A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
Homage to proteus
Who am i?
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2
MY LIBRARY TELLS ME THAT the problem is an ancient one.
Legend has it that Proteus was not only king of Egypt but also a sea god, shepherd of the water flocks, capable of seeing the future and of constantly changing his appearance. Dante imagined this versatility as a punishment: in the eighth circle of his Hell, he dreamt that thieves and robbers, who during their mortal life lay hands on what doesn’t belong to them, are condemned after death to not even being able to possess the shape of their earthly bodies and endlessly turn into something else, “never again being that which they once were.”
All of us must one day be confronted with the terrible question that the Caterpillar asks Alice in Wonderland: “Who are you?” Indeed: Who are we? The answers that we try to give throughout our unfolding lives are never utterly convincing. We are the face in the mirror, the name and nationality given to us, the sex that our cultures steadfastly define, the reflection in the eye of those we look at, the fantasy of the one who loves us and the nightmare of the one who hates us, the incipient body in the cradle and the motionless body in the winding sheet. We are all these things, and also their contrary, our self in the shadows. We are the secret traits missing in our supposed faithful likeness, in the description of us meant to be exact. We are someone about to come into being, and also someone who has been, long ago. Our identity, and the time and place in which we exist, are fluid and transient, like water.
There is another scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that perfectly illustrates the heroine’s many identities, but also those of her readers, and it take place in one of the first chapters of the book. After falling down the rabbit hole, Alice feels she’s no longer herself, and wonders who it is that has taken her place. Instead of despairing, she decides to wait until someone looks down to call her, saying: “Come up again, dear!” And then she’ll ask: “Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.”
The many faces (all our own) that await our inquisitorial eye in dreams and in books and in everyday life end up, alas, becoming real. At first their appearances may amuse us or befuddle us; after a time they cling like masks of flesh to our skin and bones. Proteus could change his shape but only until someone grabbed him and held him secure: then the god would allow himself to be seen as he really was, as a blending of all his metamorphoses. So it is with our myriad identities. They change and dissolve in our eye and the eyes of others, until the moment when we are suddenly able to pronounce the word I. Then they cease to be illusions, hallucinations, guesswork and become, with astonishing conviction, an epiphany.