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In this incendiary epoch we inhabit, many of our cultural artifacts are made to lie in ruins. Wars have destroyed countless volumes of literature and repressive regimes have prevented the publication of many more. Plates of text have been smashed and the night sky has been illuminated with burning dreams. Yet the explosions that annihilate books can be countered by an explosion principle inherent in the nature of books themselves. When not physically destroyed, books exist as the ruins of their own explosive natures. This explosion inherent in the book is that of its potential readability, or its constantly being written. Books explode like bombs. We walk away with chunks sunk in us.

The works discussed below involve themselves with the book both as victim of war's destruction and as explosive. Czeslaw Milosz's poem "A Book in the Ruins" discovers books in a bombed library. Another bombed library, full of books rigged to explode, appears in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Thomas Wharton's novel Salamander begins in the "bombed-out ruins" of a Quebecois bookshop. These three literary artifacts, set beside Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, form a revelatory ensemble. A comparative search of the wreckage of these works illuminates an archetypal form of ruin.

In Milosz's "A Book in the Ruins," the poet explores tension between the present ruins of a "dark building" (and its contents, books included), which the speaker walks through, and an absent, pastoral fiction that has its origins in a book (28). The speaker (let's call him by the poet's name) prescribes that "ivy snaking…is wire / Dangling," "twisted metal / Columns…are tattered tree trunks," and what "could be the brick / Of the library" may be a "sick / Grove of dry white aspen" (28). Milosz's metaphorical equation of the present, ruinous building with an absent, damaged, pastoral fiction, indicates that something has hit this "gutted foyer" which affects them both (28). The shift of perspective, from real nightmare to shattered ideal and back, necessitates a reading of not only the book's assaulted, absent musings, but present broken up remains of "Pages of books lying / Scattered" (28). This is one way Milosz gets us, as readers, to flesh out the ruinous skeleton of his poem.

Milosz's juxtaposition leads him, essentially, to "read" the ruins. Maurice Blanchot writes, "Reading is… empty - at bottom it doesn't exist; you have to cross an abyss…" (10). In order to read (a book or a ruins) we must shift from what is before us (words or remains) to that which once was intact, and which no longer exists. Milosz alludes to an abyss that is perhaps darker than Blanchot's when "a book [is] picked up" and he shows us the "Green times of creatures," the book's pastoral presence, "tumbled to the vast / Abyss and backward…" (28). Milosz's "Abyss" is the horror of war, within which "green time" wilts. He goes on to reveal a brief series of romantic images, such as "an earring," "instruments," a woman's "shawl floating in the dark" and a man who "sit[s] close on a bench," found in the almost idyllic landscape of a "formal park;" here the woman "meets him in a bower overgrown / with vines" (28-9). Despite its overall sense of nicety, this image is pervaded by neglect, insofar as the "bower" is "overgrown." This verdurous setting, located amidst the debris of warfare, wherein men are often without the women they love, aligns itself with the damaged pastoral imagery earlier posited by Milosz as being absent. The earlier juxtapositions placed absent, assaulted nature beside present wartime ruins. Now the idyllic setting and the story of a man met by a woman is situated within "a book picked up / From the ruins" (28). The associations of present destruction with damaged absence; of the bombed building, its ruined books, and a fictional, pastoral ruin, suggest that both absence and presence explode simultaneously. To read is to be hit by both at once.

If, as we have inferred, Milosz is 'reading' the ruins, then it is intriguing that he would make a literal ruins of not only physical books, pages strewn about as above, but also "the body of a song / On Daphnis and Chloe" (30, my italics). This literary artifact is "pierced" by "a fragment / Of grenade" (30). Milosz delicately interweaves absent fiction and present reality as he shows us a Chloe whose "breasts / are pierced by shrapnel," as though present for the ruinous result of the book's being pierced, and who, at the same time, is "charmed, not caring at all" as she, an absent and untouched character, "run[s] through [the present] forests of machinery and concrete" (30). By her very absence, Chloe survives the explosions which put her present surroundings to ruins.

Towards the end of "The Book in the Ruins," in vague summation, it is declared:

We were predestined to live when the scene
Grows dim and the outline of a Greek ruin
Blackens the sky. (30)

What is of most interest to us here is that Milosz puts us in the past tense and the "Greek ruin" in the present. By saying "we were predestined" (my italics), Milosz takes us out of our lively present presence and throws us back to a time when we were as yet absent. To follow this with "the outline of a Greek ruin," clarifying the fact that our presence does not last, only in ruins, confirms that our lives are but a tiny detonation of presence surrounded by an immortal absence. Likewise, Blanchot informs us that "writing continues by discontinuity" (56). As our bodies explode we grow old in their ruins, constantly ceasing to be ourselves. So the written word's volatile readability and its constant erasure, that tension subsists as an incessant explosion: an absence exploding from the book's ruinous presence. What is the nature of this explosion? Blanchot, in one of the pieces making up The Writing of the Disaster, supplies us with this definition:

"Explosion," a book: this means that the book is not the laborious assemblage of a totality finally obtained, but has for its being the noisy, silent bursting which without the book would not take place. (124)

The book never obtains completion because it constantly projects outward, hurling projectiles at potential reader-victims.

In The English Patient, Ondaatje describes the library as a literally ruinous one, a hole in one wall "caused by mortar-shell attack" (11). Hana, the novel's heroine, likes to come here, despite the danger of not-yet-triggered mines, to peruse the voluminous shelves (11). As the first library-set scene ends, we are given a glimpse of how Hana reads (12). Hana "enter[s] the story" and "emerges" with "her body full of sentences and moments" (12). Similarly to Milosz' Chloe above, Hana is pierced by literary shrapnel. But is this shrapnel real, if real means actually present in the novel's present? The "sentences and moments" which enter Hana are related to "a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams" (12). Dreams can certainly become very present absences when they go unremembered. Unlike Chloe, an absent presence pierced by a present explosion, Hana is (within the text) a present presence pierced by an absent explosion. Because she carries lines of text within her, the line between her and the book is blurred. She is made up of ruins from which the text constantly explodes.

Other examples from The English Patient indicate a view of the book as explosive. Ondaatje describes "pencil bombs…attached…to the spines of books" (75). Then juxtaposes, "A book, a map of knots, a fuze board, a room of four people in an abandoned villa…lit…now and then [by] the possible light from an explosion" (111-2). While he seems here to be referring to the light of an exploded mine outside, he also leaves open the possibility that he is referring to an explosion from any one of the sentence's first four referents. A "map of knots" can explode by coming undone in all directions. A "fuze board" can explode, spewing shrapnel post-detonation. A "room of four people" can explode with silence, conversation, affection or violence. A book explodes with its recurring absence and a possibly read, ruinous presence.

There is another way, described in The English Patient, in which books burst open in our hands. The English Patient himself has "a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations" (16). The burnt man incorporates himself into the encyclopedic explosiveness of Herodotus, adding extra charge. Hana, presumably inspired by her patient, begins to take note of her own observations upon the blank pages in a couple of the library's many volumes (61, 209). These instances of intertextuality work well metaphorically in examining what it is a reader, as a container of literature, brings to a book. We bring all that we know. And the book explodes with that knowledge, insofar as it opens out in new directions. After some putative primary text, our every reading experience is intertextual, and even to that primary text we bring that which has preceded it. That we bring a version of our own history to bear upon the book in hand makes one reconsider the popular phrase "my life is an open book." As our characters are influenced by those characters which resonate most with us from the page, or we fictionalize our perceived surroundings to reflect the environment of a certain passage, our lives too explode with the meaning we make of things.

Meaning can be salvaged not only from the book's explosive writing, but from the object's bursting presence and its circumstances. Yet another ruinous room full of blasted books appears in Thomas Wharton's novel Salamander. It opens with the image of "A burning scrap of paper" drifting down before "the black hole that was once the…entrance" to a bookshop (1). Reading the bookshop as a synecdochical representation of the book, we uncover a suggestive expression of the book's read text as constantly exploding ruins, given that from the gaping entry "Wind moans...like the sound from a shell held to the ear" (1). Here is a case of metonymy exceeding itself: the shell, as part of the oceanic sphere, not only represents the ocean, but gives off a sound which resembles that of the ocean's roar, if "held to the ear." Wharton's shell can be read as distinctly reminiscent of the one William Wordsworth describes in Book Fifth of The Prelude, in the Dream of the Arab. Wordsworth's speaker "hold[s the shell] to [his] ear" to hear "a loud prophetic blast" emanate from what is referred to as a "book" (90-102, my italics).1 Another style of shell also explodes, the sort that provides Blanchot's metaphor for books. As Blanchot notes, "the book itself belongs to burst being-to being violently exceeded and thrust out of itself" (124). A bomb lies within a shell. A bomb bursts. A bomb lies between two covers which reverberate metonymically with the full literary cataclysm, the ruinous nature of their incomplete containment of such eruptions.

To write a book is to create an explosion that puts the book to dying. This coincides with Blanchot's remark which denies the possibility of a book's "totality finally [being] obtained." That which explodes incessantly never reaches completion. Within the book's "silent[ly] bursting" materiality lies a "noisy" outburst which may resonate in turn within its reader.

In a pastoral version of the ruin, Wharton asserts, "In every library, readers sit in placid quiet while all around them a forest decays" (153). There is the obvious material reference to the book as decaying forest, since the paper used for books is commonly made from trees. Besides this, Wharton situates the book's content in a pastoral manner like that which Milosz uses in the poem discussed above, and in the midst of yet another abysmal war zone, Montreal under siege on the eve before its fall. The book's present horror corrupts the absent pastoral fiction, as recognized in the preceding sentence which ends with "words themselves… drained of their living sap" (153). Wharton refers to the book as "that thing not found in nature, yet still subject to its changes" (153). In ruins as a result of its own inherent explosiveness, the book is also vulnerable not only to physical destruction but assaults on its readable absence. Milosz also places the book's dying idyllic content within a violent framework. Books contain idylls, but their deaths are not necessarily idyllic. Books die aloud as they explode with words contained therein. A book destroyed in war bemoans not only its physical discontinuity but the loss and death of its explosive content.

How do we react to this dying? Blanchot tells us, "The dying of a book calls; and this is the call which must be answered" (124). The colonel in Salamander replies to the bookshop's moaning entrance by entering. He is encouraged by "a flicker of candlelight deep within the shadows of the bombed-out ruins" (1). This small flickering light is the mystery of what lies inside each unread book, the tiny flame of excitement that kindles a flare-up. It is what we are drawn to. Its flickering is the dying which calls to us.

We respond to the book's dying by becoming a receptacle, as does Hana, for what Blanchot calls "the echo of a language of explosion" (124). As the "sentences and moments" of a book are in perpetual eruption, so their echoing effect resounds silent through our ruinous interiors - that is, should we be able and choose to read books. Wharton's Irena notes of her father, the oppressive Count, "He wished to own books … not read them" (349). The Count is a character who wishes to rid his home of all beating hearts. He is a man who handles explosives poorly, who is attracted by the cover or shell but is afraid of loud noises. He holds no desire to carry any echo but his own.

Others risk destruction for the echo's sake. Ondaatje's Hana enters the library of boarded up doors, knowing Germans may have left mines inside as atrocious parting gifts (11). It is clearly stated that "she knew these dangers when she slid into the room" (11). She is attracted to the numerous explosions, candle-small, taking place on the shelves of this ruinous library. She, like Irena, who has read widely from her father's library, is like a moth (Wharton 24). They are both drawn to the book's narrow flame of possibility by hopes of unleashing an illuminating explosion.

They want something to positively explode from books in the midst of oppression and its subsequent, life-sized ruins. They need an explosion to fill the space that has been blown out of them. At Salamander's beginning, the Colonel meets Irena's daughter, Pica, in the burning bookshop (3). He asks her, "Do booksellers read their books?" (5). She seemingly denigrates the importance of books with her reply: "I used to…now most of them will become fuel, I suppose" (5). Yet it seems emblematic of the role of books in our time of war for them to be used as a source of warmth through a "cold winter['s]…hardship" (5). Pica is made to destroy books sacrificially; hers is not the harsh destruction of the bookshop, its books "shredded, riddled and bisected" or, like Milosz's volume of Daphnis and Chloe, "transfixed by a jagged black arrow of shrapnel" (2). Despite being assaulted or even destroyed, books continue to explode as a feature of human memory for as long as it lasts.

Books know how to explode without being consumed. A chief character in Wharton's novel, Nicholas Flood uses the salamander as his printer's device. He explains that "the little dragon that dwells in fire... without becoming consumed, was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper" (86). So literature prevails. Not only does it reverberate in us, but it vibrates out from us. After telling the Colonel that she no longer reads books, Pica, Flood's daughter, confesses there is "one…[she]'d like to read" (7). As she tells its story, her story, Wharton's novel explodes into its central narrative. When she is lowered into war's abysmal, gaping hole, and no longer wishes to read books, there is still one that needs to be read, written, or told. It is the tale of a quest to make an infinite book.

Every book is an explosion whose physical shell incompletely contains its ruins. The explosion's lodging of fragments in the reader and the book's constant ruination within the larger intertextual sphere allows for a book's sense of infinite bursting. Were every book on earth destroyed, no abyss of war and oppression could prevent us from crossing the abyss to reading. We live, write and read books, those fascinating ruins in which lie explosive evidence of our human nature. The book shares its explosion's infinity with humanity's, in a world shuddering with exploding bombs and bombs potentially exploding.

(1) Significant to our argument is that the "blast" Wordsworth's speaker hears in Book Fifth of The Prelude is one of "harmony" (95). This "song" of "articulate sounds" that are "understood" by the speaker explicitly counters the "Destruction of the earth" that it prophecies, insofar as its impulse is creative and bent on recognition. Rather than resonate with death, as the "deluge" does and as bombs do, the Arab's shell, held to the speaker's ear, echoes with his own blood's "noisy, silent" flow (98).

Bibliography

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Milosz, Czeslaw. New and Collected Poems 1931-2001. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage, 1992.

Wharton, Thomas. Salamander. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001.

Wordsworth, William. "From The Prelude." British Literature 1780-1830.

Ed. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996. 635-57