A Reader on Reading

SOMETIME IN THE SPRING OF 1943, Northrop Frye wrote a paper which, a holograph note on the typescript tells us, was intended for an Emmanuel College publication “that never came off.” Its title is “The Present Condition of the World” and its thrust the problem of steering “a middle course between platitude and paradox,” between “Olympian detachment and Bacchic outcries” when discussing this condition, which, Frye reminds us, is one of universal warfare. With his habitual clarity, Frye warns us against judging that war reaps any benefits. “A corrupt tree can only bring forth corrupt fruit, and the notion that some good may be salvaged from this evil and monstrous horror is, however pathetic and wistful, a pernicious illusion.” And Frye concludes: “And that such benefits will be ‘worth’ the blood and misery and destruction of the war is nonsense, unless posterity are insanely cynical bookkeepers.”

Much of Frye’s paper is concerned with the deistic society whose goal, he reminds us, is war. This is a truth very much worth recalling in our third millennium. It is of the essence, and we can only lament that Frye left his paper incomplete. But like all of Frye’s writings, it is rich with tempting asides. One in particular, that of a certain actor in this warmongering society, may prove useful to explore. I refer to the bookkeeper, the person in charge of tallying the sum of our follies.

Bookkeeping is an excellent word. Its present meaning is fully justified. In the brightest of our mornings, when writing was invented, the first human to scratch a readable sign on a piece of clay was not a poet but an accountant. The earliest examples of writing we have, now probably destroyed in the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, are two small tablets that record a certain number of goats or sheep: the receipts, in fact, for a commercial transaction. Our first books were ledgers, and it should not surprise us that poets later retained the two essential characteristics of their accountant elders: the delight in making lists and the responsibility of keeping records.

Two of our founding books, the Iliad and the Odyssey, excel in both. Their author agreed with Frye on the sterility of war and would never have suggested that the fruit of war is peace. Homer loathed war. “Atrocious,” “scourge of men,” “lying, two-faced,” are the terms he uses to describe it. In Homer’s poems, pity and mourning are never far from the battlefields, and it is not by chance that pleas for compassion begin and end the Iliad. The debits and credits in Homer’s books are not those of our politicians. Homer the bookkeeper is never insanely cynical.

Who then are these sane and merciful bookkeepers who, like Homer, set our accounts in order? What characteristics must they have, or, rather, what characteristics do we imagine them to have so that they can perform their work efficiently? Why have we brought into being a Homer to father our two primordial stories?

The history of writing, of which the history of reading is its first and last chapter, has among its many fantastical creations one that seems to me peculiar among all: that of the authorless text for which an author must be invented. Anonymity has its attraction, and Anonymous is one of the major figures of every one of our literatures. But sometimes, perhaps when the depth and reverberations of a text seem almost too universal to belong on an individual reader’s bookshelf, we have tried to imagine for that text a poet of flesh and blood, capable of being Everyman. It is as if, in recognizing in a work the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us, we wished to satisfy ourselves in the belief that this too was the creation of human hands and a human mind, that a man or woman like us was once able to tell for us that which we, younger siblings, merely glimpse or intuit. In order to achieve this, the critical sciences come to our aid and do their detective work to rescue from discretion the nebulous author behind the Epic of Gilgamesh or La Vie devant soi, but their labors are merely confirmation. In the minds of their readers, the secret authors have already acquired a congenial familiarity, an almost physical presence, lacking nothing except a name.

Homer begins long after the composition of his poems, a parent adopted, as it were, by his children. Long centuries of literary criticism lent him features both concrete and emblematic, first through apocryphal biographies, later as an allegory, an idea, as the identity of a nation, and even as the embodiment of poetry itself. In every case, however, it was the readers who had first to conceive of an author for the poem to be conceivable.