How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (8 page)
The screen book consists in large part of what the reader knows or believes he knows about the book, and thus to the comments exchanged about it. To a significant extent, our discourse about books focuses on the discourse of other people about those books, and so forth ad infinitum. The abbey’s library stands as a luminous symbol of such discourse about discourse, in which the book itself disappears in a fog of language, since libraries are the site par excellence of infinite commentary.
At the core of such discourse is the one we address to ourselves, for our own words about books separate and protect us from them as much as the commentary of others. As soon as we begin to read, and perhaps even before that, we begin talking to ourselves and then to others about books. We will resort thereafter to these comments and opinions, while actual books, now rendered hypothetical, recede forever into the distance.
For Eco even more than Valéry, it seems, the book is an undefined object that we can discuss only in imprecise terms, an object forever buffeted by our fantasies and illusions. The second volume of Aristotle’s
Poetics
, impossible to find even in a library of infinite capacity, is no different from most other books we discuss in our lives. They are all reconstructions of originals that lie so deeply buried beneath our words and the words of others that, even were we prepared to risk our lives, we stand little chance of ever finding them within reach.
1
. SB and HB++.
2
. UB-.
3
. HB+.
4
. Umberto Eco,
The Name of the Rose
, translated by William Weaver (New York:Harcourt, 1983), p. 468.
5
. Ibid., p. 473.
6
. Ibid.
7
. Ibid., p. 471.
8
. Ibid.
9
. UB+.
10
. Eco, op. cit., p. 471.
11
. Certain deaths are not even attributable to Jorge. One of the monks committed suicide; another was murdered by a different monk.
12
. “Alinardo had told me about his idea, and then I heard from someone that you too had found it persuasive . . . I became convinced that a divine plan was directing these deaths, for which I was not responsible.” Eco, op. cit., p. 470.
13
. Ibid.
14
. See my book
Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
(New York:New Press, 2000), FB+.
15
. Freud uses the term
screen memory
to designate false or insignificant childhood memories whose function is to conceal others less acceptable to the conscious mind. See “Screen Memories,” in Sigmund Freud,
The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works
, vol. 3, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 307, SB++.
(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise
the question of whether a book you have
read and completely forgotten, and which
you have even forgotten you have read,
is still a book you have read)
A
S WE HAVE NOW SEEN
, there is not much between a book that has been “read”—if that category still has a meaning— and one that has been skimmed. But Valéry has even better grounds than this for merely flipping through the works he discusses, and Baskerville, likewise, for commenting on books without opening them, which is that the most serious and thorough reading quickly metamorphoses after the fact into summary. To appreciate this, we must take into account a dimension of reading neglected by many theorists: that of time. Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.
Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances.
No reader is safe from this process of forgetting, not even the most voracious. Such was the case for Montaigne, who is fundamentally associated with ancient culture and libraries and who nevertheless presents himself, with a frankness that anticipates Valéry, as an eminently forgetful reader.
The flaws of memory are, in fact, a persistent theme in the
Essais
,
1
if not the best known. Montaigne complains endlessly about his memory trouble and the unpleasantness it causes him. He tells us, for example, that he is incapable of going to look for a piece of information in his library without forgetting on the way what he is looking for. When speaking, he finds it necessary to maintain a tightly ordered discourse so as not to lose his train of thought. And he is so unable to remember names that he resolves to refer to his servants according to their jobs or countries of origin.
The problem grows so serious that Montaigne, always on the brink of an identity crisis, occasionally fears that he will forget his own name. He even goes so far as to ponder how he will navigate daily life on the inevitable day that such a misadventure occurs.
This general faultiness of memory plainly affects the books he has read. Toward the beginning of his essay on his reading, Montaigne unhesitatingly acknowledges his difficulty in keeping track of what he has read: “And if I am a man of some reading,” he declares, “I am a man of no retentiveness.”
2
Montaigne experiences a progressive and systematic erasure that attacks every component of the book from the author to the text itself, each vanishing one after the other from his memory as quickly as it entered:
I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.
3
This effacement, in other words, is the flip side of an enrichment. Having made the text his own, Montaigne rushes to forget it, as though a book were no more than a temporary delivery system for some general form of wisdom and, its mission accomplished, might as well disappear. But the fact that the implications of forgetting are not altogether negative does not solve all its associated problems, especially the psychological ones. Nor does it dispel the anguish, intensified by the daily obligation of speaking to others, of not being able to fix anything in one’s memory.
It is true that we all experience mishaps of this sort, and that all literature ends up providing us only a fragile and temporary kind of knowledge. What seems particular to the case of Montaigne, however, and indicates the breadth of his problems with memory, is his inability to recall whether he has read a specific book:
To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.
4
The memory deficit is revealed as even more acute in this case, since it is no longer just the book but the experience of reading that is forgotten. Here, the forgetting erases not just the contents of the object—whose general shape, at least, can still be called to mind—but the act of reading itself, as though the radical nature of the erasure had ended up affecting everything related to the object. We would be justified in such circumstances in wondering whether reading that we cannot even remember performing still deserves to be called reading.
Curiously, Montaigne displays a relatively precise memory of certain books he dislikes; he is, for instance, capable of distinguishing different kinds of texts by Cicero or even the different books of the
Aeneid.
5
One gets the impression that these texts in particular—conceivably because they made a deeper impression than the others—have escaped oblivion. Here, too, the affective factor proves decisive in the substitution of a screen book for the hypothetical real book.
Montaigne finds a solution to his memory problem through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading. We can assume that another function of the notes is to assure him that he has indeed read the works in which they were inscribed, like blazes on a trail that are intended to show the way during future periods of amnesia.
What follows in this essay about reading is even more astonishing. After explaining the principle behind his notational system, Montaigne unflappably presents the reader with a few excerpts. In doing so, he tells the reader about books that it is hard to say whether he has read, since he has forgotten their contents and must rely on his own notations—writing, for example, “Here is what I put some ten years ago in my Guicciardini (for whatever language my books speak, I speak to them in my own).”
6
The first author “discussed” is indeed the Renaissance historian Guicciardini, whom Montaigne deems to be a “diligent historiographer,” and all the more trustworthy in that he was himself an actor in the events he recounts and seems little inclined to flatter those in power. His second example is Philippe de Commines, for whom Montaigne has unstinting praise, admiring his simplicity of language, narrative purity, and absence of vanity. Third, he evokes the
Memoirs
7
of du Bellay, an author whose work in public office he admires, but who, he fears, is too much in the service of the king.
8