A Reader on Reading

In the library of the mind, however, books that have no material existence constantly cram the shelves: books that are the amalgamation of other books once read and now only imperfectly remembered, books that annotate, gloss, and comment on others too rich to stand on their own, books written in dreams or in nightmares that now preserve the tone of those nebulous realms, books that we know should exist but which have never been written, autobiographical books of unspeakable experiences, books of unutterable desires, books of once obvious and now forgotten truths, books of magnificent and inexpressible invention. All editions of Don Quixote published to date in every language can be collected — are collected, for instance, in the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. But my own Don Quixotes, the ones that correspond to each of my several readings, the ones invented by my memory and edited by my oblivion, can find a place only in the library of my mind.

At times both libraries coincide. In Chapter 6 of the first part of Don Quixote, the knight’s library of solid books overlaps with the remembered library of the priest and the barber who purge it; every volume taken off the shelves is echoed in the recalled reading of its censors and is judged according to its past merits. Both the books condemned to the flames and the books that are spared depend not on the words printed black on white in their pages but on the words stored in the minds of the barber and the priest, placed there when they first became the books’ readers. Sometimes their judgment depends on hearsay, as when the priest explains that he has heard that the Amadís de Gaula was the first novel of chivalry printed in Spain and therefore, as fountainhead of such evil, it must burn — to which the barber retorts that he has heard that it’s also the best, and that for that reason it must be forgiven. Sometimes the prior impression is so strong that it damns not only the book itself but also its companions; sometimes the translation is condemned but the original is spared; sometimes a few are not sent to the fire but merely removed, so as not to affect their future readers. The priest and the barber, attempting to cleanse Don Quixote’s library, are in fact molding it to the image of the library they themselves bear in mind, appropriating the books and turning them into whatever their own experience made them up to be. It is not surprising that in the end the room in which the library is lodged is itself walled up, so that it appears never to have existed, and when the old knight wakes and asks to see it, he is told that it has simply vanished. Vanished it has, but not through the magic of an evil wizard (as Don Quixote suggests) but through the power granted other readers of superimposing their own versions of a book onto the books owned by someone else. Every library of the solid world depends on the readings of those who came before us.

Ultimately, this creative hermeneutics defines the reader’s supreme power: to make of a book whatever one’s experience, taste, intuition, and knowledge dictate. Not just anything, of course, not the concoctions of a raving mind — even though psychoanalysts and surrealists suggest that these too have their validity and logic. But rather the intelligent and inspired reconstruction of the text, using reason and imagination as best we can to translate it onto a different canvas, extending the horizon of its apparent meaning beyond its visible borders and the declared intentions of the author. The limits of this power are painfully vague: as I have said before, Umberto Eco suggested that they must coincide with the limits of common sense. Perhaps this arbitration is enough.

Limitless or not, the power of the reader cannot be inherited; it must be learned. Even though we come into the world as creatures intent on seeking meaning in everything, in reading meanings in gestures, sounds, colors, and shapes, the deciphering of society’s common code of communication is a skill that must be acquired. Vocabulary and syntax, levels of meaning, summary and comparison of texts, all these are techniques that must be taught to those who enter society’s commonwealth in order to grant them the full power of reading. And yet the last step in the process must be learned all alone: discovering in a book the record of one’s own experience.