A History of Reading in the West (review)

Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 478 pages.

"Far from being writers--founders of their own place, heirs to the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses--readers are voyagers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), reading does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise" (1).

This passage from Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) opens this volume of essays and appears frequently in the writings of Roger Chartier, one of its editors. It is worth reproducing here in its entirety, for its evocation is central to the concerns of the essays gathered here under the title A History of Reading in the West, central too in the writings of Chartier.

This opposition of the acts of writing and reading would seem to relegate that of reading not only to a subsidiary position, but also to one of a feckless, even larcenous character. Why then devote not only the space of this volume to its history, but much of the scholarly output of its two editors as well?

The answer perhaps lies in Certeau's wistful phrase "lost paradise," a place visited again and again by readers as they go about plundering and pillaging what writing has so assiduously provided for them. Paradise is where the text written and the book read come together, fleetingly, where the two spaces coexist for an instant, before each goes its separate way, leaving the possibility of another encounter always open. Wistful too, for the way readers go in and out of paradise, without undergoing the tortures of writing, blithely enjoying its fruits without having paid the slightest price. And wistful the image of the never-ending voyage which makes readers and their activities a subject of curiosity and reverie.

The project, as described by Chartier and his co-editor, Guglielmo Cavallo, in their introduction is to reconstruct, in all its diversity, the various modes of reading that have characterized Western society since classical Antiquity. This project requires paying close attention to the encounter of "the world of the text" and "the world of the reader" (the terminology is from Ricoeur).

Two sets of basic tenets are born in mind throughout. The first, and most fundamental, holds that texts exist only as physical objects, and that they have life only if they are read or used by a reader. Secondly, the editors maintain that a mode of reading is not inscribed in the text a priori, that meaning assigned by an author or by critics does not coincide with interpretation, something constructed by a reader. A text does not exist except that a reader gives it meaning, and this is always accomplished by means of the physical object, the book.

There exists then an intricate relation among the three elements text-book-reader. The book stands at the pivotal point of this ménage-à-trois, embodying the text and providing the physical support encountered by the reader. It is an element that has long been neglected in literary and historical studies, and it constitutes the central focus of Roger Chartier's work over the past two decades, particularly the early modern book. His co-editor, Cavallo, has written on the book in the Roman and Byzantine worlds.

If the realm of the text then consists of objects and of forms, the realm of the reader consists of "communities of interpretation" (a...