A Reader on Reading

Sometimes the tyranny of the page is subverted on one level only, but that in a way that is powerfully intimate and personal. Montaigne, whose scribbling habits amounted to a conversation, would continue the dialogue at the back of the book he was reading, including the date on which he had finished it in order to better recall the circumstances of the event. Though Montaigne’s books were in various languages, his marginal notes were always in French (“no matter what language is spoken by my books,” he tells us, “I speak to them in my own”), and in French he extended the text and its notes through his own critical comments. For Montaigne this reading method was necessary for what he called his “quest for truth”: not the story as given by the words within the confines of the page but the reflection of that story, mused upon and retold by the reader Montaigne in spaces reclaimed, there where the page left itself vulnerable to encroachment.

These blank spaces, left after the writer has tried to vanquish what Stéphane Mallarmé called “the terrifying whiteness of the page,” are the very spaces in which the readers can exercise their power, in those gaps that were for Roland Barthes the essence of the erotic thrill, the interstices in the text (but we can apply this to the physical text on the page as well), which he described as “there where the clothes gape.” In those openings between the edge of the paper and the edge of the ink, the reader (let us stretch this image as far as it will go) can cause a quiet revolution and establish a new society in which the creative tension is established no longer between page and text but between text and reader.

This is the distinction made by Jewish medieval scholars regarding the Torah. According to the Midrash, the Torah that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai was both a written text and an oral commentary. During the day, when it was light, Moses read the text God had written, and in the darkness of the night he studied the commentary God had spoken. The first action submits the reader to the authority of the page; the second forgoes the page and submits the text to the authority of the reader.

Conscious of the danger of the page’s supremacy, the great eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev attempted to explain why the first page of each of the treatises of the Babylonian Talmud was missing, obliging the reader to begin on page 2. “Because however many pages the studious man reads, he must never forget that he has not yet reached the very first page.” That is to say, the commentary of the Word of God has no foreseeable beginning, neither on paper nor in the reader’s mind. By the elimination of the first page, no page could be said to force the Word of God into an explanation.

Since the page defines the text it contains by marking its beginning, middle, and end, eliminating the first page can be seen as an act of defiance. The nineteenth-century moralist Joseph Joubert went further. According to Chateaubriand, Joubert’s library contained only the texts that Joubert was truly fond of. “When he read,” says Chateaubriand, “he would tear out of his books the pages he didn’t like, thereby achieving a library entirely to his taste, composed of hollowed-out books bound inside covers that were too large for them.”

Joubert did not in fact destroy the sequence of pages; he merely interrupted it with moments of silence. In our time, Raymond Queneau tried to destroy the order imposed by the numbered pages by dividing each page into dozens of strips, each carrying a line of text. In this way, readers could construct their own pages by composing (as in the child’s game book of mix and match) a near infinity of new texts. Queneau called his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Julio Cortázar, in a better-known example, proposed a book, the novel Hopscotch, that had the appearance of submitting to the given sequence of pages but then destroyed that semblance of order by suggesting first that the reader should follow a sequence of chapters other than the one set out in the table of contents and then that the reader allow either chance or personal choice to dictate the order in which the chapters were to be read. Here the reader claims supremacy over both the space and time of the reading.