Into the Looking-Glass Wood Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 1998 by Alberto Manguel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Manguel, Alberto, 1948-

  Into the looking-glass wood : essays on words and the world

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36368-8

  1. Literature and society. I. Title.

  PN45.M345 1998 809 C98931238-0

  v3.1

  TO LENNY FAGIN,

  BEST OF FRIENDS, WHO WAS THERE

  IN THE VERY BEGINNING.

  “But what happens when you come to the

  beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter VII

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  “They drew all manner of things—

  everything that begins with an M—”

  “Why with an M?” said Alice.

  “Why not?” said the March Hare.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter VII

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I. FOREWORD

  With Thanks

  II. WHO AM I?

  A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood

  On Being Jewish

  Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest

  III. MEMORANDA

  Borges in Love

  The Death of Che Guevara

  Imagination to Power! (Remembering Julio Cortázar)

  IV. SEX

  The Gates of Paradise

  Browsing in the Rag-and-Bone Shop

  V. WORDPLAY

  The Blind Photographer

  Reading White for Black

  The Secret Sharer

  VI. LOOKING TO SEE

  The Muse in the Museum

  Dragon Eggs and Phoenix Feathers, or A Defence of Desire

  VII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  In Memoriam

  God’s Spies

  The Age of Revenge

  VIII. CERTAIN BOOKS

  Taking Chesterton at His Word

  The Irresolutions of Cynthia Ozick

  Waiting for an Echo: On Reading Richard Outram

  IX. GETTING RID OF THE ARTISTS

  Jonah and the Whale: A Sermon

  X. REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

  St. Augustine’s Computer

  I

  FOREWORD

  “You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,”

  the Red Queen said, frowning at Alice as she spoke.

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter IX

  With Thanks

  FOR ME, WORDS ON A PAGE give the world coherence. When the inhabitants of Macondo were afflicted with an amnesia-like sickness which came to them one day during their hundred years of solitude, they realized that their knowledge of the world was quickly disappearing and that they might forget what a cow was, what a tree was, what a house was. The antidote, they discovered, lay in words. To remember what their world meant to them, they wrote out labels and hung them from beasts and objects: “This is a tree,” “This is a house,” “This is a cow, and from it you get milk, which mixed with coffee gives you café con leche.” Words tell us what we, as a society, believe the world to be.

  “Believe to be”: therein lies the challenge. Pairing words with experience and experience with words, we, readers, sift through stories that echo or prepare us for an experience, or tell us of experiences that will never be ours (as we know all too well) except on the burning page. Accordingly, what we believe a book to be reshapes itself with every reading. Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library; my words and my world—except for a few constant landmarks—are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”

  What remains invariable is the pleasure of reading, of holding a book in my hands and suddenly feeling that peculiar sense of wonder, recognition, chill or warmth that for no discernible reason a certain string of words sometimes evokes. Reviewing books, translating books, editing anthologies are activities that have provided me some justification for this guilty pleasure (as if pleasure required justification!) and sometimes even allowed me to make a living. “It is a fine world and I wish I knew how to make £200 a year in it,” wrote the poet Edward Thomas to his friend Gordon Bottomley. Reviewing, translating and editing have sometimes allowed me to make those £200.

  Henry James coined the phrase “the figure in the carpet” for the recurrent theme that runs through a writer’s work like a secret signature. In many of the pieces I have written (as reviews or memoirs or introductions) I think I can see that elusive figure: it has something to do with how this craft I love so much, the craft of reading, relates to the place in which I do it, to Thomas’s “fine world.” I believe there is an ethic of reading, a responsibility in how we read, a commitment that is both political and private in the act of turning the pages and following the lines. And I believe that sometimes, beyond the author’s intentions and beyond the reader’s hopes, a book can make us better and wiser.

  Craig Stephenson, who for the past years has been the first reader of everything I’ve written, suggested the structure, order and selection for this book. He curbed my inclination to keep occasional pieces to which I was attached for sentimental reasons, and reminded me of others that I had forgotten, and spent far more time reflecting on the appropriateness of each piece than I myself, in my impatience, would have done. For this, and for more things than he would ever be willing to acknowledge, my loving thanks.

  Many of the pieces here collected have appeared, over the years, in various shapes and guises, in a number of publications whose hospitality I wish to acknowledge.

  “Jonah and the Whale” and “The Age of Revenge” were conceived as talks given at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where I was head of the Maclean-Hunter Arts Journalism Programme from 1991 to 1995; the latter piece appeared, slightly modified, in the Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm. “Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest” and “The Gates of Paradise” were the introductions to two anthologies, one of gay stories (edited with Craig Stephenson) and one of erotic short fiction. An earlier draft of “On Being Jewish” was published in the Times Literary Supplement of London, as were “The Death of Che Guevara,” “The Blind Photographer” and a shorter version of “St. Augustine’s Computer”; the latter was delivered as the TLS lecture in 1997. “Imagination to Power!” appeared as the afterword to my translation of Julio Cortázar’s Unreasonable Hours, and then was expanded to introduce a volume of his selected stories, published under the title Bestiary. Earlier versions of “Browsing in the Rag-and-Bone Shop” (under the title “Designer Porn”), “Waiting for an Echo” (under the title “Hard Words”) and “The Secret Sharer” appeared in Saturday Night magazine, Toronto. “Reading White for Black” (under the title “A Blind Eye and a Deaf Ear”) appeared both in Brick and in Index on Censorship. The latter also published an early version of “God’s Spies” as an answer to Vargas Llosa’s call for amnesty in Argentina. “Dragon Eggs and Phoenix Feathers” and “The Muse in the Museum” appeared in Art Monthly, Melbourne. “In Memoriam” was published by Heat magazine, Sydney. “The Irresolutions of Cynthia Ozick” combines several reviews of her work published in the New York Village Voice and the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Taking Chesterton at Hi
s Word” was written as an introduction to my selection of Chesterton essays for the Italian publishing company Adelphi and first published in the Frankfurter Rundschau. A section of “Borges in Love” appeared in The Australian’s Review of Books.

  In spite of my views on editing declared in “The Secret Sharer,” most of these pieces have benefited greatly from the generous and intelligent readings of a number of devoted magazine and newspaper editors, too many to name but all of whom I humbly thank. If the craft of editing required a raison d’être, it would be, in my case, my friendship with Louise Dennys, whose passion for good writing, good stories and what Stevenson called the “ultimate decency of things” I have learned to treasure over the past many years. Any errors, solecisms, unshapeliness and blots are entirely my own.

  And, as usual, my thanks to the unflagging team at Westwood Creative Artists, semper fidelis.

  ALBERTO MANGUEL, Calgary, fall 1998

  II

  WHO AM I?

  “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

  “You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,”

  Tweedledee remarked: “there’s

  nothing to cry about.”

  “If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing

  through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous

  —“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

  “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?”

  Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter IV

  A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood

  “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter VI

  Man’s innate casuistry!

  To change things by changing their names!

  KARL MARX

  quoted in The Origins of the Family,

  by Friedrich Engels

  WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, in a house that no longer stands, someone gave me a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. Like so many other readers, I have always felt that the edition in which I read a book for the first time remains, for the rest of my life, the original one. Mine, thank the stars, was enriched by John Tenniel’s illustrations and was printed on thick creamy paper that reeked mysteriously of burnt wood.

  There was much I didn’t understand in my first reading of Alice—but that didn’t seem to matter. I learned at a very early age that, unless you are reading for some purpose other than pleasure (as we all sometimes must for our sins), you can safely skim over difficult quagmires, cut your way through tangled jungles, skip the solemn and boring lowlands, and simply let yourself be carried by the vigorous stream of the tale. Alice, who couldn’t see the use of a book “without pictures or conversations,” would surely agree.

  As far as I can remember, my first impression of the adventures was that of a physical journey on which I myself became poor Alice’s companion. The fall down the rabbit-hole and the crossing through the looking-glass were merely starting points, as trivial and as wonderful as boarding a bus. But the journey! When I was eight or nine, my disbelief was not so much suspended as yet unborn, and fiction felt at times more real than everyday fact. It was not that I thought that a place such as Wonderland actually existed, but I knew that it was made of the same stuff as my house and my street and the red bricks that were my school.

  A book becomes a different book every time we read it. That first childhood Alice was a journey, like the Odyssey or Pinocchio, and I’ve always felt myself a better Alice than an Odysseus or a wooden puppet. Then came the adolescent Alice, and I knew exactly what she had to put up with when the March Hare offered her wine when there was no wine at the table, or when the Caterpillar wanted her to tell him exactly who she was and what she meant by that. Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s warning, that Alice was nothing but the Red King’s dream, haunted my sleep, and my waking hours were tortured with exams in which Red Queen teachers asked me questions like “What’s French for fiddle-de-dee?” Later, in my twenties, I found the Knave of Hearts’ trial collected in André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir, and it became obvious that Alice was a sister of the surrealists; after a conversation with the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy in Paris, I was startled to discover that Humpty Dumpty owed much to the structuralist doctrines of Change and Tel Quel. And later still, when I made my home in Canada, how could I fail to recognize that the White Knight (“But I was thinking of a plan/ To dye one’s whiskers green,/ And always use so large a fan/ That they could not be seen”) had found a job as one of the numerous bureaucrats that scurry through the corridors of every public building in my country?

  In all the years during which I’ve read and reread Alice, I’ve come across many other different and interesting readings of her books, but I can’t say that any of these have become, in any deep sense, my own. The readings of others influence, of course, my personal reading, offer new points of view or colour certain passages, but mostly they are like the comments of the Gnat who keeps naggingly whispering in Alice’s ear, “You might make a joke on that.” I refuse; I’m a jealous reader and will not allow others a jus primae noctis with the books that I read. The intimate sense of kinship established so many years ago with my first Alice hasn’t weakened; every time I reread her, the bonds strengthen in very private and unexpected ways. I know bits of her by heart. My children (my eldest daughter is, of course, called Alice) tell me to shut up when I burst, yet again, into the mournful strains of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” And for almost every new experience, I find a premonitory or nostalgic echo in her pages, telling me once again, “This is what lies ahead of you” or “You have been here before.”

  One adventure among many describes for me not any particular experience I’ve had or may one day have, but rather seems to address something vaguer and vaster, an experience or (if the term is not too grand) a philosophy of life. It takes place at the end of chapter three of Through the Looking-Glass. After passing through her reflection and making her way across the chessboard country that lies behind it, Alice reaches a dark wood where (she has been told) things have no names. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she says bravely, “after being so hot, to get into the—into the—into what?” Astonished at not being able to think of the word, Alice tries to remember. “ ‘I mean to get under the—under the—under this, you know!’ putting her hand on the trunk of a tree. ‘What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name—why, to be sure it hasn’t.’ ” Trying to recall the word for the place she is in, accustomed to putting into words her experience of reality, Alice suddenly discovers that nothing actually has a name: that until she herself can name something, that thing will remain nameless, present but silent, intangible as a ghost. Must she remember these forgotten names? Or must she make them up, brand-new? Hers is an ancient conundrum.

  After creating Adam “out of the dust of the ground” and placing him in a garden east of Eden (as the second chapter of Genesis tells us), God went on to create every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called every living creature, “that was the name thereof.” For centuries, scholars have puzzled over this curious exchange. Was Adam in a place (like the Looking-Glass Wood) where everything was nameless, and was he supposed to invent names for the things and creatures he saw? Or did the beasts and the fowl that God created indeed have names, which Adam was meant to know, and which he was to pronounce like a child seeing a dog or the moon for the very first time?

  And what do we mean by a “name”? The question, or a form of the question, is asked in Through the Looking-Glass. A few chapters after crossing the nameless wood, Alice meets the doleful figure of the White Knight who, in the authoritarian manner of adults, tells her that he will sing a song to “comfort” her. “
The name of the song,” says the Knight, “is called Haddocks’ Eyes.’ ”

  “Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.

  “No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’ ”

  “Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.

  “No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

  “Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

  “I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

  As it turns out, the tune isn’t his own invention (as Alice points out) and neither are the Knight’s careful distinctions between what a name is called, the name itself, what the thing it names is called and the thing itself; these distinctions are as old as the first commentators of Genesis. The world into which Adam was inducted was innocent of Adam; it was also innocent of Adam’s words. Everything Adam saw, everything he felt, as everything he fancied or feared was to be made present to him (as, eventually, to every one of us) through layers of names, names with which language tries to clothe the nakedness of experience. It is not by chance that, once Adam and Eve lost their innocence, they were obliged to wear skins “so that,” says a Talmudic commentator, “they might learn who they were through the shape that enveloped them.” Words, the names of things, give experience its shape.

  The task of naming belongs to every reader. Others who do not read must name their experience as best they can, constructing verbal sources, as it were, by imagining their own books. In our book-centred societies, the craft of reading signals our entrance into the ways of the tribe with its particular codes and demands, allowing us to share the common source of recorded words; but it would be a mistake to think of reading as a merely receptive activity. On the contrary: Mallarmé proposed that every reader’s duty was “to purify the sense of the words of the tribe.” To do this, readers must make books theirs. In endless libraries, like thieves in the night, readers pilfer names, vast and marvellous creations as simple as Adam and as far-fetched as Rumpelstiltskin. A writer will tell us, as Proust does, that the volumes of Bergotte’s library keep watch over the dead artists throughout the night, in pairs like guardian angels; but it is the reader of Proust who, alone one night in the darkened bedroom, sees those angels’ wings betraying their presence, outlined in the sweep of passing headlights. Bunyan describes Christian running from his house with his fingers in his ears, so as not to hear the pleas of his wife and children; Homer describes Ulysses, bound to the mast, trying in vain to shut out the sirens’ song; the reader of Bunyan and Homer names with these words the deafness of our contemporary, the amiable Prufrock. Edna St. Vincent Millay calls herself “domestic as a plate” and it is the reader who renames the daily kitchen china, the companion of his meals, with a newly acquired meaning.