A Reader on Reading

Just before she died, Gertrude Stein was heard to ask, “What is the answer?” As no answer came, she laughed and said, “In that case, what is the question?” Then she died. Stein understood that because our knowledge of the world is fragmentary, we believe the world to be fragmentary. We assume that the bits and pieces we encounter and collect (of experience, pleasure, sorrow, revelation) exist in splendid isolation like each of the motes in a cloud of stardust. We forget the all-encompassing cloud, we forget that in the beginning there was a star. Don Quixote or Hamlet might be the testamentary works of Cervantes and of Shakespeare, Picasso could have put away his brushes after Guernica and Rembrandt after The Night Watch, Mozart could have died happily having composed The Magic Flute and Verdi Falstaff, but we would be missing something. We would be missing the approximations, the tentative versions, the variations, the changes of tone and perspective, the circuitous itineraries, the circumventions, the dealings in the shadows, the rest of their creative universe. We would be missing the errors, the stillbirths, the censored snapshots, the trimmings, the lesser inspired creations. Since we are not immortal, we have to content ourselves with a sampling, and therefore the choice of testamentary works is fully justified. As long as we remember that under the pomp and circumstance there is a rustle and a stirring, a vast, dark, rich forest full of fallen or discarded leaves.

What Song the Sirens Sang

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

“No, I give up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7

THE ODYSSEY IS A POEM OF false beginnings and false endings. In spite of the initial invocation to the Muse, in which the poet begs her to sing (in Robert Fagles’s translation) of “the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy,” the reader feels that these verses are not the start but the conclusion of the story, that the Muse has now ended her task and that everything has already been told.

The first book of the poem closes the seafaring narrative. It tells us that Odysseus left Troy a long time ago, that he suffered many misfortunes, and that neither his wife nor his son know his whereabouts. The last book opens the narrative to future undertakings, leaving the reader in suspense in the middle of a battle interrupted by Athena. But not only do the start and the conclusion of the poem explicitly assume the reader’s foreknowledge. Every one of Odysseus’s adventures carries the assumption of its own outcome and of the poem’s beginning and end. Every new episode assumes the entire Odyssey with a different and never-to-be-accomplished resolution: leading the life of a slave in the arms of the lovely Calypso, becoming guilty of infidelity with Princess Nausicaa, forgetting the world among the Lotus-Eaters, being ignominiously devoured by the cannibal Cyclops, falling victim to the wrath of King Aeolus’s winds, suffering a hideous fate between Scylla and Charybdis, dying under the swords of his wife’s suitors. Tempted by endless endings, Odysseus’s return is an eternal one.

One of these possible fates is prophesized to Odysseus by the ghost of the seer Tiresias in the Underworld: that after the story’s conclusion, once Odysseus has reached his Ithaca again, he will “go forth once more” and come upon “a race of people who know nothing of the sea” and here, among strangers, meet his true end. Dante, who had not read Homer, magically intuited the prophecy and made it come poetically true. In the circle of Hell where liars and cheats are punished, Ulysses (as Odysseus was renamed by the Romans) tells Dante that he did indeed undertake this further voyage, urging his aged companions to set sail once again. The famous passage was rendered by Tennyson in equally famous lines:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Dante’s Ulysses sets off with his old crew, travels westward beyond the horizon, sees a mountain rise from the sea, rejoices but immediately despairs as a storm descends upon the ship and a whirlpool appears in its path and, “as Another willed,” it sinks into the unknown waters. Here ends Dante’s version of the Odyssey’s conclusion. Other than the implicit warning, that Ulysses’ account may not necessarily be the true one since he was condemned to Hell for deceiving, Dante tells us nothing about the old king’s intentions, about his will “to strive, to seek, to find”—what?