wife of Bath, the adventurous spirit of Ulysses, the mettle of Holden Caulfield, at least for the space of the story.
The ideal reader treads the beaten path. “A good reader, major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Vladimir Nabokov.
The ideal reader is polytheistic.
The ideal reader holds, for a book, the promise of resurrection. Robinson Crusoe is not an ideal reader. He reads the Bible to find answers. An ideal reader reads to find questions.
Every book, good or bad, has its ideal reader.
For the ideal reader, every book reads, to a certain degree, as an autobiography.
The ideal reader has no precise nationality.
Sometimes a writer must wait several centuries to find the ideal reader. It took Blake 150 years to find Northrop Frye.
Stendhal’s ideal reader: “I write for barely a hundred readers, for unhappy, amiable, charming beings, never moral or hypocritical, whom I would like to please; I know barely one or two.”
The ideal reader has known unhappiness.
Ideal readers change with age. The fourteen-year-old ideal reader of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems is no longer its ideal reader at thirty. Experience tarnishes certain readings.
Pinochet, who banned Don Quixote because he thought it advocated civil disobedience, was that book’s ideal reader.
The ideal reader never exhausts the book’s geography.
The ideal reader must be willing, not only to suspend disbelief, but to embrace a new faith.
The ideal reader never thinks, “If only …”
Writing on the margins is a sign of the ideal reader.
The ideal reader proselytizes.
The ideal reader is guiltlessly whimsical.
The ideal reader is capable of falling in love with one of the book’s characters.
The ideal reader is not concerned with anachronism, documentary truth, historical accuracy, topographical exactness. The ideal reader is not an archaeologist.
The ideal reader is a ruthless enforcer of the rules and regulations that each book creates for itself.
“There are three kinds of readers: one, who enjoys without judging; a third, who judges without enjoying; another in the middle, who judges while enjoying and enjoys while judging. The last class truly reproduces a work of art anew; its members are not numerous.” Goethe, in a letter to Johann Friedrich Rochlitz.
The readers who committed suicide after reading Werther were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Ideal readers are seldom sentimental.
The ideal reader wishes both to get to the end of the book and to know that the book will never end.
The ideal reader is never impatient.
The ideal reader is not concerned with genres.
The ideal reader is (or appears to be) more intelligent than the writer; the ideal reader does not hold this against the writer.