How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  Besides the fact that the book in question is an element in a larger ensemble, which provides Dempsey a certain amount of information to begin with, he knows enough about the book (through its title, his acquaintance with the author, what he has heard about it) to be able to judge whether it is of interest to him. It is the book’s perceived affinities (or lack thereof) with his own inner book that allow him to make a judgment—affinities that are not directly detectable in Swallow’s text and that probably would be neither reinforced nor diminished if Dempsey were to familiarize himself with it.

  It should be the most normal of behaviors to acknowledge that we haven’t read a book while nevertheless reserving the right to pass judgment on it. If we rarely see this practice in action, it is because acknowledging our non-reading (which, as we have seen, may be quite active rather than passive) is, in our culture, deeply and ineradicably marked by guilt.

  It is striking that Dempsey only offers his opinion of Swallow’s book so frankly because he is speaking to a computer, and not a living person. His attitude changes completely, moreover, as soon as he has the sense that his interlocutor is endowed with a kind of personality—that is, as soon as it emits what is theoretically impossible for a machine, an opinion:

  R.D.: . . . The idea of his being a serious candidate for the UNESCO Chair is preposterous.

  ELIZA: I wouldn’t say that.

  It is this last line of the dialogue that Robin Dempsey has been staring at, transfixed, for the last few minutes. Its appearance made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle, for it is of an entirely different order from anything ELIZA has produced until now: not a question, not a request, not a statement about something already mentioned in the discourse, but an expression of opinion. How can ELIZA have opinions? How can she know anything about the UNESCO Chair that Robin himself doesn’t know, or hasn’t told her? Robin is almost afraid to ask. At last, slowly and hesitantly, he types:

  What do you know about it?

  Instantly ELIZA replies:

  More than you think.

  Robin turns pale, then red. He types:

  All right, if you’re so clever, tell me who will get the UNESCO Chair.

  Whereupon the machine, gradually freeing itself from its status as a machine, replies imperturbably, “Philip Swallow.”5

  If the computer is able to proffer firm opinions, including its thoughts on the subject of future academic appointments, it is because it is not as autonomous as Dempsey has long believed, but is being controlled from a distance by one of his colleagues. The discovery of this ruse plunges Dempsey into a fury—which is understandable, for in his ignorance that his interlocutor is human he has revealed some of his most private thoughts, and specifically his hatred of Swallow, thus exposing himself to humiliation.

  Our degree of cultural knowledge—which is to say, most often, our lack of cultural knowledge—is something we guard closely, and so, too, are the lies we resort to in order to conceal our foibles. With a confidant other than a machine, Dempsey would not have risked acknowledging that he, like the rest of us, frequently talks about books he hasn’t read. Such secrecy is a defense mechanism we use to hide the gaps in our learning and thus make ourselves presentable in the eyes of others—and in our own eyes as well.

  Believing he is conversing with a mere machine, Dempsey reveals himself in all his naked truth to one of the people who most strongly motivate his instinct for self-protection. First of all, he reveals his true hatred for one of his colleagues, a feeling that the rules of polite society and above all of academia oblige him to disguise. But second, he reveals another truth that lurks behind academia’s polite conventions about culture: that the way we approach cultural objects is often both violent and approximate.

  As long as we strive for an image of cultural literacy that only serves to disguise us from others and ourselves, our more or less unconscious shame about the real nature of our interaction with books will weigh on all our relations with them and everything we say about them. If we really intend to find adequate solutions to our daily confrontations with our shortcomings, we need to recognize this shame and analyze its foundations. Only in doing so can we hope to survive the avalanche of fragments of books that threatens to engulf us, in the face of which our deepest identity is revealed to be in permanent danger.

  If Dempsey is disinclined to confess—except to a computer— that, like the rest of us, he sometimes talks about books he hasn’t read, this is not the case for the characters in another of Lodge’s novels, Changing Places, who stage a veritable game of truth about unread books.

  The game is the invention of the same Philip Swallow whose possible appointment to the UNESCO Chair so appalled Dempsey in Small World. In Changing Places, which unfolds several years earlier, the British professor Swallow (at a humbler phase of his career) exchanges academic positions with a brilliant American professor from the West Coast, Morris Zapp. The job swap is quickly compounded by the two men swapping wives as well.

  During his stay in California, Swallow initiates a few students into a game he calls Humiliation:

  He taught them a game he had invented as a postgraduate student, in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn’t read, and scored a point for every person present who had read it. The Confederate Soldier and Carol were joint winners, scoring four points out of a possible five with Steppenwolf6 and The Story of O7 respectively, Philip in each case accounting for the odd point. His own nomination, Oliver Twist 8— usually a certain winner—was nowhere.9

  One sees why the game is called Humiliation. To score points, each person has to come up with books that nearly everyone has read, but which he hasn’t. Contrary to the ordinary goals of parlor games, especially in academia, where displaying one’s cultural sophistication is usually the goal, the game is based on exhibiting one’s lack of cultural knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the way our displays of culture in social settings, before the mirror of others, awakens unreasonable feelings of shame.

  The game thus consists in humiliating yourself as much as possible: the more you humiliate yourself, the more likely you are to win. But there is an additional twist, which is that victory also depends on sincerity. To win, you must not only give the name of a well-known book, but also convince the others that you have told the truth about not having read it. If you give the name of a book that is too well known, such that it is actually implausible for you not to have read it, the other players have the right to reject your statement. The chance of winning is thus proportional to the players’ trust in the person confessing his ignorance, and so also in proportion to the genuineness of the player’s humiliation.

  Another round of Humiliation is played later on in the novel and is recounted to us by Désirée, the wife of Morris Zapp, the American professor, in a letter to her husband. Désirée has started sleeping with Swallow, the Brit having thus replaced Zapp absolutely. During a faculty gathering, Swallow proposes that they play Humiliation. However, one of the professors present, Howard Ringbaum, finds it hard to swallow the impossible situation in which players are placed, that of being able to succeed only by losing and of gaining prestige only to the extent that they humiliate themselves:

  You know Howard, he has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two urges at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture. At first his psyche just couldn’t absorb the paradox and he named some eighteenth-century book so obscure I can’t remember the name of it. Of course, he came last in the final score, and sulked.10

  Ringbaum withdraws from the game, which is continued with such titles as Milton’s Paradise Regained,11 which the chairman of the English department, to the stupefaction of all present, confesses to not having read. But Ringbaum keeps an eye on what’s going on and abruptly decides, at one point, to intervene:

  Well, on the third round, Sy was leading the f
ield with Hiawatha,12 Mr. Swallow being the only other person who hadn’t read it, when suddenly Howard slammed his fist on the table, jutted his jaw about six feet over the table and said:

  “Hamlet!”

  Well, of course, we all laughed, not very much because it didn’t seem much of a joke. In fact it wasn’t a joke at all. Howard admitted to having seen the Laurence Olivier movie, but insisted that he had never read the text of Hamlet. Nobody believed him of course, and this made him sore as hell. He said did we think he was lying and Sy more or less implied that we did. Upon which Howard flew into a great rage and insisted on swearing a solemn oath that he had never read the play. Sy apologized through tight lips for having doubted his word. By this time, of course, we were all cold sober with embarrassment. Howard left, and the rest of us stood around while trying to pretend nothing had happened.13

  The example of Hamlet—arguably the greatest work in the English canon, and whose symbolic import is thus significant—shows the complexity inherent in the game of truth, a complexity that is compounded in the case of academia. In point of fact, a professor of English literature runs only a minimal risk in admitting—or pretending to admit— that he hasn’t read Hamlet. For one thing, no one is likely to believe him. And for another, the play is so well known that it is not necessary to have read it to speak about it. If it is true that he hasn’t “read” Hamlet, Ringbaum certainly has at his disposal a great deal of information about it and, in addition to Laurence Olivier’s movie adaptation, is familiar with other plays by Shakespeare. Even without having had access to its contents, he is perfectly well equipped to gauge its position within the collective library.

  Thus everything might have gone swimmingly if Ringbaum—as a result of the latent violence of the game, but also due to the psychological conflict mentioned by Désirée—had not committed an error, which was to not allow the ambiguity on the subject of his knowledge of the play to persist. In insisting on his ignorance, he excluded himself from the indefinite cultural space that we generally allow to reign between ourselves and others, within which we tacitly accord ourselves—and simultaneously accord them—a margin of ignorance. We do of course know at some level that all cultural literacy, even the most highly developed, is constructed around gaps and fissures (Lodge mentions Howard’s fear of “a gap in his culture”) that are no real obstacle to its taking on a certain consistency as a body of information.

  This realm of communication about books—and more generally about culture—might be characterized as a virtual library,14 both because it is a space dominated by images (images of oneself, in particular) rather than books and because it is not a realm based in reality. It is subject to a number of rules whose goal is to maintain it as a consensual space in which books are replaced by fictions of books. It is also a realm of play, not unlike that of childhood or the theater, a kind of play that can be pursued only if the principal rules are not transgressed.

  One of the implicit rules of the virtual library is that we must not attempt to find out the extent to which someone who claims he has read a book has actually done so, for two reasons. The first is that life in the virtual library would quickly become unlivable if not for a certain amount of ambiguity around the truth of our statements, and if we were instead forced to reply clearly to questions about what exactly we had read. The other reason is that the very notion of what sincerity would mean is questionable, since knowing what is meant by having read a book, as we have seen, is highly problematic.

  In declaring that he hasn’t “read” Hamlet, in telling the truth—or what he believes to be the truth—Ringbaum violates the fundamental rule of the virtual library, which is that it is fine to talk about books one hasn’t read. In so doing, he transforms the space of this exchange, through a brutal exposure of his private sphere, into a place of violence. Through this gesture, indeed, he unveils the truth of culture, which is that it is a theater charged with concealing individual ignorance and the fragmentation of knowledge. In so doing, he does not merely expose his nakedness but effects a kind of psychic rape of the others.

  The violence of the reaction to which he will be subjected is commensurate with the violence he has exercised on the normally playful stage of the virtual library. In daring to utter the truth about his reading of Shakespeare, but also, as a consequence, about the nature of the space in which we talk about books, Ringbaum finds himself exiled from it. His sanction is not long in coming, as recounted by Désirée at the end of her letter:

  A piquant incident, you must admit—but wait till I tell you the sequel. Howard Ringbaum unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet. The story had been buzzed all round the campus, of course, and there was even a paragraph alluding to it in the Euphoric State Daily. Furthermore, as this created an unexpected vacancy in the Department, they’ve reconsidered the case of Kroop and offered him tenure after all. I don’t suppose he’s read Hamlet either, but nobody was asking.15

  As Désirée observes, the question of whether the person replacing Ringbaum—who at this point has no other choice than to kill himself—has read Hamlet is secondary. What is important is that he not step out of the intermediary space of virtual books, which allows us to live and communicate with others. And rather than risk any violence to that consensual space, which cloaks us like a protective garment, we may well prefer to avoid asking a candidate, at least in this context, the exact extent of his knowledge of Shakespeare.

  Through the analysis of this virtual space and its protective function, we see clearly that it is not just shame, linked to scenarios from childhood, that is in the offing when we dare to speak about books we haven’t read, but a more serious threat to our self-image and the image we convey to others. In the intellectual circles where writing still counts, the books we have read form an integral part of our image, and we call that image into question when we venture to publicly announce our inner library’s limits.

  In this cultural context, books—whether read or unread— form a kind of second language to which we can turn to talk about ourselves, to communicate with others, and to defend ourselves in conflict. Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

  Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. We cannot coincide completely with the image the totality of our reading presents; whether the image makes us look better or worse than we should, behind it all our particularities vanish. And especially since books are often present within us only as little-known or forgotten fragments, we are often out of phase with the books that are our public face; they are as inadequate in the end as any other language.

  In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.

  In this regard, this ambiguous social space is the opposite of school—a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation. Such an aim is, in the end, illusory, for reading does not obey the hard logic of true and false, of waving off ambiguity and evaluating with certitude whether readers are telling the truth.

  When Ringbaum insists on transforming that realm of play in which books are discussed, that space of constant negotiation and intermittent hypocrisy, into a realm of truth, he locks himself into a paradox that will lead him into madness. Unable to tolerate the indecisiveness of the space within which the discussion about books takes place, he
insists on seeing himself reflected in the other players’ eyes as the best—which, given the particularity of Swallow’s game, is to say the worst. He succeeds, on his own terms, in assuming this image that is less unsettling to him, because it is less ambiguous; but in the end it leads him, reconciled with himself though he may be, to his ruin.

  To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

  1. SB+.

  2. SB+.

  3.Small World:An Academic Romance (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 247.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. SB and FB-.

  7. SB and HB++.

  8. HB++.

  9. Changing Places (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 96.

  10. Ibid., p. 135.

  11. HB++.

  12. UB-.

  13. Changing Places, p. 136.

  14. The third type of library that I am introducing here, the virtual library, is the realm in which books are discussed, in either written or oral form, with other people. It is a mobile sector of every culture’s collective library and is located at the point of intersection of the various inner libraries of each participant in the discussion.

  15. Changing Places, p. 136.