How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  This is indeed what happens to Rollo Martins in The Third Man, the Graham Greene novel that inspired Carol Reed’s celebrated film. At the beginning of the book, Martins, the story’s protagonist, arrives in postwar Vienna, which has been divided into four sectors respectively controlled by France, England, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

  Martins has traveled to Vienna to find his childhood friend Harry Lime, who has asked Martins to come meet him. But when he arrives at Lime’s home, he discovers that his friend has just died in an accident, struck down by a car as he left his house. Martins heads to the cemetery where the funeral is being held, and there meets Anna, Lime’s mistress, along with a military police officer named Calloway.

  In questioning various witnesses in the days that follow, Martins notices a number of contradictions, and he becomes convinced that his friend was the victim not of an accident, but of a murder. Calloway also has doubts about the circumstances of Lime’s death, but for other reasons. He knows that Lime was not only the considerate friend Martins remembers, but also an unscrupulous profiteer who took advantage of the postwar period to sell tainted penicillin, whose effects were fatal for those who consumed it.

  Meanwhile, Martins has fallen in love with Anna. One day, as he leaves her apartment building, Martins notices a man standing watch in the street, who turns out to be Lime. He is, in fact, still alive and has staged his own disappearance with the help of a few accomplices out of fear of being arrested by the police.

  Through one of these accomplices, Martins demands a meeting with Lime. The reunion takes place on the great Ferris wheel of the Prater in Vienna. Lime shows himself to be the sympathetic fellow that Martins has known since childhood, but also offers occasional glimpses of a man without scruples, indifferent to the fate of his victims.

  Terrified by what his friend has become, Martins decides to collaborate with the police and draw Lime into a trap, by arranging for another meeting. But Lime escapes into the underground sewer system, where he is wounded by the police. To put an end to his suffering, Martins finishes him off, then leaves Vienna with Anna at his side.

  The central narrative of the detective story is complemented by another more humorous plotline surrounding Martins’s professional activities. He is a writer, though he doesn’t describe himself as such. He owes his modesty to the fact that he writes not great works of literature, but westerns, which appear under the pseudonym Buck Dexter and bear such evocative titles as The Lonely Horseman of Santa Fe.2

  The pen name Buck Dexter is the basis of a misunderstanding that extends throughout the book. The cultural office of the embassy has, in fact, confused Martins with another Dexter, whose first name is Benjamin. This Dexter is a highbrow novelist whose works, bearing such titles as The Curved Prow,3 occupy the same literary genre as those of Henry James.

  Rather than clear things up, Martins is extremely careful not to dispel the confusion, for he has arrived in Vienna without any money, and the mistaken identity is his ticket to free lodging in a hotel, which he needs in order to pursue his investigation. But he makes every effort to avoid the representative of the cultural office, Crabbin, for fear of having to fulfill the duties that are Benjamin Dexter’s.

  Things go awry one evening when Crabbin forces Martins to come deliver a literary lecture to an audience of admirers. Since he is assumed to be Dexter, he finds himself in the position of having to comment on Dexter’s works, on which (as the author himself ) he is theoretically a specialist—even though he has, in fact, neither written nor read them.

  Martins’s situation is especially complex in that the other Dexter dwells in a region of literature that is totally foreign to him, an author of popular novels. So alien is this world that Martins is not only completely incapable of answering the audience’s questions, but for the most part incapable of even understanding them: “Martin missed the first question altogether,” Greene writes, “but luckily Crabbin filled the gap and answered it satisfactorily.”4

  To make matters even worse, Martins is not dealing with just any group of readers, but with a circle of admirers— literary enthusiasts of “his” works, who, delighted finally to have Dexter at their disposal and eager to pay homage, cannot resist showing off by asking highly specialized questions:

  A kind-faced woman in a hand-knitted jumper said wistfully, “Don’t you agree, Mr. Dexter, that no one, no one has written about feelings so poetically as Virginia Woolf? In prose, I mean.”

  Crabbin whispered, “You might say something about the stream of consciousness.”

  “Stream of what?”5

  Even on the question of writers that have influenced his work, Martins quickly finds himself in trouble. While there are certainly great masters whom he admires, he places himself within an entirely different lineage than the man who shares his name, a lineage featuring writers of dime-store fiction:

  “Mr. Dexter, could you tell us what author has chiefly influenced you?”

  Martins, without thinking, said, “Grey.” He meant of course the author of Riders of the Purple Sage,6 and he was pleased to find his reply gave general satisfaction— to all save an elderly Austrian who asked, “Grey. What Grey? I do not know the name.”

  Martins felt he was safe now and said, “Zane Grey— I don’t know any other,” and was mystified at the low subservient laughter from the English colony.7

  No matter how Martins responds, it evidently has no direct impact on the discussion, which continues to follow its normal course. The dialogue transpires in a setting that seems not real, but rather like the space in dreams—possessed of its own laws, which are considerably removed from those that govern our ordinary conversations.

  All the same, Crabbin senses that Martins is in trouble and finally steps in. But his intervention has the involuntary effect of complicating the exchange still further, by compounding the misunderstanding between the audience and the author:

  “That is a little joke of Mr. Dexter’s. He meant the poet Gray—a gentle, mild, subtle genius—one can see the affinity.”

  “And he is called Zane Grey?”

  “That was Mr. Dexter’s joke. Zane Grey wrote what we call Westerns—cheap popular novelettes about bandits and cowboys.”

  “He is not a great writer?”

  “No, no. Far from it,” Mr. Crabbin said. “In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all.”8

  Now, in saying this, Crabbin creates an intolerable situation for Martins, for he is taking on that sector of literature that constitutes Martins’s personal universe and is his reason for living. And while in general Martins does not consider himself a writer, he becomes one upon seeing himself publicly denied that title:

  Martins told me that he felt the first stirrings of revolt at that statement. He had never regarded himself before as a writer; but Crabbin’s self-confidence irritated him—even the way the light flashed back from Crabbin’s spectacles seemed an added cause of vexation. Crabbin said, “He was just a popular entertainer.”

  “Why the hell not?” Martins said fiercely.

  “Oh well, I merely meant—”

  “What was Shakespeare?”9

  The situation quickly becomes even more tangled, because Crabbin, trying to come to the rescue of a writer who hasn’t read the work he’s discussing (because he hasn’t written it), puts himself in a parallel situation. He, too, is reduced to speaking about books he doesn’t know, as Martins is quick to point out:

  “Have you ever read Zane Grey?”

  “No, I can’t say—”

  “Then you don’t know what you are talking about.”10

  This is unarguably true. Still, Crabbin is basing his judgment on Grey’s place in the collective library that allows us to develop our idea of books. Based on the genre Grey’s novels fall into, their titles, and what Martins communicates about them, Crabbin is no less justified in voicing an opinion than all the other informed non-readers we have encountered thus far.

  Despite the occasi
onal murmurs of surprise from his audience, Martins emerges quite gracefully from this exercise, for two reasons.

  The first is the unfailing self-assurance he demonstrates, no matter what question is asked:

  “And James Joyce, where would you put James Joyce, Mr. Dexter?”

  “What do you mean, ‘put’? I don’t want to put anyone anywhere,” Martins said. It had been a very full day: he had drunk too much with Colonel Cooler; he had fallen in love; a man had been murdered—and now he had the quite unjust feeling that he was being got at. Zane Grey was one of his heroes: he was damned if he was going to stand any nonsense.

  “I mean would you put him among the really great?”

  “If you want to know, I’ve never heard of him. What did he write?”11

  If Martins’s confidence is due in part to his character, it is also a function of his having been placed in a position of authority by the organizer of this meeting and his audience. Anything he might say redounds in his favor, since given the symbolic place he holds (and so long as his identity is not revealed), it is impossible that he would say anything foolish. Thus the more he demonstrates that he doesn’t know his subject, the more convincing he becomes on another level:

  He didn’t realize it, but he was making an enormous impression. Only a great writer could have taken so arrogant, so original a line. Several people wrote Zane Grey’s name on the backs of envelopes and the Gräfin whispered hoarsely to Crabbin, “How do you spell Zane?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.”

  A number of names were simultaneously flung at Martins—little sharp pointed names like Stein, round pebbles like Woolf. A young Austrian with an intellectual black forelock called out, “Daphne du Maurier,” and Mr. Crabbin winced and looked sideways at Martins. He said in an undertone, “Be gentle with them.”12

  Authority is an essential element at play in our discussions of books, if only because citing a text is most often a way of establishing one’s own authority or contesting that of others. Martins can connect Benjamin Dexter to the tradition of the western without risk of contradiction: either his statements will be accepted as illuminating and original, or, should they push the envelope too far, they will be understood as humorous.13 In either case, the belief that his statement is accurate precedes its formulation, and thus the content of the statement is of relatively little importance.

  To uncover and study the power in play, or, if you prefer, to analyze the exact position we find ourselves in when speaking about a work, is essential to our reflection on books we haven’t read. It is only through such analysis that we will be able to adopt the correct strategy when we find ourselves in the position of not having read the books we’re talking about, as Martins experiences here. We will have occasion to return to this question of strategy further on.

  In this public lecture, then, a writer who has not read the books on which he is expected to speak confronts an audience that has not read those he has written. We have before us a perfect example of what is conventionally called a dialogue of the deaf.14

  While this scenario is taken to the extreme in the case of the lecture in The Third Man, it occurs more commonly than you might think in our conversations about books. First, often the various interlocutors will not have read the book they are talking about, or will only have skimmed it, in which case they are each actually talking about a different book.

  Second, in the more unusual case in which each person has held the book in his or her hands and truly knows it, the discussion is less about the book itself than about a fragmentary and reconstituted object (as we have seen in Umberto Eco, for example), a private screen book unrelated to the screen books of the other readers and unlikely, as a result, to overlap with them.

  But what is at stake here transcends the case of any individual book. The dialogue of the deaf is a function not only of the divergence between the two authors Martins is speaking about, but also of the fact that the parties present are attempting to conduct a dialogue on the basis of two sets of books, or, if you prefer, two distinct and adversarial libraries. It is not simply two books that are in play, but two irreconcilable lists of names (Dexter and Dexter, Grey and Gray), as a result of the profound difference, indeed the incompatibility, of the two cultures confronting each other.

  We might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books—a subset of the collective library—around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual relationship to books and to other people.15 Specific titles figure in these private libraries, but, like Montaigne’s, they are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.

  In this case, the dialogue of the deaf arises from the fact that the inner libraries of Martins and of his audience don’t overlap, or do so only to a limited extent. The conflict is not limited to any particular book, even if certain titles are mentioned, but bears more broadly on the very conception of what a book, and literature, may be. For this reason, achieving communication between the two libraries will not be easy, and any attempt to do so will inevitably create tension.

  Thus it is that in truth we never talk about a book unto itself; a whole set of books always enters the discussion through the portal of a single title, which serves as a temporary symbol for a complete conception of culture. In every such discussion, our inner libraries—built within us over the years and housing all our secret books—come into contact with the inner libraries of others, potentially provoking all manner of friction and conflict.

  For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering. Just as Martins cannot bear to hear criticism of the novels written by his heroes, comments that challenge the books in our inner libraries, attacking what has become a part of our identity, may wound us to the core of our being.

  1. “Everyone who has passed the Matriculation examination at the end of his school studies complains of the obstinacy with which he is pursued by anxiety-dreams of having failed, or of being obliged to take the examination again, etc. In the case of those who have obtained a University degree this typical dream is replaced by another one which represents them as having failed in their University finals; and it is in vain that they object, even while they are still asleep, that for years they have been practicing medicine or working as University lecturers or heads of offices. The ineradicable memories of the punishments that we suffered for our evil deeds in childhood become active within us once more and attach themselves to the two crucial points in our studies—the dies irae, dies illa of our stiffest examinations.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (New York:Avon, 1965), p. 308.

  2. UB++. UB-.

  3. UB

  4. Graham Greene, The Third Man (London:Heinemann, 1950), p. 83.

  5. Ibid., p. 86.

  6. UB++.

  7. Greene, op. cit., pp. 83-84.

  8. Ibid., p. 84.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid., p. 85.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., pp. 85–86.

  13. Before arriving in Vienna, Martins makes a stop in Frankfurt, where he is also mistaken for the other Dexter and where his frank answers are also taken to be humorous:

  A man he could recognize from twenty feet away as a journalist approached his table.

  “You Mr. Dexter?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Martins said, taken off his guard.

  “You look younger than your photographs,” the man said [ . . . ] “What about views on the American novel?”

  “I don’t read them.”

  “The well-known acid humor,” the journalist said. (Ibid., p. 13.)

  14. Concerning this notion, see my Enquête sur Hamlet: Le dialogue de sourds (Paris:Minuit, 2002), FB-.

  15. The second of the three librari
es I am introducing in this book, the inner library is a subjective part of the collective library and includes the books that have left a deep impression on each subject.

  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)

  AS A TEACHER, it is my lot more often than average to find myself obligated to speak to a large audience about books I haven’t read, either in the strict sense (having never opened them) or the attenuated sense (having only skimmed them or forgotten them). I am not sure I have dealt with the situation any better than Rollo Martins. But I have often attempted to reassure myself with the thought that those who are listening to me are no doubt on similar ground and are probably no more confident about it than I am.

  I have observed over the years that this situation in no way unsettles my students, who often comment about books they haven’t read in ways that are not only relevant, but indeed quite accurate, by relying on elements of the text that I have, involuntarily or not, conveyed to them. To avoid embarrassing anyone in my place of employment, I shall choose an example that is geographically remote, to be sure, but close to our subject: that of the Tiv tribe of West Africa.