How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (4 page)

In the second case, the person not reading abstains, like Musil’s librarian, in order to grasp the essence of the book, which is how it fits into the library as a whole. In so doing, he is hardly uninterested in the book—to the contrary. It is because he understands the link between content and location that he chooses not to read, with a wisdom superior to that of many readers, and perhaps, on reflection, with greater respect for the book itself.

1
. SB and HB++.

2
. Robert Musil,
The Man Without Qualities
, vol. 1, translated by Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 500. In this quotation as in the others, Stumm is speaking to his friend Ulrich.

3
. Ibid., pp. 500–501.

4
. Ibid., p. 503.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Ibid., p. 502.

7
. HB++.

8
. SB and HB++.

II
Books You Have Skimmed

(in which we see, along with Valéry, that
it is enough to have skimmed a book
to be able to write an article about it, and
that with certain books it might even
be inappropriate to do otherwise)

T
HE IDEA OF OVERALL PERSPECTIVE
has implications for more than just situating a book within the collective library; it is equally relevant to the task of situating each passage within a book. The cultivated reader will find that the orientation skills he has developed with regard to the library function just as well within a single volume. Being culturally literate means being able to get your bearings quickly in a book, which does not require reading the book in its entirety—quite the opposite, in fact. One might even argue that the greater your abilities in this area, the less will it be necessary to read any book in particular.

The attitude of the librarian in
The Man Without Qualities
represents an extreme position held by few people, even among those opposed to reading, for in the end it is quite difficult to choose never to read at all. More common is the case of the reader who does not shun books entirely, but is content to skim them. The behavior of the heroic librarian is somewhat ambiguous in this regard, moreover, since although he is careful not to open any books, he is still interested in their titles and tables of contents, and so develops an impression of the work whether he means to or not.

Skimming books without actually reading them does not in any way prevent you from commenting on them. It’s even possible that this is the most efficient way to absorb books, respecting their inherent depth and richness without getting lost in the details. Such, in any case, was the opinion—and the declared practice—of that master of non-reading Paul Valéry.

In the gallery of writers who have warned of the risks of reading, Valéry occupies a significant place, having devoted a portion of his work to denouncing this dangerous activity. Monsieur Teste, the Valéryan hero par excellence, lives in an apartment empty of books. Quite plausibly he is modeled in this regard (as in many others) on the writer, who makes no secret of the fact that he does not read much: “Initially, I took an aversion to reading and even divided up among my friends the books I liked best. I was obliged to buy several of them back later on, after the acute phase. But I am not much of a reader, since what I look for in a work is what will enable or impede an aspect of my own activity.”
¹

This mistrust of books was directed first and foremost against biography. Valéry achieved a certain fame in the world of literary criticism by calling into question the common practice of linking a work closely to its author. It was conventional in nineteenth-century criticism to maintain that knowledge of the author enhanced that of the work, and thus to amass as much information about him as possible.

Breaking with that critical tradition, Valéry posited that despite appearances, an author is in no position to explain his own work. The work is the product of a creative process that occurs in the writer but transcends him, and it is unfair to reduce the work to that act of creation. To understand a text, therefore, there is little point in gathering information about the author, since in the final analysis he serves it only as a temporary shelter.

Valéry was far from the only writer of his era to advocate a separation between the work and its author. In his posthumously published book
Against Sainte-Beuve
,
²
Proust advanced the theory that a literary work is the product of a different self from the person we know; in
A la recherche de
temps perdu
,
³
he illustrated this theory through the character of Bergotte. But Valéry was not satisfied with eliminating the author from the domain of literary criticism; pressing his advantage, he sought to drive him out of the text as well.

Though Valéry did not read much, this did not prevent him from having precise opinions on the authors about whom he knew so little, and discussing these authors at length.

Like most people who talk about Proust, Valéry had never read him. But unlike most, he was unfazed by this fact, and with serene cynicism he began his tribute to Proust in the January 1923 issue of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, shortly after the writer’s death, with these words:

Although I have scarcely read a single volume of Marcel Proust’s great work, and although the very art of the novelist is an art that I find inconceivable, I am nevertheless well aware, from the little of the
Recherche du
temps perdu
that I have found time to read, what an exceptionally heavy loss literature has just suffered; and not only literature but still more that secret society composed of those who in every age give the age its real value.
⁴

His shamelessness shows no signs of abating as the introduction continues, for in justifying his lack of knowledge of the author he is discussing, he is reduced to taking refuge in the favorable (and, more important, convergent) assessments of André Gide and Léon Daudet:

In any case, even if I had never read a line of Proust’s vast work, the mere fact that two people with minds as different as Gide and Léon Daudet were agreed about its importance would have been sufficient to allay any doubts; such unexpected agreement could only occur in the case of a virtual certainty. We can be easy in our minds; the sun must be shining if they both proclaim the fact at the same time.
⁵

Other people’s views are thus an essential prerequisite to forming an opinion of your own. In fact, you might even be able to rely on them entirely, to the point—one assumes that such was the case for Valéry—that it might be unnecessary to read a single line of the text. The trouble with this blind reliance on other readers is, as Valéry acknowledges, that it is then hard to comment on the text with any specificity:

Others will speak with authority and penetration of the power and subtlety of Proust’s work. Still others will tell us what manner of man it was who conceived the work and brought it to a glorious conclusion; I myself merely caught a glimpse of him many years ago. I can therefore only put forward a view without weight and barely worth recording. Let it be no more than a tribute, a fading flower on a tomb that will endure.
⁶

If we can credit Valéry for his sincerity and manage to look past his cynicism, we are likely to concede that the several pages on Proust that follow are not without truth, demonstrating something we will have occasion to observe again and again: it is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you’re talking about in order to talk about it accurately.

After the introduction, Valéry’s article is divided into two sections. The first deals with the novel in general, and here one can sense that the author is in no rush to offer any specific observations. We thus learn that the novel is intent on “conveying to us one or several imaginary ‘lives,’ which it institutes as characters, whose time and place are determined, whose adventures are formulated”—a characteristic that distinguishes it from poetry and allows it to be summarized and translated without great loss. These remarks, true enough in the case of many novels, are in fact hardly applicable to Proust, whose work is hard to summarize. But Valéry shows greater inspiration in the second part of his text.

This section is devoted to Proust, whom it is difficult to avoid mentioning entirely. Valéry brings him up in the context of a broader trend in writing (“Proust turned such a loose and simple structure to the most extraordinary account”), but then teases out the author’s specificity, based on the manifestly Proustian notion that his work explores the “overabundance of echoes that the least image awakened in the author’s very substance.”
⁷
There are two advantages to concentrating on the Proustian habit of playing on an image’s infinite associations. First of all, you don’t need to have read Proust to be aware of it; you need merely open his work to any page to observe this technique in action. Second, it is a strategic choice in that it justifies Valéry’s own approach, since Proust’s habit of drawing associations from the smallest detail might seem to encourage a critic to do likewise with Proust’s work, as opposed to actually reading it.

Shrewdly, Valéry explains that the value of Proust’s work lies in its remarkable ability to be opened at random to any page:

The interest of his work lies in each fragment. We can open the book wherever we choose; its vitality does not depend on what went before, on a sort of
acquired illusion
; it depends on what might be called the
active properties
of the very tissue of the text.
⁸

Valéry’s stroke of genius lies in showing that his method of non-reading is actually necessitated by the author, and that abstaining from reading Proust’s work is the greatest compliment he can give him. Thus, as he concludes his article (with a tribute to “difficult authors” who will soon be understood by no one), he barely conceals that, having accomplished his critical task, he has no more intention of reading Proust than ever.

If his tribute to Proust allowed Valéry to illustrate his conception of reading, it was one of Proust’s major contemporaries, Anatole France, who gave Valéry the pretext to show his full powers as a critic depended neither on author nor text.

In 1925, the Académie Française invited Valéry to fill the chair left vacant by Anatole France, and in the way of things, Valéry was therefore forced to eulogize him. Valéry diligently avoided following the responsibility he outlined for himself in the opening of his address:

The dead have but one last resort: the living. Our thoughts are their only access to the light of day. They who have taught us so much, who seem to have bowed out for our sake and forfeited to us their advantages, ought by all rights to be reverently summoned to our memories and invited to drink a draught of life through our words.
⁹