Talking about Books You Haven't Read

            Having found an unoccupied armchair at Barnes & Noble, I sat down to look at the beginning of a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, a favorite writer. I got fully thirty pages in before I realized that I had read it before. I sat there with a silly expression for a while; then I bought the book, took it home, and read it again. Doesn’t my not remembering what went on in this book render my saying that I had read it nearly meaningless? This question is one of many considered by Pierre Bayard in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman and published in 2007.

              With a very light touch and much amusement in boldly springing paradoxes on the reader, Bayard points out that we haven’t read most books, although he wants to muddy the line between reading and not reading. In any case, he categorizes the books we haven’t read as books unknown to us, books we have skimmed, books we have heard of, and books we have forgotten—because there are many ways of not reading.

            Bayard wants to remove the guilt from talking about books we haven’t read and argues that not having read a book does not mean we can’t know a great deal about it—or at least enough to sustain a conversation and even to discover whether the person with whom we’re talking is lying about having read it.

            Pat McCarthy, one of my teachers in grad school, told me that the professors who taught him at Columbia would never admit that they hadn’t read a book that came up in conversation. No one quite like that attended our faculty parties at Murray State, where one night Richard Steiger suggested a sort of parlor game: we each had to come up with the title of a book that we had never read but had always pretended we had. It’s a version of a game David Lodge has his academic characters play in Changing Places, which Bayard mentions in this book. We had fun with the idea; one prof even admitted he’d written a Masters exam question on a book he hadn’t read, and he passed! Much merriment and a lot of revelations, but only as much embarrassment as there was uptightness in the group. The moral, says Bayard, is not to be ashamed. Face it out. Talking about books you haven’t read is a creative act. There is no reason to fear exposure for not having read a book: you can always backtrack and say you’ve made a mistake. The key to “being able to talk about books with grace, whether we’ve read them or not,” says Bayard, is to “liberate ourselves from the idea that the Other knows whether we’re lying—the Other being just as much ourselves.”

            The heart of his book is a series of analyzed examples from literature and film—because of course Bayard has read a great deal more than he lets on in the preface—that illustrate some of the unexpected advantages of not reading and the possible embarrassments of having read. The librarian of the imperial library in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities does not read any of the books in it; in order to retain perspective on all the books, he looks only at titles and reads only catalogues. Paul Valéry (who famously proposed that the author was the last person to talk to about the meaning of his work) manages a fulsome tribute to Marcel Proust and a nasty elegiac speech about Anatole France, both without having read either man. Bayard talks about the solution of the mystery in The Name of the Rose and Jorge of Burgos’s fanatical hiding of the library’s unique copy of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on comedy, a book which no one has ever read except Jorge. But Baskerville, the detective, can predict the outline and contents of the book without having even handled it—which is lucky, since the pages are poisoned. Montaigne is Bayard’s example for “Books You Have Forgotten,” since Montaigne confesses to often forgetting that he has read a book—even his own.

            Bayard is delighted with the situation in which Rollo Martins finds himself in The Third Man, lecturing to an audience that thinks he is someone else, whose books he has not read. Martins writes Westerns and admires Zane Grey; his audience thinks him a highbrow author and does not recognize Grey’s name. Martins acquits himself well when he finally loses his temper and admits he doesn’t know the terms and authors the audience is asking him about. Bayard also enjoys Laura Bohannan’s attempt to prove the universality of Hamlet by trying vainly to make the Tiv tribe of West Africa understand it.

            Naturally, there is a French book made for Bayard’s purposes of confusing the issue of reading/not reading. In Pierre Siniac’s thriller Ferdinaud Céline, the “co-authors” of a best-seller appear on a television program to be interviewed about their book. One of them is not in fact the author; he is the publisher who blackmails the other to put the publisher’s name on the book as co-author when he realizes the book will be a hit. But the other author is in fact not the author either: he gave his wretched writings to a typist who substitutes her own tale, based on her experiences as a collaborator during the war, but he doesn’t know about the substitution. So the publisher attempts to deflect questions about a book he has read but not written to keep from alerting the author, who has neither written nor read his own book.

            This is one of those books that had to be written, and it just happens that it was written by a French academic, who in the tradition of French intellectuals, proceeds to construct theory and make a system out of what the rest of us might have labeled as just plain fibbing to save face, or showing off. For the most part, he keeps it light and shows that he’s not taking this any more seriously than the subject warrants.