Read the Virus Away

Picasso

Meekly accepting our assignment among the highest risk group in a pandemic has meant accepting a social isolation so nearly complete as to leave us struggling to impose structure on our days and to find meaning in activities that might unkindly be called killing time.  The most socially redemptive of these is reading.  There’s always been a lot of that in my life, but this takes it to an altogether new level.  It has also made me think in a slightly new way—this after a long career of being an English professor—about the social role of stories and story-telling.  It is as though my whole library had been picked up and moved into a brightly lit cubbyhole between two of the departure gates at Newark Airport to compete with racks of hard candy and potato chips.

The illusion of large swaths of uncommitted time stretching out before me is one of the more curious aspects of the medical house arrest in which we find ourselves.  One knows, of course, that it is an illusion, that actually the circumstances are an emblem of vulnerability and mortality rather than leisure, but it encourages the adoption of mad projects, such as reading all of Don Quixote in Spanish.  Mind you that is an aspiration rather than a guarantee.  It’s a book of half a million words or so, and my Spanish, though a little better than minimally functional, struggles with the richness of Cervantes’s vocabulary and the frequent obsolescence of his constructions.

As a character Don Quixote is a man who has been made mad by books, or at any rate whose madness has been made all the madder by them.  Art is supposed to imitate life, but Quixote reverses that.  The knights errant of the endless romances in his library take over his life, creating a work of genius frequently described as “the first novel.”  That characterization is not uncontested, and I have simultaneously been reworking my way through another claimant to the title of “first novel,” the Latin prose narrative of Apuleius of Madaurus.  Apuleius was a north African Roman writer of the second century.  The general cultural milieu of his circumstances and training in rhetoric and Platonic philosophy inevitably invites comparison with that of the young pagan Augustine two centuries later.  Only a few of Apuleius’s writings have survived, but one of them is a masterpiece.  It is The Metamorphosis, a picaresque narrative about the adventures of a young man supernaturally transformed into a donkey.  What happens to him in his donkey state is scarcely to be believed, and certainly not to be put down before you read the last word.  The book was known in translation to the English Renaissance  as The Golden Asse, a title of ribald amusement to my fellow undergraduates in the college course in which I first read it.

We professors are prone to make extravagant ethical claims concerning the benefits of reading fiction carefully, and I can hardly abjure  a high seriousness that kept food on my family table for so many years.   But these competing first novels suggest something less grandiose.  The purpose of stories seems first of all to be entertainment and distraction, and the recompense of the story-teller has more to do with bread than with philosophical celebrity.  The narrators of the tales in the Decameron, one of our earliest and best collections of tales, are motivated by the desire to take their minds off the plague and think of something less serious.  Six hundred years ago Boccaccio placed them in the fictional situation that we are today living through in reality.  Though I and others are capable of finding ingenious moral meanings in those tales, they are presented first and foremost as pastime and entertainment.  Scheherazade, the genius narrator of the Arabian Nights, has an aim more urgently practical yet: indefinitely deferring her execution!  The monarch Shahryar’s draconian response to his wife’s infidelity was—after disposing of her--to marry a fresh virgin every night and remove her, permanently, the next morning.   But he got hooked on Scheherazade’s brilliant narratives, and always wanted to hear just one more day’s life-extending installment.

With sea shanties and work-songs of other kinds toilers sought to dull the monotony and physical exhaustion of hard labor.  Travelers, especially, were story tellers.  Travel (with its obvious connections to the two different senses of French and English travail) was arduous work, and often dangerous.  Medieval pilgrims undertaking serious journeys were compelled by canon law to make out their wills before departure.  They well might not be coming back.  The Golden Ass of Apuleius begins with its narrator Lucius on a tiring business trip on horseback.  His destination is Thessaly.  On the road he overtakes two travelers arguing.  Lucius can hear the one accuse the other of having told outrageous tall tales.  It is precisely far-fetched narrative that Lucius seeks as palliatives for the rigors of the journey, and certainly what he delivers in his own right.  As a matter of fact, ancient travelers—and their medieval counterparts, mainly pilgrims—gained the reputation of extravagant fabulators.  The parallels with the framing premise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are quite marked.  The Canterbury pilgrims agree to participate in a tale-telling contest, the prize for which will be a meal at a wayside inn.  Lucius proposes a very similar arrangement.  Story-telling, traveling, and sharing a meal form a fundamental social nexus.  Remember the literal meaning of the word companion—one with whom you share your bread (panis).

“All men by nature desire to know”, as Aristotle’s Metaphysics famously begins.  “An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things”.  But for the Greek philosophers the desire for true knowledge was quite different from idle and indulgent curiosity.  Curiosity is regarded by most of us today as a plus, but do remember that it killed the cat.  In the Latin moral vocabulary, both classical and Christian, the word curiositas is deeply ambivalent.  If we can believe Saint Paul the Greeks and especially the Athenians had an insatiable appetite for hearing about the new and the strange.  “Now the Athenians in general and the foreigners there had no time for anything but talking or hearing about the latest novelty” (Acts 17:21). 

Apuleius’s narrator Lucius would seem to be an honorary Athenian.  When he hears one of his prospective new companions accuse the other of telling “absurd and monstrous lies,” he becomes all ears.  “Such is my thirst for novelty that I said, ‘Please let me share in your conversation, not because I am one of those curious ones, but I am one who wants to know everything or at least most things!”  That curiously qualifying phrase has to be a nod to Aristotle, but its literary-critical import is hard to pin down.

There is an explicit invocation of Aristotle in the first narrative chapter of Cervantes, which deals chiefly with his hero’s literary pathology.  The old don struggled with the vapid purple passages of his beloved romances, “although Aristotle himself would not have been able to understand them, even if he had been resurrected for that sole purpose.”  Don Quixote “had filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and torments and …had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”  That’s one hell of a fix in “real life,” but, boy, does it ever make for an absorbing story.