A Reader on Reading

I have mentioned the pragmatic source of the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. But technologies are often, always perhaps, diverted from their original intentions. Soon the recording of buying and selling transactions was joined by the story of those transactions, and the buyers and sellers who until then were headings on either column acquired individual features and personal narratives. Writing became, to a large extent, the place that not only recorded our world but also created it, and the words that until then were spoken to render memory present and to name experience and desire were set down in clay to keep the stories available to generation after generation of readers. The bookkeeper, who in order to account for a trading of sheep or goats needed both his eyes, now, symbolically at least, was best thought to be blind, because readers realized that the stories that mattered were not those copied from nature but those that distilled and translated the natural and social world into the language of myth. Frye, in his notes at the end of his unfinished paper, remarks that the prophet’s role is to preach the Word of revealed, not natural, religion. If we take the etymological meaning of the term religion (“to bind again” or “to bind more strongly”), we have something akin to the definition of poetry.

On this etymological level, the opposition between natural and revealed rebinding acquires a startling meaning. On the one hand, we are creatures bound to the earth and to the things of this earth. We are not different from any other living thing or even, from a molecular point of view, from other inanimate things. The old image of humans as stardust is scientifically true: our atoms belonged long ago to exploded stars. But as Darwinism has taught us, each species has evolved different methods to adapt to this material world, and our species acquired along the way the ability of self-consciousness, to know not only that we are on this earth but that we are on this earth. And through this self-consciousness, or simultaneously with this self-consciousness, we acquired the gift of imagination. Not imagination regarded as some flimsy, immaterial quality like that of the fantastical phlogiston which our great-grandparents thought to cause combustion, but as a biological human function such as eating or breathing. This function enables us to learn by creating in the mind situations that do not materially exist in order to study them and overcome any difficulties they may present, to be used later when such situations arise in real life. Battles are fought in the mind and strange landscapes explored before we ever have to take up arms or set upon our travels; the Iliad and the Odyssey are our preparation for every struggle and every displacement. Poetry—literature—binds us again to the world, more strongly this time, because it helps us become conscious of it and of ourselves.

The state of universal warfare that Frye saw as the state of the world in the last years of World War II is, to some degree, that of the world today. In 1943, Frye described the United States as the “archetypal country” (according to a holograph note in the margin of the typescript). And this is still the case today, even though there are signs that the archetype is shifting. The battlefields have changed ground, the soldiers wear different uniforms, but the weapons are just as deadly and the madness just as keen. Samson killing the Philistines by killing himself was metamorphosed into the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who in turn metamorphosed into the suicide terrorists whose carnage we suffer now every day somewhere in the world.

And on either side, we continue to create our enemies. We require these enemies to keep the industry of war going but also to keep our sense of self cocooned. We are fearful of the stories we don’t know, and we are afraid that those who tell them will impose on us their versions of the world, and that we shall no longer know who we are. We don’t want to change the plots we know for plots that we may not understand, or that may not move us if we do, or may move us in mysterious ways. We want the comfort of a familiar face by the bed. We hold to the conviction that our stories are better than anyone else’s. We distrust foreign tongues, and we don’t encourage translation. The balance sheet that the writers of the twentieth century drew of the deathly experience of war was meant to be a cautionary one, summed up as “Never Again.” It didn’t stick, as daily experience has since proven. All the chronicles, all accounts factual and fictional, all the symbols and fables woven from the debris left by the slaughter and the destruction somehow failed to build for us a peaceful, or even a more humanly acceptable, world. If there is a God who reads us, then His patience or indifference is certainly remarkable.