A Reader on Reading

Heinrich Heine, in the eighth chapter of Atta Troll, imagined that for bears, the Creator would have a bearish aspect whose fur was divinely “spotless and white as snow.” Closer to the time of the Iliad, Xenophanes of Colophon (that same island of Colophon that claimed the honor of having blinded Homer) argued that if cows, horses, and lions had fingers and could paint and sculpt like men, the cows would create gods like cows, the horses gods like horses, and “so on with all the others.” We imagine our gods as we imagine our authors, much as we imagine ourselves to be. Perhaps we imagine that our authors and gods have failed because we know that we ourselves are fallible.

The perceived failure of our storytelling is not, therefore, one-sided. Literature is a collaborative effort, not as editors and writing schools will have it, but as readers and writers have known from the very first line of verse ever set down in clay. A poet fashions out of words something that ends with the last full stop and comes to life again with its first reader’s eye. But that eye must be a particular eye, an eye not distracted by baubles and mirrors, concentrated instead on the bodily assimilation of the words, reading both to digest a book and to be digested by it. “Books,” Frye once noted, “are to be lived in.”

As the Homer we invented for ourselves understood, the poet alone, even gifted with blindness, cannot alone create a new world. Demodocus’s song requires that Odysseus listen and weep, and that he understand for the first time the battles he has fought and the travels he has endured. Odysseus must, for the sake of poem, become blind as well, blind as Demodocus, blind through his tears if necessary, in order to be able to draw his eyes away from the ambitions of Agamemnon and the foul moods of Achilles, from the beauty of Circe and the terrors of the Cyclops, and look at something darker and lovelier and deeper within himself.

Perhaps in the same way, the reader too must acquire a positive blindness. Not blindness to the things of the world, certainly not to the world itself, nor to the quotidian glimpses it offers of bliss and horror. But blind to the superficial glitter and glamour of what lies all around us, as we stand erect in our selfish point of observation, a point that, because we stand in it, remains invisible to us and makes us believe that we are the center of the world, and that everything is ours for the taking. With greedy eyes we want everything to be made to our measure, even the stories we demand to be told. They should not be stories larger than ourselves, or stories of such minuteness that they take us inward, into our unacknowledged being, but merely adventures that are skin deep, easily perused and quick to grasp without causing the merest ripple. We are given to read neatly packaged books alike in size and color, which the industry tells us will entertain us without worry and lend us thoughts without reflection, offering us simple, ready-made models, ambitious, egotistical, and thin, to which we can aspire without giving up anything. We want our poets to be like the tyrant described in W. H. Auden’s epitaph:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

The blind bard is a universal paradigm. Our Homer, creator of the mythical world on a human scale, required the one feature that prevents our senses from misleading us, from being distracted by a conventional reality, from being “programmed” (as we’d say today) by preconceived patterns of thought. But we too, the readers, on the other side of the page, require such a gift to keep us, as Rupert Brooke more accurately put it, from “being blinded by our eyes.” Such a gift, as Northrop Frye taught us, lies at the core of the true craft of reading.

The Perseverance of Truth

“I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.

“Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly …”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9

ON 19 JANUARY 2007, I READ that that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink had been murdered in Istanbul by a seventeen-year-old Turkish nationalist for having criticized the government’s denial of the Armenian genocide. The murder of journalists who attempt to tell the truth is a time-honored custom, and the justifications advanced for such crimes enjoy an equally long tradition (I use the terms honored and enjoy advisedly.) From John the Baptist and Seneca to Rodolfo Walsh and Anna Politkovskaya, truth-tellers and their executioners inhabit a surprisingly vast literary shelf.