A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

At the Mad Hatter’s table
Crime and punishment

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter; and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6

AS MOST PERCEPTIVE READERS will agree, the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity. Ants scuttle in ordered lines, back and forth, with impeccable propriety. Seeds grow into trees that shed their leaves and bud again with conventional circularity. Birds migrate, lions kill, turtles mate, viruses mutate, rocks crumble into dust, clouds shape and reshape mercifully unconscious of what they build and destroy. We alone live consciously knowing that we live and, by means of a half-shared code of words, are able to reflect on our actions, however contradictory or inexplicable. We heal and help, we sacrifice ourselves and show concern and compassion, we create wonderful artifices and miraculous devices to better understand the world and ourselves. And at the same time, we build our lives on superstitions, hoard for no purpose except greed, cause deliberate pain to other creatures, poison the water and the air we need to live, and finally bring our planet to the verge of destruction. We do all this with full awareness of our actions, as if walking through a dream in which we do what we know we should not be doing and refrain from doing what we know we should do. “May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life?” wrote Lewis Carroll in his diary on 9 February 1856.

In the seventh chapter of her travels through the insane world of Wonderland, Alice comes upon a table placed under a tree and laid out with many settings. Though the table is a large one, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse are crowded together at one corner, having tea, the sleeping Dormouse serving as a cushion for the comfort of the others. “No room! No room!” they cry out when they see Alice coming. “There’s plenty of room!” Alice says indignantly and sits down in a large armchair at one end.

The table manners of Alice’s reluctant hosts are obviously mad. First she is offered wine by the March Hare. But “I don’t see any wine,” she remarks, looking around. “There isn’t any,” the March Hare says, and offers her more tea. “I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replies in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.” “You mean you can’t take less,” intervenes the Hatter, “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.” Then the seating arrangements are constantly shifted to suit the Mad Hatter’s whimsy. Whenever he wants a clean cup, everyone must move one place along to one with a soiled setting; obviously, the only one to get any advantage out of the changes is the Hatter himself. Alice, for instance, is “a good deal worse off than before,” as the March Hare has upset the milk jug into his plate.

As in the real world, everything in Wonderland, however mad, has a logical underpinning, a system of rules that are often themselves absurd. The conventions of Alice’s society have led her to believe that the behavior of her elders and betters, wherever she might find herself, is rational. Therefore, attempting to understand the logic of her strange dreamworld, Alice expects rational behavior from the creatures she meets, but, again and again, she is merely confronted by their “logical” madness. “Throughout my life,” said Bertrand Russell on his ninetieth birthday, “I have been told that man is a rational animal. In all these many years, I have not once found proof that this is so.” Alice’s world mirrors Russell’s assertion.

An amateur anthropologist, Alice assumes that an understanding of the social conventions of Wonderland will allow her to understand the logic of the inhabitants’ behavior, and therefore attempts to follow the proceedings at the table with some measure of reason and good manners. To the absurdities presented, she counters with rational questions; to the questions asked, however absurd, she tries to find rational answers. But to no avail. “Really, now you ask me,” she says, “I don’t think — “ “Then you shouldn’t talk,” snaps back the Hatter.

As in our world, the manners of the inhabitants of Wonderland carry implicit notions of responsibility and value. The Hatter, emblematic of the perfect egotist, opposes free speech (except his own) and disposes of property to which he has no claim (the table belongs, after all, to the March Hare). Nothing matters to him except his own comfort and profit, and he therefore shows himself unwilling to admit even to his own possessions for fear of being held accountable. (During the trial at the end of the book, he refuses to take off his hat because, he says, it isn’t his: “I keep them to sell,” he explains, “I’ve none of my own. I’m a hatter.”) By valuing what he has only for what he can sell it for, the Hatter need not care about the consequences of his actions, whether they concern a trail of dirty dishes or the established conventions of a court of law.

The Hatter appears only once in the second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass (jailed for a crime he may or may not one day commit), but his philosophy has spread far and wide across Alice’s dreamworlds. Halfway through Chapter 3, when Alice suddenly finds herself inside a railway carriage confronting an angry Guard who demands to see her ticket, the Hatter’s notion of value is echoed by a mysterious chorus of invisible evaluators.

“Now then! Show your ticket, child!” The Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together (“like the chorus of a song,” thought Alice) “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there wasn’t a ticket-office where I came from.” And again the chorus of voices went on. “There wasn’t room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!”

“Don’t make excuses,” said the Guard: “you should have bought one from the engine-driver.” And once more the chorus of voices went on with “The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!”

Alice thought to herself, “Then there’s no use speaking.” The voices didn’t join in, this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but, to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means — for I must confess that I don’t), “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

“I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!” thought Alice.

Whether the vastness of time or the immensity of space, whether a mere puff of smoke or the words we speak, everything has, according to the invisible multitude that echoes the Hatter’s code, a monetary value — in this case, of a thousand pounds. For these financially minded Furies, everything can be bought and sold, everything (like the Hatter’s hat) can be turned into a negotiable commodity.

There is a scene in our own history that could have found its place in Alice’s books. Exhausted from the continuing battles, convinced that further struggle was now useless, having decided to attempt capitulation rather than lose not only his freedom but his life, in the summer of 1520 the Aztec king Montezuma, prisoner of the Spaniards, agreed to hand over to Hernán Cortés the vast treasure that his father, Axayactl, had laboriously assembled, and to swear allegiance to the king of Spain, that distant and invisible monarch whose power Cortés represented. Commenting on the ceremony, the Spanish chronicler Fernández de Oviedo reported that Montezuma was in tears throughout the procedure, and, pointing out the difference between a bond willingly accepted by a free agent and one performed in sorrow by someone in chains, Oviedo quoted the Roman poet Marcus Varro: “What is given by force is not service but larceny.”

The royal Aztec treasure was, by all accounts, magnificent, and when it was assembled in front of the Spaniards, it towered in three golden heaps made up, for the most part, of exquisite utensils whose secret purpose suggested sophisticated social ceremonies; intricate collars, bracelets, wands, and fans decorated with many-colored feathers, precious stones, and pearls; and carefully wrought birds, insects, and flowers, which, according to Cortés himself, “were, beyond their value, so marvelous, that their very novelty and strangeness rendered them priceless, nor could it be believed that any of the known Princes of this World might possess things like these, and of such quality.”

Montezuma had intended the treasure to be a tribute from his court to the Spanish king. Cortés’s soldiers, however, demanded that the treasure be treated as booty and that they each receive a fair part of the gold. A fifth of the treasure belonged by rights to the king of Spain, and an equal portion to Cortés himself. A large sum was destined to indemnify the governor of Cuba for the cost of the expedition. The garrison at Veracruz and the leading caballeros were expecting their part, as well as the cavalry, the harquebusiers, and the crossbow men, who were entitled to double pay. This left the common soldiers with about one hundred gold pesos each, a sum so insignificant, compared to their expectations, that many eventually refused to accept it.

Bending to his men’s wishes, Cortés sent for the famed goldsmiths of Azcapozalco to turn Montezuma’s precious objects into ingots, which were then stamped with the royal arms. The task took the goldsmiths three full days of work. Today, engraved in stone over the door of the Museum of Gold in Santafé de Bogotá, the visitor can read the following verse, addressed by an Aztec poet to the Spanish conquerors: “I am amazed by your blindness and folly, that you undo such beautifully wrought jewels to make bricks out of them.”

The question of value is an ancient one. For Cortés, the value of a work of art whose “very novelty and strangeness” rendered it “priceless,” was superseded by the value of the raw material from which the work was made and which had been granted a (however fluctuating and symbolic) market price. Since gold itself was the measure of the value of his social transactions, he deemed himself justified in turning the Aztec artworks into ingots. (In our time, the businessman who bought van Gogh’s Sunflowers and locked up the painting in a safe proceeded under exactly the same conviction.)

Of course, other values exist. The German language, for instance, employs several words to denote value and its different meanings, such as Gewalt (the quality of power), Wert (the agreed-upon importance of something), Geltung (the current validity), Gültigkeit (the official worth or usefulness) in the fields of morality, aesthetics, scholarship, and epistemology. But for Cortés, the monetary value superseded them all. Such an overriding notion allowed the baron de Montesquieu, two centuries later, to suggest mockingly that if buying and selling have become our evaluating scales, “a man is worth the price he would be sold for in Algiers.”

By assuming, like Cortés, the precedence of economic values, we change our relationship to all creative activities. If financial profit is the final goal, then perfection of a kind is what we are after: the production of artifacts that are easily converted into money. That is to say, in a world in which monetary value is the measure of all things, works of art that do not carry in themselves immediate financial gratification, that require mostly long and laborious procedures, that cannot be defined by tags or sound bytes, and that may or may not result in commercial benefits through convoluted aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical byways must be discarded or, at least, given very little consideration. Failure, the acceptance of which is inherent in any creative activity, is regarded in such a light as anathema, as are the poetic creations Shelley called “nurslings of immortality,” since economic law demands that whatever is created carry within itself its own mortality, its “sell by” date, which will enable the chain of production to continue to sell its products. The artistic qualities of a work must be subjected to the taste of the majority or, in certain cases, to a supposed “elitist” taste which the majority are told they might, for a price, attain. Under the common evaluation of economic worth, all other values blur or dissolve.

This need to consume is created, not through the opening of new fields of intellectual and emotional exploration by the work of art itself, but by planned campaigns that, inspired by census taking and market research, effectively invent a prehistory of longing for something that will be later deliberately produced to satisfy it. Readers don’t know that they “need” the Alice books until they have discovered and read Carroll’s work and see how his writing lends words to their own unuttered experience. However, it is possible to produce books to appease a spiritual “need” after advertising prefabricated pseudo-mysticisms available to all, filling bookstores with apocalyptic warnings and conspiracy theories based, of course, on real collective anguish and fear. But while Carroll, even when portraying our most nightmarish experiences, does not provide consolatory solutions, only rich questions in the style of the ancient oracles, the ersatz Alice-texts shower us with tidy answers, clipped and rounded and superficially satisfying, catechisms that lend their readers the illusion of having solved immemorial riddles which, because of their very nature, must remain unresolved.

In our time, in order to create and maintain the huge and efficient machinery of financial profit, we have collectively chosen speed over deliberate slowness, intuitive responses over detailed critical reflection, the satisfaction of reaching snap conclusions rather than the pleasure of concentrating on the tension between various possibilities without demanding a conclusive end. If profit is the goal, creativity must suffer. Discussing the lack of support for scientific research outside the private industries, I once heard a scientist comment, “Electricity was not invented by attempting to produce better lamps.”

Notoriously, every age develops its own artistic genre for its own brand of fools. In the Middle Ages, the charlatan’s sermons and fortune-teller’s prophecies were two of the most popular; in Carroll’s day, it was the three-volume “silly” novel and the moral tales. In ours, the fool’s art par excellence is the art of advertising—commercial, political, or religious—the ability to create desire for the preys of moth and rust. Advertising begins with a lie, with the assertion that Brand X is more important, or more necessary, or merely better than other brands, and that its possession, like that of the magic objects in fairy tales, will make the owner wiser, more beautiful, more powerful, than his or her neighbor. The willing suspension of disbelief that Coleridge demanded from the reader is tempered in advertising by an induced and simultaneous suspension of belief: the goods or services advertised require not so much belief or disbelief as a kind of bland faith in the imaginary thing created, in which colorful, innocuous images, conventional but voided symbols, simple reassurances or commands lull the viewer into a state of vacuous longing. These images surround us now at all times and everywhere. When we speak of a modern “culture of images,” we forget that such a culture was present since the days of our prehistoric ancestors, only the images on caves, in medieval churches, or on Aztec temple walls carried profound and complex meanings, while ours are deliberately banal and shallow. It is not fortuitous that advertising companies control the contemporary art market in which that same deliberate banality and shallowness have been transformed into qualities that justify the monetary value of a work.

Both qualities, however, respond to a view of the world. The world, as we recognize from the moment we are born, is a library of signs, an archive of mysterious texts, a gallery of compelling images, some arbitrary or haphazard, some deliberately created, which we feel we are meant to decipher and read. A natural inclination, what Professor Giovanna Franci calls “the anxiety to interpret,” leads us to believe that everything is language, pictures of a vocabulary whose key may be lost, or never existed, or must be wrought again to unlock the pages of the universal book. Plants, animals, clouds, the faces and gestures of others, landscapes and sea currents, constellations and forest tracks have their equivalent in pictographs and ideograms, in letters and coded signals with which we attempt to mirror our experience of the world. The Aztecs called their colored manuscripts maps, a better word to make explicit this relationship than our neutral text.

But there is also such a thing as a false map that leads nowhere except back to itself. The Hatter has been father to a huge mass of such cartography produced in the past twenty or thirty years by philosophers, sociologists, and economists, who, couching their arguments in elegant language and protected by some version of freedom of speech, defend the virtues of greed and self-enrichment and lend intellectual weight to those who use their power to achieve them. Holding on to what he has and yet always grasping for something else, the Hatter offers others nothing and, pointing to his laid-out table, tells the others to take more, and to believe that “it’s very easy to take more than nothing …” It is not very easy to take more than nothing, as millions on our planet know. But the rules of the mad tea party are those of the world we have constructed so that we can keep for ourselves vast spaces meant for many, so that we can offer wine that is not there and “more” tea to someone who has had none, so that we can appropriate fresh territory after we have spoiled the one we have been occupying. To amass more than we can possibly need or enjoy, to propose to others participation in a common culture that is being eroded daily and gradually replaced with “nothing,” to suggest to the poor and needy that they help themselves to “more” of the common wealth when they had none in the first place, to clear-cut, mine out, or fish dry vast areas of our planet and then move on to others, leaving behind our spillage and waste, are the methods of our global madness, regardless of whether we are dealing with fellow human beings, forests, seas, the earth we inhabit, or the air we breathe. They are methods by which we appear to share fortunes and misfortunes with others when in reality we share nothing, we hand over nothing, we hide our wine and hold on to our tea and feel comforted by what we believe we see.

“When we look into a mirror,” wrote Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize lecture, “we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

At the Mad Hatter’s table sit today not the imaginary creatures met by Alice but painfully real beings: the inheritors of Cortés, reducing all creation to sticks and stones; the merchants for whom the only measure of value is that of financial profit and who believe that the surest way to bigger earnings is the lowering of the public’s intellectual level; the catechists, for whom art is not a dialogue and an exchange of questions but a series of simpleminded and stifling answers; the rag-and-bone vendors who can turn anything into a salable commodity; the philosophers who, in the name of personal considerations or abstract notions of justice, lend arguments to those in power, and false justification; the egotists who, under the protection of civic freedom, believe that tolerance is a virtue that allows for the distinction between “those above” and “those below;” the advertisers of trite virtues and creators of false needs; the religious leaders who believe that the deity has granted their church, and no other, grace, illumination, and a privileged position above that of all other creeds; the revolutionaries for whom there can be no purification without destruction; the political leaders for whom wealth and power are proof of righteousness and moral authority. In a word, the enemies of “the dignity of man.”

Alice and her Wonderland shadows play out for us the parts we enact in the real world. Their folly is tragic or amusing, they are themselves exemplary fools or they are eloquent witnesses to the folly of their shadowy brethren, they tell us stories of absurd or mad behavior which mirrors our own so that we may better see and understand it. The difference is that their folly, unlike ours, is framed by the margins of the page, contained by the however-uncertain imagination of their author. Crimes and evil deeds in the real world have sources so deep and consequences so distant that we can never hold them entirely in our understanding, we can merely clip them in a moment, box them in a judicial file, or observe them under the lens of psychoanalysis. Our deeds, unlike those of the great mad creatures of literature, seep far and wide into the world, infecting everything and every place beyond all help and purpose.

The folly of the world is unintelligible. We can (and do, of course) experience it, suffer it in the flesh and in the mind, fall under its merciless weight and be crushed by its implacable movement towards the precipice. We can even, in certain enlightened moments, rise through it to acts of extraordinary humanity, irrationally wise and insanely daring. For such acts, no words suffice. And yet, through language at its best, our folly can be trapped in its own doings, made to repeat itself, made to enact its cruelties and catastrophes (and even its glorious deeds) but this time under lucid observation and with protected emotion, beneath the aseptic covering of words, lit by the reading lamp set over the open book.

The flesh-and-blood beings at the Mad Hatter’s table — the military leaders, the torturers, the international bankers, the terrorists, the exploiters — cannot be forced to tell their story, to confess, to beg forgiveness, to admit that they are rational beings guilty of willful cruelty and destructive acts. But tales can be told and books can be written about them that might allow for a certain understanding of what they have done and for a judicious empathy. Their deeds bear no rational explanation, follow absurd logical rules, but their madness and their terror can be trapped for us, in all their consuming and illuminating fire, inside stories or “maps” where they can mysteriously lend our folly a kind of enlightened rationality, transparent enough to clarify our behavior and ambiguous enough to help us accept the indefinable.