A Reader on Reading

And what do we mean by a “name”? The question, or a form of the question, is asked in Through the Looking-Glass. A few chapters after crossing the nameless wood, Alice meets the doleful figure of the White Knight, who, in the authoritarian manner of adults, tells her that he will sing a song to “comfort” her. “The name of the song,” says the Knight, “is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’”:

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’ ”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways And Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On A Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

As it turns out, the tune isn’t his own invention (as Alice points out) and neither are the Knight’s careful distinctions between what a name is called, the name itself, what the thing it names is called, and the thing itself; these distinctions are as old as the first commentators of Genesis. The world into which Adam was inducted was innocent of Adam; it was also innocent of Adam’s words. Everything Adam saw, everything he felt, as everything he fancied or feared, was to be made present to him (as, eventually, to every one of us) through layers of names, names with which language tries to clothe the nakedness of experience. It is not by chance that once Adam and Eve lost their innocence, they were obliged to wear skins “so that,” says a Talmudic commentator, “they might learn who they were through the shape that enveloped them.” Words, the names of things, give experience its shape.

The task of naming belongs to every reader. Others who do not read must name their experience as best they can, constructing verbal sources, as it were, by imagining their own books. In our book-centered societies, the craft of reading signals our entrance into the ways of the tribe, with its particular codes and demands, allowing us to share the common source of recorded words; but it would be a mistake to think of reading as a merely receptive activity. On the contrary: Stéphane Mallarmé proposed that every reader’s duty was “to purify the sense of the words of the tribe.” To do this, readers must make books theirs. In endless libraries, like thieves in the night, readers pilfer names, vast and marvelous creations as simple as “Adam” and as far-fetched as “Rumpelstiltskin.” Dante describes his encounter with the three beasts in a dark forest, “in the middle of the road of life;” for his readers that half-run life becomes their own, and also a mirror of another forest, a place they once saw in childhood, a forest that fills their dreams with scents of pine and fox. John Bunyan describes Christian running from his house with his fingers in his ears so as not to hear the pleas of his wife and children, and Homer describes Ulysses, bound to the mast, forced to listen to the sirens’ song; the reader of Bunyan and Homer applies these words to the deafness of our contemporary, the amiable Prufrock. Edna St. Vincent Millay calls herself “domestic as a plate,” and it is the reader who renames the daily kitchen china, the companion of our meals, with a newly acquired meaning. “Man’s innate casuistry!” complained Karl Marx (as quoted by Friedrich Engels in The Origins of the Family): “To change things by changing their names!” And yet, pace Marx, that is exactly what we do.