A Reader on Reading

Flaubert, as he was writing Madame Bovary, read certain sections of the novel to his friend Louis Bouilhet, but confessed that as he did the narrative time of those pages (113 pages, from page 139 to page 251) became not his own but something dictated by the flicking of the pages itself. “This afternoon,” he wrote to Louise Colet, “I ended up abandoning my corrections; I no longer understood anything; immersed in my work, it became overwhelming; what seemed now like a mistake, five minutes later no longer seemed like one; it’s all a series of corrections and corrections of corrections that are endless.” And earlier he had written, “The middle pages of all long books are always awful.”

Is our lot, in this electronic age, at all different? Electronic reading alters certain parameters. Reading on the screen precludes (up to a point) the time-restricting quality of reading on paper. The scrolling text (like that of the Roman or Greek scrolls) unfurls at a pace that is not dictated by the dimensions of the page and its margins. In fact, on the screen, each page shifts shape endlessly, remaining the same in size but altering its content, since the first and last line keep changing as we scroll, always within the fixed frame of the screen. Though reading a long text on the screen is thoroughly inconvenient (for physiological reasons that may, no doubt, change as we evolve), it does free us (if we want to be freed) from the very temporal realization of progress illustrated by the thickening bulk of pages held in the left hand and the diminishing bulk of pages held by the right.

In fact, Borges’s imaginary book finds its incarnation in the not-quite-infinite pages of the e-book. The e-book page exceeds the nightmarish quality of Borges’s book since none of its pages has a verso. Since text can always be added to the “volume,” the e-book has no middle. The e-book page is the frame applied by the reader to what is essentially Borges’s borderless text. Like every other literary creation, the e-book was foreseen in Borges’s Library.

For the common reader, the notion of page becomes confused with the notion of leaf or folio, and the dictionary defines page as both “the leaf of a book” and “one side of it.” In this sense, a short poem by Goethe on the infolded leaf of the gingko tree perhaps best describes the dual nature of the page. The gingko tree is called a living fossil, since it is the only modern representative of a species long vanished and, like the page of a book, does not exist in the wild. Each of its leathery leaves, though born from a single stem, seems double, and this ambiguity led Goethe to write his poem:

This small leaf that traveled eastward

And now in my garden lies, offers rich and secret meanings

That bear wisdom to the wise.

Is it one green living creature

Split in two and yet left whole?

Are they two that fused together

To become a single soul?

The right answer to these questions

Can be found by everyone.

Can’t you tell from my own verses

That I’m also two and one?

The Voice That Says “I”

“We, indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the

end of its tail. “As if I would talk on such a subject!”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2

IT WAS WHILE READING Stevenson’s Treasure Island when I was eight or nine that I was suddenly struck by the question of who I really was. My edition had an introduction titled “How This Book Came to Be Written” that explained how Stevenson, one rainy afternoon, had started telling the story to his stepson by drawing for him the island’s map. A picture of the map was faithfully reproduced as the frontispiece.

Treasure Island begins with a confession: “I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 —, and go back to the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Ben-bow’ inn …” The appearance at the inn of the wicked Old Sea Dog afraid of a certain “seafaring man with one leg” had begun to fill me with delightful terror when, twenty-odd pages into the book, I noticed that the narrator was suddenly addressed as “Jim.” “Jim”: I leafed again through the introduction. There was no doubt about it. The author, I read, was someone whose Christian names were “Robert Louis.” And yet here, on the printed page, his name was given as “Jim.” I couldn’t understand how that was possible. Was the narrator not the person whose name appeared on the cover? It obviously was not a mistake since “I take up my pen …” was clearly written in the first paragraph. Therefore the “I” who had begun to tell me his story was not “Robert Louis,” the book’s announced author, but someone who called himself “Jim” and who, conjured out of nowhere, had mysteriously usurped Robert Louis’s position in my book. Was then the story untrue? Could the author have lied?