So thoroughly does Cervantes’s fiction absorb reality to render it “more real” that it ends up devouring its own self. In the second chapter of Part 2, Sansón Carrasco lets Sancho know that his adventures are told in a book (which Carrasco has read in Salamanca, a town famous for the seriousness of its academic publications) “under the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha.” Hearing this, Sancho crosses himself in fright; much the same reaction is that of the reader for whom, if the first part of the book he’s reading has also been read by the characters of the part he’s reading now, then he, a creature of flesh and blood, is also part of that device, that trickery, that imaginary world, a ghost among ghosts, a servant not of his own will but of another man’s dreams, a man who is not dust and ashes and who once upon a time was called Miguel de Cervantes.
Cervantes was no doubt aware of the mirror he held up to his readers. Towards the end of Part 2, a certain scholarly canon tells Don Quixote that he cannot understand how certain books can delight without teaching unless they are nothing but beautiful. For the canon, “Delight conceived in the soul must be that of loveliness and balance seen or observed in things that sight or imagination bring forward; since anything that carries in itself ugliness or imperfection can produce no contentment whatsoever.” The world of which the canon approves is that of perfect sterility, meaningless beauty, vacuous creations, like that of today’s fashion models or sitcom characters for whom everything is immaculately aseptic, and time nothing but an interminable state of existence in which there is no responsibility and no distress. To this time without depth and without limits with which society shrouds the real passing of time, Don Quixote opposes a time of ethical action, a time in which every act has its consequences, good or evil, just or unjust. Instead of a vast and anonymous magma in which we exist unconsciously, Don Quixote proposes a time in which we are alive and fertile, in which our consciousness works towards rendering us more fully in our own image, becoming whoever it is the canon’s time prevents us from knowing. In this time, in this truly real time, we must live, Don Quixote says, “undoing all manner of wrongs, and placing ourselves in situations and dangers which, once overcome, will grant us eternal renown and fame.” This, Cervantes tells us, is the time of the stories we tell in order to be able to affirm that we exist.
Saint Augustine’s Computer
“But there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory
works both ways.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5
IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE sixteenth century, the elders of the guild of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice commissioned the artist Vittore Carpaccio to paint a series of scenes illustrating the life of Saint Jerome, the fourth-century reader and scholar. The last scene, now set up high on the right as you enter the small, darkened guildhall, is not a portrait of Saint Jerome but of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Jerome’s contemporary. In a story popular since the Middle Ages, it was told that Saint Augustine had sat down at his desk to write to Saint Jerome, asking his opinion on the question of eternal beatitude, when the room filled with light and Augustine heard a voice telling him that Jerome’s spirit had ascended to the heavens.
The room in which Carpaccio placed Augustine is a contemporary Venetian study, as worthy of the author of the Confessions as of the spirit of Jerome, responsible for the Latin version of the Bible and patron saint of translators: thin volumes facing forward on a high shelf, delicate bric-a-brac lined beneath it, a brass-studded leather chair and a small writing desk lifted from the flood-prone floor, a distant table with a rotating lectern beyond the door at the far left, and the saint’s working space, cluttered with open books and with those private objects which the years wash onto every writer’s desk—a seashell, a bell, a silver box. Set in the central alcove, a statue of the risen Christ looks towards a statuette of Venus standing among Augustine’s things; both inhabit, admittedly on different planes, the same human world: the flesh from whose delights Augustine prayed for release (“but not just now”) and the Logos, God’s Word that was in the beginning and whose echo Augustine heard one afternoon in a garden. At an obedient distance, a small white shaggy dog is expectantly watching.
This place depicts both the past and the present of a reader. Anachronism meant nothing to Carpaccio, since the compunction for historical faithfulness is a modern invention, not later perhaps than the nineteenth century and John Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelite credo of “absolute, uncompromising truth … down to the most minute detail.” Augustine’s study and Augustine’s books, whatever these might have been in the fourth century, were, to Carpaccio and his contemporaries, in all essentials much like theirs. Scrolls or codices, bound leaves of parchment, or the exquisite pocket books that Aldus Manutius had printed just a few years before Carpaccio began his work at the guild were variant forms of the book—the book that changed and would continue to change, and yet remained one and the same. In the sense in which Carpaccio saw it, Augustine’s study is also like my own, a common reader’s realm: the rows of books and memorabilia, the busy desk, the interrupted work, the reader waiting for a voice — his own? the author’s? a spirit’s?—to answer questions seeded by the open page in front of him.
Since the fellowship of readers is a generous one, or so we are told, allow me to place myself for a moment next to Carpaccio’s august reader, he at his desk, I at mine. Has our reading—Augustine’s and Carpaccio’s and mine— altered in the passing centuries? And if so, how has it altered?
When I read a text on a page or a screen, I read silently. Through an unbelievably complex process or series of processes, clusters of neurons in specific sections of my brain decipher the text my eyes take in and make it comprehensible to me, without the need to mouth the words for the benefit of my ears. This silent reading is not as ancient a craft as we might think.
For Saint Augustine, my silent activity would have been, if not incomprehensible, at the very least surprising. In a famous passage of the Confessions, Augustine describes his curious coming upon Saint Ambrose in his cell in Milan, reading silently. “When he read,” Augustine recalled, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Augustine, in the fourth century, usually read as the ancient Greeks and Romans had read, out loud, to make sense of the attached strings of letters without full stops or capitals. It was possible for an experienced and hurried reader to disentangle a text without speaking the words—Augustine himself was able to do this, as he tells us in his description of the tremendous moment of his conversion, when he picks up a volume of Paul’s Epistles and reads “in silence” the oracular line that tells him to “put on Christ like an armor.” But reading out loud was not only considered normal, it was also considered necessary for the full comprehension of a text. Augustine believed that reading needed to be made present; that within the confines of a page the scripta, the written words, had to become verba, spoken words, in order to spring into being. For Augustine, the reader had literally to breathe life into a text, to fill the created space with living language.