A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

The blind bookkeeper
Memoranda

I told them once, I told them twice:

They would not listen to advice.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6

SOMETIME IN THE SPRING OF 1943, Northrop Frye wrote a paper which, a holograph note on the typescript tells us, was intended for an Emmanuel College publication “that never came off.” Its title is “The Present Condition of the World” and its thrust the problem of steering “a middle course between platitude and paradox,” between “Olympian detachment and Bacchic outcries” when discussing this condition, which, Frye reminds us, is one of universal warfare. With his habitual clarity, Frye warns us against judging that war reaps any benefits. “A corrupt tree can only bring forth corrupt fruit, and the notion that some good may be salvaged from this evil and monstrous horror is, however pathetic and wistful, a pernicious illusion.” And Frye concludes: “And that such benefits will be ’worth’ the blood and misery and destruction of the war is nonsense, unless posterity are insanely cynical bookkeepers.”

Much of Frye’s paper is concerned with the deistic society whose goal, he reminds us, is war. This is a truth very much worth recalling in our third millennium. It is of the essence, and we can only lament that Frye left his paper incomplete. But like all of Frye’s writings, it is rich with tempting asides. One in particular, that of a certain actor in this warmongering society, may prove useful to explore. I refer to the bookkeeper, the person in charge of tallying the sum of our follies.

Bookkeeping is an excellent word. Its present meaning is fully justified. In the brightest of our mornings, when writing was invented, the first human to scratch a readable sign on a piece of clay was not a poet but an accountant. The earliest examples of writing we have, now probably destroyed in the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, are two small tablets that record a certain number of goats or sheep: the receipts, in fact, for a commercial transaction. Our first books were ledgers, and it should not surprise us that poets later retained the two essential characteristics of their accountant elders: the delight in making lists and the responsibility of keeping records.

Two of our founding books, the Iliad and the Odyssey, excel in both. Their author agreed with Frye on the sterility of war and would never have suggested that the fruit of war is peace. Homer loathed war. “Atrocious,” “scourge of men,” “lying, two-faced,” are the terms he uses to describe it. In Homer’s poems, pity and mourning are never far from the battlefields, and it is not by chance that pleas for compassion begin and end the Iliad. The debits and credits in Homer’s books are not those of our politicians. Homer the bookkeeper is never insanely cynical.

Who then are these sane and merciful bookkeepers who, like Homer, set our accounts in order? What characteristics must they have, or, rather, what characteristics do we imagine them to have so that they can perform their work efficiently? Why have we brought into being a Homer to father our two primordial stories?

The history of writing, of which the history of reading is its first and last chapter, has among its many fantastical creations one that seems to me peculiar among all: that of the authorless text for which an author must be invented. Anonymity has its attraction, and Anonymous is one of the major figures of every one of our literatures. But sometimes, perhaps when the depth and reverberations of a text seem almost too universal to belong on an individual reader’s bookshelf, we have tried to imagine for that text a poet of flesh and blood, capable of being Everyman. It is as if, in recognizing in a work the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us, we wished to satisfy ourselves in the belief that this too was the creation of human hands and a human mind, that a man or woman like us was once able to tell for us that which we, younger siblings, merely glimpse or intuit. In order to achieve this, the critical sciences come to our aid and do their detective work to rescue from discretion the nebulous author behind the Epic of Gilgamesh or La Vie devant soi, but their labors are merely confirmation. In the minds of their readers, the secret authors have already acquired a congenial familiarity, an almost physical presence, lacking nothing except a name.

Homer begins long after the composition of his poems, a parent adopted, as it were, by his children. Long centuries of literary criticism lent him features both concrete and emblematic, first through apocryphal biographies, later as an allegory, an idea, as the identity of a nation, and even as the embodiment of poetry itself. In every case, however, it was the readers who had first to conceive of an author for the poem to be conceivable.

This history of conceived authorship is, in some sense, a parallel history of literature. For the Greeks he was the beginning of all things Greek, of Greek civilization and history. For Virgil he was a Roman in all but birth. For the poets of Byzantium, he was a historian whose knowledge of humanity was great but whose knowledge of history was shaky. For Dante, a famous but retired craftsman. Thomas de Quincey, towards 1850, asked whether Homer (a name absent otherwise in Greek literature) might not be a deformation of the Semitic “Omar” and imagined him as a brother of the Arabian Nights’ storytellers. The much-derided Heinrich Schliemann, following the divagations of the historian Karl Blind, suggested that Homer, like his Trojans, was Aryan, blue-eyed, red-haired, martial, musically gifted and philosophical. Alexander Pope likened Homer to an English gentleman. Goethe saw in Homer a self-portrait: perhaps for that reason in 1805 he chose to listen to the famous Homeric lectures of Friedrich August Wolf hidden behind a curtain, embarrassed at the description of a poet whose German reincarnation he felt himself to be. Samuel Butler argued, ironically, that Homer was a woman. For Rudyard Kipling, for Ezra Pound, for James Joyce, for Derek Walcott, and for Jorge Luis Borges, Homer was everyone and no one. The linguists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord twinned Homer with the guzlars, the epic Serbian singers who still chant their verses from village to village. In 2008, the German poet Raoul Schrott argued that Homer was inspired by the archaic songs of Sumer and suggested that he was a transplanted Middle Eastern poet who had learned his craft in Babylon or Ur. This Babylonian influence does not seem incongruous: the Epic of Gilgamesh has indeed an atmosphere not unlike that of the Odyssey, and the adventures of two men, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whom the reader feels as one, are similar to those of a single man who calls himself Nobody and whom the reader sees as many.

A diversity of occupations, a diversity of influences, a diversity of ethnicities mark the long history of the man we call Homer. What no one, neither Aristotle nor Joyce, appeared to have doubted was that the main physical feature of Homer, real or imagined, singular or plural, must have been his blindness. Already the Hymn to Apollo, from about the seventh century B.C., tells the maidens of Delos that when a stranger asks them, “Who is the sweetest man of all the singers who comes here to you,” they should answer, “The blind man who lives in rocky Chios; all his songs will be the best, now and in the time to come.”

But what reason might there be for always depicting our bookkeeper as blind? Homer’s blindness is an unvarying trait in the numerous “Lives” of Homer that were produced from the fifth century B.c. on. The best known of these is a Life of Homer written in the fourth or fifth century B.c. and once attributed to Herodotus, in which it is stated that Homer was not born blind but contracted an eye illness while visiting Ithaca, the city where he also learned the story of Odysseus, which he would one day immortalize in his verse. The citizens of Ithaca were pleased with the synchronicity: the moment and place in which the poet was given his story were also those in which he was given his blindness, as if illumination within required the lack of light without.

But Ithaca’s presumption did not go unchallenged. Where exactly Homer became blind held such obvious importance for his readers that the pseudo-Herodotus (whom we know to have been Ionian) went on to deny Ithaca’s claim and argued instead that it was in Ionian Colophon that blindness had struck him. “All Colophonians agree with me on this,” he added with assurance in his book. Other places could boast of having lent Homer family roots or a deathbed, and seven cities disputed his birthplace, but the site in which blindness overtook him was, in literary terms, of the essence.

Always, according to the pseudo-Herodotus, it was the poet’s blindness that gave him the name by which we know him today. As a child, the future author of the Odyssey was given the name Melesigenes, after the river Meles; he acquired the name Homer much later, in Cimmeris, where the wandering poet had proposed to the local senate that in exchange for bed and board, he might make the town famous with his songs. The senators (in the tradition of most government bodies) refused, arguing that if they set this dangerous precedent, Cimmeris would soon be overrun with blind beggars (homers in Cimmerian) in search of handouts. To shame them, the poet adopted the name Homer.

Emblematically, blindness has a double and contradictory meaning. It is said to be vision-inspiring, supposed to open the inner eye, but it is also the reverse of sight, and stands for the quality of misguided judgment personified by the goddess Ate, the deity who causes mortals to make wrong decisions and become victims of undiscriminating Nemesis. The double quality of blindness is apparent in Homer’s poems: at King Alcinous’s court, where Odysseus is received incognito, the blind bard Demodocus perceives in his darkness what others cannot see or know. Seer of the truth, blind Demodocus sings of Odysseus himself, whom no one else in the court has recognized, and tells of Odysseus’s quarrel with Achilles and the ploy of the Wooden Horse, causing the secret wanderer to weep at the memory of a past now distant. And yet Odysseus, however much he might admire Demodocus for his gift, knows that darkness is also the lot of the dead whose kingdom no light reaches and who bemoan their imposed blindness. Furthermore, Odysseus knows that blindness can be a punishment, a death-in-life, which he inflicts on the cannibal Cyclops who has imprisoned him and his companions. Blindness is also the punishment inflicted by the Muses on the bard Thamyris for having boasted that he could surpass them in song.

This Greek ambiguity survived in Judeo-Christian times. According to the Old Testament, blindness disqualified the descendants of Aaron from performing sacrifices to God; it was also a punishment sent to the men of Sodom for their lack of kindness towards strangers. But at the same time, the blind were protected by God’s covenant: it is forbidden in Leviticus to place stumbling blocks in their way, and, according to Deuteronomy, anyone who misleads a blind person is eternally cursed. Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46—52) recognizes Jesus as the Son of David and asks to “receive” (not “have restored” as some translations have it) his sight; his blindness from birth has allowed him to see the truth, and he now wishes for his eyes to be truly opened. Milton (Paradise Lost, 3.35—42) laments that for him, as for “Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,” “Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,” and yet he rejoices in the fact that his blind eyes “feed on thoughts, that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in the shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note.”

As the millennial tradition has it, Homer is both a poor blind man and an enlightened seer; this double quality provides the justification for our multiple readings of his poems. Our invention of a blind Homer excuses a ritual understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey as metaphors of life, life as battle and life as voyage; at the same time, these readings imply his existence as primordial author, the mythical Father of Poetry, and thereby guarantee the poems’ prestige. Whether we conceive of Homer as the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey or we conceive the two as giving rise to their colossal creator—that is to say, whether we believe, as Nietzsche suggested, that a person had been made out of a Begriff (a concept) or a Begriff out of a person — this circular process defines our relationship to the poetic act itself, an act which exists between an endless sequence of interpretations, each owing its vocabulary and perspective to a particular vision of the world, and also our relationship to an all-encompassing creative genius from the farthest regions of time — someone whom it is impossible to antecede, a man indifferent to all deluding worldly sights, capable, because of his blindness, of seeing beyond them into the truth.

The concept of blindness builds upon itself. To be blind is not to see the outer reality; implicit in this observation is the suspicion that the inner reality is perceived more clearly if not encumbered by any other. If the world of color and form is no longer grasped (that is to say, limited, as Blake says, by our senses), then the poet is free to apprehend the universe in its fullness, the past through his story’s past and the future through the future of his characters. He can become both our seer and our bookkeeper in the fullest sense. When Hector says to Andromache in the Iliad:

There will be a day when holy Troy will perish.

And Priam, and the people of Priam of the fine ash-spear

the reader knows of what fate he is speaking and that it isn’t only Priam’s own that lies open to the poet.

I have mentioned the pragmatic source of the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. But technologies are often, always perhaps, diverted from their original intentions. Soon the recording of buying and selling transactions was joined by the story of those transactions, and the buyers and sellers who until then were headings on either column acquired individual features and personal narratives. Writing became, to a large extent, the place that not only recorded our world but also created it, and the words that until then were spoken to render memory present and to name experience and desire were set down in clay to keep the stories available to generation after generation of readers. The bookkeeper, who in order to account for a trading of sheep or goats needed both his eyes, now, symbolically at least, was best thought to be blind, because readers realized that the stories that mattered were not those copied from nature but those that distilled and translated the natural and social world into the language of myth. Frye, in his notes at the end of his unfinished paper, remarks that the prophet’s role is to preach the Word of revealed, not natural, religion. If we take the etymological meaning of the term religion (“to bind again” or “to bind more strongly”), we have something akin to the definition of poetry.

On this etymological level, the opposition between natural and revealed rebinding acquires a startling meaning. On the one hand, we are creatures bound to the earth and to the things of this earth. We are not different from any other living thing or even, from a molecular point of view, from other inanimate things. The old image of humans as stardust is scientifically true: our atoms belonged long ago to exploded stars. But as Darwinism has taught us, each species has evolved different methods to adapt to this material world, and our species acquired along the way the ability of self-consciousness, to know not only that we are on this earth but that we are on this earth. And through this self-consciousness, or simultaneously with this self-consciousness, we acquired the gift of imagination. Not imagination regarded as some flimsy, immaterial quality like that of the fantastical phlogiston which our great-grandparents thought to cause combustion, but as a biological human function such as eating or breathing. This function enables us to learn by creating in the mind situations that do not materially exist in order to study them and overcome any difficulties they may present, to be used later when such situations arise in real life. Battles are fought in the mind and strange landscapes explored before we ever have to take up arms or set upon our travels; the Iliad and the Odyssey are our preparation for every struggle and every displacement. Poetry—literature—binds us again to the world, more strongly this time, because it helps us become conscious of it and of ourselves.

The state of universal warfare that Frye saw as the state of the world in the last years of World War II is, to some degree, that of the world today. In 1943, Frye described the United States as the “archetypal country” (according to a holograph note in the margin of the typescript). And this is still the case today, even though there are signs that the archetype is shifting. The battlefields have changed ground, the soldiers wear different uniforms, but the weapons are just as deadly and the madness just as keen. Samson killing the Philistines by killing himself was metamorphosed into the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who in turn metamorphosed into the suicide terrorists whose carnage we suffer now every day somewhere in the world.

And on either side, we continue to create our enemies. We require these enemies to keep the industry of war going but also to keep our sense of self cocooned. We are fearful of the stories we don’t know, and we are afraid that those who tell them will impose on us their versions of the world, and that we shall no longer know who we are. We don’t want to change the plots we know for plots that we may not understand, or that may not move us if we do, or may move us in mysterious ways. We want the comfort of a familiar face by the bed. We hold to the conviction that our stories are better than anyone else’s. We distrust foreign tongues, and we don’t encourage translation. The balance sheet that the writers of the twentieth century drew of the deathly experience of war was meant to be a cautionary one, summed up as “Never Again.” It didn’t stick, as daily experience has since proven. All the chronicles, all accounts factual and fictional, all the symbols and fables woven from the debris left by the slaughter and the destruction somehow failed to build for us a peaceful, or even a more humanly acceptable, world. If there is a God who reads us, then His patience or indifference is certainly remarkable.

Heinrich Heine, in the eighth chapter of Atta Troll, imagined that for bears, the Creator would have a bearish aspect whose fur was divinely “spotless and white as snow.” Closer to the time of the Iliad, Xenophanes of Colophon (that same island of Colophon that claimed the honor of having blinded Homer) argued that if cows, horses, and lions had fingers and could paint and sculpt like men, the cows would create gods like cows, the horses gods like horses, and “so on with all the others.” We imagine our gods as we imagine our authors, much as we imagine ourselves to be. Perhaps we imagine that our authors and gods have failed because we know that we ourselves are fallible.

The perceived failure of our storytelling is not, therefore, one-sided. Literature is a collaborative effort, not as editors and writing schools will have it, but as readers and writers have known from the very first line of verse ever set down in clay. A poet fashions out of words something that ends with the last full stop and comes to life again with its first reader’s eye. But that eye must be a particular eye, an eye not distracted by baubles and mirrors, concentrated instead on the bodily assimilation of the words, reading both to digest a book and to be digested by it. “Books,” Frye once noted, “are to be lived in.”

As the Homer we invented for ourselves understood, the poet alone, even gifted with blindness, cannot alone create a new world. Demodocus’s song requires that Odysseus listen and weep, and that he understand for the first time the battles he has fought and the travels he has endured. Odysseus must, for the sake of poem, become blind as well, blind as Demodocus, blind through his tears if necessary, in order to be able to draw his eyes away from the ambitions of Agamemnon and the foul moods of Achilles, from the beauty of Circe and the terrors of the Cyclops, and look at something darker and lovelier and deeper within himself.

Perhaps in the same way, the reader too must acquire a positive blindness. Not blindness to the things of the world, certainly not to the world itself, nor to the quotidian glimpses it offers of bliss and horror. But blind to the superficial glitter and glamour of what lies all around us, as we stand erect in our selfish point of observation, a point that, because we stand in it, remains invisible to us and makes us believe that we are the center of the world, and that everything is ours for the taking. With greedy eyes we want everything to be made to our measure, even the stories we demand to be told. They should not be stories larger than ourselves, or stories of such minuteness that they take us inward, into our unacknowledged being, but merely adventures that are skin deep, easily perused and quick to grasp without causing the merest ripple. We are given to read neatly packaged books alike in size and color, which the industry tells us will entertain us without worry and lend us thoughts without reflection, offering us simple, ready-made models, ambitious, egotistical, and thin, to which we can aspire without giving up anything. We want our poets to be like the tyrant described in W. H. Auden’s epitaph:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

The blind bard is a universal paradigm. Our Homer, creator of the mythical world on a human scale, required the one feature that prevents our senses from misleading us, from being distracted by a conventional reality, from being “programmed” (as we’d say today) by preconceived patterns of thought. But we too, the readers, on the other side of the page, require such a gift to keep us, as Rupert Brooke more accurately put it, from “being blinded by our eyes.” Such a gift, as Northrop Frye taught us, lies at the core of the true craft of reading.