Library at Night

What distinguishes Crusoe from Defoe, that avid reader, since they are both members of the society of the book? What distinguishes someone for whom a book is powerful or prestigious, but who can be content with no books or with only one single emblematic volume, from a reader of books individually chosen and now personally meaningful? There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that tradition has declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book comes into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected as finding Friday's footprint on the sand. "The songs of Homer," declared Goethe, "have the power to deliver us, if only for brief moments, from the fearsome load with which tradition has weighed us down over many thousands of years."²³⁷ To be the first to enter Circe's cave, the first to hear Ulysses call himself Nobody, is every reader's secret wish, granted over and over, generation after generation, to those who open the Odyssey for the first time. This modest jus primae noctis, or "first- night rights," assures for the books we call classics their only useful immortality.

There are two ways of reading the much-quoted verse of Ecclesiastes, "Of making many books there is no end."²³⁸ We can read it as an echo of the words that follow—"and much study is a weariness of the flesh"— and we can shrug at the impossible task of reaching the end of our library; or we can read it as a jubilation, a prayer of thanks for the bounty of God, so that the connecting "and" reads as "but": "but much study is a weariness of the flesh." Crusoe chooses the first reading; Aristotle (and his descendants down to Northrop Frye) the second. Beginning some lost afternoon in Mesopotamia, countless readers have persevered in picking their way through "many books," in spite of the "weariness of the flesh." Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate. Libraries are the vaults and treasure chests of those charms.

These two kinds of readers are, of course, not the only possible ones. At the other extreme from Crusoe—the man whose library consists of one venerated Book and a few other books he doesn't read—sits the reader for whom every book in his library is open to reprimand, the reader who believes that any interpretive reading must be erroneous. Discipline, not pleasure, dictates such readers' craft, and they sometimes find occupations in the seats of academia, or the customs office.

One evening of 1939, in Buenos Aires, Borges and two of his friends, the writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, decided to immortalize this punctilious censor. The three were extraordinarily eclectic readers. In Bioy and Silvina's library (a large, decrepit hall in a nineteenth-century apartment overlooking one of the loveliest parks in the city) they talked about books, put together anthologies, attempted translations into Spanish, defended with passion their personal choices and mocked with equal passion the authors they disliked. They complemented one another: Borges preferred the epic genre and the philosophical fantastic story; Bioy the psychological novel and social satire; Silvina, lyrical poetry and the literature of the absurd. Together, their reading covered every style and every genre.

Sometimes they played at making up stories. One of these inventions (which was never finished) concerned a young literary enthusiast who seeks out the work of an older writer who, before his death, acquired a reputation for unsurpassed refinement and stylistic perfection. Unable to find more than a few unappealing texts, the enthusiast travels to the writer's home and, among the dead man's papers, discovers a curious list of "Things to avoid in literature":²³⁹

~ psychological curiosities and paradoxes: murders through kindness, suicides through contentment; ~ surprising interpretations of certain books and characters: the

misogyny of Don Juan, etc.; ~ twin protagonists too obviously dissimilar: Don Quixote and

Sancho, Sherlock Holmes and Watson; ~ novels with identical twin characters, like Bouvard and Pecuchet. If the author invents a trait for one, he is forced to invent an equivalent trait for the other; ~ characters depicted through their peculiarities, as in Dickens; ~ anything new or astonishing. Civilized readers are not amused by

the discourtesy of a surprise; ~ idle games with time and space: Faulkner, Borges, etc.; ~ the discovery in a novel that the real hero is the prairie, the

jungle, the sea, the rain, the stock market; ~ poems, situations, characters with which the reader might—God

forbid!—identify; ~ phrases that might become proverbs or quotations; they are

incompatible with a coherent book; ~ characters likely to become myths; ~ chaotic enumeration;

~ a rich vocabulary. Synonyms. Le mot juste. Any attempt at precision; ~ vivid descriptions, worlds full of rich physical details, as in Faulkner;

~ background, ambiance, atmosphere. Tropical heat, drunkenness,

the voice on the radio, phrases repeated like a refrain; ~ meteorological beginnings and endings. Pathetic fallacies. "Le

vent se leve! Il faut tenter de vivre!"; ~ any metaphors. Particularly visual metaphors. Even more particularly, metaphors drawn from agriculture, seamanship, banking. As in Proust; ~ anthropomorphism;

~ books that parallel other books. Ulysses and the Odyssey; ~ books that pretend to be menus, photo albums, road maps, concert programs;

~ anything that might inspire illustrations. Anything that might inspire a film;

~ the extraneous: domestic scenes in detective novels. Dramatic

scenes in philosophical dialogues; ~ the expected. Pathos and erotic scenes in love stories. Puzzles

and crimes in detective stories. Ghosts in supernatural stories; ~ vanity, modesty, pederasty, no pederasty, suicide.

At the end of this reader's demands lies, of course, the absence of any literature.

Happily, most readers fall between these two drastic extremes. Most of us neither shun books in veneration of literature, nor shun literature in veneration of books. Our craft is more modest. We pick our way down endless library shelves, choosing this or that volume for no discernible reason: because of a cover, a title, a name, because of something someone said or didn't say, because of a hunch, a whim, a mistake, because we think we may find in this book a particular tale or character or detail, because we believe it was written for us, because we believe it was written for everyone except us and we want to find out why we have been excluded, because we want to learn, or laugh, or lose ourselves in oblivion.

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone. In Mesopotamia as in Greece, in Buenos Aires as in Toronto, readers and non-readers have existed side by side, and the non-readers have always constituted the majority. Whether in the exclusive scriptoria of Sumer and medieval Europe, in popular eighteenth-century London or in populist twenty-first-century Paris, the number of those for whom reading books is of the essence is very small. What varies is not the proportions of these two groups of humanity, but the way in which different societies regard the book and the art of reading. And here the distinction between the book enthroned and the book read comes again into play.