How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  Continuing his defense of criticism, Gilbert asserts that it is more difficult to speak about a thing than to do it. He begins by taking examples from history and showing that the poets who related the exploits of the heroes of antiquity were more meritorious than the heroes. Whereas action “dies at the moment of its energy” and is “a base concession to fact, the world is made by the singer for the dreamer.”12

  Ernest retorts that in elevating the creative artist to such a height, there is a risk of proportionate abasement to the critic. In response, Gilbert returns to his theory of criticism as an art:

  Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.13

  The idea of independence is crucial here, since it liberates critical activity from the secondary and devalued function, with relation to literature and art, to which it is often consigned. Instead, it confers on criticism a measure of true autonomy:

  Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.14

  The work being critiqued can be totally lacking in interest, then, without impairing the critical exercise, since the work is there only as a pretext:

  And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris’s poems, M. Ohnet’s novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the painter. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.15

  Among the examples given by Wilde, the most significant is no doubt that of Flaubert, who boasted of Madame Bovary16 that he had written a “book about nothing,” by devoting his novel to the inhabitants of Yonville. Though Flaubert’s work is often called “realist,” literature for him was autonomous in relation to the world and obeyed its own rules. Art had no need to concern itself with reality, even if it remained present in the background, and was to find its own coherence in itself.

  If Wilde does not break the link completely between the work and criticism, he strains it significantly by reducing the work to its thematic nature, with the critical text then being judged on the basis of its treatment of those themes and not for its faithfulness. Concentrating on the thematic nature of the object of criticism aligns this original text more closely with art (which may also treat reality as no more than a pretext), at the same time that it asserts the superiority of criticism, which treats works of art the way art treats reality.

  From this perspective, the critical text is no more about the work than the novel, according to Flaubert, is about reality. What I have attempted to call into question in this book is this word about, in an effort to alleviate the guilt experienced when it is forgotten. The ten minutes that Wilde recommends we accord to a book are a function of setting that concept firmly aside. In doing so, we return criticism to itself— to its solitude, that is, but also, happily, to its capacity for invention.

  For the critic, thus, literature or art occupy the same secondary position as nature for the writer or painter. Their function is not to serve as the object of his work, but to stimulate him to write. For the only true object of criticism is not the work it discusses, but itself.

  To understand anything of Wilde’s conception of criticism and reading is impossible without a clear view of the location of the creative subject within it. According to Wilde, it is the writer of criticism who occupies the foreground:

  Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.17

  Ultimately, criticism attains its ideal form when it no longer has any relation with a work. Wilde’s paradox lies in making criticism an intransitive activity without support, or rather in radically displacing its support. To put it another way, its object is not a work (since any work would do, just as any provincial housewife for Flaubert), but the critic himself:

  I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work.18

  Thus does criticism, having cut its ties to a work whose constraints handicapped it, end up revealing its relation to the literary genre that most emphatically foregrounds the subject, namely autobiography:

  That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography . . . 19

  Criticism is the record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports in that quest. As for Valéry, the literary work is for Wilde a handicap, but for different reasons. For Valéry, the work itself prevents a critic from grasping the essence of literature, in relation to which the book is merely a contingent object. For Wilde, the work leads away from the critic, who is in fact the raison d’être of the whole critical exercise. But for each of them, to read well is to turn away from the work.

  Speaking about ourselves, then, is to Wilde what should be the ultimate aim of our critical activity. From this perspective, criticism should be protected at all cost from the grips of the work, which might otherwise distract it from that goal.

  As a result, from Wilde’s perspective, the literary work should be reduced to mere pretext (“To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes”),20 but if we’re not careful, it can easily metamorphose into an obstacle. So it is not only because many modern works are of little interest that we shouldn’t linger over them—the same, indeed, holds true for great works—but because an overly attentive reading, forgetful of the interests of the reader, may distance him from himself. Reflection on the self, meanwhile, is the primary justification for critical activity, and this alone can elevate criticism to the level of an art.

  Keeping the work at a distance is thus a leitmotif of Wilde’s thinking about reading and literary criticism. It leads him to this provocative formulation, which a large part of his work serves to illustrate: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”21 At the same time that a book may stimulate the reader’s thinking, it can also separate him from what, in him, is most original. Wilde’s paradox is thus not concerned solely with bad books; it is even more valid for good ones. When you enter a book in order to critique it, you risk losing what is most yourself—to the hypothetical benefit of the book, but to your own detriment.

  The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books
, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in—a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there. And it is a traversal of just this type that we have observed in readers as diverse and as inspired as Valéry, Rollo Martins, or certain of my students who, when latching onto a single element from a work they know only vaguely or not at all, pursue their own reflection with no concern for anything else and thus take care not to lose sight of themselves.

  If we bear in mind, in the numerous complex situations we have analyzed, that what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books (which is the only way, in all probability, to speak well about them), our perception of these situations changes strikingly. In fact, it is the many points of encounter between the work and ourselves that it is urgent to bring to the fore, on the basis of the limited available data. The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exchange, among many other possible instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.

  The work itself, meanwhile, vanishes into the discourse around it and gives way to a fleeting, hallucinatory object, a phantom book that attracts our every projection and shifts its shape with each remark we make about it. We would do well, therefore, to use this phantom book primarily to support the work we do on ourselves, drawing on its available elements to compose passages of our inner books and taking heed of those elements that reveal something intimate and irreplaceable about us. It is ourselves we should be listening to, not the “actual” book—even if it sometimes provides us momentum—and it is the writing of self that we must pursue without swerving.

  The book invented in any given context will be credible if it emerges from the truth of the subject and is inscribed within the elaboration of his inner universe. If the Tiv, for example, propose a strong reading of Hamlet, even though Shakespeare’s play would appear to be totally foreign to them, it is because they feel so deeply accused in the truth of their ancestral beliefs that they are prepared to animate the phantom book they have invented with a transitory life. In the end, we need not fear lying about the text, but only lying about ourselves.

  Beyond all defensiveness, our discussion of unread books offers a privileged opportunity for self-discovery, akin to that of autobiography, to those who know how to seize it. In these conversations, whether written or spoken, language is liberated from its obligation to refer to the world and, through its traversal of books, can find a way to speak about what ordinarily eludes us.

  Beyond the possibility of self-discovery, the discussion of unread books places us at the heart of the creative process, by leading us back to its source. To talk about unread books is to be present at the birth of the creative subject. In this inaugural moment when book and self separate, the reader, free at last from the weight of the words of others, may find the strength to invent his own text, and in that moment, he becomes a writer himself.

  1.Oscar Wilde, Selected Journalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 12, UB++.

  2. UB+.

  3. UB+.

  4. SB++.

  5. UB-.

  6. Wilde, op. cit., p. 12.

  7. Ibid.

  8. “The Critic as Artist,” The Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition, http://www .ucc.ie/celt/online/E800003-007/text001.html.

  9. Ibid., p. 121.

  10. Ibid., p. 126.

  11. Ibid., p. 127.

  12. Ibid., p. 133.

  13. Ibid., p. 137.

  14. Ibid., p. 138.

  15. Ibid.

  16. SB and HB++.

  17. “The Critic as Artist,” p. 139.

  18. Ibid., p. 140

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., p. 146.

  21. Quoted in Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 284, HB++. This remark is also attributed to the British writer Sydney Smith (1771–1845).

  Epilogue

  OUR ANALYSIS OF the delicate situations encountered in this book suggests that we have no other choice, in preparing to face such confrontations ourselves, than to accept a kind of evolution of our psychology. It is not enough for us simply to learn how to remain unflustered in these situations; we must profoundly transform our relationship to books.

  To begin with, such an evolution implies extricating ourselves from a whole series of mostly unconscious taboos that burden our notion of books. Encouraged from our school years onward to think of books as untouchable objects, we feel guilty at the very thought of subjecting them to transformation.

  It is necessary to lift these taboos to begin to truly listen to the infinitely mobile object that is a literary text. The text’s mobility is enhanced whenever it participates in a conversation or a written exchange, where it is animated by the subjectivity of each reader and his dialogue with others, and to genuinely listen to it implies developing a particular sensitivity to all the possibilities that the book takes on in such circumstances.

  But it is equally necessary to make this effort to change so that we can listen to ourselves, without missing the private resonances that connect us to every work and whose roots go deep in our history. The encounter with unread books will be more enriching—and sharable with others—if the person undergoing it draws his inspiration from deep within himself.

  This different mode of listening to texts and to oneself again recalls what may reasonably be expected from psychoanalysis, the primary function of which is to free the patient from his inner constraints and, by the end of a journey over which he remains the sole master, to open him up to all his creative possibilities.

  To become a creator yourself: this is the project to which we have been brought by the observations drawn from our series of examples, and it is a project accessible only to those whose inner evolution has freed them from guilt completely.

  These people know that talking about books you haven’t read is an authentically creative activity, as worthy—even if it takes place more discreetly—as those that are more socially acknowledged. The attention accorded to traditional artistic practices has resulted, in fact, in a certain neglect and even misperception of those others that by their nature transpire in a kind of secrecy.

  How can one deny, however, that talking about books you haven’t read constitutes an authentic creative activity, making the same demands as other forms of art? Just think of all the skills it calls into play—listening to the potentialities of a work, analyzing its ever-changing context, paying attention to others and their reactions, taking charge of a gripping narrative—and you will surely find yourself convinced.

  Furthermore, our new creativity may go far beyond our comments on unread books. At a higher level, any kind of creativity, whatever its object, entails a certain detachment from books. For as illustrated by Oscar Wilde, there is a kind of antinomy between reading and creating, since every reader runs the risk, lost as he is in someone else’s book, of distancing himself from his personal universe. And if commentary on books one hasn’t read is a kind of creation, the converse is also true: creation implies not lingering too long over books.

  Becoming the creators of our own works is thus the logical and desirable extension of an apprenticeship in commenting on books we haven’t read. This creativity is one step along the path to self-conquest and to our liberation from the burden of culture, which may impede the existence of those who haven’t been trained in its mastery, and thus in the ability to bring life to their works.

  If learning to talk about books you haven’t read is for many people their first encounter with the demands of creation, particular responsibility lies with those who teach. Given their position and personal experience, teachers are ideally placed to advance this practice among their students.

&nbs
p; Although students are initiated during their education into the art of reading and are even taught how to talk about books, the art of talking about books they haven’t read is singularly absent from our curricula, as though no one had ever thought to question the premise that it is necessary to have read a book in order to talk about it. So why are we astonished by their distress when they are questioned on an exam about a book they don’t “know” and cannot find the wherewithal to reply?

  Our educational system is clearly failing to fulfill its duties of deconsecration, and as a result, our students remain unable to claim the right to invent books. Paralyzed by the respect due to texts and the prohibition against modifying them, forced to learn them by heart or to memorize what they “contain,” too many students lose their capacity for escape and forbid themselves to call on their imagination in circumstances where that faculty would be extraordinarily useful.

  To show them, instead, that a book is reinvented with every reading would give them the means to emerge unscathed, and even with some benefit, from a multitude of difficult situations. For knowing how to speak with finesse about something with which we are unacquainted has value far beyond the realm of books. As we have seen exemplified by numerous authors, the entirety of our culture opens up to those with the ability to cut the bonds between discourse and its object, and to speak about themselves.

  The key, in the end, is to reveal to students what is truly essential: the world of their own creation. What better gift could you make to a student than to render him sensitive to the art of invention—which is to say, self-invention? All education should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists.