A Reader on Reading

Pinocchio’s superficial reading experience is exactly the opposite of that of another wandering hero (or heroine). In Alice’s world, language is restored to its essential rich ambiguity and any word (according to Humpty Dumpty) can be made to say what its speaker wishes it to say. Though Alice refuses such arbitrary assumptions (“But ‘glory’ does not mean ‘a well-rounded argument,” she tells him), this free-for-all epistemology is the norm in Alice’s world. While in Pinocchio’s world the meaning of a printed story is unambiguous, in Alice’s world the meaning of “Jabberwocky,” for instance, depends on the will of its reader. (It may be useful to recall here that Collodi was writing at a time when the Italian language was being set down officially for the first time, from a choice among numerous dialects, while Lewis Carroll’s English had long been “fixed” and could be opened and questioned in relative safety.)

When I speak of “learning to read” (in the fullest sense I mentioned earlier), I mean something that lies between these two styles or philosophies. Pinocchio responds to the strictures of scholasticism, which, up to the sixteenth century, was the official learning method in Europe. In the scholastic classroom, the student was meant to read as tradition dictated, according to fixed commentaries accepted as the authorities. Humpty Dumpty’s method is an exaggeration of the humanist interpretations, a revolutionary viewpoint according to which every reader must engage with the text on his or her own terms. Umberto Eco usefully limited this freedom by noting that “the limits of interpretation coincide with the limits of common sense;” to which, of course, Humpty Dumpty might reply that what is common sense to him may not be common sense to Eco. But for most readers, the notion of “common sense” retains a certain shared clarity that must suffice. “Learning to read” is then to acquire the means to appropriate a text (as Humpty Dumpty does) and also to partake of the appropriations of others (as Pinocchio’s teacher might have suggested). In this ambiguous field between possession and recognition, between the identity imposed by others and the identity discovered by oneself, lies, I believe, the act of reading.

A fierce paradox exists at the heart of every school system. A society needs to impart the knowledge of its codes to its citizens so that they can become active in it; but the knowledge of that code, beyond the mere ability of deciphering a political slogan, an advertisement, or a manual of basic instructions, enables those same citizens to question that society, to uncover its evils and attempt a change. In the very system that allows a society to function lies the power to subvert it, for better or for worse. So the teacher, the person appointed by that society to unveil to its new members the secrets of its shared vocabularies, becomes in fact a danger to that same society, a Socrates able to corrupt the youth, someone who must on the one hand rebelliously teach civil disobedience and the art of critical questioning and on the other submit to the laws of the society that has assigned the teacher’s position—submit even to the point of self-destruction, as was the case with Socrates. A teacher is forever caught in this double bind: to teach in order to make students think on their own, while teaching according to a social structure that imposes a curb on thinking. School, in Pinocchio’s world as in most of ours, is not a training ground for becoming a better, fuller child but an initiation place to the world of grownups, with its conventions, bureaucratic requirements, tacit agreements, and caste system. There is no such thing as a school for anarchists, and yet, in some sense, every teacher must teach anarchism, must teach the students to question rules and regulations, to seek explanations in dogma, to confront impositions without bending to prejudice, to demand authority from those in power, to find a place from which to speak their own ideas, even if this means opposing, and ultimately doing away with, the teacher herself.