Books Ex Libris A love letter written to reading.
The mere fact that you are reading this review shows that you belong, however casually, to the book world. We forget how limited that world is, in space, in historical time—how specialized an act reading is. Much the greater portion of mankind has belonged to cultures of orality, of the spoken word. They are far more ancient than those of writing and reading. Definitions of basic literacy are themselves in dispute; but even today reading skills among hundreds of millions remain rudimentary. The outward literacies of the privileged, industrially developed West are deceptive. Numerous men and women read only for immediate utilitarian ends, or, perhaps, one book a year. The range of habits that separate the obsessive reader, the book-possessed, for whom, as Flaubert said, reading is life, from the men or women who decipher a tabloid headline or glance at the comics is immense.
Tens of millennia precede the book, and may follow it. Ritual inscriptions, commercial labels, and pictographs may reach back to the fourh millennium B.C. But the means and acts of reading, as we take them for granted, come late. References in Plato point to the availability of philosophic texts in the form of rolls, which could be consulted should memory fail. Scholars differ when estimating how many men and women in ancient Athens could read more than inscriptions on public monuments, or wished to do so. The celebrated anecdote in Augustine’s “Confessions” that has his master, Ambrose of Milan, among the very first men able to read silently, without moving their lips, is now in doubt. Silent reading was certainly recorded earlier. But how many had mastered that skill? Homer’s voluminous epics could be written down and made available to private readers only when treated, papyrus or sufficient animal skins for parchment had become technically and economically accessible. To innumerable communities and languages, a written text remained exactly what the word “lithography” denotes: letters carved in rock or stone. It is only with Hellenistic Alexandria and its celebrated library that the life of the book as we have experienced it is deployed in Western consciousness. Whether this life will persist much longer is, today, a fascinating question.
And it is precisely the uncertainties surrounding the book in its classical format which have, over the past decades, generated intense scholarly interest in the history of reading. The systematic study of the development of private and public libraries, of printing and bookselling, of censorship and the economics of literature has produced a major body of knowledge and insight, particularly in France, where archives are extensive. We now know more about how texts were set down and read in ancient Greece and Rome, in medieval Paris, in Renaissance Venice, in the intellectual centers of the Enlightenment than ever before. The privileged coincidence between literary-historical excellence (Dickens, Carlyle, Macaulay) and best-sellerdom in the Victorian age, the seminal role of the small and semiprivate presses in modernist movements, samizdat or clandestine distribution of forbidden works under the ancien regime and Soviet despotism, the explosive story of the pocket book and paperback—all these have been explored. At present, scholars of social history and gender are turning to such elusive questions as that of the accessibility of books to women in, say, the Middle Ages or the seventeenth century. Inquiry into the reading habits of children and into book illustration has given rise to busy fields. As the enigmatic author of Ecdesiastes might phrase it, “Of making many books about books there is no end.”
Now we have Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading” (Viking; $26.95). Manguel belongs only marginally to this mandarin hive. He is a passionate bibliophile, collector, connoisseur of literary fantasy, erotica, and gay literature. He is a polyglot anthologist and translator, whose Buenos Aires origins relate him, deliberately, to the universal bookishness of Borges. He is at home amid the bookstalls of London and Paris. But he remains, in the proper, etymological sense of the word, an “amateur,” a lover rather than a specialist or a technician. His rhythm is leisurely and erratic. He browses lovingly among sources and motifs. The illustrations for this “History of Reading” have been chosen with an eye to surprise and contentment. Even where it enlists recent learning, Manguel’s ramble retains the quizzical charm, the wholly personal, often autobiographical savor of those book collectors’ memoirs numerous at the turn of the century. Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James are for Manguel, as they were for Borges, familiar presences and accomplices in “that unpunished vice” (the definition of reading offered by Valery Larbaud, another bookman-translator of rare finesse).
Chapters succeed each other as in a gentle maze. We pass from somewhat loose dicta on the social universality of reading—an axiom sustainable only if we give to “reading” an almost shapeless sense—to an outsider’s look at the psychology or neurophysiology of the act of reading by eye and brain. A consideration of silent reading is followed by a section on the arts of memory, on the capacity of books to preserve—most notably if we commit them to exact recollection—what would otherwise enter oblivion. A poignant anecdote—Manguel is first and foremost a raconteur—sums up the case. Soon to be murdered in the Nazi camp at Sachsenhausen, a famous scholar, who knew many classics by heart, “offered himself as a library to be read to his fellow inmates,” Manguel writes. “I imagined the old man in that murky, relentless, hopeless place, approached with a request for Virgil or Euripides, opening himself up to a given page and reciting the ancient words for his bookless readers.” This is in fact the way many of Mandelstam’s poems were preserved and handed on under Stalinist terror.
The chapter on learning to read also contains illuminating anecdotes, especially with regard to differences between boys and girls in premodern communities. One is haunted by a photograph of Helen Keller sitting by a window and passing her hands over Braille. An excursus on Kafka’s childhood reading takes us to the fascinating interactions between picture and text, to the “reading” of stained-glass images and statuary by medieval illiterates unable to decode the Scriptures as such. Today, the comic book, television, mass-market advertising are reverting to this sub- or iconic literacy. Increasingly, language is caption. Moreover, as Manguel reminds us, printing in the West derives immediately from illustration. It was the woodcut blocks used for reproducing pictures which inspired Gutenberg’s experiments in the cutting of reusable type during the late fourteen-forties and early fourteen-fifties. Soon printed books could take on private, portable formats. It was a crowded, varied, but logical step from Gutenberg to the launching, on July 30, 1935; of the first ten Penguins, at, magically, sixpence a volume.
After diverse distractions—images of reading in Whitman, in Proust, in Colette—Alberto Manguel shifts into reverse: back to papyrus rolls and the foundation of the first great libraries in the Hellenistic world. The library at Alexandria was reputed to contain almost half a million rolls; forty thousand more were kept in an annex attached to the Temple of Serapis. Out of the fertile mud of the Nile came the attendant fauna of librarians, grammarians, editors, and book reviewers.
A brief meditation on the stealing of books is mournfully vivid. One quote alone is worth the price of admission. It derives from the monastery library of San Pedro in Barcelona:
To which every victim of such depredations shall breathe “Amen.”
A wholly irrelevant causerie on Rilke as translator leads to “forbidden reading” and an epilogue on the open-ended, blessedly interminable nature of the matter of books. The spirit roams forever in Borges’s library at Babel, whose boundless labyrinths house all possible books, including those lost, those yet to come, and those never to be written. For human life is also, and emphatically, the Book of Life.
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Manguel is a generous companion, and it would be churlish to bridle at various inaccuracies. What is troubling is his blithe unawareness of or indifference to the difficulties raised by his theme. There may never have been a higher master of language and text than Plato, whose critique of reading has lost nothing of its unnerving force. Books lead to the erosion of human memory, which is the storehouse of our being and the font of knowledge and creative imagining. Written, printed discourse takes on a wholly spurious authority. Inevitably, it lays daim to fixed, proved truths, when the elicitation of such truths ought, at all times, to be a dynamic, provisional, self-correcting process. Worst of all: a book is not answerable to immediate challenge, to questioning, as is an oral interlocutor in live dialogue. The reader cannot answer back in querying immediacy and demand for clarification. For Wordsworth, “one impulse from a vernal wood” outweighed the secondary, parasitic fabric of book learning, of library dust. Even more radically, the heirs to Tolstoy’s anarchist fundamentalism held a complete Shakespeare or Pushkin to be of far less benefit to men and women than a pair of sound shoes. The book burners (the theoretical ones, at least) have not always been totalitarian thugs. There is an adversarial case that, time and again, requires rebuttal.
Does the book, as we have known it, have a future? The Gutenberg revolution accelerated, made less costly, and immensely multiplied the production of written texts. It did not, fundamentally, transform the nature of the relations between writer, reader, and book. The electronic revolution now in progress will, on the other hand, generate mutations in every aspect of writing and reading—indeed, in the fabric of meaning itself. CD-rom, the Internet, the miniaturization on microchips of whole libraries, immediate access to vast bibliographies, the as yet incalculable facilities offered by virtual reality are set to dwarf the impact of movable type. Already the humble word processor permits the recomposition of any text or the collage of any set of texts in willed superposition and cross-reference. Books can now be written, edited, produced, and published across the Internet from home. The fundamentals of the relationship between text and image are being altered. The conception of the planet as a living book, as a single storehouse of information, record, entertainment, rhetorical argument—each special domain interrelated with all others via electronic synapses of recognition, classification, and translation (as in the human brain?)—is no longer a science-fiction fantastication.
To a large extent, the socioeconomic conditions of the classic act of reading—Erasmus, Montaigne, Jefferson in their private libraries—no longer obtain, or obtain only in the artifice of the academic. Already the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which “high reading” depended are largely dispersed. Paperbacks do not make libraries. Yet even these erosions, together with the crisis in the teaching of the liberal arts and ancient languages that underwrote Western literacy, are nearly insignificant compared with the brave new world of the electronic. It may well be that we are already witnessing early symptoms of this transmutation in the actual practice of literature. Forms with strong roots in orality, such as poetry and drama, are formidably vital. The traditional novel, with its essential reliance on the written word, on silent reading, on a middle-class sense of narrative rationality and resolution (as in tonal music), has declined, to a considerable degree, into packaged conventionality. It is not only, as postmodernism proclaims, “the end of the great stories”: it is the radical change in the means whereby these were told and taken in.
Books do continue to be produced and published in large numbers. Handwritten illuminated manuscripts continued to be produced well after Gutenberg. Periods of transition are difficult to make out. They are also intensely stimulating. One can intuit deep-lying seismic shocks affecting our cultural perceptions of time, of individual death. These will put in question the claims of literature, of written thought, to individual glory, to survival “for all ages.” Milton held a good book to be the “lifeblood of a master spirit.” Doubtless this precious liquor will continue to flow, but, perhaps, in altogether different channels and test tubes. The boys and girls at their computer keyboards, finding, stumbling onto insights in logic, in fractals, may neither read nor write in any “book sense.” Are they illiterate? ♦
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