A Reader on Reading

Several characteristics of the song are known to us. The first is its danger, since in its very attraction it makes us forget the world and our responsibilities in it. The second is its revelatory nature, since it tells of what has taken place and of what will take place in the future, of what we already know and of what we cannot discern. Finally, it is a song that can be understood by all, whatever their tongue or birthplace, since almost all men travel the sea and anyone might encounter the fearful Sirens.

These features lead on to further questions. First: where exactly lies the danger of their song? In the melody or in the words? That is to say, in the sound or in the meaning? Second: if their song reveals all, do the Sirens know their own tragic destiny or, like self-reflecting Cassandras, are they alone insensible to their own prophesizing music? And third: what is this language deemed to be universal?

If we suppose with Plato that their song is composed not of words but of musical notes, something in those sounds suffices to lend them sense. Something that the Sirens’ voices transmit (and that cannot be reduced to pure rhythm or intelligence) calls on those who hear them like a rutting animal, emitting a sound untranslatable except as an echo of itself. The Church of the Middle Ages saw in the Sirens an allegory of the temptations that beset the soul in search of God, and in their voices the beastly noises that lure us away from the divine. But it is perhaps for that same reason that the sense of the Sirens’ song, unlike the sense of God’s will, is “not beyond all conjecture.” The problem, I believe, touches upon certain aspects of the essential conundrum of language.

The tongues developed in the Homeric and pre-Homeric world, under the influence of migrations and conquests, for the purpose of both commercial and artistic communication, were “translated” tongues. That is to say, tongues that for reasons of war or trade served to establish connections between Greeks and “barbarians,” between those who called themselves civilized and the others, the speakers of babble. The passage of one vocabulary to another, the translation (in physical terms) of one perception of meaning to another perception of that same meaning is one of the essential mysteries of the intellectual act. Because if a semantic communication, oral or written, colloquial or literary depends on the words that make it up and on the syntax that rules it, what is preserved when we exchange them for other words and another syntax? What remains when we replace the sound, structure, cultural bias, linguistic conventions? What do we translate when we speak to one another from tongue to tongue? Neither the endemic sense nor the sound but something else that survives the transformation of both, whatever remains when all is stripped away. I don’t know if this essence can be defined but perhaps, as an analogy, we might understand it as the Sirens’ song.

Of all its characteristics, the most powerful one is its divinatory nature. All great literature (all literature we call great) survives, more or less painfully, through its reincarnations, its translations, its readings and rereadings, transmitting a sort of knowledge or revelation that in turn expands and illuminates new intuitions and experiences in many of its readers. This creative quality, like the shamanic reading of tortoiseshells or tealeaves, allows us to understand, through the reading of fiction or poetry, something of our own mysterious selves. This procedure entails not just the comprehension of a shared vocabulary but the discernment, in a literary construction, of a newly created meaning. In such cases, it is the reader (not the author) who recomposes and deciphers the text, standing as it were on both sides of the page at once.

In the same section of the Republic in which the Sirens appear, Plato imagines that when the great dead heroes of antiquity were told to choose their future reincarnations, the soul of Odysseus, remembering how ambition had made him suffer in his previous life, chose the life of an ordinary citizen, a fate the other souls had disdainfully discarded. In that instant, Odysseus rejects the glory of Troy, the fame of inventor and strategist, the knowledge of the sea, the dialogue with his cherished dead, the love of princesses and witches, the crown of slayer of monsters, the role of honorable avenger, the reputation of faithful husband: all in exchange for a quiet, anonymous life. We may ask if such wisdom, surprising in a man who felt that the adventurous life was his destiny, was not given to him in the moment when, tied to the mast, he heard the Sirens’ song.