Curiouser and curiouser
Inside Alberto Manguel’s large literary library
Alberto Manguel, translator and critic, is Canada’s best, and perhaps only, practitioner of that critical genre termed by Anatole France “the adventures of the sensitive soul among masterpieces.” His latest book, Curiosity, certainly fits that description. It recounts Manguel’s adventures in reading a number of masterpieces, but chiefly Dante’s Divine Comedy — hereafter referred to as the Commedia — abetted by such authorities as Saint Thomas Aquinas, the “unavoidable source for Dante’s moral tenets.”
Manguel has no overarching critical argument to pursue, no detailed invocation of the political, theological, and poetic context of Dante’s work. Nor do we have any real thesis concerning the phenomenon of human curiosity. Instead, what we have borders on platitudes: “Curiosity is the art of asking questions,” he writes. Then he adds — and this, too, is characteristic — an intriguing quotation culled from his voluminous reading: “So essential is the art of questioning that in the 18th century Rabbi Nahman of Bratislav was able to say that a man who has no questions about God does not believe in God at all.”
As a gesture to his book’s theme, Manguel writes his chapter headings in the form of questions, e.g. “What Are the Consequences of Our Actions?” These questions very often lead us back to Dante, and also to glimpses of the author’s personal history. What Manguel calls “our romantically inclined souls” have never been so sensitively handled as in these pages.
Perhaps the best example of the author’s personalized treatment of the Divine Comedey is in his exploration of Dante’s vision of emerging from a dark forest. “In his text, the exact location of the forest is not given,” Manguel writes, bringing his erudition to bear on this theme:
“It rises in all its awful darkness as a long succession of forests: some older, like the demon forest through which Gilgamesh must journey at the beginning of all our literatures, or like the one that first Odysseus and then Aeneas must traverse on their quests; others more recently sprung up, like the live forest that moves forward to defeat Macbeth, or the black forest in which Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb and Hansel and Gretel lose their innocent way, or the bloodsoaked forest of the Marquis de Sade’s unfortunate heroines, or even the pedagogical forest to which Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs entrust their young.”
This is impressive, and lends genuine authority to his summation: “Dante’s for- lorn forest is a place through which we must all pass in order to emerge more conscious of our humanity.”
Manguel’s treatment of the contrary state of nature, the bucolic, is also given more force by virtue of juxtaposition with the “forlorn forest.” Manguel writes, “The experience of nature is the experience of God’s hand in the world” — the Pythagoreans, he informs us, believed that trees had souls. By Dante’s time, the familiar way of expressing the duality of God’s communication with his creatures was to state that there were two books of God: the Book of Nature and the Book of Holy Writ.
Manguel, author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night, doubtless is more at home with the Book of Words than the Book of Nature. That is why he has collected, according to this book’s jacket copy, a home library with more than 30,000 volumes, which now functions almost as a personal augur:
“Since as long as I can remember, I have believed that my library held every answer to every question.… Sometimes I will look for a specific author or book or sympathetic spirit, but often I let chance guide me: Chance is an excellent librarian.” As a bookworm myself, I can sympathize, and easily imagine Manguel staying up later than he should, in search of something in his library that will add to the stock of his mind.
Curiosity is enriched by Manguel’s narrative treatment of several brilliant men obsessing over the Book of Words — such as the 19thcentury Belgian scholar Paul Otlet, who collected over 10 million index cards full of information, in an attempt to create, Manguel writes, “an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge.” Otler died of a heart attack after losing his index cards and literally tons of other printed bibliographical material to Nazi invaders.
Manguel recalls how his own recent stroke — he seems, fortunately, to have recovered — provided a new perspective on words. His mental process slowed; he found himself trying to tell the nurse he wasn’t feeling any pain by first “thinking ‘I feel pain’ and adding ‘no’ to the words.” The grammatical structure of stating in order to negate, he says, “is in fact a ‘prototype of narration.’ ” Manguel cites Don Quixote here, but a clearer example might be the technique used by the comedian Mike Myers, saying something and then exclaiming, “Not!”
Near the end of Curiosity, Manguel looks at his life and work and proclaims himself satisfied: “I know that my desk is ordered to my satisfaction, my letters mostly answered, my books in their right places, my writing more or less finished.” As part of this stock-taking he ventures to characterize his writing. “Since I first started reading, I know that I think in quotations and that I write with what others have written, and that I can have no other ambition than to reshuffle and rearrange. I find great satisfaction in this task.”
This reshuffling and rearranging has its occasional flaws. He often feels the need to make statements that sound resonant but add little to the reader’s understanding — hence the bromides. He also has a humourless quality. Nonetheless this “writing with what others have written,” his insistence on being called a reader rather than a critic or an editor, is a noble stance, and he has been faithful to it. May he and his library long flourish.
He reshuffles the work of others, adding resonant bromides