A Reader on Reading

Tiresias had told him that after the last, mysterious voyage his death would be peaceful, “a gentle, painless death … borne down with the years in ripe old age / with all your people there in blessed peace around you.” Dante was unable to grant it to him, and neither did the generations of poets who each in his own way translated the Sirens’ song. Almost all, from Homer to Joyce and Derek Walcott, demanded that Odysseus/Ulysses be an adventurer. Only a few, Plato among them, intuited that Odysseus alone could change his given destiny after discovering his true self in the song he is made to hear. In the fourth century A.D., the rhetorician Libanius, friend of Julian the Apostate, argued in his Apology of Socrates that Homer had written the Odyssey in praise of the man who, like Socrates, wished to know himself.

Dante too recognized the necessary ambiguity of the Sirens’ song, which allows each listener to hear a different version. In the nineteenth canto of Purgatorio, Dante dreams a dream. He sees (in W. S. Merwin’s translation),

a stammering

woman, cross-eyed, and her feet were crooked, her hands mangled, and her color faded.

Dante looks at her, and his gaze renders her beautiful. The woman begins to sing, and her song dazzles the poet.

“I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet siren

who lures sailors astray out on the sea

so full of pleasure they are when they hear me.

I turned Ulysses from his wandering course

with my singing, and he leaves me seldom

who is at home with me, so wholly do I satisfy him.”

Suddenly, “a watchful and holy lady” appears beside them and calls upon Virgil to tell Dante who this apparition really is. Virgil grabs the Siren, tears open her dress, and reveals a pestilential belly whose stench wakes Dante from his dream.

The Siren (as conceived by the poet) is the creation of Dante’s erotic desire, a desire that transforms the image he looks on, exaggerating its features until it acquires a haunting but false beauty. The Siren, as Virgil attempts to show his charge, is not a true amorous vision but a reflection of his own perverted longing. The Siren and her song are projections of that which Dante hides from himself, a shadow of his own dark side, unspeakable and hallucinatory, the secret text that Dante’s dream conjures up and that his consciousness attempts to decipher. This is a possible interpretation of Dante’s Siren. But perhaps more can be read in her changing apparition.

Centuries later, Kafka suggested that, faced with Odysseus’s expectations, the Sirens kept still, either because they wished to defeat him with their silence or because they were themselves seduced by the powerful gaze of the hero, and that the clever Ulysses only pretended to hear the magic song which they denied him. In this case, we might add, it was neither the sound nor the words that Ulysses perceived but a sort of blank page, the perfect poem, taught between writing and reading, on the point of being conceived.

Later still, Jorge Luis Borges, attempting to define his ars poetica, wrote,

They say that Ulysses, tired of astonishments

Wept for love at once again seeing his Ithaca

Humble and green. Art is like that Ithaca

Of green eternity, not of mere astonishments.

We too can imagine — why not?—that Ulysses, like Dante in Purgatory, was able to transform, through his amorous desire, the Sirens and their song. We can imagine him, “tired of astonishments,” reading the apparition, and its voice or its silence, as something uniquely personal. We can imagine him translating the Sirens’ universal language into a singular and intimate tongue in which he then composes an all-encompassing autobiography, past, present and future, a mirrored poem in which Ulysses recognizes, and also discovers, his true self.

Perhaps this is the way in which all literature works.

PART FIVE

The Ideal Reader

At last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-Glass

book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass,

the words will all go the right way again.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1

Notes Towards a Definition

of the Ideal Reader

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all

the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that

haven’t been invented just yet.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6

THE IDEAL READER IS THE writer just before the words come together on the page.

The ideal reader exists in the moment that precedes the moment of creation.

Ideal readers do not reconstruct a story: they re-create it.

Ideal readers do not follow a story: they partake of it.

A famous children’s book program on the BBC always started with the host asking, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin.” The ideal reader is also the ideal sitter.

Depictions of Saint Jerome show him poised over his translation of the Bible, listening to the word of God. The ideal reader must learn how to listen.