The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor

3 The Bookworm: The Reader as Inventor of the World

chapter 3 S THE BOOKWORM The Reader as Inventor of the World S “Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at doors—and behind trees—and down chimneys—or you couldn’t have known it!” “I haven’t, indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VI Chapter 3 90 the Creature Made of books I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a book. —Thomas à Kempis at a table made of huge books laid flat and borne on legs of parchment scrolls, a wizened man with large spectacles turns the leaves of a thick book with his chin. He cannot use his hands: his body is cocooned in a sheaf of printed paper, poised the bookworm 91 on an open treatise. the back wall is covered with huge pages and a shelf full of books. He is the bookworm, mocked in an 1842 caricature by the French cartoonist Jean ignace isidore Gérard, known as Grandville. the meaning of the jest is clear: here is someone literally made out of print, so absorbed in the words on the page that nothing else seems to exist for him. in his book-centered world, the flesh has become the word. Does this metamorphosis grant him special powers? according to Grandville, it would not seem so. all the reader can do, bound by his strange fate, is peruse with his eyes the book in front of him, page after page; he is helpless in every other sense. He has no effect on the world around him: even his own body, swathed in paper, seems not his to command. and though his cocoon-like appearance suggests that a butterfly might be born from his captive state, no indication is given of when, if ever, this rebirth is likely to happen. in Grandville’s depiction, the bookworm seems condemned to his cloistered fate for as long as there are books to be read. though this caricature of the reader’s fate illustrates the negative aspects of the ivory tower, it is not, thankfully, the overriding image of the reader in our world. images of readers in every conceivable situation have been produced since our earliest literate civilizations, endowed with complex symbolic meanings of identity, power, and privilege. Whether holdJ . J. Grandville, “A bookworm.” From Vies Publiques et Privées des Animaux (1840–1842). Courtesy the Granger Collection, New York. Chapter 3 92 ing in their hands something sacred, something dangerous, something instructive or entertaining, whether dipping into a trove of memory and learning, whether listening to the voice of their contemporaries or ancestors, to the Word of God or the words of those long dead, readers are depicted as engaging in a mysterious, numinous act. implicit in the act are the reader’s capacities: to rescue experience, transgress physical laws, translate and reinterpret information, learn facts, delight in lies, and judge. also implicit are the rules by which the reader engages with the writer, establishing territories of responsibility and obligation , as well as borders that must not be transgressed, unless by an act of subversion on either side. Depending on what the text is supposed to be, on its agreed-upon identity, reader and writer have different duties and expectations. according to convention , fiction demands one set of rules, biography another, and generations of readers and writers have endeavored to break, undermine, and renew these basic preconceptions. three centuries before Grandville, the scholar nicholas de Herberay prefaced his translation into French of the first volume of the chivalry romance amadís de Gaula with a sonnet in which he asks the readers to content themselves with the story the writer has presented for them, and not inquire about its truth. Kind reader, with keen judgment gifted, When you discover the refined invention the bookworm 93 of this author, be with the style content and ask not if what takes place is true.1 it is a curious invocation. to warn the reader not to compare too closely the facts of the books with the facts of reality carries the implicit acknowledgment of textual untruth, transgressing the rules by which both reader and author agree to undertake the romance, the former suspending disbelief, the latter lending verisimilitude to the story. the contract...