A Reader on Reading

Word games are myriad: texts that eschew one or several letters of the alphabet (such as Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, brilliantly translated into English by Gilbert Adair, which excludes in both languages the letter e); texts that avoid all vowels except one (“I’m living nigh grim civic blight; / I find its victims, sick with fright”); tautonyms, or words made up of two identical parts (such as murmur), which in turn develop into the highly sophisticated “charade sentence” (“Flamingo pale, scenting a latent shark / Flaming opalescent in gala tents—hark!”); transposal words obtained by rearranging the letters of another word (carol to coral); three-way homonyms, the scourge of foreigners learning English (idol, idle, and idyll); “undominated” words in which an alphabetic sequence can be found containing all the letters in that sequence, when no word exists with a longer sequence of those same letters (as in deft).

The fact that many of these classifications are also hugely entertaining should not lead anyone to question their seriousness. Poets, for instance, have long used them, from Lasus of Hermione, who in the sixth century B.c. excluded sigma from his “Ode to the Centaurs,” to Cervantes, who included in his preface to Don Quixote a few “truncated” sonnets (in which not the final but the penultimate syllable of each line carries the rhyme), and from Gerald Manley Hopkins with his fondness for charade sentences (“Resign them, sign them”) to the anonymous bard who penned, “Time wounds all heels.” Poetry, in fact, is proof of our innate confidence in the meaningfulness of wordplay. That we should trust rhyme to lend meaning or alliteration to express a thought is not too far from the spirit of the Renaissance necromancers who believed that the secret name of Rome was Roma spelled backwards. (What hope is there for Vancouver, which magically reads Revuocnav — “Revue of Knaves” in the Evenki tongue, or Toronto, which reveals itself as Otnorot, “The Rot of Otno” in Esperanto?)

Martin Gardner observed that much of today’s wordplay “would not have been made without the help of computers” but adds that he does not want to “give the impression that computers are required for making new discoveries.” Indeed. Though computers can tell us (for instance) that there are 3,276 ways in which three letters can be chosen from the alphabet with repetition allowed, such mechanical methods provide, I believe, scant entertainment to either seasoned lexicophiles or inveterate Kabbalists. At the dawn of the computer age, Arthur C. Clarke penned a warning. In a short story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” a Tibetan lamasery engages the services of Western computer experts to run through all possible combinations of letters in order to come up with one that is the hidden name of God—a task which, these Tibetans believe, lends a reason to the existence of the universe. The experts install the computer, and over several months it spews out countless jumbles of names. At last, the final combination is produced. As the experts pack up to leave, one of them casually looks up at the sky. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars are going out.

A Brief History of the Page

The Fish-Footman began by producing from under

his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

THE PAGE LEADS AN UNDERHAND existence. Lost among its brethren within the covers of a book, or singled out to carry, all on its own, a limited piece of scribbling; turned, torn, numbered, dog-eared; lost or recalled, lit up or deleted, skimmed or scrutinized the page comes into our reader’s consciousness only as a frame or container of what we mean to read. Its brittle being, barely corporeal in its two dimensions, is dimly perceived by our eyes as they follow the track of the words. Like a skeleton supporting the skin of a text, the page disappears in its very function, and in that unprepossessing nature lies its strength. The page is the reader’s space; it is also the reader’s time. Like the changing numbers of an electronic clock, the pages mark the numbered hours, a doom to which we, the readers, are called to submit. We can slow down or speed up our reading, but whatever we do as readers, the passing of time will always be clocked by the turning of a page. The page limits, cuts, extends, censors, reshapes, translates, stresses, defuses, bridges, and separates our reading, which we arduously attempt to reclaim. In this sense, the act of reading is a power struggle between reader and page over the dominion of the text. Usually, it is the page that wins. But what exactly is a page?