The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  The obvious irony here is that Holden Caulfield is an archetype of sympathetic wavering: the preppy on the loose in New York, ricocheting about in the bewildering space between childhood and adulthood, he decides that people are phoney and then unmakes the decision, is repelled and then attracted without knowing why, a moment later, observed all the while by the adult consciousness of Salinger which makes no explicit sound, but controls Holden’s voice, and sees further than Holden does what emergent shape his adventures have. Every adolescent boy who reads the book feels a bit like him, but usually you feel that he’s doing being a lost boy more completely than you, with a fictive conviction and whole-heartedness. You have to be really fucked-up to feel something stabilising in your resemblance to him.

  Another irony, more general, is present too. The ability to feel you have a special bond with the protagonist of a bestseller is dependent on the segregation of readers that is designed into books by their form. Books are a mass medium, but there is no way for readers to be aware of one another. The lines of attention run from reader to book, never laterally from reader to reader. A reader feels alone in a book, but is actually one of a crowd, all occupying the same points in textual space, all making a hubbub that none of them can hear. If the readers of Catcher in the Rye were visible to each other, it would become clear that the solitary paths of Holden’s thoughts are actually intensively trafficked. Imagine the endless parking-lots, the turnstiles, the take-a-number-machines, the endless queues of pissed-off youth, with their long hair, short hair, greasy hair, confrontationally shaved hair, their combat jackets and anoraks and golf club blazers sarcastically worn; all of them, John Hinckley and Mark Chapman mere dots in the throng, all shuffling forward to take their turn at the front end of the attraction, where each reader steps up and looks through Holden Caulfield’s eyes, at a room in a house in Pennsylvania on an icy evening in the 1940s, a room whose other occupant, a flu-gripped teacher, has no idea he is speaking to a million people. ‘“I’d like to put some sense into that head of yours, boy. I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help you, if I can.” He really was, too. You could see that. But it was just that we were too much on opposite sides of the pole, that’s all.’

  I wasn’t single-minded enough to be a lone gunman. I wasn’t looking for one perfect reflection of myself in a character. For me, the promise of books lay in them being multiple. They were inexhaustible because, turning disappointed or self-disgusted away from one book, you could always hope that the next would hit just the right spot, and remind you why you kept reading.

  *

  Instead, I discovered meta-fiction: stories about stories. The first monument of adult literature I discovered for myself was not Jane Austen at thirteen, but, at seventeen, the dull-green-spined Penguin Modern Classics edition of the collected stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges took me to a place where dry, crabbed, pedantic phrases could be the language of wonder. He made annotation into a technique of shimmering paradox. His footnotes had no bottom to them: you could fall through, and keep falling, tumbling without end into an abyss of recursive possibilities. Reference was the essence of what he did, pointing your attention from one apparently existing thing to another one, but it was always unreliable, because so many of the books, persons, places, flowers, gems, ideas he named, were invented by him, glimmering into existence for just that moment at which he referred to them; and so many of the boxes he suggested you open were either empty, or contained an infinitely nested set of other ever-smaller boxes, or were larger on the inside than the outside, or, strangest of all, had no inside at all. In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, he proposed a novel in which, at every point of decision, both outcomes took place, until the book contained ‘a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times’. In ‘The Library of Babel’, he sketched – or rather, ‘adumbrated’, to use one of the words from his mannered, repetitive vocabulary of favourites – a universe consisting entirely of ventilation shafts and hexagonal galleries, lined with identical volumes, whose pages contain every conceivable permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet as they can be arranged at random over 410 pages. But not in order; the books are shuffled at random, and a librarian can walk for many miles over many years to find a single intelligible sentence, knowing all the while that, because the library comprises all possible permutations, it must therefore include

  the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in every language, the interpolations of every book into all books …

  Borges’ characteristic manoeuvre was a version, in story, of the Möbius twist that the mathematical philosophers had discovered early in the twentieth century. Hoping to put logic on a foundation of consistent, comprehensive axioms, Bertrand Russell found instead that the ability of a set to include itself as a member set off a rip in the axiomatic fabric into which the whole hope for reliable, consistent knowledge was then inexorably sucked, like a black hole devouring the philosophic space. Later, Kurt Gödel showed that even the simplest mathematical system, like arithmetic, had the potential to eat its own tail in the same way, and therefore could not be proved to map reality reliably. Borges haunted these points of conceptual un-making, using the power of the authorial voice to be both within the story and (simultaneously) its external sustainer, as his analogue of Russell’s problem, and thus the means to prise open a vortex. Into the classification system of an imaginary Chinese encyclopaedia, he introduced the category of ‘things contained in this encyclopaedia’, a part which must therefore contain the whole, which in turn must contain the part, that contains the whole, ad infinitum; and this was just one of his most modest and local embodiments of the idea. Here, in Borges’ work, story became almost pure form. It contained just enough substance – just enough naming and evocation – to furnish the ideas with a backing, like the film of mercury on the back of a mirror that allows a flat thing to contain ever-receding depths. Borges’ stories actually reached the state that the dumbest idea-led science fiction only approximated to. They were truly about something other than people. They were about themselves, about the interesting diagrams that the multiplicity of things books do will make, if you reduce them to pure lines and angles: perfect reading, in a way, for Piaget’s last age, of ‘abstract operations’.

  They seduced me; and when prolonged exposure to Borges’ unchanging circuit of preoccupations had left me feeling bleak, I could turn to meta-fiction’s European branch, represented by Italo Calvino, where the residual human content backing the lovely forms was a little bit warmer, a little bit more conversational and expansive. I collected the thin, elegant Picador translations of his books. The conceptual cities of Invisible Cities were limpidly beautiful. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller managed to proceed, conjuriously, by sampling for you the different types of pleasure that you, the book’s reader, might obtain from the first chapters of ten different novels you stumbled across in the fruitless search to get hold of a copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. It sounded, from time to time, as if Calvino was regretting language’s inadequacy to convey the world; but in fact, at these moments, he was always slyly demonstrating how, by slitting an incision in one level of representation, and pulling through the one below in a decorative rosette, he could replace dull old, mute old, heavy old material reality, and have language do everything that atoms used to. ‘To tell it as I would like,’ he wrote in The Non-Existent Knight, the story of an empty suit of armour in the service of Charlemagne,

  this blank page would have to bristle with reddish rocks, flake with pebbly sand, sprout sparse juniper trees. In the midst, on a twisting ill-marked track, I would set Agilulf, passing erect on
his saddle, lance at rest. But this page would have to be not only a rocky slope but the dome of the sky above, so low that there is room only for a flight of cawing rooks in between. With my pen I should also trace faint dents in the paper to represent the slither of a snake through grass or a hare crossing a heath …

  I had always reduced books to pattern in my memory, preferring the inside curves of story to the difficulties of engagement with the things the story represented. Now, I had found stories that were pure pattern already; that took the pleasures I had enjoyed in The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and twisted them around on themselves, till they met their own beginnings in a sealed, self-conscious loop of narration that needed nothing outside itself.

  *

  Utopias took away everything discreditable about humanity. The black flag absorbed destructive impulses while it denied them. The textual abyss swallowed the whole world. To chart my mind’s geography at eighteen, imagine that in the place where a clearing in the forest had once been, and then an island in the sea of possibilities, and then a busy town on the lonely prairie, the space that books made in me now centred on a sinkhole, a circular gap in the fabric, that sucked troubling emotion into itself. But at the same time that I found metafiction, I discovered another kind of writing, in which the holes weren’t abstract at all, in which nothingness became hot and fleshy: porn, of course.

  In the early 1980s, when I began reading one-handedly, the present incredible profusion of ‘erotic novels’ didn’t yet exist. The first dirty book I tried was the novel of Emmanuelle. It didn’t do much for me. It still had some connection to reality, it still had a faint intention to represent something, a milieu of chic hedonism among the minor French diplomats and swinging air-hostesses of Bangkok, circa 1970. The people in Emmanuelle were just real enough to waken my real-world sense of judgement. They obliged you to notice that they were boring airheads. While you waited for them to have sex, you had to listen to them talk drivel. This was not what I wanted pornography to be. I had no wish for books that resembled, or mimicked, or supplemented my own gauche experience of sex. By then the waiting was over. I had made some actual love with an actual female person, and I had discovered that, whether you were feeling kind or feeling edgy, feeling bored or feeling excited, there was nothing like real sex for driving you out of your head and into your skin, for stopping you caring about conceptual geography, for delivering you both, sweating and trembling, to the heart of reality, to reality at its most consequential, where you feel your heart beating, and know that your finite number of heartbeats really ought to be laid out on the pursuit of happiness. Sex made you feel terminally alive. In short, real sex turned out to be the quintessence of the kind of connected experience I had always looked to books to counter-balance. If I was going to read about sex, I wanted it to be a kind of sex that exploited text’s liquid ability to do things that reality didn’t; more than that, I wanted it to exert, like the other kinds of reading that had hooked me, a pressure that kept reality at bay. And I wanted it to elicit and enact and soak up the emotions from the sump of my psyche that I would not dare to allow near a real person. C. S. Lewis once praised tales of the marvellous which are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience’. That was what I wanted porn to be. Emmanuelle failed the test comprehensively.

  But then, in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge, I chanced on a series of Grove Press paperbacks that claimed to be suppressed Victorian classics. These American imports were packaged in chocolate-box colours and trimmed with curly Art Nouveau type, in the line with the marketing ploy. Each had a woman’s name as a title (‘Beatrice’, ‘Davina’) and a gauzy photo of a 1970s nymph looking wistfully nude in a field of poppies. Very Athena poster, very Silvikrin shampoo. On the inside, however, there was nothing soft-focus about the way they conjured up female bodies in prose. The writing grabbed at what it described. It grasped it, it squeezed it. It evoked flesh as if to pinch it between noun and adjective. It took exact, almost obsessional note of different kinds of tissue: the berry-like crimping of a nipple, the rubbery knot of a navel, the smooth weight of a thigh. It looked at the colours of bodies, and even at the colours of the shadows on them, specifying cinnamon highlights, ginger-shaded clefts, pubic hair in tight yellow curls.

  I recognised this. It was another manifestation of the greed for particulars I had always sought out in stories. And now the greedy story had become angry too. It was not just that these books were as eager for punishments as for actual sex: the anger was intrinsic, it was written into the way the luscious female bodies were seen in the first place. To the eye of this kind of story, the curves of a woman were imbued with a scarcely tolerable power, which intensified the more voluptuous she was, the more closely she approximated to porn’s anatomically unlikely ideals of bulbousness. Women inspired desire by being the objects, of all the objects in the world, in which the Keatsian delights of texture and colour and scent were most concentrated; the warm and bountiful surfaces against which you most wanted to press and huddle. More than that: they broadcast desire, they did desire to men, and so to you, the male reader, when they were evoked on the page. But at the same time, they thwarted desire, by not quite being objects at all, by not being as open to possession as all the other objects which they exceeded in desirability. They weren’t biteable like apples, they weren’t driveable like cars. It was as if women were playing an unfair trick, and they did it, this invidious, provocative withholding of themselves, merely by being people. The solution was to push into them; to cram the omnipotent imaginary dick with which porn equipped its reader, into the three openings in them about which porn was interchangeably excited, making them all hole. Porn first worked itself (and me) into excited fury by conjuring women’s bodily frontiers. Then it breached them. Farther up and farther in! – as it said in the Narnia books. This vengeful wish didn’t have to be embodied in a literal rape fantasy. In fact, I avoided the books that were crass enough and guileless enough to make me notice that that’s what it amounted to. Anger could perfectly well be worked out in fucks that looked rapturously consenting. The force was already there in the language, which at these moments of resolution deliberately crossed the line separating the words properly used to describe people from those used to denote things. The challenge for the pornographer was to go a fraction further than even their reader’s most coldly assessing self expected, to produce a new shock of verbal reduction, and therefore a new sense of possession. Successful porn transfixed you at the same moment that, by one orifice or another, it invited you to transfix its imaginary harem.

  So I read Davina and I read Beatrice, and without looking too closely at it I poured into them a jealous anger that went all the way back, I’m sure, to the (male) infant’s first discovery that the warm breast they depend upon belongs to a person, who has the power to walk away. I read as if the fantasies the porn enacted were entirely the authors’ responsibility, and vanished back between the covers when I shut the book, having rid me of something I didn’t want to own. I would even, as a farewell to porn, play over what I’d just read from the point of view of the female character, letting my sense of outrage and resistance tell me that I was still a nice guy. Everything was hunky-dory. I knew that by reading these nasty and corrupted specimens of fiction I was deliberately betraying the things I honoured in story. I knew that there was a blatant contradiction between this brutish thingifying of women, and my nervous attention to them as individuals in real life. But I didn’t care. I wanted to be nasty. I wanted to transgress again, to go across this new line fiction offered me. Now, as well as loving books, and learning from them, I could consummate the relationship by having sex with them.

  Only from time to time I began to find that the sharply gross phrases the porn came up with to seal my possession of its warm channel to nowhere, left me feeling as if I had murdered someone. And soon I would discover that wh
en a fantasy collapses, when the unreal estate you have been manipulating in the service of desire turns back to vacuum, and you find yourself confronting your own wishes undisguised by story, the encounter is not fun; for everything you put into a story, you store in yourself, there being no such thing in inner geography as a truly bottomless hole. Whatever you bury returns some day, to remind you of what you have left undone.

  *

  That’s about it. Those are the origins of my life as a reader. Bridget died when she was twenty-two, of cystine deposits in her brain, an organ that can’t be transplanted. ‘I’m sick of living at the frontiers of medical knowledge,’ she said soon before the end. She lingered long enough for my father to read her the whole of The Lord of the Rings, aloud. I went off to university, and there I met people whose privacy isn’t mine to dispense with. So the rest is none of your business.

  Except for this one scene, which repeats, in spite of all the self-knowledge I have ever been able to muster. I’ve fucked things up again. My heart is broken. I have lost my life’s jewel. I am inconsolable. I go into a bookshop. And as I walk down the aisles, I remember that in every novel there are reverses, that all plots twist and turn, that sadness and happiness are just the materials authors use, in arrangements I know very well; and at that thought the books seem to kindle into a kind of dim life all round me, each one unfolding its particular nature into my awareness without urgency, without haste, as if a column of grey, insubstantial smoke were rising from it, softening the air, filling it with words and actions which are all provisional, which could all be changed for others, according to taste. Among these drifting pillars, the true story of my life looks no different; it is just a story among stories, and after I have been reading for a while, I can hardly tell any more which is my own.