A Reader on Reading

In times long gone by, in short periods during which the bureaucrats slumbered, certain funds had been granted to artistic causes by soft-hearted or soft-headed Ninevite kings. Since those times, more conscientious officials had been redressing this financial oversight and vigorously pruning down the allotted sums. No official would, of course, recognize any such change in the government’s support of the arts, and yet the Ninevite secretary of finance was able to cut the actual funds allotted to the arts down to almost nothing, while at the same time advertising a committed increase of those same funds in the official records. This was done by the use of certain devices borrowed from the Ninevite poets (whose tools the politicians happily pilfered, while despising the poets who invented them). Metonymy, for instance, the device by which a poet uses a part or an attribute of something to stand in its place (crown for king, for example), allowed the secretary of provisions to cut down on the funds spent on subsidizing artists’ work materials. All any artist now received from the city, whatever his needs, was a number 4 rat-hair paintbrush, since in the secretary’s official vocabulary brush was made to stand for “the ensemble of an artist’s equipment.” Metaphors, the most common of poetic tools, were employed to great effect by these financial wizards. In one celebrated case, a sum of ten thousand gold dinars had been set aside long ago for the lodging of senior artists. By simply redefining camels, used in public transport, as “temporary lodgings,” the secretary of finance was able to count the cost of the camels’ upkeep (for which the city of Nineveh was responsible) as part of the sum allotted to artists’ lodgings, since the senior artists did indeed use subsidized public camels to get from place to place.

“The real artists,” said the Ninevites, “have no cause to complain. If they are really good at what they do, they will make a buck no matter what the social conditions. It’s the others, the so-called experimenters, the self-indulgers, the prophets, who don’t make a cent and whine about their condition. A banker who doesn’t know how to turn a profit would be equally lost. A bureaucrat who didn’t recognize the need to clog things down would be out of a job. This is the law of survival. Nineveh is a society that looks to the future.”

True: in Nineveh, a handful of artists (and many con artists) made a good living. Ninevite society liked to reward a few of the makers of the products it consumed. What it would not recognize, of course, was the vast majority of the artists whose attempts and glitterings and failures allowed the successes of others to be born. Ninevite society didn’t have to support anything it didn’t instantly like or understand. The truth was that this vast majority of artists would carry on, of course, no matter what, simply because they couldn’t help it, the Lord or the Holy Spirit urging them on night after night. They carried on writing and painting and composing and dancing by whatever means they could find. “Like every other worker in society,” the Ninevites said.

It is told that the first time Jonah heard this particular point of Ninevite wisdom, he drummed up his prophetic courage and stood in the public square of Nineveh to address the crowds. “The artist,” Jonah attempted to explain, “is not like every other worker in society. The artist deals with reality: inner and outer reality transformed into meaningful symbols. Those who deal in money deal in symbols behind which stands nothing. It is wonderful to think of the thousands and thousands of Ninevite stockbrokers for whom reality, the real world, is the arbitrary rising and falling of figures transformed in their imagination into wealth—a wealth that exists only in their imagination. No fantasy writer, no virtual-reality artist could ever aspire to create in an audience such an all-pervading trust in fiction as that which takes place in an assembly of stockbrokers. Grownup men and women who will not for a minute consider the reality of the unicorn, even as a symbol, will accept as rock-hard fact that they possess a share in the nation’s camel bellies, and in that belief they consider themselves happy and secure.” By the time Jonah had reached the end of this paragraph, the public square of Nineveh was deserted.