Page 74 - Critical and Cultural Theory

READING
makes it akin to the erotic one? The association of reading with
privacy, even secrecy, is a relatively modern phenomenon: 'reading
out loud was the norm from the beginnings of the written word'
and there is little doubt that in the ancient libraries, scholars 'must
have worked in the midst of a rumbling din' (Manguel 1997: 43).
Silent reading was mistrusted, in the conviction that it 'allowed for
day-dreaming', that 'a book that can be read privately, reflected
upon as the eye unravels the sense of the words, is no longer
subject to immediate clarification or guidance, condemnation or
censorship' (Manguel 1997: 51). The notion of intimacy is
endowed with sexual undertones by the fact that private reading
often takes place in bed. Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a
Traveller capitalizes on this idea by consistently equating reading
and love-making. The central characters, a male reader and a
female reader, use bed and book alike as means of establishing a
dialogue. They read each other via the novels they both cherish,
and via the senses, in the 'unrecognizable tangle' formed by their
bodies 'under the rumpled sheet'. Yet, any understanding thus
achieved is inevitably riddled with doubts. The male reader cannot
help wondering whether the female reader is actually reading him
or rather 'fragments' of his body 'detached from the context to
construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone'.
Moreover, there is no way of ascertaining whether the readers/
lovers share sensations and thoughts in their readings or merely
inhabit parallel universes. This echoes the idea that any interpreta-
tion or configuration is always tentative. Both the reading of the
book and the reading of the body yield a story that 'skips, repeats
itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and diver-
gent messages' (Calvino 1993: 149-51). Its voice is that of a 'silent
nobody made of ink and typographical spacing' (Calvino 1993:
143) which anyone can appropriate because, ultimately, it does
not belong to anyone.
The erotic metaphor is one way of understanding the relation-
ship between reading and the body. At the same time, we should
bear in mind that reading is affected by our physical environment.
When we pick up a book, we do not relate to it in purely intellec-
tual ways. Thus, Calvino's narrator urges the reader to 'find the
most comfortable position', whilst reminding him that 'of course,
the ideal position for reading is something [one] can never find'
(Calvino 1993: 3). Furthermore, books themselves are/have bodies

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