How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (18 page)
Through the analysis of this virtual space and its protective function, we see clearly that it is not just shame, linked to scenarios from childhood, that is in the offing when we dare to speak about books we haven’t read, but a more serious threat to our self-image and the image we convey to others. In the intellectual circles where writing still counts, the books we have read form an integral part of our image, and we call that image into question when we venture to publicly announce our inner library’s limits.
In this cultural context, books—whether read or unread— form a kind of second language to which we can turn to talk about ourselves, to communicate with others, and to defend ourselves in conflict. Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. We cannot coincide completely with the image the totality of our reading presents; whether the image makes us look better or worse than we should, behind it all our particularities vanish. And especially since books are often present within us only as little-known or forgotten fragments, we are often out of phase with the books that are our public face; they are as inadequate in the end as any other language.
In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.
In this regard, this ambiguous social space is the opposite of school—a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the students have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation. Such an aim is, in the end, illusory, for reading does not obey the hard logic of true and false, of waving off ambiguity and evaluating with certitude whether readers are telling the truth.
When Ringbaum insists on transforming that realm of play in which books are discussed, that space of constant negotiation and intermittent hypocrisy, into a realm of truth, he locks himself into a paradox that will lead him into madness. Unable to tolerate the indecisiveness of the space within which the discussion about books takes place, he insists on seeing himself reflected in the other players’ eyes as the best—which, given the particularity of Swallow’s game, is to say the worst. He succeeds, on his own terms, in assuming this image that is less unsettling to him, because it is less ambiguous; but in the end it leads him, reconciled with himself though he may be, to his ruin.
To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.
1
. SB+.
2
. SB+.
3
.
Small World:An Academic Romance
(New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 247.
4
. Ibid.
5
. Ibid.
6
. SB and FB-.
7
. SB and HB++.
8
. HB++.
9
.
Changing Places
(London: Penguin, 1975), p. 96.
10
. Ibid., p. 135.
11
. HB++.
12
. UB-.
13
.
Changing Places
, p. 136.
14
. The third type of library that I am introducing here, the
virtual library
, is the realm in which books are discussed, in either written or oral form, with other people. It is a mobile sector of every culture’s
collective library
and is located at the point of intersection of the various
inner libraries
of each participant in the discussion.
15
.
Changing Places
, p. 136.
(in which Balzac proves that one key to imposing
your point of view on a book is to remember
that the book is not a fixed object, and that
even tying it up with string will not be
sufficient to stop its motion)
A
S LONG AS
you have the courage, therefore, there is no reason not to say frankly that you haven’t read any particular book, nor to abstain from expressing your thoughts about it. The experience of not having read a book is the most common of scenarios, and only in accepting our non-reading without shame can we begin to take an interest in what is actually at stake, which is not a book but a complex interpersonal situation of which the book is less the object than the consequence.
Books are not insensitive to what is said around them, in fact, but may be changed by it in just the time it takes us to have a conversation. This mobility of the text is the second great uncertainty of the ambiguous realm that is the virtual library. It compounds the kind of uncertainty we have just examined—our uncertainty about how well those who talk about books actually know them—and will be crucial to our delineation of what strategies to adopt in these situations. These strategies will be all the more relevant in that they will not depend on an image of books as fixed objects, but instead assume that the participants in a fast-moving discussion, especially if they have the strength to impose their own points of view, can change the text itself.
Lucien Chardon, the hero of Balzac’s novel
Lost Illusions
,
1
is the son of an apothecary from Angoulême who dreams of retrieving the aristocratic name of his mother, who was born de Rubempré. Having fallen in love with a woman of the local nobility, Madame de Bargeton, he follows her to Paris, leaving behind his best friend, the printer David Séchard, who has married Lucien’s sister Eve. But he is also heading for the capital with an eye to making his name in the world of letters, and he brings with him his first texts, a collection of poems called
Les Marguerites
2
and a historical novel called
L’Archer de Charles IX
.
3
In Paris, Lucien finds his way into the small circle of intellectuals in control of publishing and the press and quickly discovers the reality—far removed from his illusions—of the milieu in which literature and art are produced. Its true nature is brutally revealed to him in a conversation with one of his new friends, a journalist named Étienne Lousteau. Lousteau, short of money, is forced to resell several books to a bookseller named Barbet. The pages of several of them turn out to have not even been cut, even though Lousteau has promised reviews of them to the editor of a newspaper:
Barbet looked over the books, carefully examining the edges and the covers.
“Oh! They’re in perfect condition!” exclaimed Lousteau. “The leaves of
Travels in Egypt
4
aren’t cut, nor the Paul de Kock, nor the Ducange, nor the one on the mantelpiece,
Reflections on Symbolism
.
5
I’ll throw that one in, the mythology in it is so boring. I’ll give it to you so that I needn’t watch thousands of mites swarming out of it.”
“But,” asked Lucien, “how will you write your reviews on them?”
Barbet gave Lucien a glance of profound astonishment and then looked back at Lousteau with a snigger. “It’s plain to see that this gentleman hasn’t the misfortune to be a man of letters.”
6
Surprised that one might devote an article to a book one hasn’t read, Lucien cannot resist asking Lousteau how he plans to honor his promise to the newspaper editor:
“But what about your review article?” asked Lucien as they drove away to the Palais-Royal.
“Pooh! You’ve no idea how they’re dashed off. Take
Travels in Egypt
: I opened the book and read a bit here and there without cutting the pages, and I discovered eleven mistakes in the French. I shall write a column to the effect that even if the author can interpret the duck-lingo carved on the Egyptian pebbles they call obelisks, he doesn’t know his own language—and I shall prove it to him. I shall say that instead of talking about natural history and antiquities he ought only to have concerned himself with the future of Egypt, the progress of civilization, the means of winning Egypt over to France, which, after conquering it and then losing it again, could still establish a moral ascendancy over it. Then a few pages of patriotic twaddle, the whole interlarded with tirades on Marseilles, the Levant and our trading interests.”
7
When Lucien asks what Lousteau would have done if the author
had
discussed politics, his friend replies without missing a beat that he would have reproached the writer for boring his reader with political talk, rather than concerning himself with Art by focusing on the picturesque aspects of the country. In any event, he relies in the end on another method: he gets his girlfriend, Florine, an actress and “the greatest reader of novels in the world,” to read the book. Only when she declares herself bored by what she calls “author’s sentences” does he start to take the book seriously and ask the bookseller for a new copy so that he can write a favorable article.
Here we encounter once again some of the varieties of non-reading that we have already identified, in which we either surmise what a book is about without knowing it at all; skim through it; or base our opinions on the opinions of others. Lucien, nonetheless, is a bit surprised by his friend’s critical method and confesses his astonishment to him:
“Great Heavens! But what about criticism, the sacred task of criticism?” said Lucien, still imbued with the doctrines of the Cénacle.
“My dear chap,” said Lousteau. “Criticism’s a scrubbing-brush which you mustn’t use on flimsy materials—it would tear them to shreds. Now listen, let’s stop talking shop. You see this mark?” he asked, pointing to the manuscript of
Les Marguerites.
“I’ve inked a line in between the string and the paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly won’t be able to put the string back along the line. So your manuscript is as good as sealed. It’s not a bad dodge for the experiment you want to make. One more thing, just remember that you won’t get into that sweatshop by yourself and without a sponsor: you’d be like those young hopefuls who go round to ten publishers before they find one who’ll even offer them a chair . . .”
8
Thus does Lousteau pitilessly pursue the task of disillusioning his friend, advising him, before Lucien submits his poetry manuscript to one of the most important publishers in Paris, to devise a test—a piece of ink-stained string that binds the book shut—of not only whether Dauriat has read it, but whether he has even opened it.