How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre BayardMore interesting than the title suggests––reading is not the only way to engage with literature. Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it.
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all
We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of books that exist. As a result, unless he abstains definitively from all conversation and all writing, he will find himself forever obliged to express his thoughts on books he hasn’t read.
Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,’ he explained. ‘He’s bound to lose perspective.’
Rather than any particular book, it is indeed these connections and correlations that should be the focus of the cultivated individual, much as a railroad switchman should focus on the relations between trains––that is, their crossings and transfers––rather than the contents of any specific convoy.
Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.
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.
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.
Blessed are those writers who relive us of the burden of thought, and who dextrously weave a luminous veil over the complexity of things.
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.
Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.
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.
The commentary he is reading is not exactly his, without its being foreign to him either. He conveys to the reader the reaction he had to these books on an earlier occasion, without taking the trouble to verify whether that reaction coincides with what he might experience today.
We do not contain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings
This is an unpleasant situation, no doubt, but with a little finesse we may extricate ourselves from it at no great cost - by changing the subject, for example.
For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are
Their ideas are instead actually prior, in the sense that they constitute a whole and systematic vision of the world, in which the book is received and given a place
The uncanny experience of discovering the absence of any connection between what he meant to accomplish and what has been grasped of it
For there is no such thing as an isolated book. A book is an element in the vast ensemble I have called the collective library, which we do not need to know comprehensively in order to appreciate any one of its elements.
One of the implicit rules of the virtual library is that we must not attempt to find out the extent to which someone who claims he has read a book has actually done so, for two reasons. The first is that life in the virtual library would quickly become unlivable if not for a certain amount of ambiguity around the truth of our statements, and if we were instead forced to reply clearly to questions about exactly what we had read. The other reason is that the very notion of what sincerity would mean is questionable, since knowing what is meant by having read a book, as we have seen, is highly problematic.
In this cultural context, books––whether read or unread––form a kind of second language to which we can turn to talk about ourselves, to communicate with others, and to defend ourselves in conflict.
In each case, the book does not change materially, but it undergoes modifications to its situation in the collective library. What Balzac is calling our attention to is the importance of context.
The acknowledgement that books are mobile objects rather than fixed texts is indeed destablizing, since it reflects back our own uncertainty
Our unreading or forgetting plays such a significant role that there is little risk in declaring yourself the victim of one of the many lapses in memory induced by our reading––and non-reading––of books
How can one deny, however, that talking about books you haven’t read constitutes an authentic creative activity, making the same demands as other forms of art? Just think of all the skills it calls into play–– listening to the potentialities of a work, analyzing its ever-changing context, paying attention to others and their reactions, taking charge of a gripping narrative - and you will surely find yourself convinced