How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (16 page)
Since there is a moral in films, if not in life, it is not through his possession of Rita, but through his dispossession of himself, that Phil will finally achieve his ends. If the slow accumulation of the words awaited by the Other allows Phil to kiss Rita, getting the girl is not sufficient to set time back in motion; no matter how much progress he makes with his beloved, Phil continues to wake up on the same day.
But as time goes by and events repeat identically, Phil changes and loses his arrogance toward others. He begins to take an interest in them, to ask them questions about their lives, to do them favors. The days continue to repeat, but they are now devoted to helping others, with Phil using his method for personal improvement for benevolent purposes, such as preventing an old man from freezing to death in the street or catching a little boy who falls out of a tree.
In becoming interested in others, he himself becomes interesting, and he manages, through his kindness, to win Rita’s heart in a single day. And after falling asleep alongside her in the room where he has been waking up every day without progressing in time, he has the surprise, one day, of reawakening to discover the young woman still with him and to hear, for the first time, different music streaming from his alarm clock. Thus does he manage at last to cross the border, in one unsurpassable moment, that separates his day from the days to come.
1
.
Groundhog Day
(1993), directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.
2
. FB++.
(in which it is confirmed, with regard to the
novels of David Lodge, that the first condition
for speaking about a book you haven’t
read is not to be ashamed)
W
E NOW ARRIVE
at this book’s raison d’être: having detailed the different modes of non-reading and studied several of the situations in which the need to discuss unread books may occur, it is now time to discuss the various means of extricating ourselves from these situations with grace. Some of these solutions have already been mentioned in preceding chapters or derive logically from my remarks, but the moment has come to examine the structure of these methods more closely.
As we have seen, talking about books has little to do with reading. The two activities are completely separable; I for one speak at greater length and with greater perception about books that I have more or less stopped reading, which grants me the necessary distance—Musil’s overall perspective—to speak about them accurately. The difference between talking about books and reading them is a function of the fact that the former implies a third party, whether present or absent. That implied third party has palpable effects on the act of reading as well, by suggesting that an outside presence might be able to change how our reading unfolds.
As I have attempted to show in the previous section through a number of concrete situations, our discussion of books is the stage for a conflict in which our relationship with the Other, whatever its nature may be, ultimately wins out over our relationship to the text—which is itself inevitably affected by the struggle.
There is no doubt that teaching is one of the professions that exposes us most relentlessly to the obligation to comment on unread books. Almost all of us, in fact, find ourselves having to talk about books that we lack the time—or more simply, the desire—to read. And the risk is ever present of having to speak about a given text with the author himself, or with other specialists whom it is not easy to deceive.
A teacher himself and thus attuned to the habits of the profession, the English novelist David Lodge has reflected at least twice in his books about what attitude we should adopt with regard to books we haven’t read. The two examples figure in two novels—
Changing Places
1
and
Small World
2
—that explore the intellectual and sentimental worlds of an academic microcosm, novels that have helped to establish a specific literary genre known as the campus novel.
The first case, which occurs in
Small World
, involves a rather unusual dialogue. One of the denizens of this campus microcosm, Robin Dempsey, carries out a discussion with a computer he has borrowed, one so advanced that it can sustain a normal conversation.The machine, which answers to the name ELIZA and thus seems to be female, gradually becomes his most intimate confidant.
Having at last discovered someone to whom he can open his heart without fear of indiscretion, Dempsey confides to ELIZA the full fury and contempt he feels for one of his colleagues, Philip Swallow:
Robin Dempsey: I’m not feeling any better.
ELIZA: Why is that?
R.D.: This business about Philip Swallow.
ELIZA: Tell me about Philip Swallow.
R.D.: I already told you about him.
ELIZA: Is there anything you would like to add to your previous remarks?
R.D.: Swallow epitomizes the unfairness of life to me. At Rummidge he got the senior lectureship I should have got. Then he got the chair there by a lucky fluke. Now he’s having a great success with this pathetic book about Hazlitt.
3
All those who believe themselves to have been the victim of injustice in their academic careers will understand Dempsey’s anger. And they will recognize themselves even more in the lines that follow:
ELIZA: Tell me about Hazlitt.
R.D.: I’m not interested in Hazlitt. I haven’t even read Swallow’s rotten book. I don’t need to. I sat through enough tedious examiners meetings with him to know what it’s like. The idea of his being a serious candidate for the UNESCO Chair is preposterous.
4
These lines represent quite accurately the kind of goodwill that tends to prevail in academic communities, particularly when it comes to evaluating our colleagues’ work, which most often we haven’t read anyway. Clearly, David Lodge is speaking about a world he knows well.
Like Dempsey and a number of others in the academy, I have spent enough time in meetings with my colleagues to have an idea, be it positive or negative, of the value of their books without having to read them. Contrary to the celebrated Proustian argument dissociating the work from the author— or rather, contrary to a certain reading of that argument—a book is not a meteorite or the product of a hidden self. It is often, more simply, an extension of the person we know (on the condition, obviously, that we take the trouble of getting to know him), and it is quite possible to forge an opinion of it, like Dempsey, merely by spending time with the author.
What Dempsey is saying here—and probably David Lodge as well, through him—is well known in circles where books are common. As we have established, it is not necessary to read a book to have a clear sense of it and to talk about it, not just in general terms but even in detail. For there is no such thing as an isolated book. A book is an element in the vast ensemble I have called the
collective library
, which we do not need to know comprehensively in order to appreciate any one of its elements (Dempsey, after all, has a keen sense of what
kind
of book he is dealing with). The trick is to define the book’s place in that library, which gives it meaning in the same way a word takes on meaning in relation to other words.
We are never dealing with just the book in our hand, but with a set of books common to our particular culture, where any individual book in the set might be lacking. So there is no reason not to tell the truth: to acknowledge that we haven’t read some specific element in the collective library, which in no way prevents us from having an overall view of the library and remaining one of its readers. It is the entire library that is called into play through each book, which serves as a kind of temporary shimmering prism through which we see the whole. Dempsey’s view of his colleague’s book is thus perfectly reasonable, as far as subjective opinions go, and it is unlikely that it would be noticeably different if he had taken the time to read it.
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.