A Reader on Reading

A company, an aptly called Anonymous Society, a Multinational, or an Umbrella Organization, is a thing invisible and incorporeal, except in its effects. It has no face, no soul. The “value” of its labors, the meaning of its metaphors is falsely advertised, and it is society’s dull obligation to read its pronouncements closely, over and over again, in order to be aware of their potential harm in which we are, as citizens, implicated.

In March 2000, Paul Stewart, one of the directors of the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, was touring an AIDS clinic in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town. Boehringer is the maker of Nevirapine, a drug used to treat certain AIDS-related illnesses, and Stewart, according to an article by Jon Jeter in the Washington Post (20 April 2001), was in South Africa to prevent the production of a generic version of the drug. At a certain point in the tour, Stewart came upon an emaciated seven-year-old boy alone in a crowded waiting room. The boy was too weak to lift his head, and his chest was covered in raw blisters. Stewart grew pale. “I would like to pay for his treatment, personally,” he blurted out. Wisely, the clinic’s director told Stewart that it was too late for such private emotional responses. Stewart had to do more than address one single heartbreaking case. He had to confront the vastness of the problem, the large moral question, the horror of which the seven-year-old boy was the visible reality, a horror in which Stewart’s company played an intricate part, a horror which Stewart could not change by the expiatory gesture of digging into his pockets.

I am not certain that a piece of writing, any writing, however brilliant and moving, can affect the reality of South Africa’s AIDS sufferers, or any other reality. There may be no poem, however powerful, that can remove one ounce of pain or transform a single moment of injustice. But there may be no poem, however poorly written, that may not contain, for its secret and elected reader, a consolation, a call to arms, a glimmer of happiness, an epiphany. Something there is in the modest page that, mysteriously and unexpectedly, allows us, not wisdom, but the possibility of wisdom, caught between the experience of everyday life and the experience of literary reality.

There is perhaps a metaphor that may conjure up this space between our imagining of the world and the page (from the point of view of the writer) or the space between the solid page and our imagining the world (from the point of view of the reader). In the seventh canto of the Inferno, Dante describes the punishment of thieves who in the looking-glass universe of sin and retribution are condemned to losing even their own human forms and are endlessly transformed into creature after monstrous creature. These transformations happen in staggered stages, gradually, so that at no one time is the agonized soul a single self-possessed shape. And Dante says (this, in Richard Wilbur’s translation):

Just so, when paper burns, there runs before

the creeping flame a stain of darkish hue

that, though not black as yet, is white no more.

Between the blankness of the page and the authoritarian letters in black, there is a space, a moment, a color in which, ever-changing, the writer and the reader both may find illumination just before the meaning is consumed by the flames.

PART FOUR

Wordplay

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6

The Full Stop

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go

on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12

DIMINUTIVE AS A MOTE OF DUST, a mere peck of the pen, a crumb on the keyboard, the full stop is the unsung legislator of our writing systems. Without it, there would be no end to the sorrows of young Werther, and the travels of the Hobbit would have never been completed. Its absence allowed James Joyce to weave Finnegans Wake into a perfect circle, and its presence made Henri Michaux compare our essential being to this dot, “a dot that death devours.” It crowns the fulfillment of thought, gives the illusion of conclusiveness, possesses a certain haughtiness that stems, like Napoleon’s, from its minuscule size. Anxious to get going, we require nothing to signal our beginnings, but we need to know when to stop: this tiny memento mori reminds us that everything, ourselves included, must one day come to a halt. As an anonymous English teacher suggested in the 1680 Treatise of stops, Points or Pauses, a full stop is “a Note of perfect Sense, and of a perfect Sentence.”