The question then arises of whether the artist is making up stories by commenting on the dramatic death of the heroine (which is, moreover, another way of wondering whether Sseki is talking about a book he hasn’t read). Can one say that the heroine dies, and if the answer is yes, might her death be sufficiently moving to send chills down one’s spine?
This question is not so simple to answer. The historical character one would tend to regard as the heroine— Theophano, the wife of Emperor Nicephorus, whom she helps to assassinate—does not die, but on the last page of the novel, she is imprisoned and exiled.9 We are thus dealing with a kind of death, or at least a disappearance. A reader who had read the book might in good faith forget the precise circumstances of her elimination and simply remember that a misfortune befalls her, without it being possible to say that he hadn’t read the book.
The problem is further complicated by the observation that there is not one heroine, but two, in the novel. The second is Princess Agatha, a discreet and admirable heroine who withdraws to a convent upon learning of the death in combat of her beloved, the emperor’s companion Basil Digenes. The passage about this incident refrains from lyrical excess and is all the more successful for doing so. Thus there is a quite moving case of the disappearance of a female character, and an alleged reader’s recollection that she had died would hardly seem like grounds for an evaluation of whether he had really read the book.
At an entirely different level than the factual question of whether the heroine dies, the artist is perfectly justified in praising the quality of the passage describing such an event, since in a certain sense it feels right to him, at least as an unrealized possibility. Few adventure novels of this period do not include a female character, and it is hard to see how the reader’s interest might be sustained for any great length of time without including a love story. And how, in that case, would one not have the heroine die, unless one were telling a story with a happy ending, which literature is rarely inclined to do?10
It is thus doubly difficult to know whether the artist has read Theophano. In the first place, it is not that far off to say that the book features the death of a heroine, even if the word disappearance might be more appropriate. Moreover, being wrong on this point in no way proves that he hasn’t read it. This cultural fantasy of the heroine’s death is so potent that it is unsurprising that he would associate it with the book once his reading is complete, even to the point where it becomes an integral part of the book for him.
The books we talk about, in other words, are not just the actual books that would be uncovered in a complete and objective reading of the human library, but also phantom books that surface where the unrealized possibilities of each book meet our unconscious. These phantom books fuel our daydreams and conversations, far more than the real objects that are theoretically their source.11
One sees how directly the discussion of a book leads us to a point where the notions of true and false, contrary to what the artist with gold-rimmed spectacles believes, lose much of their validity. It is first difficult to know whether we ourselves have read a book, so evanescent is our reading. Second, it is more or less impossible to know whether others have read it, since this would first entail their knowing such a thing. Finally, the content of a text is so fluid that it is difficult to assert with certainty that something is not found in it.
The virtual space of discussion about books is thus characterized by extraordinary uncertainty, which applies to the participants, incapable of stating rigorously what they have read, as much as to the moving target of their discussion. But this uncertainty is not entirely disadvantageous; it can also provide the opportunity, if those in the conversation seize the moment, to transform the virtual library into an authentic realm of fiction.
Fiction, here, should not be understood pejoratively. What I mean to say is that if its rules are respected by the occupants, the virtual library is in a position to advance an original kind of creativity. Such creativity can arise from the resonances that a book calls up in those who haven’t read it. It can be individual or collective. Its aim is to construct a book more propitious to the situation in which the non-readers find themselves—a book that may have only feeble links to the original (which would be what, exactly?), but one that is as close as possible to the hypothetical meeting point of various inner books.
In another of his books, Grass on the Wayside,12 Sseki depicts a painter who has retreated to the mountains to produce a summation of his art. One day his landlady’s daughter comes into his room and, seeing him with a book, asks him what he is reading. The painter answers that he doesn’t know, since his practice is to open the book at random and read the page before his eyes without knowing anything of the rest of the book. Reacting to the young woman’s surprise, the painter explains to her that it is more interesting for him to proceed in this manner: “I open the book at random as though it were a game of chance, and I read the page that ends up in front of me, and that’s what is interesting.”13
The woman suggests that he show her his method, which he agrees to do, eventually translating a passage from the English book in his hand into Japanese for her. The subject is a man and a woman of whom nothing is known other than that they are in a boat in Venice. When the young woman asks who these characters are, the painter replies that he hasn’t the slightest idea, since he hasn’t read the book and insists on not finding out any more:
“Who are that man and that woman?”
“I have no idea. But that’s precisely why it’s interesting. We have no need to be concerned with their relations until then. Just like you and I finding ourselves together, it’s only the present moment that counts.”14
What is important in the book is external to it, since it is only a pretext or vehicle for this moment of discussion: talking about a book is less about the book itself than about the moment of conversation devoted to it. The real relationship is not between the novel’s two characters, but between its pair of “readers.” But the latter couple will be better able to communicate if they are less constrained by the book and if it is allowed to retain its ambiguity. Such is the price paid for our inner books to have some chance, as in the distended temporality of Groundhog Day, of joining together for even one brief moment.
We would thus be wise to avoid diminishing the books that surface in our encounters by making overly precise comments about them, but rather to welcome them in all their polyvalence. In this way, we allow none of their potential to be lost, and we open up what comes from the book—title, fragment, genuine or fake quotation, or in this case the image of the couple on a boat in Venice—to all the possibilities of connection that can be created, at that moment, between people.
This ambiguity has a certain kinship with the ambiguity of interpretation in psychoanalysis. It is because interpretation can be understood in different ways that it stands a chance of being understood by the subject to whom it is addressed, whereas if it were too clear, it might be experienced as a kind of violence against the other. And like analytic interpretation, a statement about a book is narrowly dependent on the exact moment when it is made and has meaning only in that moment.
A truly effective statement about an unread book also involves a bracketing of conscious, rational thought, a suspension that is once again reminiscent of psychoanalysis. What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and thereby to ourselves.
Letting books keep their ambiguity does not contradict the necessity to be assertive and impose your point of view on a book, as we saw in Balzac’s novel. It might even be its flip side. It is a way of showing that you have grasped the specific nature of the conversational space and the singularity of each participant. Even if it is a screen book that each person is discussing, it is better
not to shatter the common space, but instead to leave our phantom books intact, along with our potential to non-read and to dream.
Given these circumstances, one might well conclude that ultimately I invented nothing when I decided earlier in this book to save the library in The Name of the Rose from the flames, to unite Rollo Martins and Harry Lime’s girlfriend, or to drive David Lodge’s unhappy hero to suicide. To be sure, these facts are not directly stated in the texts. But like all the facts I have offered the reader in the works I have discussed, they correspond for me to what I see as the likely logic of each text and thus, as far as I’m concerned, are an integral part of them.
No doubt I will be reproached, as was the artist with gold-rimmed spectacles, for talking about books I haven’t read, or for recounting events that, literally speaking, are not part of the books. However, it felt to me not as if I were lying, but rather that I was uttering a subjective truth by describing with the greatest possible accuracy what I had perceived of these books, being faithful to myself at the moment and in the circumstances when I felt the need to invoke them.
1. SB++.
2. I Am a Cat, translated by Katsue Shibata and Motonari Kai (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1961), p. 1.
3. UB-.
4. Soseki, op. cit., pp. 13–14.
5. SB-.
6. Soseki, op. cit., p. 14.
7. Ibid.
8. Frederic Harrison, Theophano:The Crusade of the Tenth Century (New York: Harper & Bros., 1904).
9. Ibid., p. 337.
10. There is no end to the number of books in world literature in which the “death of the heroine” is one of the most beautiful passages.
11. The third type of book I am introducing here, the phantom book, is that mobile and ungraspable object that we call into being, in writing or in speech, when we talk about a book. It is located at the point where readers’ various screen books meet—screen books that readers have constructed based on their inner books. The phantom book belongs to the virtual library of our exchanges, as the screen book belongs to the collective library and the inner book belongs to the inner library.
12. SB++.
13. Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa), translated by Edwin McClellan (revised by J. Mehlman) (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1969).
14. Ibid., p. 102.
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)
AS WE SEE, the obligation to talk about unread books should not be experienced as something negative, a source of anxiety or remorse. To the person who knows how to experience it as positive, who manages to lift the burden of his guilt and pay attention to the potential of the concrete situation in which he finds himself, talking about unread books invites us into a realm of authentic creativity. We should learn to welcome the opportunity to enter this virtual library and embrace all its rich possibility.
That, in any event, is the major lesson to be drawn from Oscar Wilde’s writings on the subject. These texts concentrate especially on one type of situation in which we may be led to talk about books we haven’t read—that of literary criticism—but his suggestions may easily be extended to other situations, such as dialogues in social or academic settings.
A voracious reader if ever there was one and a man of vast culture, Oscar Wilde was also a resolute non-reader. Long before Musil or Valéry, Wilde had the courage to warn of the dangers of reading for the cultivated individual.
One of Wilde’s most important contributions to the study of non-reading, because of the new channels it opens up, appeared in an article called “To read, or not to read”1. in the Pall Mall Gazette, a newspaper for which he wrote regularly. Responding to an inquiry about the hundred best books it was possible to recommend, Wilde proposed dividing the contents of the collective library into three categories.
The first would consist of books to be read, a category in which Wilde places Cicero’s letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s lives of the painters,2 Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography,3 John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Saint-Simon’s memoirs,4 Mommsen, and Grote’s history of Greece.5 The second category, equally expected, would comprise books worth rereading, such as Plato and Keats. In the “sphere of poetry,” Wilde adds “the masters, not the minstrels”; in that of philosophy, “the seers, not the savants.”6. Wilde, op. cit., p. 12.
To these rather banal categories, Wilde adds a third that is more surprising. It consists of books it is important to dissuade the public from reading. For Wilde, such dissuasive activity is crucial and should even figure among the official missions of universities. “This mission,” he notes, “is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst Hundred Books’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.”7
Unfortunately, Wilde did not leave us the list of the hundred books it would be important to keep away from students. However, the list is manifestly less important than the idea that reading is not always a beneficial activity, but can turn out to be harmful. So menacing is reading perceived to be that in other texts, the list of books to be proscribed seems to have been extended ad infinitum, and it is not only a hundred books that we need to be wary of, but all of them.
Wilde’s most important text about his wariness toward reading is called “The Critic as Artist.”8 Structured as a dialogue in two parts, it features two characters, Ernest and Gilbert. It is likely Gilbert who articulates the author’s very original positions most trenchantly.
The first thesis developed by Gilbert is intended to counter Ernest’s assertion that in the greatest artistic epochs, such as ancient Greece, there were no art critics. Refuting that statement, Gilbert cites such examples as Aristotle’s Poetics to establish that for the Greeks, creation was inseparable from general considerations about art, and creators were thus already performing the role of critics.
This assertion serves as an introduction to a passage in which Gilbert shows how artistic creation and criticism, far from being separate activities, cannot in reality be disjoined:
Ernest: The Greeks were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty is higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between them.
Gilbert: The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art.9
There is thus no separation between artistic creation and criticism, nor can there be any great creation without its share of criticism, as the example of the Greeks reveals. But the inverse is equally true, and criticism itself is a form of art:
Ernest: You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what of criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless.10
Defending critics against this accusation of insignificance, Gilbert asserts that they are far more cultured than the authors they review, and that criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation. In this defense of criticism as an art, an apologia for non-reading first appears:
The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual
criminals of art. It is sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to criticise. They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed misanthropes [ . . . ] Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine.11
The assertion that it takes only ten minutes to familiarize oneself with a book—or even considerably less, since Gilbert begins by assuming as a matter of course that critics don’t read the books submitted to them—thus surfaces in a defense of critics, whose cultural sophistication should allow them to perceive the essence of a book quickly. The defense of non-reading thus enters the discussion as an offshoot of the inquiry into criticism; non-reading is said simply to be a power acquired by specialists, a particular ability to grasp what is essential. But the remainder of the text gives us to understand that non-reading is also a duty, and that there is a true risk for the critic in spending too much time reading the book he is to talk about. Or, if you prefer, there are more decisive factors in our encounters with books than the simple question of time.
Over the rest of the text, Wilde elaborates on this articulation between art and criticism with increasing emphasis, to the point where he reveals a veritable distrust of reading.
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Page 13