How to Talk About
Books You Haven’t Read
PIERRE BAYARD
Translated from the French
by Jeffrey Mehlman
BLOOMSBURY
New York Berlin London
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Foreword
Preface
Ways of Not Reading
I. Books You Don’t Know
(in which the reader will see, as demonstrated by a character of Musil’s, that reading any particular book is a waste of time compared to keeping our perspective about books overall)
II. Books You Have Skimmed
(in which we see, along with Valéry, that it is enough to have skimmed a book to be able to write an article about it, and that with certain books it might even be inappropriate to do otherwise)
III. Books You Have Heard Of
(in which Umberto Eco shows that it is wholly unnecessary to have held a book in your hand to be able to speak about it in detail, as long as you listen to and read what others say about it)
IV. Books You Have Forgotten
(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read)
Literary Confrontations
V. Encounters in Society
(in which Graham Greene describes a nightmarish situation where the hero finds himself facing an auditorium full of admirers impatiently waiting for him to speak about books that he hasn’t read)
VI. Encounters with Professors
(in which we confirm, along with the Tiv tribe of western Africa, that it is wholly unnecessary to have opened a book in order to deliver an enlightened opinion on it, even if you displease the specialists in the process)
VII. Encounters with the Writer
(in which Pierre Siniac demonstrates that it may be important to watch what you say in the presence of a writer, especially when he himself hasn’t read the book whose author he is)
VIII. Encounters with Someone You Love
(in which we see, along with Bill Murray and his groundhog, that the ideal way to seduce someone by speaking about books he or she loves without having read them yourself would be to bring time to a halt)
Ways of Behaving
IX. Not Being Ashamed
(in which it is confirmed, with regard to the novels of David Lodge, that the first condition for speaking about a book you haven’t read is not to be ashamed)
X. Imposing Your Ideas
(in which Balzac proves that one key to imposing your point of view on a book is to remember that the book is not a fixed object, and that even tying it up with string will not be sufficient to stop its motion)
XI. Inventing Books
(in which, reading Sseki, we follow the advice of a cat and an artist in gold-rimmed spectacles, who each, in different fields of activity, proclaim the necessity of invention)
XII. Speaking About Yourself
(in which we conclude, along with Oscar Wilde, that the appropriate time span for reading a book is ten minutes, after which you risk forgetting that the encounter is primarily a pretext for writing your autobiography)
Epilogue
I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
—OSCAR WILDE
Foreword
PIERRE BAYARD PUTSHIS readers—this reader—in a uniquely paradoxical position. Having just read his witty How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I have now discovered that there was no reason for me to have read it in the first place. But without having read it, how would I have known that I could just as well have skimmed it, or perhaps heard about it somewhere, or possibly formed a sense of the book based entirely on what other readers have said about it, on the sort of received opinions about a work that float around in the culture? In addition, not having read the book shouldn’t—or so Pierre Bayard has assured me—prevent me from talking confidently and learnedly about it, or even from writing these brief, introductory words of appreciation. But how would I have known that without Bayard’s sage advice, which I could only have found in his wise and original volume?
In any case, the fact remains that I am very glad I did read Bayard’s book. Had I skimmed it too rapidly, I might have missed the chapter in which he gives us the thrilling examples of literary doublespeak with which Paul Valéry eulogized Marcel Proust and Anatole France while making it quite clear that he had hardly read a word of their work. Had I not read Bayard, I would not have found myself determined not only to read—but to reread—Graham Greene’s The Third Man, as well as the essay in which Montaigne lamented his failing memory and its effect on his ability to read and retain what he had read. I would not have been so thoroughly entertained by Laura Bohannan’s attempt to discuss Hamlet with a group of West African tribesmen whose responses were hilariously and informatively out of synch with the instant, cross-cultural recognition of Shakespeare’s universality that she expected. Nor would I have been so pleased to discover that Bayard’s advice to those who meet writers of books they have not read confirms, so very gratifyingly, my own observation and experience: “Praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book, and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.”
Having read such passages, I can only hope that I am not being insufficiently ambiguous when I say that what I liked best about Pierre Bayard’s sly meditation on the permissibility, the importance, and the sheer necessity of not reading is how, without our quite being aware of it, it becomes a study of the psychology of reading and of the purposes of literature, and a hymn to the pleasures of reading and to all the reasons why we cannot live without it.
—Francine Prose
Preface
BORN INTO A MILIEU where reading was rare, deriving little pleasure from the activity, and lacking in any case the time to devote myself to it, I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read.
Because I teach literature at the university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated.
In addition, I am regularly called on to discuss publications in my books and articles, since these for the most part concern the books and articles of others. This exercise is even more problematic, since unlike spoken statements—which can include imprecisions without consequence—written commentaries leave traces and can be verified.
As a result of such all-too-familiar situations, I believe I am well positioned, if not to offer any real lesson on the subject, at least to convey a deeper understanding of the non-reader’s experience and to undertake a meditation on this forbidden subject.
It is unsurprising that so few texts extol the virtues of non-reading. Indeed, to describe your experience in this area, as I will attempt here, demands a certain courage, for doing so clashes inevitably with a whole series of internalized constraints. Three of these, at least, are crucial.
The first of these constraints might be called the obligation to read. We still live in a society, on the decline though it may be, where reading remains the object of a kind of worship. This worship applies particularly to a number of canonical texts—the list varies according to the circles you move in�
��which it is practically forbidden not to have read if you want to be taken seriously.
The second constraint, similar to the first but nonetheless distinct, might be called the obligation to read thoroughly. If it’s frowned upon not to read, it’s almost as bad to read quickly or to skim, and especially to say so. For example, it’s virtually unthinkable for literary intellectuals to acknowledge that they have flipped through Proust’s work without having read it in its entirety—though this is certainly the case for most of them.
The third constraint concerns the way we discuss books. There is a tacit understanding in our culture that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision. In my experience, however, it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read— including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn’t read it either.
Moreover, as I will argue, it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven’t read it in its entirety—or even opened it. Throughout this book, I will insist on the risks of reading—so frequently underestimated—for anyone who intends to talk about books, and even more so for those who plan to review them.
The effect of this repressive system of obligations and prohibitions has been to generate a widespread hypocrisy on the subject of books that we actually have read. I know few areas of private life, with the exception of finance and sex, in which it’s as difficult to obtain accurate information.
Among specialists, mendacity is the rule, and we tend to lie in proportion to the significance of the book under consideration. Although I’ve read relatively little myself, I’m familiar enough with certain books—here, again, I’m thinking of Proust—to be able to evaluate whether my colleagues are telling the truth when they talk about his work, and to know that in fact, they rarely are.
These lies we tell to others are first and foremost lies we tell ourselves, for we have trouble acknowledging even to ourselves that we haven’t read the books that are deemed essential. And here, just as in so many other domains of life, we show an astonishing ability to reconstruct the past to better conform to our wishes.
Our propensity to lie when we talk about books is a logical consequence of the stigma attached to non-reading, which in turn arises from a whole network of anxieties rooted (no doubt) in early childhood. If we wish, then, to learn how to emerge unscathed from conversations about books we haven’t read, it will be necessary to analyze the unconscious guilt that an admission of non-reading elicits. It is to help assuage such guilt, at least in part, that is the goal of this book.
It is all the more difficult to reflect on unread books and the discussions they engender because the concept of non-reading is itself unclear, and so it is often hard to know whether we’re lying or not when we say that we’ve read a book. The very question implies that we can draw a clear line between reading and not reading, while in fact many of the ways we encounter texts sit somewhere between the two.
Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society.
The uncertainty of the border between reading and not reading will lead me to reflect more generally on the ways we interact with books. Thus my inquiry will not be limited to developing techniques for escaping awkward literary confrontations. By analyzing these situations, I will also attempt to articulate a genuine theory of reading—one that dispenses with our image of it as a simple, seamless process and, instead, embraces all its fault lines, deficiencies, and approximations.
These remarks bring us logically to the organization of this book. I will begin in the first section by describing the principal kinds of non-reading—which, as we will see, goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we’ve skimmed, books we’ve heard about, and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading.
A second section will be devoted to analyzing concrete situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven’t read. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of such circumstances, and it is beyond the scope of this project to enumerate them all. But a few significant examples— sometimes borrowed, in disguised form, from my own experience—may allow us to identify some patterns that I will draw on in advancing my argument.
The third and most important section is the one that motivated me to write this book. It consists of a series of simple recommendations gathered over a lifetime of non-reading. This advice is intended to help anyone who encounters one of these social dilemmas to resolve it as well as possible, and even to benefit from the situation, while also permitting him or her to reflect deeply on the act of reading.
These opening remarks are intended not only to explain the general structure of this book, but also to remind us of the peculiar relation to truth that infuses all our traditional ways of referring to books. To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them.
In keeping with my general thesis, which posits that the notion of the book-that-has-been-read is ambiguous, from this point forward I will indicate the extent of my personal knowledge of each book I cite, via a system of abbreviations.1 This series of indications, which will be clarified as we go, is intended to complete those that traditionally appear in footnotes, and that are used to designate the books the author theoretically has read (op. cit., ibid., etc.). In fact, as I will reveal through my own case, authors often refer to books of which we have only scanty knowledge, and so I will attempt to break with the misrepresentation of reading by specifying exactly what I know of each book.
I will complement this first series of indications with a second series conveying my opinion of the books being cited, whether or not they have ever passed through my hands.2 Since I will argue that evaluating a book does not require having read it, there is, after all, no reason for me to refrain from passing judgment on whatever works I come across, even if I have never heard of them before.3
This new system of notations—which I hope will one day be widely adopted—is intended as a ongoing reminder that our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
1. The four abbreviations used will be explained in the first four chapters. UB designates books unknown to me; SB, books I have skimmed;HB, books I have heard of; FB, books I have forgotten (see the list of abbreviations). These abbreviations are not mutually exclusive. An indication is given for every book title, and only at its first mention.
2. The abbreviations used are ++ (extremely positive opinion), + (positive opinion), - (negative opinion), and -- (extremely negative opinion). See the list of abbreviations.
3. It will be observed that this system of notations is valuable as well for its omissions, specifically RB (book that has been read) and NRB (book that has not been read), the very notations one might have expected, which will never be used. It is precisely in opposition to this kind of artificial distinction that the book is organized, a distinction conveying an image of reading that makes it hard to think about the way we actually experience it.
Ways of Not Reading
I
Books You Don’t Know
(in which the reader will see, as demonstrated by a character of Musil’s, that reading any particular book is a waste of time compared to keeping our perspective about books overall)
THERE IS MORE THAN one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For
any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist. As a result, unless he abstains definitively from all conversation and all writing, he will find himself forever obliged to express his thoughts on books he hasn’t read.
If we take this attitude to the extreme, we arrive at the case of the absolute non-reader, who never opens a book and yet knows them and talks about them without hesitation. Such is the case of the librarian in The Man Without Qualities,1 a secondary character in Musil’s novel, but one whose radical position and courage in defending it make him essential to our argument.
Musil’s novel takes place at the beginning of the last century in a country called Kakania, a parody of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A patriotic movement, known as Parallel Action, has been founded to organize a lavish celebration of the upcoming anniversary of the emperor’s reign, a celebration that is intended to serve as a redemptive example for the rest of the world.
The leaders of Parallel Action, whom Musil depicts as so many ridiculous marionettes, are thus all in search of a “redemptive idea,” which they evoke endlessly yet in the vaguest of terms—for indeed, they have neither the slightest inkling of what the idea might be nor how it might perform its redemptive function beyond their country’s borders.
Among the movement’s leaders, one of the most ridiculous is General Stumm (which means “mute” in German). Stumm is determined to discover the redemptive idea before the others as an offering to the woman he loves—Diotima, who is also prominent within Parallel Action:
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