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.”