And what do we mean by a “name”? The question, or a form of the question, is asked in Through the Looking-Glass. A few chapters after crossing the nameless wood, Alice meets the doleful figure of the White Knight, who, in the authoritarian manner of adults, tells her that he will sing a song to “comfort” her. “The name of the song,” says the Knight, “is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’”:
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’ ”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.
“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways And Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”
“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On A Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”
As it turns out, the tune isn’t his own invention (as Alice points out) and neither are the Knight’s careful distinctions between what a name is called, the name itself, what the thing it names is called, and the thing itself; these distinctions are as old as the first commentators of Genesis. The world into which Adam was inducted was innocent of Adam; it was also innocent of Adam’s words. Everything Adam saw, everything he felt, as everything he fancied or feared, was to be made present to him (as, eventually, to every one of us) through layers of names, names with which language tries to clothe the nakedness of experience. It is not by chance that once Adam and Eve lost their innocence, they were obliged to wear skins “so that,” says a Talmudic commentator, “they might learn who they were through the shape that enveloped them.” Words, the names of things, give experience its shape.
The task of naming belongs to every reader. Others who do not read must name their experience as best they can, constructing verbal sources, as it were, by imagining their own books. In our book-centered societies, the craft of reading signals our entrance into the ways of the tribe, with its particular codes and demands, allowing us to share the common source of recorded words; but it would be a mistake to think of reading as a merely receptive activity. On the contrary: Stéphane Mallarmé proposed that every reader’s duty was “to purify the sense of the words of the tribe.” To do this, readers must make books theirs. In endless libraries, like thieves in the night, readers pilfer names, vast and marvelous creations as simple as “Adam” and as far-fetched as “Rumpelstiltskin.” Dante describes his encounter with the three beasts in a dark forest, “in the middle of the road of life;” for his readers that half-run life becomes their own, and also a mirror of another forest, a place they once saw in childhood, a forest that fills their dreams with scents of pine and fox. John Bunyan describes Christian running from his house with his fingers in his ears so as not to hear the pleas of his wife and children, and Homer describes Ulysses, bound to the mast, forced to listen to the sirens’ song; the reader of Bunyan and Homer applies these words to the deafness of our contemporary, the amiable Prufrock. Edna St. Vincent Millay calls herself “domestic as a plate,” and it is the reader who renames the daily kitchen china, the companion of our meals, with a newly acquired meaning. “Man’s innate casuistry!” complained Karl Marx (as quoted by Friedrich Engels in The Origins of the Family): “To change things by changing their names!” And yet, pace Marx, that is exactly what we do.
As every child knows, the world of experience (like Alice’s wood) is nameless, and we wander through it in a state of bewilderment, our heads full of mumblings of learning and intuition. The books we read assist us in naming a stone or a tree, a moment of joy or despair, the breathing of a loved one or the kettle whistle of a bird, by shining a light on an object, a feeling, a recognition and saying to us that this here is our heart after too long a sacrifice, that there is the cautionary sentinel of Eden, that what we heard was the voice that sang near the Convent of the Sacred Heart. These illuminations sometimes help; the order in which experiencing and naming take place does not much matter. The experience may come first and, many years later, the reader will find the name to call it in the pages of King Lear. Or it may come at the end, and a glimmer of memory will throw up a page we had thought forgotten in a battered copy of Treasure Island. There are names made up by writers that a reader refuses to use because they seem wrongheaded, or trite, or even too great for ordinary understanding, and are therefore dismissed or forgotten or kept for some crowning epiphany that (the reader hopes) will one day require them. But sometimes they help the reader name the unnamable. “You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language,” says Tom Stoppard in The Invention of Love. Sometimes a reader can find on a page that perfect reply.
The danger, as Alice and her White Knight knew, is that we sometimes confuse a name and what we call a name, a thing and what we call a thing. The graceful phantoms on a page, with which we so readily tag the world, are not the world. There may be no names to describe the torture of another human being, the birth of one’s child. After creating the angels of Proust or the nightingale of Keats, the writer can say to the reader, “Into your hands I commend my spirit,” and leave it at that. But how are readers to be guided by these entrusted spirits to find their way in the ineffable reality of the wood?
Systematic reading is of little help. Following an official book list (of classics, of literary history, of censored or recommended reading, of library catalogues) may, by chance, throw up a useful name, as long as we bear in mind the motives behind the lists. But the best guides, I believe, are the reader’s whims—trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness — which sometimes lead us into a makeshift state of grace, allowing us to spin gold out of flax.
Gold out of flax: in the summer of 1935 the poet Osip Mandelstam was granted by Stalin, supposedly as a favor, identity papers valid for three months, accompanied by a residence permit. According to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, this little document made their lives much easier. It happened that a friend of the Mandelstams, the actor and essayist Vladimir Yakhontov, chanced to come through their city. In Moscow he and Mandelstam had amused themselves by reading from ration books, in an effort to name paradise lost. Now the two men did the same thing with their identity papers. The scene is described in Nadezhda’s memoir Hope Against Hope: “It must be said that the effect was even more depressing. In the ration book they read off the coupons solo and in chorus: ‘Milk, milk, milk … cheese, meat …’ When Yakhontov read from the identity papers, he managed to put ominous and menacing inflections in his voice: ‘Basis on which issued … issued … by whom issued … special entries … permit to reside, permit to reside, permit to re-side …’ ”
All true readings are subversive, against the grain, as Alice, a sane reader, discovered in the Looking-Glass world of mad name givers. The Duchess calls mustard “a mineral;” the Cheshire Cat purrs and calls it “growling;” a Canadian prime minister tears up the railway and calls it “progress;” a Swiss businessman traffics in loot and calls it “commerce;” an Argentinean president shelters murderers and calls it “amnesty.” Against such misnomers readers can open the pages of their books. In such cases of willful madness, reading helps us maintain coherence in the chaos. Not to eliminate it, not to enclose experience within conventional verbal structures, but to allow chaos to progress creatively on its own vertiginous way. Not to trust the glittering surface of words but to burrow into the darkness.