Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and often beautifully written. Yet it, too, is hard to pin down. Despite having read it twice, I am still not sure that I know what Manguel is saying, exactly. His musings have an almost dream-like quality: while you are immersed in them, they seem wholly plausible; afterwards, though, they tend to dissolve into nothingness.
At least the central subject is clear. The City of Words is a book about storytelling — about mankind’s age-old need to make sense of the world in words. Manguel wants to convince us that the storytelling impulse is not merely valuable, but is also, in some sense, at the root of our humanity. If we stop telling stories, his logic goes, we cease to be fully human (which is why societies that censor or persecute writers are so pernicious). To illustrate how valuable stories are, Manguel cites a number of instances, both real and fictional, in which they have helped people survive tough situations. He tells of a concentration camp victim who set herself the task of remembering the stories that she had read out loud in the past. While this ‘did not lend meaning to her plight,’ it did remind her of ‘light at a time of dark catastrophe, helping her to survive.’ He describes a William Trevor short story in which a Northern Irish schoolteacher, driven to the brink of despair by the Troubles, resorts to telling her pupils about an English girl who is gang-raped by IRA soldiers and then commits suicide. The pupils are largely unmoved (‘stuff like that is in the papers the whole time’), but through the act of telling the teacher finds a measure of hope.
But it is not just on account of their ability to console us that stories are important. They have more positive benefits too. Stories, Manguel suggests, take us out of our narrow daily existences and connect us to something larger — above all, to our common humanity. It is this boundary- dissolving power, this ability to help us transcend ourselves, that makes literature truly valuable in Manguel’s eyes. ‘The language of poetry and stories,’ he writes, ‘groups us under a common and fluid humanity … [where] there are no borders, no labels, no finitudes.’
At this point, it becomes clear that Manguel’s defence of storytelling is also an attack on politics — at least politics as traditionally conceived. Where literature enlarges, politics makes smaller, since it has always been mainly about subdividing humanity into groups and establishing fixed identities. Whatever the unit of subdivision — the city, the nation-state, the continent — Manguel dislikes the way that political discourse narrows humanity’s scope, and suggests that ‘we’ are different from ‘them’. Temperamentally, he is a universalist — and, by creed, a multiculturalist. The unstated, though obvious, thesis at the heart of The City of Words is that literature itself, by encouraging us to question the familiar and look beyond ourselves, is a natural ally of multiculturalism, which likewise insists that all barriers are artificial and can be overcome.
But recruiting literature to the cause of multiculturalism in this way is a crazy strategy. Literature may indeed, as Manguel says, help us to grasp the limits of political dogma; but surely multiculturalism, with its vocabulary of ‘togetherness’ and ‘inclusion’ is as much a dogma as any other creed. In what sense, then, is it literature’s ally? The absurdity of the proposition becomes apparent when Manguel treats us to a detailed reading of Gilgamesh, which emerges from his account as a sort of prototypical multicultural text (later, Don Quixote receives the same treatment). He then launches an attack on Gordon Brown’s ‘exclusionary’ policy of Britishness, the implication being that if Brown had spent his time reading the Mesopotamian epic rather than all those drab enlightenment tracts, he would welcome the Muslims into the fold just as King Gilgamesh does the monster Enkidu. At this point I’m afraid I rather lost patience with Manguel’s thoughts not only on multiculturalism, but on literature as well. Sometimes, stories really are just stories.
William Skidelsky is Deputy Editor of Prospect.