nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy
Chapter 1
But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.
So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.
With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out.
(nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy)
Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
It’s all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, find myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the non outsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them. Yes, envy.
In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can’t imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.
Chapter 2
You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions—carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others'.
And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don’t waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?
Outside the Town of Malbork
Every moment you discover there is a new character, you don’t know how many people there are in this immense kitchen of ours, it’s no use counting, there were always many of us, at Kudgiwa, always coming and going: the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character, indicated according to the circumstances by baptismal name, nickname, surname or patronymic, and even by appellations such as “Jan’s widow,” or “the apprentice from the corn shop.” But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines—Bronko’s gnawed nails, the down on Brigd’s cheeks—and also the gestures, the utensils that this person or that is handling—the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler—so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling a butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, “Ah, that’s the butter-curler one!” thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler.
Chapter 3
“Nothing. I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.”
Leaning from the Steep Slope
A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.
Chapter 6
“All our work depends on the sensitivity of the subject at our disposal for the control tests: and it must, moreover, be a person of strong eyesight and nerves, to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.”
The man in the white smock rips off one encephalogram after another, as if they were pages from a calendar. “Worse and worse,” he says. “Not one novel being produced holds up. Either the programming has to be revised or the reader is not functioning.”
In a Network of Lines that Enlace
though nobody these days knows the feeling of being struck by an arrow, we all believe we can easily imagine it.
We cross on the rustling paths of leaves and sometimes we say “Hi!” to each other, sometimes nothing, because we have to save our breath. This, too, is an advantage running has over other sports: everybody is on his own and is not required to answer to others.
Chapter 7
This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas to you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla),
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. To understand this, our Reader knows that the first step is to visit the kitchen.
What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Chapter 8
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes . . . Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.”
And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say, “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”
On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, “It was a dark and stormy night. . .” Every time I sit down here I read, “It was a dark and stormy night. . .”
For an instant I seem to understand the meaning and fascination of a now inconceivable vocation: that of the copyist. The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object.
firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of Silas Flannery’s novels, and it manages to produce absolutely new ones, and first-class novels at that, so it can invade the world market. Retranslated into English (or, rather, translated into English, from which they claim to have been translated), they cannot be distinguished, by any critic, from true Flannerys.
The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once—the biographers of the Prophet tell us—while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith.
“Mentally. He shouldn’t even be aware of it. He would believe he is writing as he likes; instead, the message coming from space on waves picked up by his brain would infiltrate what he is writing.”
I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.
The idea that Lotaria reads my books in this way creates some problems for me. Now, every time I write a word, I see it spun around by the electronic brain, ranked according to its frequency, next to other words whose identity I cannot know, and so I wonder how many times I have used it, I feel the whole responsibility of writing weigh on those isolated syllables, I try to imagine what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that I have used this word once or fifty times. Maybe it would be better for me to erase it. . . But whatever other word I try to use seems unable to withstand the test. . . . Perhaps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alphabetical order, an avalanche of isolated words which expresses that truth I still do not know, and from which the computer, reversing its program, could construct the book, my book.
“I’m not disappointed. On the contrary. But not because you correspond to an image: because you are an absolutely ordinary person, as I was expecting, in fact.”
Chapter 9
No, don’t fear that we want to force you to assist us in our censorship work. Modern technology will soon put us in a position to perform those tasks with rapidity and efficiency. We have machines capable of reading, analyzing, judging any written text. But it is precisely the reliability of the instruments on which we must run some checks. In our files you are listed as a reader of the sort corresponding to the average, and we see that you have read, at least in part, Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. We feel it would be opportune to compare your impressions of your reading with the results of a reading machine.”
Chapter 10
the countries where existing censorship is crude, approximate, and unpredictable;the countries where the censorship is subtle, informed, sensitive to implications and allusions, managed by meticulous and sly intellectuals;
“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,” Arkadian Porphyrich says. “What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it?
“Do I read outside of my professional duties, you mean? Yes, I would say that every book, every document, every piece of evidence in this archive I read twice, two entirely different readings. The first, in haste, summarily, to know in which file I must keep the microfilm, under what heading it must be catalogued. Then, in the evening (I spend my evenings here, after the official office hours: the place is calm, relaxing, as you see), I stretch out on this sofa, I insert the film of some rare work in the reading machine, some secret dossier, and I enjoy the luxury of savoring it for my exclusive pleasure.”
“Something must always remain that eludes us. . . For power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms. . . As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading’s sake, I can convince myself that the world continues. . . And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman. . .”
Chapter 11
“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.”