Pierre Bayard
COMMENT PARLER DES LIVRES QUE L’ON N’A PAS LUS?
162pp. Minuit. 15euros.
978 2 7073 1982 1

Pierre Bayard’s elegant and witty essay on “How to discuss books that one hasn’t read” (published in a series called “Paradoxe”) addresses a subject that may interest readers of, as well as contributors to, the TLS: after all, can there be many reviewers who haven’t at some point pronounced on books they have merely skimmed, or alluded to works that they are largely unfamiliar with?

Bayard’s project is a serious one. He tells us, in his “Prologue”, that he was born into a family who read little, that he himself has almost no appetite for reading and that, anyway, he cannot find the time for it. As a (fifty-two-year-old) professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII (and a practising psychoanalyst), he often finds himself obliged to comment on books he hasn’t looked at. And yet “non-reading” is a taboo subject in the circles in which he moves. He lists three constraints that we all feel as readers: “The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”, particularly where certain “canonical texts” are concerned: it is practically forbidden not to have read these. The second constraint “could be called the obligation to read a book in its entirety. If non-reading is frowned on, speed-reading and skimming are viewed in as poor a light”. For example, “it would be almost unthinkable for professors of literature to admit – what is after all true for most of them – that they have merely skimmed Proust’s work”. Can this really be the case? If so, it’s a dismaying thought – presumably Bayard has had some explaining to do to his colleagues since his book was published in France earlier this year. The third constraint, and the one which most of us would take as given, is the need to have read a book in order to be able to talk about it: according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. These constraints lead to a lack of openness in our dealings with each other, Bayard claims, and generate unnecessary feelings of guilt.

He does not address the fact that most of us have our blind spots where particular authors are concerned, and that many of us do feel oppressed by the thought of the books we haven’t quite got round to reading, or wish that we had read years ago and know we now never will. Bayard is not interested in this; instead, he divides the works he mentions into four categories: “LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten). Ulysses, for example, falls into the category “LE”: he claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this confession, or at the revelation that, “in common with numerous university lecturers”, Bayard “has spent enough time in the company of colleagues to have an idea, positive or negative, of the worth of their books without the need to read them”. This comes in a discussion of literary embarrassment, a chapter to which he gives the mock-archaic subtitle “In which it is confirmed, in connection with the novels of David Lodge, that the first condition for talking about a book one hasn’t read is not to be ashamed of it”. Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation”, according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

Bayard draws on some distinguished non-readers. He quotes from a homage the poet Paul Valéry paid to Proust in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1923, shortly after the novelist’s death: “Although I’m barely familiar with a single volume of Marcel Proust’s great work, and the art of the novelist is altogether unimaginable to me, I nevertheless well recognize from the little of the Recherche du temps perdu that I have had the occasion to read, what an exceptional loss literature has just suffered . . . ”. Even Bayard concedes that this is a bit rich, particularly as the rest of the article makes it clear that Valéry has no intention of making good his omission. As Bayard points out, it makes one suspect Valéry’s literary judgement in general (and it rather undermines his own case). Elsewhere, Bayard asks, with Montaigne, how we should regard those books that we have read but have entirely forgotten. Montaigne took forgetfulness one stage further when he admitted that people were apt to quote passages from his Essays to him that he didn’t recall having written. Bayard classes Montaigne among the “involuntary non-readers” (ie, forgetful), and sees reading in this context as forming part of a (necessary) process of loss: we cannot, after all, hope to retain everything we read, and should not reproach ourselves for not doing so.

Bayard has written studies of Laclos and Maupassant. He is also the author of Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées? (how to improve failed works), as well as Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? (can literature be applied to psychoanalysis?). Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? is, contrary to what its title might suggest, not a self-help manual, and it is tempting to think that some of those buyers who briefly turned the book into a best-seller in France earlier this year will have been bemused by it – if they read it. At times it seems as if Bayard is looking for ever more elaborate ways to state the obvious as he weaves intricate theoretical patterns, while the psychoanalyst in him threatens to overwhelm the endeavour altogether: “In discussing books, we are doing far more than exchanging foreign elements in our culture; these are aspects of ourselves that serve, in stressful situations of narcissistic menace, to assure us of our inner coherence”.

But there is considerable pleasure to be had from this book too; the most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues (“LP, LE et LO”), in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism. Rubempré has submitted a manuscript of his poems, entitled Les Marguerites, to the philistine publisher Dauriat, and is shocked and angry when he calls on Dauriat several days later, and hears him expressing opinions on the poems even though the seal on the manuscript is clearly unbroken (Bayard places Les Marguerites in his “LI” category which, given that the book doesn’t exist, suggests that not everything he writes should be taken at face value). Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique”, learns from his more worldly friends that this is perfectly normal practice: indeed, to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist”. Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself. Bayard also excavates, to good effect, the scene in The Third Man, in which Graham Greene has fun at the expense of his thriller writer Buck Dexter, who is called on, in an embarrassing case of mistaken identity, to address a literary audience in Vienna on Joyce and the modern novel – a subject he is eminently unqualified to pronounce on.

It would, of course, be wrong to take everything Bayard writes here seriously – and maybe he would not want us to – but we could do worse than heed his therapeutic advice when he suggests that

"in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves."

Bayard cheerfully insists that he will continue to talk about books he hasn’t read – he seems to have got away with it until now – and offers the optimistic notion that only when people overcome their “fear of culture” can they themselves begin to write.

Adrian Tahourdin works at the TLS.