A Reader on Reading

Every act of terror protests its own justification. It is said that before ordering each new atrocity, Robespierre would ask, “In the name of what?” But every human being knows, intimately, that no act of terror is possibly justified. The constant cruelty of the world and, in spite of everything, its daily miracles of beauty, kindness, and compassion bewilder us because they spring up with no justification, like the miracle of rain (as God explains to Job) falling “where no man is.” The primordial quality of the universe seems to be absolute gratuity.

Of all this we are aware, as we also aware the old trusims: that violence breeds violence, that all power is abusive, that fanaticism of any kind is the enemy of reason, that propaganda is propaganda even when it purports to rally us against iniquity, that war is never glorious except in the eyes of the victors, who believe that God is on the side of large armies. This is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words and metaphors for what we already know.

Metaphor builds on metaphor and quotation on quotation. For some, the words of others are a vocabulary of quotations in which they express their own thoughts. For others those foreign words are their own thoughts, and the very act of putting them on paper transforms those words imagined by others into something new, reimagined through a different intonation or context. Without this continuity, this purloining, this translation, there is no literature. And through these dealings, literature remains immutable, like the tired waves, while the world around it changes.

During a staging of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Algiers, at the height of the War of Independence, after the hero, Béranger, had pronounced the play’s last brave words, “Je ne capitule pas!” the entire audience, Algerian indépendantistes and French colonials, burst out in cheers. For the Algerians, Béranger’s cry echoed their own, intent on not giving up their struggle for freedom; for the French, the cry was theirs, intent on not surrendering the land their fathers had conquered. Ionesco’s words are, of course, the same. The sense (the reading) is different.

It may be useful here to look at the practical side of this question of intellectual ownership, that is to say, at the notion of literary copyright. What it sets out to do is not protect the right of, say, Homer, to put himself forward as sole inventor of the expression “the wine-dark sea” but rather to regulate the exploitation of that expression by, say, Ezra Pound and the Greek Tourist Board. While Martial brags about his poems being read by even the centurions posted at the empire’s farthest borders, he also complains about publishers who sell those poems to those far-flung centurions without paying him, the author, for the privilege. It was in order to make sure that Martial got his sestertium that on 4 August 1789 the Revolutionary Assembly in Paris abolished all privileges of individuals, cities, provinces, and organizations and replaced them with the notion of rights. Authors as well as publishers, printers, and booksellers were granted particular rights regarding a text, and would from then on share in the profits of what the author had written, the publisher published, the printer printed, and the bookseller sold. Two essential points were made. The first, that “the work is deemed created, independently of its being rendered public, by the very fact of its having been conceived by the author, even if left unfinished.” The second, that “intellectual property is independent of the property of the material object itself.” That is to say, Rhinoceros belongs to Ionesco even before the first production, independent of the fact that Algerians and French may each have appropriated the play through their individual readings. The “value” of Rhinoceros belongs to Ionesco.

What is this value? This is the best answer I know: “Value does not carry whatever it is written on its forehead. Instead, it transforms each of the fruits of labor into a hieroglyph. In time, man seeks to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyph, to penetrate the secrets of the social creation to which he contributes, and this transformation of useful objects into objects of value is one society’s creations, just like language itself.” The author of this splendid discovery is the sadly ill-reputed Karl Marx. Value as meaning: anyone interested in literature can grasp the common sense of this notion, akin to Keats’s Beauty as Truth and Truth as Beauty. “What imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth—whether it existed there or not,” Keats wrote to a friend. Value then is a metaphor, as are Truth and Beauty. They stand as conceptual realities, things that we know are there, in our flesh and blood, but that, like the thrill of King Lear, cannot be defined more precisely.