February 25, 2007
I'LL NEVER READ THIS , BUT I GET THE PICTURE
The New York Times had a piece yesterday about what may be the most ironic book ever written. Currently only published in France, negotiations are underway for British and American rights to How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Parisian literature professor Pierre Bayard. The aim of the book is to allay readers' (or rather, non-readers') guilt or embarrassment at not having read books they felt they should have, either out of vanity or insecurity.
“I am surprised because I hadn’t imagined how guilty nonreaders feel,” Mr. Bayard, 52, said in an interview. “With this book, they can shake off their guilt without psychoanalysis, so it’s much cheaper.”
Mr. Bayard reassures them that there is no obligation to read, and confesses to lecturing students on books that he has either not read or has merely skimmed. And he recalls passionate exchanges with people who also have not read the book under discussion.
Remember, this is a professor of literature at the university level. His book is essentially a primer on fatuous disingenuousness.
Having demonstrated that non-readers are in good company, Mr. Bayard then offers tips on how to cover up ignorance of a “must-read” book.
Meeting a book’s author can be particularly tricky. Here, Mr. Bayard said there was no need to display knowledge of the book, since the author already has his own ideas about it. Rather, he said, the answer is “to speak well of it without entering into details.” Indeed, all the author needs to hear is that “one has loved what he has written.”
Domestic life is another potentially hazardous zone. People often want their spouses and partners to share their love of a particular book. And when this happens, Mr. Bayard said, they can both inhabit a “secret universe.” But if only one has read the book, silent empathy may offer the best way out.
Students, he noted from experience, are skilled at opining about books they have not read, building on elements he may have provided in a lecture. This approach can also work in the more exposed arena of social gatherings: the book’s cover, reviews and other public reaction to it, gossip about the author and even the current conversation can all provide food for sounding informed.
One alternative, he said, is to try to change the subject. Another is to admit not knowing a particular book while suggesting knowledge of the so-called “collective library” into which the book fits.
But Mr. Bayard’s most daring suggestion is that nonreaders should talk about themselves, using the pretext of the book without dwelling on its contents. In this way, he said, they are forced to tap their imagination and, in effect, invent their own book.
“To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth more than the universe of books,” he writes. [emphasis mine]
I'm not sure how to respond to that other than to caution with the aphorism "It is better to keep one's mouth shut and thought a fool than to open one's mouth and prove it." Frankly, I don't see what's so difficult about admitting you haven't read a book. I read a lot, but still consider myself generally ill-read. Present me with a list of the 100 most essential works of the Western canon and I can assure you that I haven't even read one in five. Am I sometimes embarrassed to admit that I've never read any of the Russian novelists? Sure, but I'd be a lot more embarrassed of and to myself if I tried to pretend that I had. If anything, I know there's always something good to read out there that I just haven't gotten around to yet.
This Bayard's book sounds like almost the exact opposite of Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself In Books or Harold Bloom's How To Read And Why. Both books are meditations on the pleasure of reading for pleasure's sake. They entail a viewpoint that literature is better used as a source of intellectual enjoyment than intellectual embarrassment. At least I think they do; I didn't finish either book.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at February 25, 2007 6:49 AM
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