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understand it, but also of those who have no business with it [the italics are mine]. The text doesn’t know
how to address the right people, and how not to address the wrong ones. And when it is ill-treated and
unfairly abused, it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.”
Right and wrong readers: for Socrates there appears to be a “correct” interpretation of a text, available
only to a few informed specialists. In Victorian England, Matthew Arnold would echo this splendidly
arrogant opinion: “We … are for giving the heritage neither to the Barbarians nor to the Philistines, nor
yet to the Populace.” Trying to understand exactly what that heritage was, Aldous Huxley defined it as the
special accumulated knowledge of any united family, the common property of all its members. “When we
of the great Culture Family meet,” wrote Huxley, “we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer,
and that awful old Dr Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. ‘And do you remember that
absolutely priceless thing Uncle Virgil said? You know. Timeo Danaos.… Priceless; I shall never forget it.’
No, we shall never forget it; and what’s more, we shall take good care that those horrid people who have
had the impertinence to call on us, those wretched outsiders who never knew dear mellow old Uncle V.,
shall never forget it either. We’ll keep them constantly reminded of their outsideness.”
Which came first? The invention of the masses, which Thomas Hardy described as “a throng of
people … containing a certain minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being
what is worth observing”, or the invention of the bespectacled Book Fool, who thinks himself superior to
the rest of the world and whom the world passes by, laughing?
Their chronology hardly matters. Both stereotypes are fictions and both are dangerous, because under
the pretence of moral or social criticism they are employed in an attempt to curtail a craft that, in its
essence, is neither limited nor limiting. The reality of reading lies elsewhere. Trying to discover in
ordinary mortals an activity akin to creative writing, Sigmund Freud suggested that a comparison could
be drawn between the inventions of fiction and those of day-dreaming, since in reading fiction “our actual
enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our mind … enabling us
thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreaming without self-reproach or shame”. But surely that is not the
experience of most readers. Depending on the time and the place, our mood and our memory, our
experience and our desire, the enjoyment of reading, at its best, tightens rather than liberates the
tensions of our mind, drawing them taut to make them sing, making us more, not less, aware of their
presence. It is true that on occasion the world of the page passes into our conscious imaginaire — our
everyday vocabulary of images — and then we wander aimlessly in those fictional landscapes, lost in
wonder, like Don Quixote. But most of the time we tread firmly. We know that we are reading even while
suspending disbelief; we know why we read even when we don’t know how, holding in our mind at the
same time, as it were, the illusionary text and the act of reading. We read to find the end, for the story’s
sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers,
oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, skipping pages. We read contemptuously, admiringly,
negligently, angrily, passionately, enviously, longingly. We read in gusts of sudden pleasure, without
knowing what brought the pleasure along. “What in the world is this emotion?” asks Rebecca West after
reading King Lear. “What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel
so glad?” We don’t know: we read ignorantly. We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space,
weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling
gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a
shudder, as if someone or something had “walked over our grave”, as if a memory had suddenly been
rescued from a place deep within us — the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of
something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us
before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.
This reading has an image. A photograph taken in 1940, during the bombing of London in the Second
World War, shows the remains of a caved-in library. Through the torn roof can be seen ghostly buildings
outside, and in the centre of the store is a heap of beams and crippled furniture. But the shelves on the
walls have held fast, and the books lined up along them seem unharmed. Three men are standing amidst
the rubble: one, as if hesitant about which book to choose, is apparently reading the titles on the spines;
another, wearing glasses, is reaching for a volume; the third is reading, holding an open book in his
hands. They are not turning their backs on the war, or ignoring the destruction. They are not choosing the
books over life outside. They are trying to persist against the obvious odds; they are asserting a common
right to ask; they are attempting to find once again — among the ruins, in the astonished recognition that
reading sometimes grants — an understanding.
Readers browsing through the severely damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a
fire bomb on 22 October 1940. (photo credit 21.5)
ENDPAPER
PAGES
Patient as one of the alchemists, I’ve always imagined
and attempted something else, and would be willing
to sacrifice all satisfaction and vanity for its sake, just
as in the old days they used to burn their furniture
and the beams of their roofs to feed their furnace for
the magnum opus. What is it? Difficult to say: simply
a book, in several volumes, a book that is truly a book,
architecturally sound and premeditated, and not a
collection of casual inspirations however wonderful
that might be.… So there, dear friend, is the bare
confession of this vice which I’ve rejected a
thousand times.… But it holds me in its sway and
I may yet be able to succeed, not in the completion of
this work as a whole (one would have to be
God-knows-who for that!) but in showing a
successful fragment.… proving through finished
portions that this book does exist, and that
I was aware of what I wasn’t able to accomplish.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ
Letter to Paul Verlaine, November 16, 1869
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