In Praise of the Garrulous Page 9

  Personally I am struck by the range of genres gathered together in this early attempt to systemise and catalogue human knowledge.

  The literate relate to their languages in a different way from the illiterate. The difference is similar to that of a cardriver who understands how a car works and a car-driver who doesn’t. The literate know how a language works, because they have seen it broken up into its constituent parts: words, clauses and sentences. The artificiality of writing turns the literate into artificial speakers; they lose the spontaneity of their language use, and if they have read a great deal, then they become aware of how their language has evolved and is evolving. The ensuing loss of innocence can either stultify or liberate, but in any event, writing, like all the technological changes discussed in this chapter, brings a gain and a loss. It is up to the individual to make use of that gain and minimise that loss.

  Writing obviously presupposes the existence of an author or indeed authors, but just as importantly it presupposes the existence of a reader. In no other art does the “end-user” play such an active part (and literature is the least artistic of the arts). All art takes full possession of the artist’s mind, but writing has this same effect on the reader. This is not to imply that listeners to music or viewers of a painting do not have to use sensitivity and intelligence; it is just that reading entirely isolates the mind from the other senses, and demands that the imagination bypasses or rather substitutes for them. Books are such an efficient way of transferring information and sensations, and we are all so good at it, for the simple, powerful reason that language is what we do and what we are. It is no exaggeration to say that the ideal reader has to be as creative as the writer. On this point, Sartre cannot be bettered:

  Reading is therefore an act of generosity, and the writer requires of readers not the application of an abstract freedom, but the gift of all their beings, with their passions, prejudices, sympathies, sexual temperaments and sets of values.10

  Reading is “an act of generosity”, and readers are required to recreate everything within their minds, particularly in narrative works. Reading is opening the door of one’s mind to other people – to the “other”. No wonder then that reading (paradoxically a very solitary act circumscribed by a particular language) must surely be considered the artistic activity that most increases tolerance and openness to other people. Ashurbanipal, our bibliophilic Assyrian monarch, always chose native administrators for his various imperial possessions, and very possibly this enlightened approach hastened the end of his empire and the learning that he had amassed.

  In a sense, readers perform a literary work to themselves in their brains. That performance can be of varied quality: the reader might know the accents described and recreate them in his or her brain, as well as tone, sentiment or register (this is particularly difficult in English, because we don’t have a serviceable system for reproducing phonology on the page – and so the reader has to work that bit harder). Complex non-fiction works require the reader to ponder each argument carefully, and that often means the reader has to take notes or gloss the text. Our hurried manner of consuming things has been extended to reading, and this means that the modern writer is supposed to adapt to a similarly frenetic pace. Somebody in a hurry does not want too many obstacles or too many demands. But good reading, like good writing, demands time and cannot compete with the television, the playstation and perpetual motion. Reading is the key to a rational knowledge of the world, because we can only understand the world rationally through our use of language, even though language does have its inherent limitations as a rational tool. The fact that reading doesn’t feel like hard work is further proof that it is an activity appropriate to our natures.

  It is difficult to assess the degree to which writing led to a professionalisation of the word and the invention of an intellectual elite. The principal features of an, albeit highly exclusive, literate world were present from a very early time: an obsession with reading and book-collecting, a weariness with the word and a surfeit of ideas. This was more than the powerful wanted, when they went looking for a tool to rationalise the administration of large territories. Writing took off and, although still very much an exclusive province, became menacing because of vastness of the information it accumulated.

  Zhuangzi, who believed that excessive reading was likely to clog up the brain, wrote, “The spirit that persists in studying grows bigger every day; the spirit that pursues the Tao grows smaller every day. By growing smaller one achieves wuwei (non-action); nothing is impossible when one does not take action.”11 And Zhuangzi wrote at a time when writing was still a ponderous affair, often involving large bamboo rods. Francis Bacon believed that excessive reading had the opposite effect: “To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules is the humour of the scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience.”12 There are two elements of interest here, one concerning Bacon’s times and one his nation. The Renaissance, which arrived late in England, was the period in which texts were tested against “experience” and their authority was first challenged. But Bacon’s pronouncements, although not original in that first sense, have a tone that is peculiarly English. They are an early example of the English anti-intellectualism expressed by a consummate intellectual, which was to become the mainstay of a very fruitful tradition for many centuries, before it degenerated into a mere excuse for intellectual disengagement. Interestingly Bacon adds, “Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them.” Admiration for learning would have been widespread in England at the time, just as in the rest of Europe.

  Whilst the Chinese Taoist thinker of the fourth century bc criticised excessive reading because it could engender activism, and the hyper-active Englishman of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries criticised its potential detachment from the observation of the real world, Plato simply referred to Aristotle, perhaps a little sarcastically, as “the reader”, and Aristotle’s position as the patron saint of all pedants may have been due to the fact that, unlike his more brilliant teacher, he didn’t know when to stop reading and let his own thoughts develop themselves.

  No doubt the new intellectual elite itself felt overwhelmed by enormity of learning. Its members also probably felt underappreciated by the ignorant, stymied by the ambitious and not a little alienated by the solitude of their profession. The ivory tower had been built, and with it came the varying mix of hubris and generosity that typifies the intellectual. Writing may have invented the intellectual, but it was a god that immediately humiliated its creation, by demonstrating the intellectual’s ignorance in relation to the great mass of human learning. By turning the social mind into something tangible, writing displayed learning in its physical bulk, which could be weighed, counted and quantified. Polastron informs us that the 30,000 ceramic bisques collected with shovels from the ruins of Mesopotamia between 1849 and 1854 occupied 100 cubic metres and were roughly equivalent to 500 of our 500-page quarto editions.

  This, of course, was the weakness of the new media for recording language: its physicality meant that it could rot, crumble or burn in an accidental fire. It also meant that hostile forces could destroy the accumulated learning of centuries within a few hours (in this the cumbersome clay tablets actually had an advantage over the other media such as papyrus, parchment, vellum and paper, as fire did not destroy them but rather it vitrified them). The fear and loathing inspired by these great heaps of congealed garrulousness we call libraries is a matter of historical record, and Lucien Polastron decided to write his exhaustive work on the subject on seeing the destruction of Sarajevo Library in 1992.

  I have tried to distinguish a pattern, but it is not at all easy. Julius Caesar accidentally caused the first destruction of the famous library in Alexandria, and coming from a literate class, he appears to have been a little defensive about his error. The presumably literate officers in command of the French and British armies that p
lundered the Chinese emperor’s summer palace on 6 October 1860 do not appear to have been remorseful about their destruction of the 168,000 volumes in the palace library, particularly as Lord Elgin, the son of the famous despoiler of the Parthenon, resolutely returned on the 18th of the same month to finish off the job.

  Nevertheless the illiterate do appear to have a particular loathing for the library, possibly because they know that they are excluded from its power. While other objects are looted, these useless and highly inflammable items are wilfully destroyed. Men of violence dislike books and bookishness, and on the whole books and bookishness return the compliment:

  Almighty Author and Lover of peace, scatter the nations that delight in war, which is, above all plagues, injurious to books. For wars being without the control of reason make a wild assault on everything they come across, and lacking the check of reason they push on without discretion or distinction to destroy the vessels of reason.13

  The amiable, slightly pedestrian and decidedly peaceable Anglo-Norman Richard de Bury (1287-1345) wrote several chapters of his Philobiblon as though books themselves were speaking. This passionate bibliophile very possibly exaggerated in his deification of the written word, but all of us who detest war can join the books in their prayer as it appears in the English translation above.

  Polastron, who has studied the matter in depth, feels that monotheist religions are particularly prone to book-burning. The evidence that this is so in the moments of military victory appears to be slim, as this can be considered a constant. These religions were however affected by a cycle of expansion and destruction for reasons of religious orthodoxy and purification, although Islam was the least affected, at least before the Enlightenment. A particularly distressing but instructive incident occurred in 1233 when orthodox Jews in Monpellier petitioned the Inquisitor for books by Maimonides to be burnt, and the zealous cleric decided to burn all Jewish books including the Talmud (of the three religions, Judaism is the one that invests most significance in the sacred nature of the written word; it is also worth noting that the works of Maimonides are now considered ultra-orthodox). For me the most terrible event described in Polastron’s book does not involve a large number of books: St. Cyril of Alexandria, who controlled a mob of Christian bigots, was allegedly responsible for having had Hypatia stoned to death with roof tiles. She was then cut into pieces which were then thrown on a fire along with all her books. Even if he was not personally responsible for her death, Saint Cyril, who also undertook to destroy the writings of the apostate Emperor Julian (apparently of literary worth), had organised a squad of five hundred bravoes who terrorised non-Christians in public spaces such as theatres and tribunals. These parabalani were the principal perpetrators of her murder. Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician, was the daughter of Theon, the last of the philosophers of the Alexandrine Museum, and her death, which was in clear breach of Christ’s injunctions and all the more scandalous because of the apparent innocence of the victim, demonstrates how bibliophobia can be a crowd-puller.

  The wily Almanzor or al-Mansūr (“the victorious”) came from humble origins, and literacy provided his initial career as a professional letter writer. His instinct for all aspects of politics from seduction or, at the very least, ingratiation of the caliph’s favourite wife to the affairs of state and the art of war provided him with all the reins of power, although the young and ineffectual caliph Hishām II came to the throne in 976 ad and retained the title. This Machiavellian prince avant la lettre was profligate and not free from public criticism in the early part of his career. His infallible political instinct convinced him to do something he is unlikely to have approved of in principle: to burn the Caliph’s library to please religious fanatics and the crowd. This unholy alliance of the powerful and the people has often destroyed accumulated knowledge throughout history, even though most literary works are overly deferential to the powerful (and also hostile to the “crowd”, reflecting the innate conservatism of much of the intellectual class). Almanzor would become the subject of a play that took his name; written by Heinrich Heine in 1821, it produced the famously prophetic line, “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too” – prophetic for the scale on which this observation of the past would come true in the future, and prophetic because Heine’s own works were amongst those burned by the thousand in Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933.

  China appears to lead the way in large-scale centrally organised destruction not only of its books but also its culture as a whole – a kind of auto-da-fe of the social mind. The most famous cases of this collective self-harming were the product of two extreme megalomaniacs intent upon massive programmes of modernisation, rationalisation and centralisation: Li Si in 213 bc and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in 1966. Li Si was the Emperor Quin Shi Huang’s demonic chancellor, and was more extreme than Almanzor. He ordered the systematic destruction of all historical records and philosophical works, including the works of Confucius himself, and had 460 Confucian scholars buried alive after they had protested. He felt that the learning of the past subverted the rule of ministers in the present. Mao’s Cultural Revolution may not have produced as many deaths as the famines caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization or the insane Great Leap Forward which Mao himself had organised in the 1950s, but its nightmarish creation of a society of humiliators and humiliated amounted to institutionalised hysteria. It was said that only five plays were considered suitable to be staged in Chinese theatres, and they were all written by Madame Mao. That might of course be Western propaganda or an “urban myth”, but the story does seem quite typical of the frighteningly irrational and destructive forces at work, albeit in their most absurdist mode. Although both these regimes, which could be defined as dictatorships of the present, were to be short-lived, they changed China irreversibly and permanently destroyed cultural realities.

  The hatred of books is both rational (ideas are dangerous) and irrational (books are mysterious and chaotic). The powerful have a rational dislike of books, which is mitigated by a rational awareness that some forms of learning are essential to the survival of a state. The “crowd” (a motley alliance of the orthodox, the fanatical and the illiterate) have an irrational dislike of books, which is associated with a whole series of prejudices against those “who got their learning from books”. This prejudice is not without a tiny element of truth: writing, an extremely artificial act, does inevitably have a distorting effect, although nothing like as pronounced as that of film and television. The reason for this is, once again, that writing, although artificial, is closely associated to one of our most natural activities – speech.

  After Gutenberg’s invention of printing, it became difficult to understand why people had previously become so agitated about the written word; its real power was just about to be revealed. Previously, books were a restricted luxury item and very few people had the skill to decipher them, and so printing inevitably revolutionised the way we use and perceive them. In 1553, one hundred years after Gutenberg had completed the long process of inventing the printing press with moveable type, a man was burned at the stake with what was thought to be the last copy of his book strapped to his leg. One of the many distressing aspects of Michael Servetus’s story is that he too probably thought that the book whose heresies burnt along with his own flesh would die with him, as the authorities of Calvin’s Geneva fully intended. Servetus had consciously run a tremendous risk by publishing Christianismi Restitutio after twenty years living under a false name: there can be no doubt about the importance he attached to its survival.

  He was reputed to have said, “Wretched am I who cannot end my life in this fire”, as the slow-burning green wood tortured him with its flames. In the great slaughterhouse called history, this image stands out like the one of a man dying on the cross. Like Christ, Servetus displayed all the behavioural patterns that are most likely to incense the scribes and pharisees of any religion: whether Catholic orthodoxy or reformed sects. He was a highly sensitive man w
hose ethical standards eschewed any personal ambition and who was profoundly concerned about the mistreatment of his Muslim and Jewish fellowcountrymen. What interests us here is that he also displayed the classic characteristics of the highly bookish intellectual who would become an increasingly significant figure as the flood of printed paper steadily and irreversibly changed Europe through centuries that followed. He was one of those exceptional individuals who would probably have achieved great learning even in earlier times: he knew Latin, Spanish, Catalan, French and probably some other vernaculars. He was an accomplished doctor and discovered the circulation of blood long before William Harvey published his findings in 1628 (this discovery was contained in his book and was burned with it, thus losing over seventy years for medical science). Most importantly for his religious studies, he was highly literate in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and was therefore capable of careful examination and collation of the scriptures of all three monotheist religions and of the translations of the Bible. Like many intellectuals, he believed very foolishly that most people, particularly fellow supporters of the reformed religion, were as interested as he was in rational argument and careful study. He thought that he could go around spouting off his idea of a more gentle religion free from the obvious absurdity of the trinity without unleashing the oppressive instincts of the magistratures of all the Protestant and Catholic states. There may have been a little vanity or even arrogance in Servetus’s conviction that his superior intellect could convince others, but mostly there was a generosity of heart that made his end inevitable. Calvin and Luther were superb scholars too, but they were not natural scholars like Servetus; ambition drove them to scholarship so that they could use it for the attainment of power. Men and women who pursue learning as an end in itself are on their way to complete solitude, because on the whole, human beings are not designed for rational thought but for thought constricted by social context.14