A Reader on Reading

First, the mechanical process of learning the code of the script in which the memory of a society is encoded.

Second, the learning of the syntax by which such a code is governed.

Third, the learning of how the inscriptions in such a code can serve to help us know in a deep, imaginative, and practical way ourselves and the world around us.

It is this third learning that is the most difficult, the most dangerous, and the most powerful — and the one Pinocchio will never reach. Pressures of all sorts—the temptations with which society lures him away from himself, the mockery and jealousy of his fellow students, the aloof guidance of his moral preceptors — create for Pinocchio a series of almost insurmountable obstacles to becoming a reader.

Reading is an activity that has always been viewed with qualified enthusiasm by those in government. It is not by chance that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laws were passed against teaching slaves to read, even the Bible, since (it was correctly argued) whoever could read the Bible could also read an abolitionist tract. The efforts and stratagems devised by slaves to learn to read are proof enough of the relationship between civil freedom and the power of the reader, and of the fear elicited by that freedom and that power in rulers of all kinds.

But in a so-called democratic society, before the possibility of learning to read can be considered, the laws of that society are obliged to satisfy a number of basic needs: food, housing, health care. In a stirring essay on society and learning, Collodi has this to say about the republican efforts to implement a system of obligatory schooling in Italy: “As I see it, until now we have thought more about the heads than the stomachs of the classes that are needy and suffering. Now let us think a little more about the stomachs.” Pinocchio, no stranger to hunger, is clearly aware of this primary requirement. Imagining what he might do if he had a hundred thousand coins and were to become a wealthy gentleman, he wishes for himself a beautiful palace with a library “chock-full of candied fruit, pies, panettoni, almond cakes, and rolled wafers filled with whipped cream.” Books, as Pinocchio well knows, won’t feed a hungry stomach. When Pinocchio’s naughty companions hurl their books at him with such bad aim that they fall in the sea, a school of fish hurries to the surface to nibble at the soggy pages, but soon spits them out, thinking, “That’s not for us; we’re used to feeding on much better fare.” In a society in which the citizens’ basic needs are not fulfilled, books are poor nourishment; wrongly used, they can be deadly. When one of the boys hurls a thick-bound Manual of Arithmetic at Pinocchio, instead of hitting the puppet the book strikes another of the boys on the head, killing him. Unused, unread, the book is a deadly weapon.

Even as it sets up a system to satisfy these basic requirements and establish a compulsory education system, society offers Pinocchio distractions from that system, temptations of entertainment without thought and without effort. First in the shape of the Fox and the Cat, who tell Pinocchio that school has left them blind and lame, then in the creation of Funland, which Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick describes in these alluring words: “There are no schools there; there are no teachers there; there are no books there…. Now that’s the sort of place that appeals to me! That’s how all civilized countries should be!” Books, quite rightly, are associated in Lampwick’s mind with difficulty, and difficulty (in Pinocchio’s world as in our own) has acquired a negative sense which it did not always have. The Latin expression “per ardua ad astra,” “through difficulties we reach the stars,” is almost incomprehensible for Pinocchio (as for us) since everything is expected to be obtainable with the least possible expenditure.

But society does not encourage this necessary search for difficulty, this increase in experience. Once Pinocchio has suffered his first misadventures and accepted school and become a good student, the other boys begin to attack him for being what we would today call “a nerd” and laugh at him for “paying attention to the teacher.” “You talk like a printed book!” they tell him. Language can allow the speaker to remain on the surface of thought, mouthing dogmatic slogans and commonplaces in black and white, transmitting messages rather than meaning, placing the epistemological weight on the listener (as in “you know what I mean?”). Or it can attempt to re-create an experience, give shape to an idea, explore in depth and not only on the surface the intuition of a revelation. For the other boys, this distinction is invisible. For them, the fact that Pinocchio speaks “like a printed book” is enough to label him an outsider, a traitor, a recluse in his ivory tower.