None of these Don Quixotes can be found, of course, in any library, except in the one kept by my diminishing memory. Karel Capek, in his wonderful book on gardens, says that the art of gardening can be reduced to one rule: you put into it more than you take out. The same can be said of the art of libraries. But the libraries of the material world, however great their hunger, can only hoard existing volumes. We know that every book holds within it all its possible readings, past, present, and future, but its Pythagorean reincarnations, those wonderful forms which depend on readers to come, will not be found on our shelves. Paul Masson, a friend of Colette’s who worked at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, noticed that the vast stocks of the library were defective in Latin and Italian books of the fifteenth century and so began adding invented titles on the official index cards to save, he said, “the catalogue’s prestige.” When Colette naively asked him what was the use of books that didn’t exist, Masson responded indignantly that he couldn’t be expected “to think of everything!” But librarians must, and wishful thinking cannot, unfortunately, be granted room in a seriously run institution.
In the library of the mind, however, books that have no material existence constantly cram the shelves: books that are the amalgamation of other books once read and now only imperfectly remembered, books that annotate, gloss, and comment on others too rich to stand on their own, books written in dreams or in nightmares that now preserve the tone of those nebulous realms, books that we know should exist but which have never been written, autobiographical books of unspeakable experiences, books of unutterable desires, books of once obvious and now forgotten truths, books of magnificent and inexpressible invention. All editions of Don Quixote published to date in every language can be collected — are collected, for instance, in the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. But my own Don Quixotes, the ones that correspond to each of my several readings, the ones invented by my memory and edited by my oblivion, can find a place only in the library of my mind.
At times both libraries coincide. In Chapter 6 of the first part of Don Quixote, the knight’s library of solid books overlaps with the remembered library of the priest and the barber who purge it; every volume taken off the shelves is echoed in the recalled reading of its censors and is judged according to its past merits. Both the books condemned to the flames and the books that are spared depend not on the words printed black on white in their pages but on the words stored in the minds of the barber and the priest, placed there when they first became the books’ readers. Sometimes their judgment depends on hearsay, as when the priest explains that he has heard that the Amadís de Gaula was the first novel of chivalry printed in Spain and therefore, as fountainhead of such evil, it must burn — to which the barber retorts that he has heard that it’s also the best, and that for that reason it must be forgiven. Sometimes the prior impression is so strong that it damns not only the book itself but also its companions; sometimes the translation is condemned but the original is spared; sometimes a few are not sent to the fire but merely removed, so as not to affect their future readers. The priest and the barber, attempting to cleanse Don Quixote’s library, are in fact molding it to the image of the library they themselves bear in mind, appropriating the books and turning them into whatever their own experience made them up to be. It is not surprising that in the end the room in which the library is lodged is itself walled up, so that it appears never to have existed, and when the old knight wakes and asks to see it, he is told that it has simply vanished. Vanished it has, but not through the magic of an evil wizard (as Don Quixote suggests) but through the power granted other readers of superimposing their own versions of a book onto the books owned by someone else. Every library of the solid world depends on the readings of those who came before us.
Ultimately, this creative hermeneutics defines the reader’s supreme power: to make of a book whatever one’s experience, taste, intuition, and knowledge dictate. Not just anything, of course, not the concoctions of a raving mind — even though psychoanalysts and surrealists suggest that these too have their validity and logic. But rather the intelligent and inspired reconstruction of the text, using reason and imagination as best we can to translate it onto a different canvas, extending the horizon of its apparent meaning beyond its visible borders and the declared intentions of the author. The limits of this power are painfully vague: as I have said before, Umberto Eco suggested that they must coincide with the limits of common sense. Perhaps this arbitration is enough.
Limitless or not, the power of the reader cannot be inherited; it must be learned. Even though we come into the world as creatures intent on seeking meaning in everything, in reading meanings in gestures, sounds, colors, and shapes, the deciphering of society’s common code of communication is a skill that must be acquired. Vocabulary and syntax, levels of meaning, summary and comparison of texts, all these are techniques that must be taught to those who enter society’s commonwealth in order to grant them the full power of reading. And yet the last step in the process must be learned all alone: discovering in a book the record of one’s own experience.
Rarely, however, is the acquisition of this power encouraged. From the elite schools of scribes in Mesopotamia to the monasteries and universities of the Middle Ages, and later, with the wider distribution of texts after Gutenberg and in the age of the Web, reading at its fullest has always been the privilege of a few. True, in our time, most people in the world are superficially literate, able to read an ad and sign their name on a contract, but that alone does not make them readers. Reading is the ability to enter a text and explore it to one’s fullest individual capacities, repossessing it in the act of reinvention. But a myriad of obstacles (as I mentioned in my essay on Pinocchio) are placed in the way of its accomplishment. Precisely because of the power that reading grants the reader, the various political, economic, and religious systems that govern us fear such imaginative freedom. Reading at its best may lead to reflection and questioning, and reflection and questioning may lead to objection and change. That, in any society, is a dangerous enterprise.
Librarians today are increasingly faced with a bewildering problem: users of the library, especially the younger ones, no longer know how to read competently. They can find and follow an electronic text, they can cut paragraphs from different Internet sources and recombine them into a single piece, but they seem unable to comment on and criticize and gloss and memorize the sense of a printed page. The electronic text, in its very accessibility, lends users the illusion of appropriation without the attendant difficulty of learning. The essential purpose of reading becomes lost to them, and all that remains is the collecting of information, to be used when required. But reading is not achieved merely by having a text made available: it demands that its readers enter the maze of words, cut open their own tracks, and draw their own charts beyond the margins of the page. Of course, an electronic text allows this, but its very vaunted inclusiveness makes it difficult to fathom a specific meaning and thoroughly explore specific pages. The text on the screen doesn’t render the reader’s task as obvious as the text in a material book, limited by its borders and binding. “Get anything,” reads the ad for a mobile phone able to photograph, record voices, search the Web, transmit words and images, receive and send messages, and, of course, phone. But “anything” in this case stands dangerously near “nothing.” The acquisition of something (rather than anything) always requires selection and cannot rely on a limitless offer. To observe, to judge, to choose requires training, as well as a sense of responsibility, even an ethical stance. And young readers, like travelers who have only learned to drive automatic cars, no longer seem able to shift gears at will, relying instead on a vehicle that promises to take them everywhere.