A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36419-7
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1998-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Two students’ tablets from Sumer. The teacher wrote on one side, the student copied the teacher’s writing on the other. (photo credit 12.1)

A writer can construct a text in any number of ways, choosing from the common stock of words those which seem to express the message best. But the reader receiving this text is not confined to any one interpretation. While, as we have said, the readings of a text are not infinite — they are circumscribed by conventions of grammar, and the limits imposed by common sense — they are not strictly dictated by the text itself. Any written text, says the French critic Jacques Derrida,13 “is readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I don’t know what its alleged author consciously intended to say at the moment of writing it, i.e. abandoned the text to its essential drift.” For that reason, the author (the writer, the scribe) who wishes to preserve and impose a meaning must also be the reader. This is the secret privilege which the Mesopotamian scribe granted himself and which I, reading in the ruins that might have been his library, have usurped.

In a famous essay, Roland Barthes proposed a distinction between écrivain and écrivant: the former fulfils a function, the latter an activity; for the écrivain writing is an intransitive verb; for the écrivant the verb always leads to an objective — indoctrinating, witnessing, explaining, teaching.14 Possibly the same distinction can be made between two reading roles: that of the reader for whom the text justifies its existence in the act of reading itself, with no ulterior motive (not even entertainment, since the notion of pleasure is implied in the carrying out of the act), and that of the reader with an ulterior motive (learning, criticizing) for whom the text is a vehicle towards another function. The first activity takes place within a time frame dictated by the nature of the text; the second exists in a time frame imposed by the reader for the purpose of that reading. This may be what Saint Augustine believed was a distinction God Himself had established. “What My Scripture says, I say,” he hears God reveal to him. “But the Scripture speaks in time, whereas time does not affect My Word, which stands for ever, equal with Me in eternity. The things which you see by My Spirit, I see, just as I speak the words which you speak by My Spirit. But while you see those things in time, it is not in time that I see them. And while you speak those words in time, it is not in time that I speak them.”15

As the scribe knew, as society discovered, the extraordinary invention of the written word with all its messages, its laws, its lists, its literatures, depended on the scribe’s ability to restore the text, to read it. With that ability lost, the text becomes once again silent markings. The ancient Mesopotamians believed birds to be

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