This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

R — Reading

Don Quixote is a reader. Or, perhaps more to the point, his reading is his madness. Possessed by the madness of reading, Don Quixote would like to take the things he has read — books of chivalry — and turn them into reality. The real world, the world of goatherds, marauders, innkeepers, servant girls of ill repute, and chain gangs, fails to meet Don Quixote’s illusions, wearing out the poor hidalgo, bruising him and thrashing him about.

Despite the beating he has been given by the real world, Don Quixote nevertheless insists upon seeing giants where there are only windmills. He sees them because that is what his books tell him to see.

But there is one extraordinary moment when the voracious reader Don Quixote discovers that he, the reader, is also being read.

This is the very first moment in the history of literature in which a character, Don Quixote, enters a printing press in— where else? — Barcelona. He has made his way there to denounce the apocryphal version of his adventures, published by a man called Avellaneda, and to tell the world that he, the genuine Don Quixote, is not the false Don Quixote of Avellaneda’s version.

Don Quixote travels through the noble city of Barcelona and comes upon a sign that reads BOOKS PRINTED HERE. He enters the printing press and watches the work as it is being carried out, and sees the printers “printing in one place, correcting in another, typesetting here, revising there,” until he realizes that the book being printed is in fact his own novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, a book that recounts, to Sancho Panza’s consternation, things that only he and his master spoke about, secrets that the printing and subsequent reading will make public, thus subjecting the protagonists of the story to the critical, democratic realm of knowledge and analysis. Scholasticism has died. Free analysis has been born.

Unlike any other literary moment either before or after, this moment in Don Quixote reveals the liberation that comes about from the editing, publication, and reading of a book. From this moment on, literature and, by extension, the book itself, become the repositories of a truth revealed not by God nor the power structure but by the imagination — that is, the human ability to mediate between sensation and perception and to establish a new reality that is the fruit of that mediation, a new reality that would no longer exist were it not for the verbal experience of Cervantes’s Quixote, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, or Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.

Is this intimate yet shared, secret yet public mediation between the spectator and the work of art becoming muddled in the so-called postmodern world? Are we finally witnessing the end of the era of Gutenberg and Cervantes, five centuries in which reading and literature have held fast to their cultural pre-eminence, and moving instead into the era of Ted Turner and Bill Gates, in which the only things worthy of our attention are those that we can see directly in front of us on a television or computer screen?

I grew up during the days of radio. In those years, when you wanted to be certain of what the announcer on XEW Radio had said about the bullfighter Manolete’s great performance, you had to go to the newspapers to ascertain and confirm the facts: yes, it was true, the Monster of Córdoba had cut both ear and tail. It was true because it had been written. In today’s world, the bombing of Baghdad is carried out and we watch along on our television screens. There is no need to confirm this in writing. There is no need, even, to understand it in political terms. Thanks to the ubiquitous, instantaneous nature of the image, we have a dazzling spectacle in living color. And the dead? We neither saw nor heard them.

The fate of the book and reading in our time is a dilemma for which I offer two extreme examples.

All one has to do is enter the indigenous world of Mexico to discover, with amazement, the tremendous capacity of its men and women for telling stories and recalling old legends and myths. Poor and illiterate they may be, but the Mexican Indians do not suffer cultural deprivation. Tarahumaras and Huicholes, Mazatecos and Tzotziles, they all possess an extraordinary talent for remembering and imagining dreams and nightmares, cosmic catastrophes, and sublime rebirth, as well as the infinitesimal details of everyday life.

With good reason Fernando Benítez, the great Mexican writer who extensively documented these indigenous lives, said that each time an Indian dies, a whole library dies along with him.

At the other extreme we find the frighteningly fulfilled fantasy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which a dictatorship— now perfect, of course — outlaws all libraries, burns books, and yet cannot prevent one last tribe of men and women from memorizing the literature of the world, until he or she actually becomes the Odyssey, Treasure Island, or The Thousand and One Nights.

We are talking about two distinct libraries here: one, of a purely oral culture, inside the head of an Indian, and another, in the memory of a postmodern, post-Communist, postcapitalist, posteverything suprayuppie. But what they both possess is the universal possibility to choose between silence and voice, memory and oblivion, movement and paralysis, life and death. The bridge between these two poles is the word, spoken or unspoken, wretched or joyous, visible or invisible, but always deciding, in each and every syllable, whether life should go on or end once and for all.

But can’t we say the same thing of the visual image? Aren’t analogous vital functions performed by a Goya painting, a Coyolxauqui sculpture, a Buñuel film, or an Oscar Niemeyer building? Painting, said Leonardo, is a mental thing. Is the same true of the superhighway containing so many thousands of television channels? Is the same true of the so-called modern media of visual communication that purportedly robs books of their potential readers, dig the grave of the age of Cervantes and Gutenberg, and saturate visual communication with such quantities of information that we all feel supremely well informed, never asking ourselves if the information we are receiving is at all important, and if, in fact, the truly important information is precisely what we are not receiving?

I am not arguing in favor of the book and the library as elements to supplement the possible — and obvious — shortcomings of audiovisual communication at this turn of the century and millennium. On the contrary: I would like to explore that area in which the modern media of communication may help rather than hinder the culture of the book and of reading in general. One thing is true: all you have to do is visit any family home where the television antenna has become the parish cross to confirm the universal phenomenon of the couch potato, the spectator who watches television in the most purely passive manner, very much like a prostrate, sleepy potato that is almost being raped by the succession of images observed from that supine position, images that are received without any kind of critical, creative response. This is the very opposite of what a good book, a good painting, or a good movie asks of us.

But then again, all you have to do is visit an academic center such as the Monterrey Technological Institute to realize, as well, that audiovisual information can be an extraordinary tool for extending the radius of students’ knowledge, enriching the interaction between teachers and students, and counteracting the most negative aspects of the passive way in which we receive and digest images at home. We should probe and exhaust every last possibility and opportunity that audiovisual culture can offer the culture of the book, and vice versa.

In the first place, there has been an astronomical growth in the number of audiovisual “spectators” around the world, but the shrinking number of book readers does not have to be the inevitable or absolute consequence of this fact. It is not inevitable because, once again, what counts is how these media are being used. Their mere existence is not the threat. The editors of the Library of America, a collection of American classics, have proven that new technologies may be used not just to preserve but to broaden a literary legacy, by promoting the works of great writers to great numbers of people who have never heard of them — in the same way that in music, Don Giovanni reaches more listeners in a single day now than it did during Mozart’s entire lifetime.

As such, with the support of audiovisual media, this collection of classic American literature has sold 3 million copies of its first titles, from Jefferson to Faulkner, over the past decade.

José Vasconcelos, the first education secretary of the Mexican Revolution, published a collection of universal classics, beautifully bound, sometime around 1923. Why publish Cervantes in a country with a 90 percent illiteracy rate, people asked him and criticized him in his day. But today the answer is self-evident: so that the illiterate, once they are no longer illiterate, will be able to read Don Quixote instead of Superman.

In the same vein, today’s book world should operate from the premise that new media can create new readers, not steal existing ones away. For this to happen we must insist, from the very start, from the classroom and if possible from the home as well, that the audiovisual image be judged by the same criteria that literature and the plastic arts have always been judged by. Spectators need to learn how to observe critically the images they receive.

Optimists tell us that a society with such abundant audiovisual resources will eventually move toward greater specialization, less commercialization, and, as a result, the birth of a new community composed of book editors and the audiovisual public, readers and spectators, all of whom will be able to choose from an increasingly diversified array of cultural offerings.

In other words, the mass media can certainly help to create more, not fewer, readers with all of today’s means for promoting, selling, and selecting books — means that are far superior to those of yesteryear. If the audiovisual dynamic can add that critical dimension I mention above, then massive promotion and high literary quality do not need to be at odds with each other.

We should not, however, turn a blind eye to the dangers— not so much the relatively minor danger presented by commercialization as promoter of fleeting trends and bad taste (something that has always existed) but rather the danger of abusing new technologies to make the inconclusive seem conclusive. In the human world, which has always been a world of necessity and chance, texts are necessary to make things intelligible — things that otherwise would lack meaning. This necessity, for example, may produce the Bible, but also Mein Kampf. Rudderless societies, ones in which material satisfactions leave the spirit unsatisfied, and where the unsatisfied grow tired of waiting, are the societies where the most dogmatic texts have most powerfully captured the attention and imagination of the masses. Just imagine what Hitler would have done with a television screen.

This is the danger. We live in a global village of mass communication, technical progress, and economic interdependence, but we can easily cultivate the fears and even the rebellion of the local village that does not see itself reflected in these media and which, like Tantalus, will try in vain to attain the fruits that the temptations of advertising emblazon on screens all across the planet.

An authoritarian capitalism, no longer facing a totalitarian Communist enemy, hovers as a dismal, vague threat in some parts of the world. It poses a threat not only to books and to reading, but to the free and creative use of audiovisual media. And the only way to neutralize this noxious effect is with a fully democratic order, a pluralistic political regulation of the use of these media and, above all, a political and social mandate to ensure that public education programs, public libraries, free textbooks, and the freedom for all creative expression meet the highest standards of availability, quality, and effectiveness.

Over the past century, in every Latin American country, we have all witnessed and participated in the creation of a great circle, a circle that travels from writer to editor to distributor to bookseller to the public and then back to the writer. Unlike what has happened in countries with more mercantile development but less intellectual stimulation, in Mexico and Latin America there are certain books that never disappear from the shelves. Neruda and Borges, Cortázar and García Márquez, Vallejo and Paz; they are always present in our bookshops.

They are always present because their readership is constantly being replenished, never depleted. These are young readers, between fifteen and twenty-five years old. They are men and women of the working class, middle class, or somewhere in between, carriers of the changes and the hopes of our continent.

Today, the succession of economic crises endured by Latin America since the 1980s is the greatest threat to the continuity of the reading tradition, which is a reflection of society’s continuity. Various generations of young Latin Americans have discovered who they are by reading Gabriela Mistral, Juan Carlos Onetti, or Jorge Amado. A break in this circle of reading would signify a loss of identity for many young people. Let us not condemn them to leave behind libraries and bookshops only to get lost in the subterranean realm of misery, crime, and neglect.

Let us not allow a single young reader-in-waiting to waste away in the limbo of the lost city, the slum, the marginal neighborhood, or the shanty town.

The library is an invaluable institution in the panorama I describe, because it allows us to witness, close up, the verbal riches of humanity, in a civilized environment and with a protective roof over our heads.

But once there, even when we are surrounded by beauty, peace, hospitality, and even the unique aroma of the library, we must never lose sight of the fact that the perils of censorship, persecution, and intolerance can still strike out against the written word. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is a case in point.

In 1920, José Vasconcelos launched a literacy campaign that met with fierce resistance from the landowning oligarchy of the day. The hacienda owners did not want workers who could read and write; they wanted submissive, ignorant, dependable laborers. Many of the teachers Vasconcelos sent to the countryside were hanged from the treetops. Others returned mutilated.

Vasconcelos’s heroic literacy campaign was matched, with no contradiction whatsoever, by a parallel trend toward high culture. In 1920, as the dean of the Universidad Nacional de México (National University of Mexico), Vasconcelos ordered the printing of a collection of beautifully bound volumes of Homer and Virgil, Plato and Plotinus, Goethe and Dante — a collection of true bibliographical and artistic jewels. But for a population of illiterate, indigent, marginalized people? Yes, precisely: the publication of these classics at the university was an act of hope. It was a way of saying to the majority of Mexicans: one day you will be at the center, not the margins of society. One day you will have the resources to buy a book. One day you will be able to read and understand those things that now, in our day, all Mexicans understand.

Let the book, even as it is being commercialized, transcend commerce.

Let the book, even as it competes in the contemporary world with the abundance and ease of the information technologies, stand as something more than just a source of information.

Let the book teach us all the things pure information does not: a book teaches us to extend simultaneously our understanding of ourselves, of the objective world outside of ourselves, and of the social world where the city (the polis) and the human being (the person) come together.

The book shows us something that no other form of communication is able, willing, or equipped to show us: the complete integration of our faculties for understanding ourselves so that we may become fully realized people in the world, both within ourselves and with others.

The book tells us that our lives are a repertory of possibilities that transform desire into experience and experience into destiny.

The book tells us that the Other exists, that others exist as well, that our persona does not exist in and of itself but has a compelling moral obligation to pay attention to others, who are never superfluous to our lives.

The book is the education of the senses through language.

The book is tangible, olfactory, tactile, visual, an act of friendship that opens the doors of our respective homes to the love that unites us with the world, because we share the verb of the world.

The book is the intimacy of a country, the inalienable notion we create of ourselves, of our time, of our past and our remembered future, experienced throughout the ages as verbal memory and desire in the here and now.

Now, more than ever before, a writer, a book, and a library give a name to the world and a voice to the human beings in it.

Now, more than ever, a writer, a book, and a library tell us: if we do not give things names, nobody will give us one. If we do not speak, silence will impose its dark sovereignty upon us.