A Reader on Reading

This unanswerable question is all-important. Literature, as we know all too well, does not offer solutions, but poses good conundrums. It is capable, in telling a story, of laying out the infinite convolutions and the intimate simplicity of a moral problem, and of leaving us with the conviction of possessing a certain clarity with which to perceive not a universal but a personal understanding of the world. “What in the world is this emotion?” asks Rebecca West after reading King Lear. “What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life that makes me feel so glad?” I know that I have come across that emotion in all kinds of literature, supremely great and supremely small, in a line here and there, a paragraph, and sometimes, not often, a whole book, for no obviously discernible reason, when something that is being told about a particular character or situation suddenly acquires for me, its reader, enormous private importance.

Are Don Quixote’s quixotic gestures commendable when, after he has threatened a farmer for viciously beating his young apprentice, the farmer redoubles his punishment once Don Quixote is safely out of sight? Is Hercule Poirot, at the end of his long life, justified in murdering a murderer in order to prevent others from being murdered? Is it excusable for Aeneas to abandon to her tears the welcoming Dido for the sake of the glory of the future Roman Empire? Should Monsieur Homais have received the croix d’honneur after the death of the miserable Bovarys? Is Lady Macbeth a monster or a victim, and should we pity her or fear her, or (this is much more difficult) fear and pity her at precisely the same time?

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary, so that A Hundred Years of Solitude can help us understand the fate of Carthage, and Goneril’s arguments can assist us in translating the dubious ethical dilemma of General Paul Aussaresses, the torturer of Algiers. I am tempted to say that perhaps this is all that literature really does. I am tempted to say that every book that allows a reader to engage with it asks a moral question. Or rather: that if a reader is able to delve beyond the surface of a given text, such a reader can bring back from its depths a moral question, even if that question has not been put by the writer in so many words, but its implicit presence elicits nevertheless a bare emotion from the reader, a foreboding or simply a memory of something we knew, long ago. Through this alchemy, every literary text becomes, in some sense, metaphoric.

Literature handbooks since the Middle Ages have arduously distinguished between metaphor and image, image and simile, simile and symbol, symbol and emblem. Essentially, of course, the intellectual insight that conjures up these devices is the same: an associative intuition intent on apprehending the reality of experience not directly but once removed, as Perseus did in order to see the face of the Gorgon, or Moses the face of God. Reality, the place in which we stand, cannot be seen as long as we are in it. It is the process of “once removed” (through imagery, through allusion, through plot) that allows us to see where and who we are. Metaphor, in the widest sense, is our means of grasping (and sometimes almost understanding) the world and our bewildering selves. It may be that all literature can be understood as metaphor.

Metaphor, of course, breeds metaphor. The number of stories we have to tell is limited, and the number of images that echo stories meaningfully in every mind is small. When Wallace Stevens tells us that

In that November off Tehuantepec

The slopping of the sea grew still one night,

he is seeing once more the sea (the same sea) that Stéphane Mallarmé longed for so lovingly, after telling us that “all flesh is sad” and that he has “read all the books.” It is the same terrifying sea that Paul Celan hears, “umbellet von der haiblauen See,” “barking in the shark-blue sea.” It is the wave that breaks three times for the tongue-tied Tennyson on “cold grey stones” — the same “tremulous cadence” that moves Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach and makes him think of Sophocles “who long ago / Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow, / Of human misery.” Mallarmé, Celan, Tennyson, Arnold, Sophocles are all present in Stevens when, far away on a distant shore, he sees the metallic water shine and grow still. And what does the reader find in that sight, in that sound? Arnold says it exactly: we find “in the sound a thought.” A thought, we can add, that translates itself through the power of metaphor into a question and into the vaporous ghost of an answer.