Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

The History of Reading is eclectic. The invention of the reader is followed by a chapter on the invention of
the writer, another fictional character. “I’ve had the misfortune of beginning a book with the word ‘I’,”
wrote Proust, “and immediately it was thought that instead of attempting to discover general laws, I was
analysing myself in the individual and detestable sense of the word.” This leads our author to discuss the
use of the first person singular, and how that fictitious “I” forces the reader into a semblance of dialogue
from which, however, the reader is excluded by the physical reality of the page. “Only when the reader
reads beyond the writer’s authority does the dialogue take place”, says our author, and draws his
examples from the nouveau roman, notably from Michel Butor’s La Modification, written entirely in the
second person. “Here,” says our author, “the cards are on the table, and the writer neither expects us to
believe in the ‘I’ nor presumes us to assume the role of the condescended to ‘dear reader’.”
In a fascinating aside (Chapter Forty of The History of Reading) our author advances the original
suggestion that the form in which the reader is addressed leads to the creation of the principal literary
genres — or at least to their categorization. In 1948, in Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk, the German critic
Wolfgang Kayser suggested that the concept of genre derived from the three persons that exist in every
known language: “I”, “you” and “he, she or it”. In lyrical literature, the “I” expresses itself emotionally; in
drama, the “I” becomes a second person, “you”, and engages with another “you” in a passionate dialogue.
Finally, in the epic, the protagonist is the third person, “he, she or it”, who narrates objectively.
Furthermore, each genre requires from the reader three distinct attitudes: a lyrical attitude (that of
song), a dramatic attitude (which Kayser calls “apostrophe”) and an epic attitude, or enunciation. Our
author enthusiastically embraces this argument, and proceeds to illustrate it through three readers: a
nineteenth-century French schoolgirl, Éloise Bertrand, whose diary survived the Franco-Prussian War of
1870 and who faithfully recorded her reading of Nerval; Douglas Hyde, who was prompter at the
performance of The Vicar of Wakefield at the Court Theatre in London, with Ellen Terry as Olivia; and
Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste, who read (partially) her employer’s extensive novel.
In Chapter Sixty-eight (this History of Reading is a comfortingly fat tome) our author raises the question
of how (and why) certain readers will preserve a reading long after most other readers have relinquished
it to the past. The example given is from a London journal published sometime in 1855, when most
English papers were full of news of the war in Crimea:
John Challis, an old man about 60 years of age, dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the
golden age, and George Campbell, aged 35, who described himself as a lawyer, and appeared completely
equipped in female attire of the present day, were placed at the bar before Sir R.W. Carden, charged with
being found disguised as women in the Druids’-hall, in Turnagain Lane, an unlicensed dancing room, for
the purpose of exciting others to commit an unnatural offence.

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“A shepherdess of the golden age”: by 1855 the literary pastoral ideal was very much a thing of the past.
Codified in Theocritus’s Idylls in the third century BC, appealing to writers in one form or another until
well into the seventeenth century, tempting such disparate writers as Milton, Garcilaso de la Vega,
Giambattista Marino, Cervantes, Sidney and Fletcher, the pastoral found a very different reflection in
novelists such as George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Émile Zola and Ramón del Valle Inclán, who were
giving readers other, less sunlit visions of country life in their books: Adam Bede (1859), Cranford (1853),