How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (23 page)

Given these circumstances, one might well conclude that ultimately I invented nothing when I decided earlier in this book to save the library in
The Name of the Rose
from the flames, to unite Rollo Martins and Harry Lime’s girlfriend, or to drive David Lodge’s unhappy hero to suicide. To be sure, these facts are not directly stated in the texts. But like all the facts I have offered the reader in the works I have discussed, they correspond for me to what I see as the likely logic of each text and thus, as far as I’m concerned, are an integral part of them.

No doubt I will be reproached, as was the artist with gold-rimmed spectacles, for talking about books I haven’t read, or for recounting events that, literally speaking, are not part of the books. However, it felt to me not as if I were lying, but rather that I was uttering a subjective truth by describing with the greatest possible accuracy what I had perceived of these books, being faithful to myself at the moment and in the circumstances when I felt the need to invoke them.

1
. SB++.

2
.
I Am a Cat
, translated by Katsue Shibata and Motonari Kai (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1961), p. 1.

3
. UB-.

4
. S
oseki, op. cit., pp. 13–14.

5
. SB-.

6
. S
oseki, op. cit., p. 14.

7
. Ibid.

8
. Frederic Harrison,
Theophano:The Crusade of the Tenth Century
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1904).

9
. Ibid., p. 337.

10
. There is no end to the number of books in world literature in which the “death of the heroine” is one of the most beautiful passages.

11
. The third type of book I am introducing here, the
phantom book
, is that mobile and ungraspable object that we call into being, in writing or in speech, when we talk about a book. It is located at the point where readers’ various
screen books
meet—screen books that readers have constructed based on their
inner
books
. The phantom book belongs to the virtual library of our exchanges, as the screen book belongs to the collective library and the inner book belongs to the inner library.

12
. SB++.

13
.
Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa)
, translated by Edwin McClellan (revised by J. Mehlman) (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1969).

14
. Ibid., p. 102.

XII
Speaking About Yourself

(in which we conclude, along with Oscar Wilde,
that the appropriate time span for reading a book
is ten minutes, after which you risk forgetting
that the encounter is primarily a pretext
for writing your autobiography)

A
S WE SEE,
the obligation to talk about unread books should not be experienced as something negative, a source of anxiety or remorse. To the person who knows how to experience it as positive, who manages to lift the burden of his guilt and pay attention to the potential of the concrete situation in which he finds himself, talking about unread books invites us into a realm of authentic creativity. We should learn to welcome the opportunity to enter this virtual library and embrace all its rich possibility.

That, in any event, is the major lesson to be drawn from Oscar Wilde’s writings on the subject. These texts concentrate especially on one type of situation in which we may be led to talk about books we haven’t read—that of literary criticism—but his suggestions may easily be extended to other situations, such as dialogues in social or academic settings.

A voracious reader if ever there was one and a man of vast culture, Oscar Wilde was also a resolute non-reader. Long before Musil or Valéry, Wilde had the courage to warn of the dangers of reading for the cultivated individual.

One of Wilde’s most important contributions to the study of non-reading, because of the new channels it opens up, appeared in an article called “To read, or not to read”
¹
. in the
Pall Mall Gazette
, a newspaper for which he wrote regularly. Responding to an inquiry about the hundred best books it was possible to recommend, Wilde proposed dividing the contents of the collective library into three categories.

The first would consist of books to be read, a category in which Wilde places Cicero’s letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s lives of the painters,
²
Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography,
³
John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Saint-Simon’s memoirs,
⁴
Mommsen, and Grote’s history of Greece.
⁵
The second category, equally expected, would comprise books worth rereading, such as Plato and Keats. In the “sphere of poetry,” Wilde adds “the masters, not the minstrels”; in that of philosophy, “the seers, not the
savants.
”
⁶
. Wilde, op. cit., p. 12.

To these rather banal categories, Wilde adds a third that is more surprising. It consists of books it is important to dissuade the public from reading. For Wilde, such dissuasive activity is crucial and should even figure among the official missions of universities. “This mission,” he notes, “is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst Hundred Books’ and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.”
⁷

Unfortunately, Wilde did not leave us the list of the hundred books it would be important to keep away from students. However, the list is manifestly less important than the idea that reading is not always a beneficial activity, but can turn out to be harmful. So menacing is reading perceived to be that in other texts, the list of books to be proscribed seems to have been extended ad infinitum, and it is not only a hundred books that we need to be wary of, but all of them.

Wilde’s most important text about his wariness toward reading is called “The Critic as Artist.”
⁸
Structured as a dialogue in two parts, it features two characters, Ernest and Gilbert. It is likely Gilbert who articulates the author’s very original positions most trenchantly.

The first thesis developed by Gilbert is intended to counter Ernest’s assertion that in the greatest artistic epochs, such as ancient Greece, there were no art critics. Refuting that statement, Gilbert cites such examples as Aristotle’s
Poetics
to establish that for the Greeks, creation was inseparable from general considerations about art, and creators were thus already performing the role of critics.

This assertion serves as an introduction to a passage in which Gilbert shows how artistic creation and criticism, far from being separate activities, cannot in reality be disjoined:

Ernest: The Greeks were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty is higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between them.

Gilbert: The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art.
⁹

There is thus no separation between artistic creation and criticism, nor can there be any great creation without its share of criticism, as the example of the Greeks reveals. But the inverse is equally true, and criticism itself is a form of art:

Ernest: You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what of criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless.
¹⁰

Defending critics against this accusation of insignificance, Gilbert asserts that they are far more cultured than the authors they review, and that criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation. In this defense of criticism as an art, an apologia for non-reading first appears:

The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art. It is sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to criticise. They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed misanthropes [ . . . ] Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine.
¹¹

The assertion that it takes only ten minutes to familiarize oneself with a book—or even considerably less, since Gilbert begins by assuming as a matter of course that critics don’t read the books submitted to them—thus surfaces in a defense of critics, whose cultural sophistication should allow them to perceive the essence of a book quickly. The defense of non-reading thus enters the discussion as an offshoot of the inquiry into criticism; non-reading is said simply to be a
power
acquired by specialists, a particular ability to grasp what is essential. But the remainder of the text gives us to understand that non-reading is also a
duty
, and that there is a true risk for the critic in spending too much time reading the book he is to talk about. Or, if you prefer, there are more decisive factors in our encounters with books than the simple question of time.