Alberto Manguel – Ler é um ato de poder

Reading is always an act of power. And that’s one of the reasons why readers are feared in most societies. A society is built with barriers, limiting itself.

Giving an identity to this society through denials. What can’t enter. The wall we built to keep the foreigners outside.

To keep foreign ideas from entering. To be able to define this society as such. The citizen’s duty is to question those barriers, to question those exclusions, to find doors though which the excluded will enter.

And in this communication between including the excluded and excluding the included there’s a fluidity of the identity of a society and its citizens. But who are the citizens who question? Only the literate.

I’m talking of a written society. Why? Because the communication of a written society is, of course, written.

So, a way of taking the power away from the citizen is preventing them to read. Or to learn to read. Or saying that reading is elitist or a superficial entertainment, or belongs to a marginalized group.

Women read. Or, for example, the intellectuals, in their ivory towers, read. So, the society can protect itself from these reader citizens who could question it.

Of course, not all readers question, but literature allows them to do so. So, this society fears the power of the reader. The power of the reader that consists in transforming a text, deciding a text, despite what the writer says, is… Bad literature, or pornography, or political propaganda, or a great work.

This is decided by the reader, not the writers. The readers inherited this power from the first readers, the scribes, in Mesopotamia. Who used to be called scribes exactly to hide this power of the reader, because who were the ones who said what the law implied?

The scribes. Because they were the only ones who could go to the text and tell authorities, “this is what the law says”. But this is an extraordinary power these scribes had, because not only they could transmit what the law said, but also they could interpret what the law said.

Because those who couldn’t read couldn’t contradict them. This power exists to this day. If we, as readers, read a political discourse, or read a novel, or read any text, we judge and interpret what this text say and give it back to society through our reading.

The power of the reader includes the power of every reader who came before. Because, each time we read, we don’t read that text for the first time, we read, when I read The Comedy, The Comedy that Borges read. The Comedy that Croce read, The Comedy that every Dante specialist read, from Dante’s son onwards.

So, each reader reads a palimpsest. And adds to this palimpsest a reading for their contemporaries. This is the great power of the reader.