One of my university professors, who was also a poet, used to say that there was only one real question to be asked about any work, and that was – is it alive, or is it dead? I happen to agree, but in what does this aliveness or deadness consist? The biological definition would be that living things grow and change, and can have offspring, whereas dead things are inert. In what way can a text grow and change and have offspring? Only through its interaction with a reader, no matter how far away that reader may be from the writer in time and in space. “Poems don’t belong to those who write them,” says the lowly poem-filching postman to the poet Pablo Neruda in the film II Postino.32 “They belong to those who need them.” And so it is.
Everything used by human beings as a symbol has its negative or demonic version, and the most demonic version of the text with a life of its own that I can remember comes again from Kafka. There’s a Jewish legend concerning the Golem, an artificial man who could be brought to life by having a scroll with the name of God inscribed on it placed in his mouth. But the Golem could get out of control and run amok, and then you were in trouble.33 Kafka’s story is a sort of Golem story. It’s called “In the Penal Colony,” and it revolves around a justice machine used by the administration to execute prisoners, who have not been informed beforehand of their crime. To start the machine up, a text with the sentence written on it – a sentence devised by the former commander of the colony, who is now dead – is inserted into the top. The sentence is a sentence in both senses of the word – it’s a grammatical sentence, and it’s the sentence imposed on the man to be executed. The justice machine then carries out its functions by writing the sentence with an array of pen-like glass needles, in intricate calligraphy and with many flourishes, on the actual body of the condemned man. The criminal is supposed to achieve illumination after six hours, when he comes to understand what is being written on him. “ ‘Enlightenment dawns on the dullest,’ ” says the officer who worships this machine. “ ‘It begins around the eyes. From there it spreads out … Nothing further happens, the man simply begins to decipher the script, he purses his lips as if he were listening.’ ”34 (This is a novel method of teaching reading, which has yet to be tested by the school system.)
The end of the story comes when the officer, realizing that the old letter of the law is now a dead letter, sacrifices himself to his own machine; but this time it doesn’t work properly. Its cogs and wheels break off and roll away, but by now the thing has a life of its own and it just keeps on going, scribbling and jabbing, until the officer is dead.
In this story the writer is inhuman, the page is the reader’s body, and the text is indecipherable. Poet Milton Acorn has a line that goes, “as a poem erases and re-writes its poet,”35 which also makes the text the active partner, but I doubt that Kafka’s variation is quite what he meant.
More usually, the living word is presented in a much more positive light. In the theatre – particularly the Elizabethan theatre – there was often a moment at the end of a play at which the text stepped out of its frame, so to speak, and the play appeared for a moment to be no play at all, but alive in the same sense as its audience. One of the actors would advance out front and address the audience directly. “Hello, I’m not really who you thought I was; actually I’m an actor, and this is a wig. Hope you enjoyed the play, imperfect though it was, and if you did, please treat us actors gently and give us some applause,” was what these speeches in effect were saying. Or there might be a prologue – again, apart from the main action – in which an actor said a few words about the play, and recommended it to the audience, and then stepped back into his frame again and became part of the dramatis personae.
These moments of recommendation, or of revelation and conclusion, were recreated by many writers of novels and longer poems in little vignettes, either as a prologue, or as an envoi, a sending off. The ancestry of the form is most obvious when a novelist is pretending that his book is some sort of play: Thackeray, for instance, has a section at the beginning of Vanity Fair called “Before the Curtain,” in which he says his book is a puppet show within Vanity Fair itself – a fair that consists of the readers, among others – and he, the author, is only the Manager of the Performance. And at the end of the book he says, “Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” But in many prologues or envois, the writer reveals himself as the creator of the work, and writes what amounts to a defense of the book’s character, like a letter accompanying a job application or something on a patent-medicine bottle, supposedly from a satisfied client.
Or, at the end of the story, the writer may send off his book as if waving goodbye to it as it sets out on a journey – he or she wishes it well, and sees it on its way; and he may say goodbye also to the reader who has been the silent partner and collaborator thus far on the journey. Prologue and envoi have a lot to say about the complex but intimate connection between writer and book, and then between book and reader. Quite frequently the book is little – “Go, little book” – almost as if it is a child, who must now make its own way in the world; but its way – its duty – consists in carrying itself to the reader, and delivering itself as best it can. “You understand,” says Primo Levi in a letter to his German translator, “it is the only book I have written and now … I feel like a father whose son has reached the age of consent and leaves, and one can no longer look after him.”36 One of the most disarming envois is by François Villon, the rascally and perennially broke fifteenth-century French poet, who instructed his poem to get a very urgent message through to a wealthy prince:
Go my letter, make a dash
Though you haven’t feet or tongue
Explain in your harangue
I’m crushed by lack of cash.37
Other writers are less blunt; instead, they display a friendly concern for the reader. Here is the Russian poet Pushkin, saying a charming goodbye to the reader at the end of his poem, Eugene Onegin:
Reader, I wish that, as we parted –
whoever you may be, a friend,
a foe – our mood should be warm-hearted.
Goodbye, for now we make an end.
Whatever in this rough confection
you sought – tumultuous recollection,
a rest from all its toils and aches,
or just grammatical mistakes,
a vivid brush, a witty rattle –
God grant that from this little book
for heart’s delight, or fun, you took –
for dreams, or journalistic battle,
God grant you took at least a grain.
On this we’ll part; goodbye, again.38
Two of the earliest and also the most complete pieces of writing of this sort are by John Bunyan; they come at the front of Parts One and Two of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Part One prologue, “The Author’s Apology for his Book,” is more like an advertisement than anything else – these are the many good things this book can do for you, plus a list of the wholesome ingredients – but in the Part Two prologue, called “The Author’s Way of Sending Forth his Second Part of the ‘Pilgrim,’ ” the book has become a person:
Go, now my little Book to every place,
Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his Face,
Call at their door if any say, “Who’s there?”
Then answer thou, “Christiana is here.”39
Bunyan then gives his book a list of detailed instructions; but the book becomes frightened of its assignment, and begins to answer back. Bunyan reassures it, and replies to its objections by telling it what to say in various difficult situations; and finally he tells it, or her, that no matter how wonderful she is, there will be some people that won’t like her, because that’s just the way it is:
Some love no Cheese, some love no Fish, and some
Love not their Friends, nor their own house or home;
Some start at Pig, slight Chicken, love not Fowl,
More than they love a Cuckoo or an Owl.
<
br /> Leave such, my Christiana, to their choice,
And seek those who to find thee will rejoice …40
Useful and bracing advice for any book, I think. The Ancient Mariner has an auditor who cannot choose but hear, but not all narrators have such a glittering eye, or such luck. Bunyan concludes with a very Protestant, fiscally honest, frugal, cheap-for-the-price sort of prayer:
Now may this little Book a blessing be,
To those that love this little Book and me,
And may its Buyer have no cause to say,
His Money is but lost or thrown away …41
Christiana has turned back into a book, a book-as-object, and an object that is for sale.
Such transformations – from book to person, from person to book – are in fact quite common. They can also be quite double-edged. We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist. This is the fate of Peter Kien, the protagonist of Elias Canetti’s novel Auto da Fé. Auto da fé means “act of faith,” and refers to the mass burnings of “heretics” once put on by the Inquisition. Kien is a collector of books, and loves their physical presence, though he detests novels – they have too much feeling in them. He loves these book-objects of his, but in a twisted way: he hoards them; and we know he’s in spiritual trouble when he refuses to let a little boy who is hungry for knowledge read any of them, and instead kicks him downstairs.
Early in the book, Kien has a nightmare. The scene is a bonfire, combined with an Aztec-style human sacrifice, but when the victims chest is cut open, instead of a heart, out comes a book – and then another book, and then another. These books fall into the flames. Kien tells the victim to close up his chest, to save the books, but no: more and more books pour out. Kien rushes into the fire to save them, but whenever he puts out his hand to save a book, he clutches a shrieking human being. “ ‘Let me go,’ ” Kien shouts. “ ‘I don’t know you. What do you want with me! How can I rescue the books!’ ”42
But he’s missed the point. The human beings in the dream are the books – they are the human element in the books. He hears the voice of God, which says, “ ‘There are no books here,’ ” but he misinterprets it. At the end of the novel, all the books he has collected come to life and turn against him – they are his prisoners, he has locked them up in his private library, and now they want their messages set free; for, as I’ve said, books must travel from reader to reader in order to stay alive. Finally he sets fire to them, and himself along with them: an auto da fé, the fate of a heretic. As the books burn, he can hear their letters escaping from the Dead Letter Office he has created, out into the world again.
Sometimes the book is allowed to speak on its own behalf, without the writer’s intervention. Here is a poem by Jay Macpherson, called simply “Book.” Not only is this a talking book, it’s a riddle, the answer to which is contained in its title.
Dear Reader, not your fellow flesh and blood
– I cannot love like you, nor you like me –
But like yourself launched out upon the flood,
Poor vessel to endure so fierce a sea.
The water-beetle travelling dry and frail
On the stream’s face is not more slight than I;
Nor more tremendous is the ancient whale
Who scans the ocean floor with horny eye.
Although by my creator’s will I span
The air, the fire, the water and the land,
My volume is no burden to your hand.
I flourish in your sight and for your sake.
His servant, yet I grapple fast with man:
Grasped and devoured, I bless him. Reader, take.43
As well as being a boat, a whale, and the angel who wrestled with Jacob and blessed him, the little book is the object of consumption in a communion meal – the food that may be devoured but never destroyed, the feast that renews itself as well as the feast-guests’ link with the spiritual. The angel must not only be grappled with, it must be assimilated by the reader, so that it becomes a part of him or her.44
This brings me to my last question: where is the writer when the reader is reading? There are two answers to that. First, the writer is nowhere. In his small piece called “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges inserts a parenthetical aside about his own existence. “(If it is true that I am someone)” he says.45 By the time we, the readers, come to read those lines, that’s a very big if, because by the time the reader is reading, the writer may not even exist. The writer is thus the original invisible man: not there at all but also very solidly there, at one and the same time, because the second answer to the question – Where is the writer when the reader is reading? – is, “Right here.” At least we have the impression that he or she is right here, in the same room with us – we can hear the voice. Or we can almost hear the voice. Or we can hear a voice. Or so it seems. As the Russian writer Abram Tertz says in his story “The Icicle,” “Look, I’m smiling at you, I’m smiling in you, I’m smiling through you. How can I be dead if I breathe in every quiver of your hand?”46
In Carol Shields’s novel Swann: A Mystery,47 about a murdered woman poet and also about her readers, we find out that the original versions of the dead woman’s poems are no longer fully legible – they were written on scraps of old envelopes and got thrown into the garbage by mistake, which blurred them quite a bit. Not only that, a resentful connoisseur has gone around destroying the few remaining copies of the first edition. But several readers have luckily memorized the poems, or parts of them, and at the end of the book they create – or recreate – one of these poems before our very eyes, by reciting the fragments. “Isis keeps Osiris alive by remembering him,” says Dudley Young.48 “Remembering” as a pun may of course have two senses – it is the act of memory, but it is also the opposite of dismembering. Or this is what the ear hears. Any reader creates by assembling the fragments of a read book – we can read, after all, only in fragments – and making them into an organic whole in her mind.
Perhaps you will remember the end of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic nightmare, Fahrenheit 451.49 All the books are being burnt, in favor of wraparound TV screens that allow for more complete social control. Our hero, who begins as a fireman helping to destroy the books,50 becomes a convert to the secret resistance movement dedicated to preserving books and, along with them, human history and thought. At length he finds himself in a forest where the insurgents are hiding out. Each has become a book, by memorizing it. The fireman is introduced to Socrates, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and many more, all of them reciting the books they have assimilated, or “devoured.” The reader has in effect eliminated the middle point of the triangle – the text in its paper version – and has actually become the book, or vice versa.
With this circuit complete, I will go back to the first question – for whom does the writer write? And I will give two answers. The first is a story about my first real reader.
When I was nine, I was enrolled in a secret society, complete with special handshakes, slogans, rituals, and mottoes. The name of this was the Brownies, and it was quite bizarre. The little girls in it pretended to be fairies, gnomes, and elves, and the grownup leading it was called Brown Owl. Sadly, she did not wear an owl costume, nor did the little girls wear fairy outfits. This was a disappointment to me, but not a fatal one.
I did not know the real name of Brown Owl, but I thought she was wise and fair, and as I needed someone like that in my life at the time, I adored this Brown Owl. Part of the program involved completing various tasks, for which you might collect badges to sew on to your uniform, and in aid of various badge-collecting projects – needlework stitches, seeds of autumn, and so forth – I made some little books, in the usual way: I folded the pages, and sewed them together with sock-darning wool. I then inserted
text and illustrations. I gave these books to Brown Owl, and the fact that she liked them was certainly more important to me than the badges. This was my first real writer–reader relationship. The writer, me; the go-between, my books; the recipient, Brown Owl; the result, pleasure for her, and gratification for me.
Many years later, I put Brown Owl into a book. There she is, still blowing her whistle and supervising the knot tests, in my novel Cat’s Eye, for the same reason that a lot of things and people are put into books. That was in the 1980s, and I was sure the original Brown Owl must have been long dead by then.
Then a few years ago a friend said to me, “Your Brown Owl is my aunt.” “Is?” I said. “She can’t possibly be alive!” But she was, so off we went to visit her. She was well over ninety, but Brown Owl and I were very pleased to see each other. After we’d had tea, she said, “I think you should have these,” and she took out the little books I had made fifty years before – which for some reason she’d kept – and gave them back to me. She died three days later.
On Writers and Writing Page 14
