To decipher
the world
around us

Alberto Manguel on the history of reading

By Paula E. Kirman

It's four o'clock in the afternoon when the phone rings. Alberto Manguel is on the other end, as

arranged. He's phoning from Calgary, where he has spent the day dealing with bookstore owners,

publicists and interviewers like myself. Talking to me is not the last thing scheduled in his day;

later in the evening he must give a talk and a slide show at the downtown public library. Authors

on book tours work long hours.


I first spoke to Manguel two years earlier, when he published Meanwhile, In Another Part of the

Forest, an anthology of gay male short stories. His latest work is A History of Reading. It's a

collection of essays documenting how reading has evolved throughout time, written in the voice

of an articulate storyteller whose own life has always been full of books and literature, despite the

fact that he left school early and never obtained a university degree. In his native Argentina,

Manguel read to the blind Borges, and went on to Italy, France, and England to work in the

publishing industry.  In 1980 he came to Canada, and since developed an international

reputation as a translator, anthologist, editor, and novelist.  Currently, Manguel continues

his work in Paris, where he has lived for the past several years.


This afternoon Manguel sounds tired and somewhat distant after a hectic day, but he is also

surprisingly talkative, and I never know what to expect from his erudite responses. 


PK: A history of reading is something that is very open, with many possibilities to explore. How

did you decide on the themes for each essay and how did you decide what information to

include?



AM: There wasn't a plan in the beginning. I had a vague idea that I wanted to investigate the place

we came from as readers, and how it was that we became the readers we are now. So I started

from certain aspects that I recognized from my own reading - the privacy, the memorizing

aspects, the urge to possess books - and I looked at those and worked my way through stories

that I knew by trying to find characters who could somehow be the model readers for that

particular instance. But a lot had to do with chance.  I did not know what I was going to find.

I am not a scholar, I have no academic training and therefore whatever little knowledge I have

is very erratic.


So, I worked my way through what I thought I knew and came across other facts, but most of the

time I would have to do quite a bit of research. I would find a character who lived during the

French revolution, and then I would have to study the French Revolution, and, of course, there

are libraries written about that. I'm always imagining that some very knowledgeable academic will

open the book and find 450 mistakes on each page.


PK: Was it very difficult to do the research you needed to do?


AM: No, it was fascinating. There is so much to discover, and actually one of the problems was

that there was so much that I had to end up stopping at certain points and making choices. The

book ends with a kind of grab bag of unwritten chapters, but there could be many more.


PK: You make a statement in the first essay in the book, "The Last Page," that a society could

exist without writing, but not without reading, and that reading itself comes before writing.

Aren't the two so intertwined that one really can't be separated from the other, in that you can't

read if there is nothing to read?


AM: You can read if there is nothing to read, if by "nothing to read" you mean a text, because we

are creatures who constantly need to decipher the world around us, and in that sense we have to

read everything that's around us - the landscape, the faces of the people we see, and so on. But in

the craft of language, in the invention of the craft of language, my guess is that it begins with

somebody imagining the possibility of deciphering a text, deciphering a sign that exists to

remember something, so that the first impulse is not to put down a sign to indicate ten sheep,

but to imagine the possibility of seeing a sign that says "ten sheep."  Since that sign is not

there, then you say, "Oh, well I have to put it down so that somebody will be able to read it."

But the notion of recovering information, it seems to me, comes first.


PK: I agree with you insomuch that, for example, there are languages that I can't speak or write,

but I can read them enough to at least gain a basic comprehension of the text.


AM: Yes, yes, absolutely.


PK: Why was it a goal of yours to discuss a history of reading completely separate from a history

of writing?


AM: I very much wanted to separate the history of reading from the history of writing because up

to a certain point the history of writing seems to me, if we understand by that the history of

writers, up to a certain point an artificial history. First of all, it is organized according to the

birthdate and nationalities of writers, which by and large do not hold great bearing upon where

readers place them. For instance, Poe didn't come to Latin American through North America,

which you would think would make sense since we are on the same continent, but arrived many

years afterwards through Baudelaire's translations into French.  So, for an Argentinean reader,

Poe belongs if anything to French ltierature through Baudelaire's translations, and through

him has an enormous influence.


The geographical and chronological aspects of literature according to the writers seem to me

arbitrary, and even more arbitrary is the literature that is based on the suppositions of what the

writers intended - a history of literature that divides literature into social satire, novels for

women, and so on. Those are things that a writer has decided, and in our time has been taken

over by publicists who label a book in a certain way so that the bookseller knows where to put it

on a shelf. That has nothing to do with how readers receive it.  Readers decide otherwise,

and there are very many books that are remembered as something else simply because the

readers have decided that they would be something else.


PK: Where would more ephemeral types of reading, such as magazines and newspapers, fit in

with this idea of what belongs where?


AM: I think that there, again, it is up to the reader to decide that you might want to keep copies

of the New Yorker because it has more in-depth reading material, just as an example. But, well,

no, let's compare two other things. Let's compare, for instance, Canadian Literature - the journal

from the University of British Columbia, I believe - I think readers perceive it as something that

they would keep. Books in Canada, I think, readers perceive as something ephemeral, something

that belongs to that week or that month.  Actually, noth tackle in different styles perhaps the

same books, and I am sure if you asked Books in Canada about this they would say it's

a record for if not all time, then at least all year.  But I think readers perceive it differently.

So I think the phenomenon is the same with magazines.


PK: I want to ask you about translations. You make a very poignant statement toward the end of

"The Translator as Reader" that translations are "an impossibility, a betrayal, a fraud, an

invention, a hopeful lie." So, how are they done, and how are they done well?


AM: Ah, if only I knew! Translation is one of the most intriguing, complex and rewarding forms

of reading, but at the same time frustrating and all those other things I said. The essential problem

with translation, I think, is that, number one, it forces you as a reader to read deeply and

carefully. It also forces you to take the text you have read and put it into another language which

did not create either that text or those ideas. I believe that much of what we say and think

depends on the language in which we say and think it, so that we wouldn't be saying or thinking

the same things if we changed languages.  I certinaly notice when I change languages that other

thoughts occur, and there are many things that I can't say naturally in one language that I

would say naturally in another.  In that sense translation remains an impossibility, but at 

the same time it is a record of the reader at his or her best.


PK: Do you consider the challenges of translation to be more inherent in poetry, because it can be

more technical in terms of things like rhythm and rhyme scheme?


AM: At a certain point that is a question of mechanics, if you are talking about rhyme and

scansion, because otherwise prose text has a rhythm of its own that you want to preserve. Is it

more difficult? Technically, I suppose certain poetry is more difficult. Translating, say for

instance, Neruda into English is easier than translating Schopenhauer into English.


PK: In what way?


AM: Well, because the complexity of the prose and the intricacies of the ideas that stem partly

from the use of the German language, require a taking apart of the thoughts that is much more

extensive than in Neruda, where the ideas are simpler and the language also.


PK: How do you feel that new technology will affect or is affecting reading?


AM: There always is new technology. If what you mean by new technology is the development of

the word processor, I would say that it goes back to the reading on scrolls. We only read a

certain section at one time and can't flip through a book, through a text. It allows for an easier

tracking of one word or one phrase through a long text. It doesn't permit browsing, which is a

very natural and free form of reading, and it provides a memory of text that you would otherwise

rarely have unless you were a reader with an extraordinarily developed memory.  Because the text

on a screen is evanescent, and very clear that you could lose it at the drop of a finger, I think

it has made us consider the text of the page with more respect.  It has, in comparison, a far

greater solidity, so I think it has made us go back to the idea that there is a solid text as

opposed to one that exists only for the moment.


PK: There is also a certain feel to holding a book, as opposed to scrolling a page on a computer.


AM: Yes, they are completely different and I don't think that those can be compared. You can

read a book in all sorts of places. You can't read a computer in all sorts of places, however small

the computer might be, simply because the machine doesn't lend itself to the same postures.

Certain sizes of books don't lend themselves to that either, but the book varies enormously, the

computer does not vary enormously, nor will it be able to vary enormously. I heard of trying to

make powerbooks the size of your hand, but the problem is that your fingers can't use the

keyboard, which is a limitation that the book doesn't have.


PK: That would most definitely apply to even more recent developments like the World Wide


Web, where you can actually get an entire book online.


AM: You can get an entire book online, but I don't know who would have the patience to read an

entire book sitting at the desk and looking at the screen.


PK: They're there, so somebody must be.


AM: I'm not sure. I think that some people surf them to get what particular piece of information

they need. I don't know of anyone - do you? - who reads a book on screen.


PK: I haven't done it myself. I don't know of anyone who has actually read an entire book that

way.


AM: Nor do I.


PK: Obviously somebody had to take the time and sit down to type them in, though.


AM: Well, not necessarily. You scan them in, but right now scanning produces innumerable

mistakes so that you get a text full of mistakes. But that is a problem that will eventually be

solved, I'm sure. I think that the book on the Internet will serve the purpose, as I say, of

[allowing one] to look quickly through something that might be difficult to get. In some cases, it's

a way of escaping censorship. The book by Mitterand's doctor, Le Grand Secret, which was

banned by the French government, was scanned onto the Internet and was one of the first books

to escape censorship in a very public way.  But then nobody really read it because it was long,

boring, and full of mistakes [laughing].  But I like the gesture.  Symbolically,

it is important.


PK: Does the Internet have much of a bearing on your work and research, or is it something you

really don't pay much attention to?


AM: No, I don't, but again I think that will be something that will change. Right now it's a jumble

of stuff, and you can find some quirky things. From time to time you can find a serious essay, but

you have no way of knowing what is serious and what isn't. I think it's great amusement for the

time being, and I think places you can chat with other people interested in what you are doing,

without having to travel all over the world to meet them, is also useful. But, you have no

guarantee of authority.  Not that you necessarily have it through a book in the library, but

at least you know what kind of cataloguing system you are working with.  When you meet other

people face to face and in dialogue then you have your own intuitions as to what that person is

like, but when you are chatting with someone who calls himself "Bookworm1," you have no idea

if that is a cheeky seven year old, or a seventy year old who's gone ga-ga.


PK: More so than the telephone or other modes of communication, the Internet probably gives

people a better opportunity to effectively lie about themselves, because there's really no way to

verify anything.


AM: I suppose that those are things that will eventually be ironed out. It's a difficult time to be

talking about the Internet and some of these other developments, because we are not yet at the

stage where artists have taken over the technology and put it to brilliant use. It's as if we are

analysing the importance of cinema based on the first flickerings of Lumière and asking, "Do you

really want to sit in a room and see a train coming into a station?" Well, no, you don't. Then a

few years later you get Citizen Kane.


PK: Are you still living in Paris?


AM: I just moved from Paris to London, where I'm going to be for a couple of years, but then I

will return to Canada. I'm really longing to come back.