How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (12 page)

“The son Hamlet was very sad because his mother had married again so quickly. There was no need for her to do so, and it is our custom for a widow not to go to her next husband until she has mourned for two years.”

“Two years is too long,” objected the wife, who had appeared with the old man’s battered goatskin bag. “Who will hoe your farms for you while you have no husband?”

“Hamlet,” I retorted without thinking, “was old enough to hoe his mother’s farms himself. There was no need for her to remarry.” No one looked convinced. I gave up.
⁵

If Bohannan finds it difficult to explain Hamlet’s family situation to the Tiv, this is even more the case in getting them to understand the place of ghosts in Shakespeare’s play and the society that produced it:

I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, “That night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet’s dead father spoke.”

“Omens can’t talk!” The old man was emphatic.

“Hamlet’s dead father wasn’t an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.” My audience looked as confused as I sounded. “It was Hamlet’s dead father. It was a thing we call a ‘ghost.’ ”
⁶

As familiar as ghosts are to us, the Tiv do not believe in them and they have no place in their culture:

I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn’t believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.

“What is a ‘ghost’? An omen?”

“No, a ‘ghost’ is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.”

They objected. “One can touch zombis.”

“No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made Hamlet’s dead father walk. He did it himself.”
⁷

This explanation resolves the problem not at all, since the Tiv are more rational than Anglo-Saxons and do not accept the idea of the walking dead:

“Dead men can’t walk,” protested my audience as one man.

I was quite willing to compromise. “A ‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.”

But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.”

“They do in my country,” I snapped.

The old man quelled the babble of disbelief that arose immediately and told me with that insincere, but courteous, agreement one extends to the fancies of the young, ignorant, and superstitious, “No doubt in your country the dead can also walk without being zombis.” From the depths of his bag he produced a withered fragment of kola nut, bit off one end to show it wasn’t poisoned, and handed me the rest as a peace offering.
⁸

And despite all the concessions Bohannan makes, the whole play parades by without her succeeding at all in bridging the cultural distance to the Tiv and constructing, based on Shakespeare’s play, a discursive object that she and they can share.

Even if they’ve never read a line of
Hamlet
, the Tiv are thus able to gain a number of specific ideas about the play, and so, like my students who haven’t read the text I’m lecturing on, they find themselves perfectly capable of discussing it and offering their opinions.

Indeed, if the play offers a good occasion for the expression of their ideas, these ideas are neither simultaneous nor subsequent to it and thus do not, at the end of the day, need it at all. Their ideas are instead actually
prior
, in the sense that they constitute a whole and systematic vision of the world, in which the book is received and given a place.

In fact it is not even the book that is received, but those fragments of the book that circulate in every conversation or written commentary and come to substitute for it in its absence. What the Tiv end up speaking about is an imaginary
Hamlet
. And despite her being better informed about Shakespeare’s play, Laura Bohannan’s version is caught up in its own organized set of representations, and thus is no more real than theirs.

I propose the term
inner book
to designate the set of mythic representations, be they collective or individual, that come between the reader and any new piece of writing, shaping his reading without his realizing it. Largely unconscious, this imaginary book acts as a filter and determines the reception of new texts by selecting which of its elements will be retained and how they will be interpreted.
⁹

As can be seen clearly in the case of the Tiv, the inner book contains one or more foundational stories that have an essential value for its bearer, particularly since they speak to him about origins and endings. Bohannan’s reading of Shakespeare clashes with the theories on origins and survival that are contained in the collective inner book of the Tiv and that serve to bind the group together.

It is not, then, the story of
Hamlet
that they hear, but whatever in that story conforms to their notions of the family and the status of the dead and might serve to comfort them. In the places where the book does not conform to their expectations, the alarming passages are either ignored, or they undergo a transformation that allows the largest possible overlap between their inner book and
Hamlet
—or rather, not
Hamlet
, but the image transmitted to them of Shakespeare’s play through the prism of another inner book.

Since they are not discussing the work that Bohannan wants to talk to them about, the Tiv have no need for direct access to it. The references to
Hamlet
that the anthropologist manages to convey to them are sufficient to allow them to participate in a debate between two inner books—a debate in which Shakespeare’s play serves both sides as, more than anything else, a pretext.

And since they are speaking primarily about their inner book, their comments on Shakespeare, like those of my students in similar circumstances, can very well begin before they acquire any knowledge of the work—which is itself, in any event, destined to melt and gradually disappear into the inner book.

In the case of the Tiv, the inner book is more collective than individual. It is made up of general cultural representations that draw upon common ideas not only of family relations and the afterlife, but also of reading, how one appropriately approaches a book, and how, for example, to draw the line between reality and imagination.

We know nothing about the individual members of the Tiv, aside from their elderly leader, and it is plausible that the cohesion of the group tends to unify their reactions. But although a collective inner book would seem to exist for every culture, there also exists, for each member of the collective, an individual inner book, which is equally (if not more) active in the reception—which is to say, the construction—of cultural objects.

Woven from the fantasies and private mythologies particular to each person, the individual inner book is at work in our desire to read—that is, in the way we seek out and read books. It is that phantasmagorical object that every reader lives to pursue, of which the best books he encounters in his life will be but imperfect fragments, compelling him to continue reading.

We might further speculate that every writer is driven by the attempt to discover and give form to his inner book and is perpetually dissatisfied with the actual books he encounters, including his own, however polished they may be. How indeed might we begin to write, or continue doing so, without that ideal image of a perfect book—one congruent to ourselves, that is—which we endlessly seek and constantly approach, but never reach?

Like collective inner books, individual inner books create a system for receiving other texts and participate both in their reception and their reorganization. In this sense, they form a kind of grid through which we read the world, and books in particular, organizing the way we perceive these texts while producing the illusion of transparency.

It is these inner books that make our exchanges about books so difficult, rendering it impossible to establish unanimity about the object of discussion. They are part of what I have called, in my study of
Hamlet
, an
inner paradigm
—a system for perceiving reality that is so idiosyncratic that no two paradigms can truly communicate.
¹⁰

The existence of the inner book, along with unreading or forgetting, is what makes the way we discuss books so discontinuous and heterogeneous. What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.

That what the Tiv offer is, to say the least, a partial reading of a book they have not read should not lead us to believe either that their reading is a caricature—for it underscores the characteristics of every act of reading—or that it is without interest. Quite to the contrary, the double exteriority of the Tiv in relation to Shakespeare’s work (they haven’t read it and they are from a different culture) places them in a privileged position to discuss it. In refusing to believe in the ghost story, they approach the position of a minority trend—but an active one—in Shakespearean criticism, which casts doubt on the reappearance of Hamlet’s father and suggests that the hero may have been suffering hallucinations.
¹¹
The hypothesis is heterodox, but is at the least deserving of examination, a circumstance facilitated in this case by the foreignness of the Tiv to the play. Not knowing the text—in two different ways—paradoxically gives them more direct access, not, to be sure, to its supposed universal truth, but to one of its many potential riches.

Thus, to return to the situation I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is not astonishing that my students, without having read the book I am discussing, quickly grasp certain of its elements and feel free to comment on it, based on their cultural notions and personal history. And it is also unsurprising that their comments—however far removed from the initial text (but what, in fact, might it mean to be
close
?)—bring to the encounter an originality that they would undoubtedly have lacked had they undertaken to read the book.