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Real Academia Española) — a habit our author compares to that of Stendhal, who perused the Napoleonic
Code so as to learn to write in a terse and exact style.
The topic of reading borrowed books occupies Chapter Fifteen. Jane Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle’s wife, and a
celebrated letter writer) leads us through the intricacies of reading books that don’t belong to us, “like
having an illicit affair”, and of taking out from libraries books that might affect our reputation. One
afternoon in January 1843, having chosen from the respectable London Library several risqué novels by
the French writer Paul de Kock, she brazenly entered her name in the ledger as that of Erasmus Darwin,
the dry-as-dust invalid grandfather of the more famous Charles, to the astonishment of the librarians.
Here also are the reading ceremonies of our own era and previous times (Chapters Forty-three and Forty-
five). Here are the marathon readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday, the nostalgic radio readings of a book
before bedtime, the library readings in big crowded halls and in far, empty, snowbound places, the
readings by the bedsides of the sick, the ghost-story readings by the winter fire. Here is the curious
science of bibliotherapy (Chapter Twenty-one), defined in Webster’s as “the use of selected reading
materials as therapeutic adjuvants in medicine and psychiatry”, by which certain doctors claim they can
heal the sick in body and spirit with The Wind in the Willows or Bouvard and Pécuchet.
Here are the book-bags, the sine qua non of every Victorian voyage. No traveller left home without a
suitcase full of appropriate reading, whether travelling to the Côte d’Azur or to Antarctica. (Poor
Amundsen: our author tells us that, on his way to the South Pole, the explorer’s book-bag sank under the
ice, and he was obliged to spend many months in the company of the only volume he was able to rescue:
Dr. John Gauden’s The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings.)
One of the final chapters (not the last) concerns the writer’s explicit acknowledgement of the reader’s
power. Here are the books left open for the reader’s construction, like a box of Lego: Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy, of course, which allows us to read it any which way, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a
novel built out of interchangeable chapters whose sequence the reader determines at will. Sterne and
Cortázar inevitably lead to the New Age novels, the hypertexts. The term (our author tells us) was coined
in the 1970s by a computer specialist, Ted Nelson, to describe the nonsequential narrative space made
possible by computers. “There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks,” our author
quotes the novelist Robert Coover as saying, describing hypertext in an article in The NewYork Times, “as
paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and
equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics”. The reader of a hypertext can enter the text
at almost any point; change the narrative course, demand insertions, correct, expand or delete. Neither
do these texts have an end, since the reader (or the writer) can always continue or retell a text: “If
everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer?” asks Coover. “If
the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in so many directions as she or he wishes,
does that not become the obligation to do so?” In brackets, our author questions the freedom implicit in
such an obligation.
The History of Reading, fortunately, has no end. After the final chapter and before the already-mentioned
copious index, our author has left a number of blank pages for the reader to add further thoughts on
reading, subjects obviously missed, apposite quotations, events and characters still in the future. There is
some consolation in that. I imagine leaving the book by the side of my bed, I imagine opening it up
tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after that, and saying to myself, “It’s not finished.”
NOTES
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