At some point in our history, after the invention of a code that could be communally written and read, it was discovered that the words, set down in clay or on papyrus by an author perhaps distant both in time and in space, could be not only whatever the common code proclaimed — say, a number of goats for sale or a proclamation of war. It was discovered that those goats, invisible to the senses of those who now read about them, became the goats of the reader’s experience, goats perhaps once seen on the family farm, or demon goats glimpsed in a haunting dream. And that the proclamation of war could be read not merely as a call to arms but perhaps as a warning, or as an appeal for negotiation, or as bravado. The text inscribed was the product of a particular will and intelligence, but the reading of that text did not need subserviently to follow, or even attempt to guess at, the originating intelligence and will.
At that point, what readers discovered was that the instrument in which their society chose to communicate, the language of words, uncertain and vague and ambiguous, found its strength precisely in that ambiguity and vagueness and imprecision, in its miraculous ability to name without confining the object to the word. In writing goats or war, the author meant no doubt something absolutely specific, but the reader was now able to add to that specificity the reflections of vast herds and the echoes of a possible peace. Every text, because it is made out of words, says what it has to say and also volumes more that its author could ever have conceived, volumes that future readers will compile and collect, sometimes as solid texts that in turn will breed others, sometimes as texts written half awake and half asleep, fluid texts, shifting texts hoarded in the library of the mind.
In the thirty-second chapter of the first part of Don Quixote, the innkeeper, who has given the exhausted hero a bed for the night, argues with the priest about the merits of novels of chivalry, saying that he is unable to see how such books could make anyone lose his mind.
“I don’t know how that can be,” explains the innkeeper, “since, as I understand it, there’s no better reading in the world, and over there I have two or three of these novels, together with some other papers, which, I truly believe, have preserved not only my life but also that of many others; for in harvest time, a great number of reapers come here, and there’s always one who can read, and who takes one of these books in his hands, and more than thirty of us gather around him, and we sit there listening to him with such pleasure that it makes us all grow young again.”
The innkeeper himself favors battle scenes; a local whore prefers stories of romantic courtship; the innkeeper’s daughter likes best of all the lamentations of the knights when absent from their ladies. Each listener (each reader) translates the text into his or her own experience and desire, effectively taking possession of the story which, for the censoring priest, causes readers like Don Quixote to go mad, but which, according to Don Quixote himself, provides glowing examples of honest and just behavior in the real world. One text, a multiplicity of readings, a shelfful of books derived from that one text read out loud, increasing at each turned page our hungry libraries, if not always those of paper, certainly those of the mind: that too has been my happy experience.
I am deeply grateful to my Don Quixote. Over the two hospital weeks, the twin volumes kept vigil with me: they talked to me when I wanted entertainment, or waited quietly, attentively, by my bed. They never became impatient with me, neither sententious nor condescending. They continued a conversation begun ages ago, when I was someone else, as if they were indifferent to time, as if taking for granted that this moment too would pass, and their reader’s discomfort and anxiety, and that only their remembered pages would remain on my shelves, describing something of my own, intimate and dark, for which as yet I had no words.
Sources
“I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some
flour-”
“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen
asked.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9
The pieces collected in this book have appeared, in a different form, in a number of publications, or were delivered as lectures, as follows:
“A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood”: Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood (Toronto: Knopf, 1998)
“Room for the Shadow”: Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006)
“On Being Jewish”: Published as “A Lost Sense of Belonging in No Man’s Land,” The Independent (London), 18 September 1994
“Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest”: Foreword to Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Forest: Gay Stories from Alice Munro to Yukio Mishima, ed. Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson (Toronto: Knopf, 1993)
“The Further off from England”: Bad Trips, ed. Keith Fraser (New York: Vintage, 1991)
“Homage to Proteus”: Lecture, Passa Porta Festival, Brussels, 26–29 March 2009
“Borges in Love”: Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood (Toronto: Knopf, 1998)
“Borges and the Longed-For Jew”: Published as “Borges and the Jews,” The Jewish Chronicle (London), 9 February 2007, Literary Supplement
“Faking It”: Published as “Contributing Editor’s Column,” Descant 140 / Improvisations (Toronto), vol. 39, no. 1 (Spring 2008)
“The Death of Che Guevara”: Published as “Hero of Our Time,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 1997
“The Blind Bookkeeper”: Delivered as the Northrop Frye/Antonine Maillet Lecture, Moncton, New Brunswick, 26 April 2008
“The Perseverance of Truth”: Hrant Dink Lecture, University of Ankara, 6 March 2009
“AIDS and the Poet”: PEN International lecture, London, 1997
“The Full Stop”: New York Times, 18 April 1999
“In Praise of Words”: The Spectator (London), 10 March 2001
“A Brief History of the Page”: Conference paper, The Future of the Page, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 20 June 2000
“The Voice That Says ‘I’”: Lecture, Turin Book Fair, 18–19 May 2009
“Final Answers”: Published in French as an introduction to the Opera du Rhin, Strasbourg, 2006 season, Autumn 2006
“What Song the Sirens Sang”: Conference paper, Dante’s Women, Ravenna, September 2008
“Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader”: Conference paper, The Ideal Reader, Maison des écrivains étrangers et des traducteurs de Saint Nazaire (MEET), Saint Nazaire, France, February 2003
“How Pinocchio Learned to Read”: Conference paper, originally given in French as “Comment Pinocchio apprit à lire,” Et pourquoi pas un éloge de la lecture? Actes des 13es Journées d’Arole, Bibliothèques de la Ville La Chaux-de-Fond, Lausanne, Institut suisse Jeunesse et Médias, 14–15 November 2003
“Candide in Sanssouci”: Conference paper, originally given in German as “Den alles Fleisch es ist wie das Grass,” Einstein Forum, Potsdam, 26 June 2003