How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (21 page)

I am a cat but as yet I have no name.

I haven’t the faintest idea of where I was born. The first thing I do remember is that I was crying “meow, meow,” somewhere in a gloomy damp place. It was there that I met a human being for the first time in my life. Though I found this all out at a later date, I learned that this human being was called a Student, one of the most ferocious of the human race.
²

The novel’s feline narrator, who will remain anonymous throughout the work, has little luck in this first encounter with the human species. He encounters a student who mistreats him, and he wakes up delirious and far from home. He then slips inside an unknown house, where he is fortunate enough to be welcomed by the owner, a professor.
I Am a Cat
is devoted to recounting his life in that house, where he takes up residence.

Although the point of view of our cat narrator—the feline point of view—is dominant in the book, the reader is granted a relatively complex perspective of his world. The narrator, in fact, is not an uncultivated animal, but a cat endowed with a number of skills, such as the ability to follow a conversation and even to read.

But the cat does not forget his origins; he remains connected to the feline world. He thus enters into protracted relations with two cats from his new neighborhood, the female cat Mike and the male cat Kuro. Kuro is the reigning master of the area, forcing others to respect him through physical strength. But he also occupies a special position in the novel as the animal emblem of a whole series of characters whose common characteristic is boastfulness. Kuro’s bragging centers on various domains important to cats, such as the number of mice caught, an area in which he shows no qualms about exaggerating his prowess.

Kuro has a counterpart among the humans who frequent the professor’s house. The narrator cat refers to that individual, M., as “the artist in gold-rimmed spectacles,” and he has the peculiar habit of recounting whatever stories come into his head, for the sheer pleasure of leading his listener astray.

At the beginning of the book, seeing that the professor is interested in painting and would like to do some himself, M. tells him about the Italian painter Andrea del Sarto and shares with him the theory that del Sarto would have recommended painting as much as possible in imitation of nature and learning first of all how to sketch. The professor puts his trust in this advice, but fails to become a painter. The artist then reveals to him that he has in fact invented all the alleged remarks of Andrea del Sarto and that he often takes pleasure in making up stories and playing on people’s credulity:

The artist was greatly enjoying himself. Listening to all this from the veranda, I couldn’t help wondering what my master would write in his diary about that conversation. The artist was a person who took great pleasure in fooling others. As if he did not realize how his joke about Andrea del Sarto hurt my master, he boasted more: “When playing jokes, some people take them so seriously that they reveal great comic beauty, and it’s a lot of fun. The other day I told a student that Nicholas Nickleby had advised Gibbon to translate his great
History of the
French Revolution
³
from a French textbook and to have it published under his own name. This student has an extremely good memory and made a speech at the Japanese Literary Circle quoting everything I had told him. There were about a hundred people in the audience and they all listened very attentively.”
⁴

The Nickleby story is absurd on two levels. For one thing, it would be more than a little difficult for the fictional character Nicholas Nickleby to give advice to Edward Gibbon, an entirely real British historian. Second, even if the two men did belong to the same universe, they would still not have been able to enter into dialogue, since Nickleby appeared for the first time in the world of letters in 1838, by which date Gibbon had already been dead for nearly fifty years.

If, in this first example, the artist makes up stories without compunction, the situation is slightly different in the next one he gives, which directly concerns our consideration of unread books:

“Then there’s another time. One evening, at a gathering of writers, the conversation turned to Harrison’s historical novel
Theophano
.
⁵
I said that it was one of the best historical novels ever written, especially the part where the heroine dies. ‘That really gives you the creeps’— that’s what I said. An author who was sitting opposite me was one of those types who cannot and will not say no to anything. He immediately voiced the opinion that that was a most famous passage. I knew right away that he had never read any more of the story than I had.”
⁶

This kind of cynicism raises several questions, one of which the professor asks the artist immediately:

With wide eyes, my nervous and weak-stomached master asked, “What would you have done if the other man had really read the story?”

The artist did not show any excitement. He thought nothing of fooling other people. The only thing that counted was not to be caught in the act.

“All I would have to do is to say that I had made a mistake in the title or something to that effect.” He kept on laughing.
⁷

If you have begun talking about a book imprudently and your remarks are challenged, nothing prevents you from backtracking and declaring that you’ve made a mistake. Our
unreading
or forgetting plays such a significant role that there is little risk in declaring yourself the victim of one of the many lapses in memory induced by our reading— and non-reading—of books. Even a book that we recall with great precision is in some sense a screen book, behind which our own inner book is concealed. But in this particular case, is it really the best solution for the artist to admit his error?

In fact, S
seki’s text raises an interesting problem of logic. The artist with gold-rimmed spectacles invents a scene about the death of the heroine, so when, instead of challenging the existence of such a scene in Harrison’s book, the other man says approvingly that it is splendid indeed, he is presumed to be revealed as a liar as well. But how can the artist know for sure that he is dealing with a non-reader if he himself has never read the novel?

In the situation described by S
seki, where two non-readers of the same book carry on a dialogue about it, it is actually impossible for either of the non-readers to know whether the other is lying. There can be no conviction that anyone is lying in a conversation about a book without at least one of the participants knowing the book or having at least a vague idea of it.

But is the situation different when one of the two conversationalists, or both, have “read” the book? S
seki’s anecdote, like the game of truth in Lodge, has the merit of reminding us of the first of the two uncertainties of the virtual library, which concerns the competence of readers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know the extent to which the person with whom you are speaking about a book is lying about having read it. Not only because there is hardly another domain in which such pronounced hypocrisy holds sway, but above all because each speaker cannot possibly know the other person’s history with the book and they are thus deluding themselves if they think they can answer the question.

Such a conversation amounts to a game of dupes, in which the participants fool themselves even before fooling others, and in which their memories of books will be marked by the stakes of the situation at hand. It would, after all, be a misunderstanding of the act of reading to try to separate those who have read a certain book and those who are ignorant of it into two camps, as Lodge’s professor foolishly tried to do. It is a misunderstanding both by so-called readers, who disregard the erasure and loss that accompanies every act of reading, and so-called non-readers, who ignore the creative impulse that can arise from every encounter with a book.

To liberate ourselves from the idea that the Other knows whether we’re lying—the Other being just as much ourselves—is thus one of the primary conditions for being able to talk about books with grace, whether we’ve read them or not. In truth, of course, the knowledge at stake in our comments on books is intrinsically uncertain. And the Other, meanwhile, is a disapproving image of ourselves that we project onto our listeners, an image we have internalized based on a culture so exhaustive, and whose importance is so firmly drummed into us in school, that it impedes us from living and thinking.

But our anxiety in the face of the Other’s knowledge is an obstacle to all genuine creativity about books. The idea that the Other has read everything, and thus is better informed than us, reduces creativity to a mere stopgap that non-readers might resort to in a pinch. In truth, readers and non-readers alike are caught up in an endless process of inventing books, whether they like it or not, and the real question is not how to escape that process, but how to increase its dynamism and its range.