A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  THE MISSING FIRST PAGE

  n my last year of high school, at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, a teacher whose name I don’t care to remember stood in front of the class and read to us the following:

  All that allegories intend to say is merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and that we already know. But the problems we struggle with every day are a different matter. On this subject, a man once asked: “Why such stubbornness? If you only followed the allegories, you yourselves would become allegories and in that way solve all your everyday problems.”

  Another said: “I bet that is also an allegory.”

  The first said: “You have won.”

  The second said: “But alas, only allegorically.”

  The first said: “No, in real life. Allegorically you have lost.”1

  The short text, which our teacher never tried to explain, troubled us and provoked many discussions in the smoky café La Puerto Rico, just around the corner from the school. Franz Kafka wrote it in Prague in 1922, two years before his death. Forty-five years later, it left us, inquisitive adolescents, with the unsettling feeling that any single interpretation, any conclusion, any sense of having “understood” him and his allegories, was wrong. What those few lines suggested was not only that every text can be read as an allegory (and here the distinction between “allegory” and the less dogmatic concept of “symbol” becomes blurred),2 revealing elements outside the text itself, but that every reading is in itself allegorical, the object of other readings. Without having heard of the critic Paul de Man, for whom “allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read”,3 we were in agreement with him that no reading can ever be final. With one important difference: what de Man saw as anarchic failure, we saw as proof of our freedom as readers. If, in reading, there was no such thing as “the last word”, then no authority could impose a “correct” reading on us. With time we realized that some readings were better than others — more informed, more lucid, more challenging, more pleasurable, more disturbing. But the newly discovered sense of freedom never left us, and even now, enjoying a book which a certain reviewer has condemned or casting aside another which has been hotly praised, I think I can recall that rebellious feeling quite vividly.

  Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters. The early medieval scholars sought in reading a multiplicity of voices that ultimately echoed one single voice, God’s logos. For the humanist teachers of the late Middle Ages, the text (including Plato’s reading of Socrates’ argument) and the successive comments of changing generations of readers, tacitly implied that not one but a near infinity of readings was possible, feeding upon one another. Our classroom reading of Lycias’s speech was informed by centuries that Lycias never suspected — as he might not have suspected Phaedrus’s enthusiasm or Socrates’ sly comments. The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I’ll never read.

  Around the year 1316, in a famous letter to the imperial vicar Can Grande della Scala, Dante argued that a text has at least two readings, “for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the other allegorical or mystical”. Dante goes on to suggest that the allegorical sense comprises three other readings. Setting as an example the biblical verse “When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion,” Dante explains: “For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the analogical sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and the historical.”4 All these are possible readings. Some readers may find one or several of them false: they may distrust a “historical” reading if they lack the context of the passage; they may object to the “allegorical” reading by regarding the reference to Christ as anachronistic; they may find the “analogical” (through analogy) and “anagogical” (through biblical interpretations) readings too fanciful or far-fetched. Even a “literal” reading may be suspect. What does “came out” mean, exactly? Or “House”? Or “dominion”? It would seem that, in order to read at even a skin-deep level, the reader requires information about the text’s creation, historical background, specialized vocabulary and even that most mysterious of things, what Saint Thomas Aquinas called quem auctor intendit, the author’s intention. And yet, provided reader and text share a common language, any reader can make some sense out of any text: dada, horoscopes, hermetic poetry, computer manuals, even political bombast.

  Dante holding open his Divine Comedy, a mid-fifteenth-century mural by Domenico di Michelino in Florence Cathedral. (photo credit 6.1)

  In 1782, just over four and a half centuries after Dante’s death, Emperor Joseph II promulgated an edict, the Toleranzpatent, that theoretically abolished most barriers between Jews and non-Jews in the Holy Roman Empire, with the intention of assimilating them into the Christian population. The new law made it compulsory for Jews to adopt German names and surnames, to use German in all official documents, to enrol for military service (from which they had up to then been excluded) and to attend secular German schools. A century later, on September 15, 1889, in the city of Prague, six-year-old Franz Kafka was taken by the family cook to the Deutsche Volks- und Bürgerschule on the Meatmarket,5 a German-language establishment run largely by Jews in the midst of a Czech nationalist environment, to begin his schooling according to the wishes of the long-dead Habsburg emperor.

  Kafka hated both the elementary school and, later, the Altstädter Gymnasium, or high school. He felt that, in spite of his successes (he passed all his grades easily), he had merely managed to deceive his elders and “to sneak from the first into the second Gymnasium grade, then into the third, and so on up the line. But,” he added, “now that I had at last aroused their attention, I would of course be immediately thrown out, to the immense satisfaction of all righteous men delivered from a nightmare.”6

  Out of the ten months of the high-school year, one-third was devoted to classical languages and the rest to German, geography and history. Arithmetic was considered a subject of little importance, and Czech, French and physical education were optional. Students were expected to memorize their lessons and regurgitate them on demand. The philologist Fritz Mautner, Kafka’s contemporary, noted that “of the forty students in my class, some three or four finally reached the point where, with infinite pains, they could just about handle a syllable-by-syllable translation of some ancient classic.… This certainly did not convey to them even the remotest notion of the spirit of the antique, its incomparable and inimitable strangeness.… As for the rest, the remaining 90 per cent of the class, they managed to pass the finals without ever deriving the slightest pleasure from their tag ends of Greek and Latin, promptly forgotten in any case right after graduation.”7 The teachers, in turn, seem to have blamed the students for their lack of appreciation, and by and large treated them with contempt. In a letter to his fiancée years later, Kafka wrote, “I am reminded of a teacher who, on reading the Iliad to us, often used to say: ‘Too bad one has to read this with the likes of you. You cannot possibly understand it, and even when you think you do, you don’t understand a thing. One has to have lived a great deal in order to understand even a tiny snippet.’ ” Throughout his life, Kafka read with the feeling that he lacked the experience and knowled
ge necessary to achieve even the beginning of an understanding.

  According to Kafka’s friend and biographer, Max Brod, religious teaching at the gymnasium was very poor. Since the Jewish students outnumbered the Protestants and Catholics, they were the ones who remained in the classroom to be taken through a digest of Jewish history in German and the recitation of prayers in Hebrew, a language of which most of them knew nothing. Only later did Kafka discover in his own notions of reading a common ground with the ancient Talmudists, for whom the Bible encoded a multiplicity of meanings whose continuous pursuit was the purpose of our voyage on earth. “One reads in order to ask questions,” Kafka once told a friend.8

  According to the Midrash — a collection of scholarly investigations into the possible meanings of the sacred texts — the Torah that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai was both a written text and an oral gloss. During the forty days Moses spent in the wilderness before returning to his people, he read the written word during the day and studied the oral commentary during the night. The notion of this double text — the written word and the reader’s gloss — implied that the Bible allowed an ongoing revelation, based on but not limited to the Scriptures themselves. The Talmud — composed of the Mishna, a written collection of so-called oral laws supplementing the central five books of the Old Testament or Pentateuch, and the Gemara, its elaboration in the form of a debate — was developed to preserve the diverse layers of reading over many hundreds of years, from the fifth and sixth centuries (in Palestine and Babylonia, respectively) to modern times, when the standard scholarly edition of the Talmud was produced in Vilna in the late nineteenth century.

  Two different ways of reading the Bible developed among Jewish scholars in the sixteenth century. One, centred around the Sephardic schools of Spain and North Africa, preferred to summarize the contents of a passage with little discussion of the details that composed it, concentrating on the literal and grammatical sense. The other, in the Ashkenazi schools based largely in France, Poland and the Germanic countries, analysed every line and every word, searching for every possible sense. Kafka belonged to this latter tradition.

  Since the purpose of the Ashkenazi Talmudic scholar was to explore and elucidate the text on every conceivable level of meaning, and to comment on the commentaries all the way back to the original text, Talmudic literature developed into self-regenerating texts that unfolded under progressive readings, not superseding but rather including all previous ones. When reading, the Ashkenazi Talmudic scholar commonly made use of four simultaneous levels of meaning, different from those proposed by Dante. The four levels were encoded in the acronym PaRDeS: Pshat or literal sense, Remez or limited meaning, Drash or rational elaboration and Sod or occult, secret, mystical meaning. Therefore reading was an activity that could never be completed. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, one of the great eighteenth-century Hasidic masters, was asked why the first page of each of the treatises in the Babylonian Talmud was missing, so that the reader was forced to begin on page two. “Because however many pages the studious man reads,” the rabbi answered, “he must never forget that he has not yet reached the very first page.”9

  For the Talmudic scholar, the reading of the text proceeds through a number of possible methods. Let us look at one small example. Following a system known as gematria, in which the letters of the sacred text are translated into numerical equivalents, one of the most famous Talmudic commentators, the eleventh-century rabbi Shlomo Yitzhak, known as Rashi, explained the reading of Genesis 17, when God tells Abraham that his aged wife, Sarah, will bear a son called Isaac. In Hebrew, “Isaac” is written Y.tz.h.q. Rashi aligned each letter with a number:

  Y: 10, the ten times Abraham and Sarah tried unsuccessfully to have a child.

  TZ: 90, Sarah’s age at Isaac’s birth.

  H: 8, the eighth day, when the child is to be circumcised.

  Q: 100, Abraham’s age at Isaac’s birth.

  Decoded, one of the levels on which the text is read reveals Abraham’s answer to God:

  “Are we to have a child after ten years of waiting?

  What! She is ninety years old!

  A child who must be circumcised after eight days?

  I, who am already one hundred years old?”10

  Centuries after Rashi, in the confluence of German, Czech and Jewish cultures where Hasidism had once thrived, on the eve of the Holocaust which would attempt to wipe all Jewish wisdom from the face of the earth, Kafka developed a manner of reading that allowed him to decipher words while at the same time questioning his ability to decipher them, persisting to understand the book and yet not confusing the circumstances of the book with his own circumstances — as if he was responding both to the classics teacher who sneered at his lack of experience which prevented him from understanding the text, and to his rabbinical ancestors for whom a text must continuously tempt a reader with revelation.

  What were Kafka’s books? As a child, we are told,11 he read fairy-tales, Sherlock Holmes stories, travel narratives of foreign lands; as a young man, the works of Goethe, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Dickens, Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky. In his room, where the family bustle constantly intruded, or in his office on the second floor of the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institution, he would often try, on stolen time, to pore over whatever book he had with him: searching for meanings, each meaning neither more nor less valid than the next; constructing a whole library of texts unfurled like a scroll on the open page in front of him; proceeding like a Talmudic scholar from commentary to commentary; allowing himself to drift away from and at the same time bore into the original text.

  Walking through Prague one day with the son of a colleague, he stopped outside a bookstore and looked in the window. Seeing his young companion bend his head right and left, trying to read the titles of the lined-up books, he laughed. “So you too are a lunatic about books, with a head that wags from too much reading?” The friend assented: “I don’t think I could exist without books. To me, they’re the whole world.” Kafka grew serious. “That’s a mistake,” he said. “A book cannot take the place of the world. That is impossible. In life, everything has its own meaning and its own purpose, for which there cannot be any permanent substitute. A man can’t, for instance, master his own experience through the medium of another personality. That is how the world is in relation to books. One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it’s no good.”12

  Kafka’s intuition that if the world has coherence, it is one that we can never fully comprehend — that if it offers hope, it is (as he once replied to Max Brod) “not for us” — led him to see, in this very irresolvability, the essence of the world’s richness.13 Walter Benjamin noted in a celebrated essay that in order to understand Kafka’s view of the world “one must keep in mind Kafka’s way of reading”,14 which Benjamin compared to that of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in the allegorical tale in The Brothers Karamazov: “We have before us,” says the Inquisitor, speaking to Christ returned to earth, “a mystery which we cannot grasp. And precisely because it is a mystery we have had the right to preach it, to teach the people that what matters is neither freedom nor love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they have to bow — without reflection and even without conscience.”15 A friend who saw Kafka reading at his desk said that he reminded him of the anguished figure depicted in the painting A Reader of Dostoevsky by the Czech expressionist Emil Filla, who seems to have fallen into a trance while reading the book he still holds in his grey hand.16

  Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod to burn his writings after his death; Brod famously disobeyed. Kafka’s request has been seen as a self-deprecating gesture, the obligatory “I’m not worthy” of the writer who expects Fame to answer, “But yes, yes, you are.” Perhaps there is another explanation. It may be that since Kafka realized that, for a reader, every text must be unfinished (or abandoned, as Paul Valéry suggested), that in fact a text can be read only because it is unfinished, thus allowi
ng room for the reader’s work, he wished for his own writing the immortality that generations of readers have granted to the volumes burned in the Library of Alexandria, the eighty-three lost plays of Aeschylus, the lost books of Livy, the first draft of Carlyle’s The French Revolution, which a friend’s maid accidentally tipped into the fire, the second volume of Gogol’s Dead Souls, which a fanatical priest condemned to the flames. Perhaps for the same reason, Kafka never completed many of his writings: there is no last page to The Castle because K., the hero, must never reach it, so that the reader can continue into the multilayered text for ever. A novel by Judith Krantz or Elinor Glyn locks itself into one exclusive, airtight reading, and the reader cannot escape without knowingly exceeding the limits of common sense (there are few who read Princess Daisy as an allegory of the voyage of the soul, or Three Weeks as a nineteenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress). This we realized back in Buenos Aires, together with that early sense of freedom: that the authority of the reader is never limitless. “The limits of interpretation,” Umberto Eco has noted in a useful epigram, “coincide with the rights of the text.”17

  Emil Filla’s A Reader of Dostoevsky. (photo credit 6.2)

  Ernst Pawel, at the end of his lucid biography of Kafka, written in 1984, observed that “the literature dealing with Kafka and his work currently comprises an estimated 15,000 titles in most of the world’s major languages.”18 Kafka has been read literally, allegorically, politically, psychologically. That readings always outnumber the texts that breed them is a trite observation, and yet something revealing about the creative nature of the act of reading lies in the fact that one reader can despair and another can laugh at exactly the same page. My daughter Rachel read Metamorphosis at thirteen and thought it humorous; Gustav Janouch, Kafka’s friend, read it as a religious and ethical parable;19 Bertolt Brecht read it as the work of “the only true Bolshevist writer”;20 the Hungarian critic György Lukács read it as the typical product of a decadent bourgeois;21 Borges read it as a retelling of the paradoxes of Zeno;22 the French critic Marthe Robert read it as an example of the German language at its clearest;23 Vladimir Nabokov read it (partly) as an allegory on adolescent Angst.24 The fact is that Kafka’s stories, nourished by Kafka’s reading experience, offer and take away, at the same time, the illusion of understanding; they undermine, as it were, the craft of Kafka the writer in order to satisfy Kafka the reader.