A Reader on Reading

A postscript: I believe that, like the erotic act, the act of reading should ultimately be anonymous. We should be able to enter the book or the bed like Alice entering the Looking-Glass Wood, no longer carrying with us the prejudices of our past and relinquishing for that instant of intercourse our social trappings. Reading or making love, we should be able to lose ourselves in the other, into whom—to borrow Saint John’s image—we are transformed: reader into writer into reader, lover into lover into lover. “Jouir de la lecture,” “to enjoy reading,” say the French, for whom reaching orgasm and deriving pleasure are both expressed in a single common word.

Time and the Doleful Knight

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t

talk about wasting it.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7

AFTER THE STORY OF DON QUIXOTE has been brought almost to its end, Sansón Carrasco, the pompous intellectual who believes he can cure all this madness, says that he is the Knight of the White Moon and, swearing that his lady is far more beautiful than Dulcinea, forces the old gentleman to challenge him to a duel. Don Quixote charges against his adversary, falls to the ground badly hurt, and, unable to raise himself, hears Carrasco say that he’ll admit to Dulcinea’s superior charms only if he, Don Quixote, agrees to withdraw to his house for a full year “or until such time by me decided.” The defeated Don Quixote gives his consent. A few further events take place on the following pages, further hallucinations and further enchantments, but as a result of the promise Don Quixote returns with Sancho to his village and asks to be taken to his bed, where a week later, having become once again Alonso Quijano (as the distraught author, Cide Hamete Benegeli, tells us), “he gave up his spirit: I mean to say, he died.”

The year of abeyance that Sansón Carrasco has Don Quixote promise him is, for our hero, a period of impossible time. To stop being Don Quixote for a year, or even for a moment, is to demand that time come to a halt. Don Quixote cannot simultaneously stop being himself and go on living. Don Quixote is a creation of his own reading, and his world, materially alive in all its brutality and violence, is something that he can only know through his activity as a reader. Nothing exists for Don Quixote that has not previously been read, or rather, nothing exists that does not begin and end in his books. Consequently, Don Quixote cannot refuse himself the acting-out of his reading, to continue the story that his life has become, to behave like a knight in arms, because as soon as Alonso Quijano stops reading his dream book, Don Quixote must die. Don Quixote’s time consists of the moments that Alonso Quijano is willing to grant him.

Don Quixote exists (as Alonso Quijano knows) between the covers of Cide Hamete’s book: this, for the reader, is the only true story, and there cannot be other concurrent ones. This is why it is not fortuitous that in the last chapters of Part 2 the characters discuss the false nature of the sequel to Don Quixote published by Avellaneda after the success of Cervantes’s first part of the knight’s adventures. The maid Altisidora, who pretends to have died because of her unrequited love for the old knight, describes her descent to Hell, saying that there she saw a group of devils playing ball with books, who tore Avellaneda’s opus to bits, “a book so bad,” says one of the devils, “that if I tried to produce a worse one on purpose, I wouldn’t succeed.” Neither is it fortuitous that when Alonso Quijano dictates his last will and testament, he instructs his executor to apologize to the apocryphal author for having provided an occasion for writing “such enormous and copious nonsense.” Implicit in this apology is that Avellaneda’s book was nonsense, not the one the reader now holds in his hands. False fiction (wasted time, untruth, fruitless lies) and true fiction (the chronicle of real time, of things as they essentially are) cannot and must not coexist. And Don Quixote, seemingly a believer in witchcraft and magic, never mistakes reality and untruth. Don Quixote’s time is that of the real world, the one we can recognize because we can tell it in a story.