A Reader on Reading

Every act of writing, every creation of a metaphor is a translation in at least two senses: in the sense that it recasts an outer experience or an imagining into something that elicits in the reader a further experience or imagining; and in the sense that it transports something from one place to a different one — the sense in which the word was employed in the Middle Ages to describe the moving of the pilfered remains of saints from one shrine to another, an activity generously known as furta sacra, “holy thefts.” Something in the act of writing, and then once more in the act of reading, pilfers, enshrines, and changes Arnold’s essential literary thought from writer to writer and reader to reader, building on the experience of creation, renewing and redefining our experience of the world.

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena Jesenskà, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena’s devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory. Among the texts she forced herself to remember was a short story by Maxim Gorky, “A Man Is Born.”

The story tells how the narrator, a young boy, strolling one day somewhere along the shores of the Black Sea, comes upon a peasant woman shrieking in pain. The woman is pregnant; she has fled the famine of her birthplace and now, terrified and alone, she is about to give birth. In spite of her protests, the boy assists her. He bathes the newborn child in the sea, makes a fire, and prepares tea. At the end of the story, the boy and the peasant woman follow a group of other peasants: with one arm, the boy supports the mother; in the other he carries the baby.

Gorky’s story became, for Milena’s friend, a paradise, a small safe place into which she could retreat from the daily horror. It did not lend meaning to her plight, it did not explain or justify it; it did not even offer her hope for the future. It simply existed as a point of balance, reminding her of the light at a time of dark catastrophe.

Catastrophe: a sudden and violent change, something terrible and incomprehensible. When the Roman hordes, following Cato’s dictum, razed the city of Carthage and plowed the land with salt; when the Vandals sacked Rome in 455, leaving the great metropolis in ruins; when the first Christian Crusaders entered the cities of North Africa and after slaughtering the men, women, and children set fire to the libraries; when the Catholic kings of Spain expelled from their territories the cultures of the Arabs and the Jews, and the Rabbi of Toledo threw up to Heaven the keys of the Ark for safekeeping until a happier time; when Pizarro executed the welcoming Atahualpa and effectively destroyed the Inca civilization; when the first slave was sold on the American continent; when large numbers of Native Americans were deliberately contaminated with smallpox-infected blankets by the European settlers (in what must count as the world’s first biological warfare); when the soldiers in the trenches of World War I drowned in mud and toxic gases in their attempt to obey impossible orders; when the inhabitants of Hiroshima saw their skin fly off their bodies under the great yellow cloud up in the sky; when the Kurdish population was attacked with toxic weapons; when thousands of men and women were hunted down with machetes in Rwanda; and when the suicide planes struck the twin towers of Manhattan, leaving New York to join the mourning cities of Madrid, Belfast, Jerusalem, Bogotá, and countless others, all victims of terrorist attacks — in all these catastrophes, the survivors may have sought in a book, as did Milena’s friend, some respite from grief and some reassurance of sanity.

For a reader, this may be the essential, perhaps the only justification for literature: that the madness of the world will not take us over completely though it invades our cellars (the metaphor belongs to Machado de Assis) and then softly takes over the dining room, the living room, the whole house. Joseph Brodsky, prisoner in Siberia, found it in the verse of W. H. Auden. For Reinaldo Arenas, locked away in Castro’s prisons, it was in the Aeneid; for Oscar Wilde, at Reading Gaol, in the words of Christ; for Haroldo Conti, tortured by the Argentinean military, in the novels of Dickens. When the world becomes incomprehensible, when acts of terror and terrifying responses to that terror fill our days and our nights, when we feel unguided and bewildered, we seek a place in which comprehension (or faith in comprehension) has been set down in words.