A Reader on Reading

The Voice That Says “I”

“We, indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the

end of its tail. “As if I would talk on such a subject!”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2

IT WAS WHILE READING Stevenson’s Treasure Island when I was eight or nine that I was suddenly struck by the question of who I really was. My edition had an introduction titled “How This Book Came to Be Written” that explained how Stevenson, one rainy afternoon, had started telling the story to his stepson by drawing for him the island’s map. A picture of the map was faithfully reproduced as the frontispiece.

Treasure Island begins with a confession: “I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 —, and go back to the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Ben-bow’ inn …” The appearance at the inn of the wicked Old Sea Dog afraid of a certain “seafaring man with one leg” had begun to fill me with delightful terror when, twenty-odd pages into the book, I noticed that the narrator was suddenly addressed as “Jim.” “Jim”: I leafed again through the introduction. There was no doubt about it. The author, I read, was someone whose Christian names were “Robert Louis.” And yet here, on the printed page, his name was given as “Jim.” I couldn’t understand how that was possible. Was the narrator not the person whose name appeared on the cover? It obviously was not a mistake since “I take up my pen …” was clearly written in the first paragraph. Therefore the “I” who had begun to tell me his story was not “Robert Louis,” the book’s announced author, but someone who called himself “Jim” and who, conjured out of nowhere, had mysteriously usurped Robert Louis’s position in my book. Was then the story untrue? Could the author have lied?

To say “I” and tell a story implied, for me, at the age of eight, a promise of truth, the presence of a real-life narrator who was about to reveal to me, his reader, something that had happened to him across the seas in another century. With this switch from “Robert Louis” to “Jim,” my confidence in storytelling was suddenly shaken. I realized that “I” could be not “I,” the author, but someone the author only pretended to be, a trickster playacting on the page, a deceiver taking on the voice and gestures of someone else. And if this were so (the notion was unclear to me, since I was too young to put it into words) then the “You” whom the “I” addressed, that “You” whom I’d assumed magically to mean “Me,” might also be a lie. From that moment on, I had to agree to comply with rules that I had until then ignored and to act out my role in a story I had still to discover. On that terrible afternoon, reading became, not a voyage of exploration guided by a trusted author, but a game in which the author only played the part of the author and the reader the part of the reader. Later on, as all readers must, I realized that my performance was the leading one, and that the existence of the story depended on my willingness and creative interpretation. But all those years ago in that first, essential moment of revelation, I felt the appearance of the imaginary “I” as a loss and a betrayal.

But why?

The “I” in Treasure Island is obviously the “I” of a made-up character, whether in Jim’s narrative or, later on in the book, in the narrative of Dr. Live-sey, and every reader, even the eight-year-old reader that I was, quickly accepts the device and allows him- or herself to believe in its fictional reality. We the readers accept the fact that “I” becomes someone who tells us to call him Ishmael, or Marcel, or Robinson; just as we accept the fact that these “I”s can truly speak to us, on intimate terms, across seas and centuries. The reader’s faith not only moves mountains but allows their very stones to speak.

Sometimes, however, such faith seems hardly necessary. In certain cases, the rules of the game tell us that the “I” who speaks is, indeed, the “I” who writes. Under these circumstances, how are we to respond as readers to the “I” that carries the same name as the author, the author disguised not as a fictitious character but as himself, speaking from behind a mask that has the features of his own face? How are we to establish a dialogue with the writer who shamelessly crosses fully dressed into his own creation and forgoes his reality as author for the sake of the reality of a creature made out of words in his own image?

A writer much older than Stevenson may help us towards an answer.

Throughout the whole of Dante’s Commedia runs the subject of identity, echoed in the repeated question of the shades: “Who are you?” The first lines of the poem, too well known to be quoted, conjure up from the very beginning the slender figure of the poet’s first person singular. But who is this “myself” who finds himself in the dark wood midway on the path of life, whose initialed sins are gradually wiped off his forehead as he ascends the laborious Mount Purgatory, who flies through the circular heavens with lightning speed towards the essential, ineffable Face? Are we, his readers, supposed to recognize, as we open the book, this frightened man who recalls for us in fragments particular scenes of his life, harping on the intangible Beatrice, on nebulous ancestors, and on his beloved and hated Florence? Who is it that stands there in the “myself” between the collective “our” that qualifies “life” and the almost anonymous infinitive of “to say”? Who is it that tells us he “returned,” made anew like a budding plant after reaching the starlit mountain top? Whose “desire and will” turn to love at the end of the journey?

Halfway through his descent into Hell, Dante meets souls who have committed violence against nature, where, for reasons not entirely clear from a theological point of view but perfectly understandable for anyone with any experience of the world, artists and politicians don’t mix. Here he meets a trio of distinguished Florentine Guelfs who praise Dante’s inspired “speech” and, like so many other condemned souls, ask him to speak of them when he is back in the world of the living. Earthly fame continues to have its attractions, even for those who are no more.

“Therefore, if you escape these dismal haunts

and return to see again the lovely stars,

mind that you speak of us to living men

when you rejoice in telling them ‘I was there.’ ”

[Inferno, 16.82–85, trans. Richard Howard]

“I was” is how they sum up Dante’s journey, his time spent in the other world: the act of being in the first person singular that asserts Dante’s existence both as witness and as protagonist. Not “I was there,” as Richard Howard’s translation has it, in the sense of having trodden the unthinkable and everlasting place, but “I existed,” in order to assert the action that Hamlet would later have in mind for his famous question. The voice, Dante’s voice, that might grant them posthumous memory must have not only the experience of place but also that of time, and enjoy existence in the deepest, most essential sense, as a living body and an immortal soul. The poet who is to tell future generations the truth cannot be merely emblematic, cannot depend only on the reader’s will to believe in him; he must be able to say “I was” and must acknowledge a factual biography, a specific mind, a physical body. Anonymous literature makes us uncomfortable: even the muddle of different books we call the Bible must have, we say, an Author whose floating beard lends him literary venerability. To avoid the discomfort of anonymity, early readers invented for the Iliad and the Odyssey a blind poet called Homer who knew about seafare and warfare, and who recited his verses on the island of Chios. Dante, more prudently, does not rely on posterity and has his own creations attribute these traits to himself. Everywhere on his otherworldly journey, Dante tells his readers how he meets people he knows well (a catalogue of social notables that caused Lamartine to brand the Commedia “a Florentine Who’s Who”); the corollary to this is that they, in turn, must know Dante, and either greet him with rapture or curse him. Here then, admits the reader, are trustworthy witnesses, since they can recognize Dante in his own story; ergo, Dante must be real. Gradually, in the reader’s eye, Dante (not the author of the poem but its protagonist, Dante the poet) begins to exist. But for what purpose?

Somewhere in the vast Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dante’s teacher, invented a literary conceit called quem auctor intendit, “what the author intended,” which has since become a strand in every literary tapestry, as much a part of any book as the plot or the protagonist. To the reader’s implicit question, “Why are you telling me this?” Dante provides implicit answers: “Because I want you to know how I was lost and how love saved me; because I want you to learn from my visionary experience; because I want to defend my belief in a society in which State and Church fulfill their separate obligations.” Dante’s threefold intention can be read (as far as we can read anything) as political, moral, and personal: first, to oppose the legendary Donation of Constantine that granted the Church temporal power, and to follow Christ’s precept in Matthew 22:21, rendering “unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s;” second, to “teach by the example,” according to scholastic methods, by means of his poetic model of the world; third, to fulfill the promise of his encounters with Beatrice and make them meaningful. Above all (but perhaps this is what we, as readers, want Dante’s intention to be), the third purpose, the reasons of love. Falling in love is unreasonable and ineffable: Dante attempts to lend it logic and translate it into words. To follow Dante on this triple path and not abandon the story midway, we need to believe in the existence of the man whose words echo in our ear, as if he were ourselves. To be able to enter a fiction and take part in its reality, “I,” in our mind, has to become “You.”

The dialogue a writer establishes with the reader is one of artifice and deceit. To tell the truth, the writer must lie in a number of clever and convincing ways; the instrument for doing this is language—unreliable, manipulated and manipulative, officially sacrosanct in that it purports to say what the dictionary says it says, but in practice subjective and circumstantial. The narrative voice is always a fiction behind which the reader assumes (or is asked to assume) a truth. The author, the leading character, appears to the reader out of nowhere, almost but not quite a creature of flesh and blood, made present by his own words, like the Beckettian voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush, saying, “I am what I am.” This is the absolute, godlike, self-defining, circular identity that every writer grants himself in the first person singular. An identity to which the readers are asked to respond: “If we, often across miles and centuries, can hear the voice saying ‘I’ on the page, then ‘I’ must exist and ‘We’ must be forced to believe in it.”

To say “I” is to place before the reader seemingly irrefutable proof of a speaker whose words can tell the truth or lie, but whose presence, vouched for by his voice, must not be doubted. To say “I” is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other. If that is the case, and if the characters we meet on Dante’s long way from the dark forest to the Empyrean have the quality of dreams, then what of those others whom the evidence of our senses tells us are alive: we, the constant readers? “I’ll tell you a story,” says Dante, and in that preliminary utterance both he and his audience are trapped until the last word is reached—and also beyond it. “You, reader, exist,” says the poet, “as the witness and receiver of my book, and therefore I, whom you can vouch for, since you see and hear my words, must exist too. And also, since they occupy the same linguistic space as you and I, you can vouch for the creatures of my story, the characters of my plot. At least within the circle of our relationship, bound by words, we must believe in one another and in one another’s honesty, knowing that the lie that binds us holds the truth. Within that circle, can you, reader, decide in absolute terms that I exist but the Minotaur does not? That Beatrice and Saint Bernard and Virgil and Gianni Schicchi are real because history tells us that they once lived, but that the Angel who guards the Pass of Pardon does not except in faith, and that Charon is nothing but the stuff of ancient stories?” Dante, like every poet, repeats the words of the Unicorn to Alice through the Looking-Glass: “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” Seven centuries of readers have willingly entered into this Mephistophelian bargain.

But literary faith is never absolute: it exists between the skepticism that forbids enjoyment of the imagination and the madness that denies the world tangible reality. The historical Dante, the one who perhaps resembled the famous Giotto portrait, the Dante who underwent like every man the common pains and pleasures of the human lot, becomes inextricably entwined with the other, the Dante who said “I” in Paradise and whose singed beard, people said, came from having walked too close to the flames of Hell. For Dante, for the Dante we come to know, the Commedia is not a fiction: it is the enactment in words of a truth, that of salvation from the suffering of the world. If anything, it is the chronicle of a voyage, a piece of travel writing in foreign lands, with its geographical descriptions, dialogues with the inhabitants, notes of local history and politics, personal misadventures, and passion for lists: a guide for readers who may later have to undertake a similar journey.

The reading prescriptions set out by Dante in his famous letter to Can Grande della Scala explaining how his Commedia was to be understood are too constringent. They argue for a divided or graded reading (literal, allegorical, analogical, anagogical), when in fact, as Dante no doubt knew, no reader proceeds in such an orderly fashion. All or none of these levels takes priority in the act of reading. By saying or implying “I,” the first words of a text already draw the reader into a murky place in which nothing is absolute, neither dream nor reality, and in which everything told is at once what it purports to be and something else, and also the mere words that make it up. The Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio is the stage that Dante reaches after all seven initials of sin have been wiped from his forehead, and also the garden in which we lost our innocence, and also the grove from which Proserpine was taken, and also the starting place of our ascent to Heaven, and also the lighted counterpart of the dark wood of the beginning of Dante’s voyage, and also the musical words “humming/a continuo under their rhyming” (Purgatorio, 28.17–18, trans. W. S. Merwin). But the Earthly Paradise is also the solid pine forest of Chiassi near Ravenna where Dante wrote the last cantos of Purgatorio when the sea still came up to its borders, and also the threadbare plantation that now stands far inland, a few steps from the church of San Apollinare.

To help the reader agree to believe and play the game of exchanged pretences, the writer offers his excusatio propia infirmitatis, the confession of his own weakness, a rhetorical device common in the literature of the Middle Ages. Over and over, Dante tells us that words do not suffice, that memory cannot translate experience into speech, that even memory cannot at times hold the unspoken act, and that the knowledge of certain experiences can only be granted by grace, “for these whom grace hath better proof in store.”

Words may not tell of that transhuman change;

And therefore let the example serve, though weak,

For these whom grace hath better proof in store.

[Paradiso 1.70–72, trans. H. F. Cary]

Not only what is “transhuman” and lies beyond the human realm: all attempt at communication, all literature born from the dialogue between writer and reader, every artifact made of words suffers from this essential poverty. And by declaring language’s inability to convey experience, the poet forces the reader, who shares language’s shortcomings, to acknowledge not only the honesty of the writer’s declaration but also, implicitly, the truth of what the writer confesses cannot be said. All means are valid to try and sharpen the imprecision of words.

“Take note of my words just as I say them,

and teach them to those who are living,”

[Purgatorio, 33.52–53, trans. W. S. Merwin]

says Beatrice to Dante, and later, seeing that Dante’s mind is tough as stone, she concedes:

“I would also have you carry it away

within you, painted even if not written.”

[Purgatorio, 33.76–77, trans. W. S. Merwin]

Images, though lesser tools than words, sometimes must serve where words fail, and even the divine Beatrice must, on occasion, fall back on images. One example should suffice. At the beginning of Paradiso, in order to explain to Dante why God’s brilliance is equally distributed in the heavenly bodies, Beatrice asks him to imagine an experiment involving three mirrors and a common source of light. Two of the mirrors are set at an equal distance from the viewer and the third farther away: even though the light appears smaller in this third mirror, the brilliance of all three reflections is the same. In this way, concrete experience becomes a metaphor for the otherwise ineffable: if what is seen or felt cannot at times be put into words, the impossible words can at times be put into action, for the reader to see and feel what cannot be told.

As Dante repeatedly tells us, truth (the experience of truth) recedes from human expression and understanding, plunges beyond language, beyond remembrance into an essential depth where things are known unto themselves, in their pure untranslatable essence, as that which is carried untouched from language to language in the act of translation.

Dante wants us to admit that it is he, the story’s “I,” who has journeyed through the three terrible realms, but the reader knows that Dante’s experience is not entirely that of the “I” on the page nor that of the “I” who put him there: that it belongs to yet another “I” whom the reader must rescue from the page, pronouncing the word and yet understanding that it is speaking for somebody else. The reader knows that the voice that says “I” names itself and at the same time several others, since the writer creates by mirroring his creations. Into this game of mirrors, the reader must step in, in order to get to know the reality of words and to pronounce this “I” that he is not. Through the reader’s goodwill, Dante can visit Hell and Purgatory and Heaven so that the reader can say at last, “I too was there.”

The shock I received on first discovering that literature invents and that the world peopled by words is not that which the bureaucratic world of fact proclaimed has not entirely passed, more than half a century later. I’m still bewildered by the realization that if the writer who invented an adventurous narrator for the enjoyment of his stepson was not (or only partially) that narrator, and if the poet who conjured up the traveler in the realms to come was not (or not entirely) that traveler, then I, their diligent reader, was not the boy, am not the man on the other side of the page. At least not entirely, at least only partially. I don’t know whether to rejoice or despair at this conclusion.

More than five centuries after Dante, on 15 May 1871, another traveler in Hell drafted the following report:

“If the old fools hadn’t uncovered only the false meaning of ‘I’ we’d not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons that, since time everlasting, have accumulated the fruits of their one-eyed intellect, claiming to be its authors!”

So wrote the seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud to his friend Paul Demeny, two years before composing Une Saison en enfer, beginning the letter with the inevitable conclusion: “Car JE est un autre” — “Because I is someone else.”

This is the truth that the reader must always bear in mind.