A Reader on Reading

To say “I” and tell a story implied, for me, at the age of eight, a promise of truth, the presence of a real-life narrator who was about to reveal to me, his reader, something that had happened to him across the seas in another century. With this switch from “Robert Louis” to “Jim,” my confidence in storytelling was suddenly shaken. I realized that “I” could be not “I,” the author, but someone the author only pretended to be, a trickster playacting on the page, a deceiver taking on the voice and gestures of someone else. And if this were so (the notion was unclear to me, since I was too young to put it into words) then the “You” whom the “I” addressed, that “You” whom I’d assumed magically to mean “Me,” might also be a lie. From that moment on, I had to agree to comply with rules that I had until then ignored and to act out my role in a story I had still to discover. On that terrible afternoon, reading became, not a voyage of exploration guided by a trusted author, but a game in which the author only played the part of the author and the reader the part of the reader. Later on, as all readers must, I realized that my performance was the leading one, and that the existence of the story depended on my willingness and creative interpretation. But all those years ago in that first, essential moment of revelation, I felt the appearance of the imaginary “I” as a loss and a betrayal.

But why?

The “I” in Treasure Island is obviously the “I” of a made-up character, whether in Jim’s narrative or, later on in the book, in the narrative of Dr. Live-sey, and every reader, even the eight-year-old reader that I was, quickly accepts the device and allows him- or herself to believe in its fictional reality. We the readers accept the fact that “I” becomes someone who tells us to call him Ishmael, or Marcel, or Robinson; just as we accept the fact that these “I”s can truly speak to us, on intimate terms, across seas and centuries. The reader’s faith not only moves mountains but allows their very stones to speak.

Sometimes, however, such faith seems hardly necessary. In certain cases, the rules of the game tell us that the “I” who speaks is, indeed, the “I” who writes. Under these circumstances, how are we to respond as readers to the “I” that carries the same name as the author, the author disguised not as a fictitious character but as himself, speaking from behind a mask that has the features of his own face? How are we to establish a dialogue with the writer who shamelessly crosses fully dressed into his own creation and forgoes his reality as author for the sake of the reality of a creature made out of words in his own image?

A writer much older than Stevenson may help us towards an answer.

Throughout the whole of Dante’s Commedia runs the subject of identity, echoed in the repeated question of the shades: “Who are you?” The first lines of the poem, too well known to be quoted, conjure up from the very beginning the slender figure of the poet’s first person singular. But who is this “myself” who finds himself in the dark wood midway on the path of life, whose initialed sins are gradually wiped off his forehead as he ascends the laborious Mount Purgatory, who flies through the circular heavens with lightning speed towards the essential, ineffable Face? Are we, his readers, supposed to recognize, as we open the book, this frightened man who recalls for us in fragments particular scenes of his life, harping on the intangible Beatrice, on nebulous ancestors, and on his beloved and hated Florence? Who is it that stands there in the “myself” between the collective “our” that qualifies “life” and the almost anonymous infinitive of “to say”? Who is it that tells us he “returned,” made anew like a budding plant after reaching the starlit mountain top? Whose “desire and will” turn to love at the end of the journey?

Halfway through his descent into Hell, Dante meets souls who have committed violence against nature, where, for reasons not entirely clear from a theological point of view but perfectly understandable for anyone with any experience of the world, artists and politicians don’t mix. Here he meets a trio of distinguished Florentine Guelfs who praise Dante’s inspired “speech” and, like so many other condemned souls, ask him to speak of them when he is back in the world of the living. Earthly fame continues to have its attractions, even for those who are no more.

“Therefore, if you escape these dismal haunts

and return to see again the lovely stars,

mind that you speak of us to living men

when you rejoice in telling them ‘I was there.’ ”

[Inferno, 16.82–85, trans. Richard Howard]