The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  It is when, instead, we read it stumblingly for ourselves, when there’s no other voice to link us into the web of relationship, that we feel the full force of the story’s challenge: You are alone, in a dark wood. Now cope.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Island

  I learnt to read around my sixth birthday. I was making a dinosaur in school from crepe bandage and toilet rolls when I started to feel as if an invisible pump was inflating my head from the inside. My face became a cluster of bumps on a taut sphere, my feet receded and turned into dangling limpnesses too far away to control. The teacher carried me home on her shoulders. I gripped the dinosaur in one hand. It was still wet with green and purple poster paint. After that things turned delirious. I had mumps; and one by one my sister, my mother and my father all caught it from me. The house stayed convalescent in feeling till the last of us was better. It was a long quiet time of curtains closed during the day, and wan slow-moving adults, and bedsheets that seemed as big as the world when you lay in them, each wrinkle a canyon. On my sixth birthday my class came up the road and sang ‘Happy Birthday To You’ in the front garden. It was too nice. I hid behind the curtain in my dressing gown and would not show myself at the upstairs window. Perhaps, for the very first time in my life, I was impatient to be done with a human encounter and to get back to my book. When I caught the mumps, I couldn’t read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together. Primary schools in Britain now sometimes send home a photocopy of a page of Russian or Arabic to remind parents of that initial state when writing was a wall of spiky unknowns, an excluding briar hedge. By the time I reached The Hobbit’s last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a change in the medium. In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing – an object in the world – and become a medium, a substance you look through.

  I. N. In. A. In a. H, o, l, e. In a hole. I, n, t, h, e, g, r, o, u, n, d. In a hole in the ground. L-i-v-e-d-a-h-o-b-b-i-t. In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit … And then I never stopped again.

  Perhaps what has happened when writing seems to liquefy like this is that its effect on us has approximated to the way thoughts move through our minds before we have phrased them in words at all. Perhaps writing at these times feels as if it has returned us by elaborate means to our minds’ least-elaborated mode of operation. Least elaborated means most mysterious. The part of thinking that’s easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright, a shadow theatre or a stage scorched by klieg lights, here we try out voices, including the voice we have settled on as the familiar sound of our identity, although it may not be what other people hear when we speak aloud. But that is the topmost of the linguistic processes going on in the mind. Beneath the auditorium, runs a continuous river of thought that is not only soundless but is not ordered so it can be spoken. For obvious reasons, describing it is difficult. If I dip experimentally into the wordless flow, and then try to recall the sensations of it, I have the impression of a state in which grammar is present – for when I think like this I am certainly construing lucid relationships between different kinds of meaning, and making sense of the world by distinguishing between (for a start) objects and actions – but though there are so to speak noun-like and verb-like concentrations in the flow, I do not solidify them, I do not break them off into word-sized units. Are there pictures? Yes; but I am not watching a slide show, the images do not come in units either. Sometimes there’s a visual turbulence – rapid, tumbling, propelled – that doesn’t resolve into anything like the outlines of separate images. Sometimes one image, like a key, like a presiding motif, will hold steady while a whole train of wordless thoughts flows from its start to its finish. A mountain. A closed box. A rusty hinge.

  This is the layer of the mind which Chomskyans believe is our fundamental organ of linguistic ability, generated by the physical structure of our bodies. The assignment of a noun-like quality to one portion of the undivided flow, and a verb-like quality to another, is grammar in its primary form. Whatever language a human being speaks when he or she goes on to put thought into words, the same structures underlie its particular rules about how meaning is expressed. We all have the same native tongue, deep down where ‘tongue’ can only be a metaphor. If it is true that we process the written word so it communicates with us in the mind’s own language, it is not surprising that writing can be so powerful. But of course a book does not really address us on this level. It’s just a long, long string of symbols. When we read fluently, we pass the symbols by our eye so quickly that – like the frames of a film going through the gate of a projector – we cease to be aware of them as separate, and by a kind of persistence of vision, they seem to flow and move. A book is not another mind in communion with our own. It’s just a software emulation of one, running on the hardware of our brains.

  To achieve the effect, someone reading a book in English has to perform an intricate procedure at high speed: an act of double translation. First, you turn the printed characters into sounds. The alphabet is a set of arbitrary signs standing for the sounds of the spoken language; though not on a straightforward one-to-one basis. Groups of letters build up to represent a single unit of sound, or phoneme, and the sound they make is dictated by the combination. The animal that claws your leg as you watch TV is called a cat, not a kuh-ah-tuh, although as children we’re encouraged to pretend that each letter has its own unvarying sonic identity, to give us some purchase on the first stage of the code we’re learning to crack. Then the second stage. Spoken language is itself an arbitrary code in which the sounds that the human lips, larynx and tongue can produce – the phonemes – stand for the grammatical units, or morphemes, into which meaning is divided; though not on a straightforward one-to-one basis. So you translate writing into speech, and speech into meaning. Graphemes into phonemes, and phonemes into morphemes.

  The complexity of this arrangement allows simplicity at its front end. An alphabetic writing system is extraordinarily compact. It uses a very small number of symbols to express the whole range of possible meanings in a language. You can read English, or Arabic, or Russian, or Hindi by learning between twenty and thirty different squiggles, plus a few punctuation marks representing pauses of different length and intensity. In the traditional form of lead type, the entire roman alphabet – that is, the entire European technology of writing – will fit across the palm of one hand. Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. Converted into binary code in the computers which have taken over from metal type as our culture’s prime means of word storage, the alphabet could be completely displayed as a row of 130 zeroes and ones, or 26 five-digit numbers. (Although in fact it is conventionally represented in the universal ASCII code as the first 26 of 256 eight-digit numbers, leaving the rest available for numerals, punctuation, mathematical symbols, accents, pound and dollar and yen and euro signs, and alphabetic exotica such as the Latin æ, the German ß, and the Nordic ø.) The small space required to store an alphabet in the world is paralleled by its small demand on human memory. As a dinky, discrete little system it lodges in your head among the knowledge of how to do things. Like whistling or riding a bicycle, it can be retrieved from memory without any effort at all. But the economy of the code comes at the price of some cognitive heavy lifting. There’s evidence that dyslexia is a significantly greater problem for children in the alphabet-using cultures than it is in China and Japan, where a written language based on ideograms asks the reader for a single, rather than a double, trans
lation. With ideograms, the character correlates directly with the meaning: graphemes go straight to morphemes. On the other hand, the difficulty that alphabets internalise is externalised in Japan and China in the shape of the vast array of 35,000 or more characters. A Chinese poet or jurist, no matter how learned, will from time to time come across a character they don’t recognise. In a sense, they never finish learning to read. Sparing dementia, stroke, or major head injury, a literate alphabet-user will never come across any b or z they can’t read.

  So the reading flows. So the reading flowed, when I was six with the yellow hardback copy of The Hobbit in my hands; and the pictures came. I went to the door of the hobbit hole with Bilbo as he let in more, and more, and more dwarves attracted by the sign Gandalf had scratched there in the glossy green paint. I jogged along with him on his pony out of the Shire, away from raspberry jam and crumpets, and towards dragons. In The Lord of the Rings, this journey would become a transit from a little, naive space of comfort and tended fields into a dangerous world that besieged it. This time, it was only the natural progression of a story outwards from home. Bilbo’s life in Bag End was like real life, or at any rate like a bachelor fantasy of it, in which fifty is only just grown up, and the highest felicities are a pipe and convivial male company. The further away from Bag End Bilbo went, the more purely he inhabited the world of adventure, and even of epic, until it seemed entirely proper for the dwarves – who’d reminded me faintly of Grumpy and Sneezy and Doc during the comic washing-up scene at the beginning – to speak in archaic, elevated diction: ‘It was rightly guessed that I could not forbear to redeem the Arkenstone, the treasure of my house,’ said Thorin. Bilbo went on sounding like himself, chatty, fussy, scared, resourceful, prosy: ordinary. ‘Dear me! Dear me! I am sure this is all very uncomfortable.’ He was my passport to the mountains, and the caverns, and the hollow halls that the dwarves had sung about back at Bag End, in a kind of promise that the book kept. I was ordinary too; if Bilbo could be there, so could I. Tolkien made him more extravagantly cowardly than I thought of myself as being. ‘Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out “struck by lightning, struck by lightning!” over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time.’ Therefore I believed it when he was also much braver than I could ever have been, riddling with Gollum in the dark or flattering Smaug as the dragon lay on his hoard of ‘gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light’. The angle from which Tolkien looked at Bilbo set a limit on how scary events in The Hobbit could be. Nothing too awful could happen to someone who scurried like Bilbo, even if the goblins did set fire to the tree he was hiding in, and sing about skin crackling, eyes glazing, fat melting and bones blackening. Even if the way out of that trap was an eagle-ride, with Bilbo hanging on to a dwarf’s legs for dear life, and the burning tree a red twinkle in the great dark lands swinging beneath him.

  With Bilbo, I saw the peaks of the Misty Mountains. Mirkwood surrounded me, the forest of fairy tales in particularly gnarled, glimmering, spider-infested form. When Bilbo climbed a tree in Mirkwood to spy out the land, I burst through the canopy of the forest after days in the green gloom, and found the sea of bright breeze-ruffled leaves where velvet-black butterflies played. Not – I find now, re-reading The Hobbit – that Tolkien described any of these things in the detail I remember. His was a speedy, storyteller’s art. It made a few precise suggestions, supplied a few nodal adjectives from which the webwork of an imagined world could grow in a child’s mind, and didn’t linger. I made the pictures. I was lucky that my first book put me in the hands of a writer with such a conscious and decided idea of what a reader’s imagination needed. Tolkien had trained himself on the hard nugget-like specifics of Anglo-Saxon and Viking poetry, with its names for things that were almost spells, and its metaphors that were almost riddles. At six I had no idea that the sea had once been the whale-path, or that Tolkien had any predecessors when he had Bilbo boast to Smaug that he was ‘the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly’. He made bread, blood and diamonds, and the bees as big as thumbs at Bjorn’s house, seem as fresh and vividly discovered as if they had just been thought of, for the first time in the world. What I did know explicitly was that while Tolkien’s words were authoritative, his occasional black-and-white drawings in the text only counted as hints I was free to accept or refuse. What Middle-Earth looked like was my business. Illustrations – I decided – were limitations. I had not been able to picture Bilbo’s face, but I was comfortable with that. It seemed that he existed in a story-space in which it was not necessary that the points of Tolkien’s description of a hobbit (round stomach, bright clothes, hairy feet, clever fingers, good-natured expression) should coalesce into one definite image; and in that, Bilbo was like my parents and my sister, whose ultimately familiar faces I found wouldn’t come either when I shut my eyes and tried to summon them in the brown and purple dark behind my eyelids. No: the natural destiny of a story was to be a rich, unresolved swirl in my visual cortex, and any illustrator who tried to pin it down was taking a liberty.

  At the same time, I couldn’t read quite a lot of the words in The Hobbit. I had accelerated into reading faster than my understanding had grown. If I press my memory for the sensation of reading the second half of the book, when I was flying through the story, I remember, simultaneous with the new liquid smoothness, a constant flicker of incomprehensibility. There were holes in the text corresponding to the parts I couldn’t understand. Words like prophesying, rekindled and adornment had never been spoken in my hearing. No one had ever told me aloud to behold something, and I didn’t know that vessels could be cups and bowls as well as ships. I could say these words over, and shape my mouth around their big sounds. I could enjoy their heft in the sentences. They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons and the fighting of armies: words that conjured the sound of trumpets. But for all the meaning I obtained from them, they might as well not have been printed. When I speeded up, and up, and my reading became fluent, it was partly because I had learned how to ignore such words efficiently. I methodically left out chunks. I marked them to be sorted out later, by slower and more patient mental processes; I allowed each one to brace a blank space of greater or lesser size in its sentence; I grabbed the gist, which seemed to survive even in sentences that were mostly hole; and I sped on.

  I could do this because written English is an extremely robust system. It does not offer the user a brittle binary choice between complete comprehension and complete incomprehension. It tolerates many faults, and still delivers some sense. The reasons why were spelled out in 1948, by Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company, as an incidental consequence of his mathematical research into the capacity of phone networks. Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication has been fruitful for cryptography, the sciences of chaos, literary theory, and the design of the Internet. It can also be applied to a six-year-old reading The Hobbit. Functionally speaking, there is no difference between a phone call one-third obscured by static on the line, a manuscript one-third eaten by mice, and a printed page one-third of whose words you don’t know. Ignorance is just a kind of noise; and Shannon was interested in measuring how much of a message could be disrupted by the noise that’s inevitable on any channel of communication, before it became impossible to decipher it.

  He showed that information, in certain respects, flows through a network like heat flowing in nature. Like the entropy of atoms dispersing into ever greater randomness, an information flow’s entropy could be measured, that is, the relative freedom every passing bit of information had to be any one of the symbols in the set that was in use, whether they were digits, or Morse dots and dashes, or letters of the alphabet. Conversely, it was possible to calculate how much of any information flow was not free to vary, since it was enforced by the structure of the message being transmitted. Suppose that the symbol set in question is the alphabet, and the message is being sent in English. After every let
ter q the next letter must be u. After every letter t the next letter is more likely to be h than any other; and may never be x. I comes before e except after c. All of these rules are expressions of the ‘redundancy’ in English, indications of the ways in which the structure of the written language makes it less than random, and so restricts the possibilities for each element.

  Shannon used ‘redundant’ as a technical term. He did not mean that these rules were not essential to the intricate, delicate ways by which we convey meaning in writing. But the more highly structured a message was, the more its individual elements were indeed redundant in the sense that they could be dispensed with, and the more the message could be compressed, or edited, or subjected to electrical storms and mice and ignorance, without losing its intelligibility. If u invariably followed q, then u really added no extra information to q. U could therefore be taken away and nothing would be lost from the meaning. The person receiving the message – Shannon concluded – would be able to understand it adequately if noise removed any amount of the message up to the maximum redundancy built into the message by its structure. He did a quick statistical survey of written English, and calculated that it had a redundancy of about 50 per cent. Up to half of an English text could be deleted before doing such critical damage to its message that you’d give up and say Eh? A page of The Hobbit could have had Tipp-Ex rained down on up to half its words, or been cloven by dwarvish axes so long as it was not quite cloven in twain, and I would have been able to follow it. My mental blanking when the print spelled out a-d-o-r-n-m-e-n-t could not stop the flow of story from the book into my mind.

  I found that the gaps in the text where I did not know words began to fill themselves in from the edges, as if by magic. It was not magic. I was beginning to acquire the refined and specialised sense of probability that a reader gets from frequent encounters with the texture of prose: not just the probabilities of which letters and words would follow each other that Shannon had studied, in his brief survey of language as one transmission system among many, but all the larger probabilities governing the shapes of paragraphs and chapters, all the way up to the over-arching rules – or meta-rules – of story itself, that grand repertoire of beginnings and middles and ends. Unknown words picked up meaning from the words around them; meanings that worked well enough in context, though sometimes I was completely wrong.