How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (6 page)

As we see, it is difficult—and things will only get worse— to delimit just what non-reading is, or indeed reading, for that matter. It appears that most often, at least for the books that are central to our particular culture, our behavior inhabits some intermediate territory, to the point that it becomes difficult to judge whether we have read them or not.

Just as Musil does, Valéry prompts us to think in terms of a collective library rather than a solitary book. For a true reader, one who cares about being able to reflect on literature, it is not any specific book that counts, but the totality of all books. Paying exclusive attention to an individual volume causes us to risk losing sight of that totality, as well as the qualities in each book that figure in the larger scheme.

But Valéry goes further, inviting us to adapt that same attitude to each book, maintaining a broad perspective over it that works in tandem with a broad view of books as a group. In our quest for this perspective, we must guard against getting lost in any individual passage, for it is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.

1
. Paul Valéry,
Oeuvres I
(Paris:Gallimard Pléiade, 1957), p. 1479, SB+.

2
. HB+.

3
. SB and HB++.

4
. Paul Valéry,
Masters and Friends
, translated by Martin Turnell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 295.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Ibid.

7
. Ibid., p. 298.

8
. Ibid. Valéry’s emphasis.

9
. Paul Valéry,
Occasions
, translated by Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 4.

10
. Ibid., pp. 12–13.

11
. Ibid., p. 13.

12
. Ibid., p. 20.

13
. Ibid., p. 23.

14
. Ibid., p. 24.

15
.
Masters and Friends,
p. 303.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Ibid.

18
. Ibid., p. 306.

19
. William Marx,
Naissance de la critique moderne
(Artois: Presses Université, 2002), p. 25, SB+.

III
Books You Have Heard Of

(in which Umberto Eco shows that it is wholly
unnecessary to have held a book in your hand to
be able to speak about it in detail, as long as you
listen to and read what others say about it)

T
HE LOGICAL IMPLICATION
of this theory—that cultural literacy involves the dual capacity to situate books in the collective library and to situate yourself within each book—is that it is ultimately unnecessary to have handled a book to have a sense of it and to express your thoughts on the subject. The act of reading is disassociated from the material book; the important thing is the encounter, which might just as easily involve an immaterial object.

Besides actually reading a book, there is, after all, another way to develop quite a clear sense of its contents: we can read or listen to what others write or say about it. This tactic (which, as you may recall, Valéry freely employed in the case of Proust) can save you a lot of time. It can also be necessary when a book is lost or has disappeared, or, as we shall see, when the quest for it imperils the life of the person wishing to read it.

This is, in fact, the extent to which we have access to most books, most of the time. Many of the books we are led to talk about, and which have, in certain cases, played important roles in our lives, have never actually passed through our hands (although we may sometimes be convinced of the contrary). But the way other people talk to us or to each other about these books, in their texts or conversations, allows us to forge an idea of their contents, and even to formulate a reasonable opinion of them.

In
The Name of the Rose
,
¹
a novel set in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco describes how a monk named William of Baskerville, accompanied by a young man named Adso— who writes the story many years later, when he himself is an old man—arrives to conduct an investigation in an abbey in northern Italy, where a suspicious death has occurred.

At the center of the abbey an immense library has been built in the form of a labyrinth; its holdings are the largest in all of Christendom. This library occupies a major place within the religious community and thus within the novel—both as a place of study and reflection, and as at the heart of a whole system of interdictions governing the right to read, since books are delivered to the monks only after authorization.

In his search for the truth about the murders, Baskerville finds himself in competition with the Inquisition and its formidable representative, Bernard Gui, who is convinced that the crimes are the work of heretics—specifically, the adepts of Dolcino, the founder of a sect hostile to the papacy. Through torture, Gui wrests from several monks confessions that support his views. Baskerville, meanwhile, remains unconvinced of the accuracy of his reasoning.

Indeed, Baskerville has arrived at a different conclusion. He believes that the deaths have no direct relation to heresy, and that the monks have been killed for having attempted to read a mysterious book guarded jealously within the library. He gradually formulates an idea of the contents of the book and the reasons why its guardian has resorted to murder. His violent confrontation with the murderer, in the last pages of the novel, sets off a massive fire in the library, which the monks save from destruction only at great cost.

In this final scene, then, the investigator comes face-to-face with the murderer. This turns out to be Jorge, one of the oldest monks in the abbey, who has lost his sight. Jorge congratulates Baskerville for having solved the mystery and, apparently admitting his defeat, hands him the book that has led to so many deaths. A heterogeneous volume, the book includes an Arabic text, a Syrian text, an interpretation of the
Coena Cypriani
²
—a parody of the Bible—and a fourth text in Greek, the one responsible for the murders.

This book, hidden among the others, is the lost second volume of Aristotle’s celebrated
Poetics
.
³
In this second volume, which at the time was not yet listed in bibliographies, the Greek philosopher is known to have continued his reflections on literature, this time exploring the theme of laughter.

Jorge responds strangely to Baskerville’s accusations. Rather than preventing the investigator from consulting the book, he instead challenges him to read it. Baskerville agrees, but first takes the precaution of arming himself with a pair of gloves. Thus equipped, he opens the book to discover the first lines of a text that he believes to have claimed several victims:

In the first book we dealt with tragedy and saw how, by arousing pity and fear, it produces catharsis, the purification of those feelings. As we promised, we will now deal with comedy (as well as with satire and mime) and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion. That such passion is most worthy of consideration we have already said in the book on the soul, inasmuch as—alone among the animals—man is capable of laughter. We will then define the types of actions of which comedy is the mimesis, then we will examine the means by which comedy excites laughter, and these means are actions and speech. We will show how the ridiculousness of actions is born from the likening of the best to the worst and vice versa [ . . . ] We will then show how the ridiculousness of speech is born from the misunderstandings of similar words for different things and different words for similar things, etc.
⁴

It would seem to be confirmed, especially given the evocation of other titles by Aristotle, that this mysterious work is indeed the second volume of the
Poetics.
After reading the first page and translating it into Latin, Baskerville attempts to leaf through the following pages. But he encounters a material difficulty, since the deteriorated pages are stuck to each other and he cannot separate them while wearing gloves. Jorge exhorts him to keep leafing through the book, but Baskerville firmly refuses to do so.

He has understood that to keep turning the pages, he would have to take off his gloves and moisten his fingertips, and that in so doing he would poison himself, just as the other monks who had come too close to the truth. Jorge has decided to dispatch troublesome researchers by applying poison to the upper part of the book, where the reader places his fingers. It is an exemplary murder, in which the victim poisons himself to the very extent that he violates Jorge’s ban and continues to read.

But why systematically execute those who are interested in the second volume of Aristotle’s
Poetics
? When William questions him, Jorge confirms what the monk-detective has intuited. The murders were committed to prevent the monks from gaining knowledge of the contents of this book. Rather than condemning laughter, the book dignifies it as an object worthy of study—and to Jorge, laughter is antithetical to faith. By reserving the right to turn anything into an object of derision, it opens the path to doubt, which is the enemy of revealed truth:

“But what frightened you in this discussion of laughter? You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.”

“No, to be sure. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humors and distracts from other desires and other ambitions . . . Still, laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians [ . . . ] But here, here”—now Jorge struck the table with his finger, near the book William was holding open—“here the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the learned of the world are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy and of perfect theology.”
⁵