CRITICAL MASS : Gaining an education from Books You Haven’t Read
Posted on Tuesday, November 20, 2007
There is a temptation to dismiss books with titles like How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read as a joke or a marketing ploy, a clever publisher’s gimmick designed to position a product in the marketplace. Books with provocative titles attract more attention on shelves and from reviewers. Consequently they sell better, maybe even enough to cover the cost of their printing.
None of us should be surprised to encounter a book with such a counterintuitive title — Abbie Hoffman called his Steal This Book, but does anyone imagine that’s what he really wanted us to do ? (Maybe Abbie was sincere, but Grove Press needed money. ) You see a book with a title like How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury, $ 19. 95 ) and assume someone is having a laugh or has produced one of those bluffer’s guides, a kind of Cliffs Notes-style fake book for the would-be pretentious.
What you might not expect is a serious — if witty — examination of the act of reading itself, the habits of readers and the reflexive guilt of nonreaders. It is a postmodern attack on the oppressive canon of “great” work, designed to liberate those of us who feel intimidated by the great gray wall of books we’ll never know. We also mightn’t expect the book to have been written by a French intellectual, Pierre Bayard, whose career would seem to put the lie to his book’s initial assertion “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 position of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read.” This is a lie; Bayard has obviously read deeply and widely. In previous books like How to Improve Failed Literary Works, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd ? and Inquiry Into Hamlet, he has exhibited an iconoclastic streak and a strong instinct for literary investigation. In these works Bayard makes salient points about the reliability of authorial intent, arguing, for instance, that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius did not murder his brother and Hamlet’s father and that Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot fingered the wrong culprit in the grand dame’s classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Bayard is not only a reader; he is what Harold Bloom would call a “strong reader” who necessarily transforms every work he reads. (In a sense, strong readers collaborate with authors and sometimes do battle with them. Reading isn’t a passive activity but a kind of wrestling match between imaginations. )
So the Bayard who is narrating this work — which was never intended as an airport bookstore best-seller but as an essay to be circulated through French academia — is a fictive personality. Some reviewers have accepted Bayard’s assertions at face value — a story in The Times of London breathlessly opened a piece about the book with this sentence A distinguished professor of literature at Paris University has become a best-selling author with a work explaining how he comments authoritatively on books that he failed to finish, has forgotten or has never read.
Replace the period with an exclamation mark and you’ve got a line worthy of the Weekly World News there. Bayard probably enjoys this sort of hysteria, in part because only someone who hasn’t read his book could write that kind of sentence about it. It’s almost as though the book itself is a kind of academic hoax on the order of Alan Sokal’s nonsensical paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” that appeared in Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern studies published by Duke University, in 1996. (After the gibberish was published, Sokal revealed his deception in Lingua Franca. )
Anyone who has read Bayard’s book — and almost every reviewer who has tackled it has made at least a mild joke about not reading it — might understand that it’s not about fooling others into thinking you’ve read what you haven’t, but about developing a healthier relationship with what you don’t know. To feign shock that someone — a literary professional ! — might pretend to familiarity with a book he doesn’t know is to miss the point.
SEEN IT ON TV Given the relatively low return on investment inherent in the book reviewing game — it takes X hours to read a book and a lot of publications pay very little — I’m sure most professional reviewers have at times skipped or skimmed passages in works they’ve evaluated. I’ve even had the experience of having a professional journalist tell me he saw no need to read a book he proposed reviewing because he’d seen a television news report on it. Nor do I doubt Bayard’s “confession” that he has never read Dickens’ Oliver Twist or Virgil’s The Aeneid; all of us have huge gaps in our education and there must necessarily be many classic works we may never have read. Bayard uses a passage from British writer David Lodge’s novel Changing Places to illustrate this point, in which a professor engages his colleagues in a game called “Humiliation” where the players must give the title of great works they have never read. The “winner” is an American who rashly announces he has never read Hamlet. At first no one believes him so he angrily insists on swearing an oath that he has never read the text of the play. Then he leaves in a huff. (And, a few weeks later, he’s denied tenure. )
Sure, it can be rash to admit you haven’t read something you are supposed to have read, and it can be socially awkward when meeting an author to announce you’ve never read his work. (Bayard’s advice: Be vague and say you loved the book — that’s all the author wants to hear anyway. )
But Bayard’s book isn’t a how-to manual for poseurs. It’s a lucid and helpful examination of the way we relate to what we know and what we don’t. It’s a work of cultural criticism disguised as a self-help manual, and it’s interesting to see it misappraised. Bayard’s “tips” are genuinely helpful — we ought not be ashamed of not having the advantages others have enjoyed, and every act of writing is probably an exertion of one’s identity — but they’re not the point. ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE “To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth more than the universe of books,” Bayard writes, and though his tongue is stuck deep in his Gallic cheek, there’s something true about that because human experience is more than books and the kind of petty intellectual jousting that can accompany their acquisition and reading. But a book is not what nonreaders mistake it for either. It is not an unyielding, dogmatic text that means whatever some lordly author meant it to mean, but the track of a human mind. A book is a call that seeks a response, an arrangement of splattered ink that is still the best technology we’ve devised for saving and storing language, of communicating mind to mind across gulfs of time and space. What we need to do is demystify the practice of reading, to understand there are many ways of relating to a book — from rote memorization to something like complete absorption where we mightn’t even be able to tell where a book ends and our own minds begin. Talking about books you haven’t read is one way to begin to read them, to use them, to strip them of their totemic paralyzing power. What we haven’t read is less important than what we have, and we should seek to incorporate our reading experience into our lives — to, in effect, become the authors of our own intellectual lives, able to invent and conflate, to open ourselves to a rich universe of connection and association. We only really begin to read when we begin to engage a book in a creative way, to wrestle with the musty gods of literature. To, in a real way, begin to write. E-mail pmartin@arkansasonline. com
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
