How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (2007)
“I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”–Oscar Wilde
Wilde’s epigram precedes Bayard’s table of contents and sums up the style of the book that is to follow. Bolstered by dry wit and an impressive grasp of a range of literary critical thought, Bayard discusses reading, non-reading, and the relationship between one’s reading and cultural literacy.
Bayard writes “Reading is first and foremost non-reading” since “…the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” Bayard feels that removing the cultural stigma that is associated with non-reading and embracing the inevitability of non-reading (since it is humanly impossible to read everything) will free us to be more creative in literary exchanges and more true to ourselves. To convince his readers of the importance of non-reading and the legitimacy of talking about books one has not read, he organizes his book into three sections.
In section one Bayard describes the principal kinds of non-reading. To delineate the differences among non-readers, he uses quotes from the librarian in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The librarian explains his non-reading: “‘The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian…He’s bound to lose perspective’”. Basically, the idea of this section is that non-reading enables one to keep perspective–to see the relationships “the connections and correlations” among books instead of simply accumulating isolated bits of knowledge.
Principal types of non-reading according to Bayard include the absence of reading altogether (not being interested in content or location) and the abstention from detailed reading (ingesting only bits and pieces of a work via reviews, conversations, table of contents, etc. order to grasp its location to the whole). He supports the latter way of non-reading. As he puts it, this view represents a fundamental shift toward seeing reading as loss (whether that loss is due to skimming, forgetting, or the time expended leaving little time to understand its relationships to other books) rather than reading as gain (toward one’s cultural and individual literacy).
In section two, Bayard analyzes concrete situations in which we might be called upon to talk about books we haven’t read. He argues “there is no such thing as an isolated book.” Each book has a place in the “collective library” and it is the reader and/or non-reader’s job to locate the book’s relationships to other books. This section includes many humorous examples of situations in which non-readers are forced to navigate through social exchanges about books they “should” have read.
In section three, Bayard offers a series of simple recommendations from one non-reader to his readers. He suggest, “To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps…” He repeatedly affirms his theory that reading is a process with “fault lines, deficiencies, and approximations.” By contrast, the non-reading approach to books enables seeing relationships among books, augments cultural literacy, and reinvigorates cultural exchanges in social situations while remaining true to oneself.
For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the work was following along with the examples he develops that so aptly buttress his arguments–to support his points he uses quite a few books I have not read (yes, I admit to non-reading) such as Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose but he also draws from works that I do know such as the Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Groundhog Day (yes, the latter is a movie, but it buttresses his point). Such diverse examples suggest a culturally literate author is behind the book and its ideas.
One need not agree with everything Bayard propounds in order to enjoy dialoguing with his argument. I did not find his recommendations for removing the stigma of non-reading all that helpful, and I won’t be quitting reading anytime soon. Mainly, though, his non-reading argument falters in his emphasis on the social aspects of reading while failing to account for the individual pleasures that come from reading books word by word, phrase by phrase, page by page.
Nevertheless, his book provides much food for thought. He’s correct that each of us only has 24 hours in a day, and our reading selections do preclude us from reading other works. Pondering this serves to make me more aware and more selective about the books that I do choose to invest time in. In some cases, for books that one has no desire and/or time to read, the non-reading approach of abstaining from details in order to locate the book’s place in the collective library makes sense.
Bayard’s work also reinforces for me the value of reading other people’s ideas about a work (and along those lines, Sam Anderson has written a top-notch (and equally witty as the book itself) review of Bayard’s book)). Bayard’s emphasis on the importance of locating each individual book within the collective library (in this case, he practices this in his work by discussing how his ideas fit with the ideas of other scholars with regards to reading and non-reading) while not being a new idea is definitely one that merits the occasional reminder.
All in all, I’m glad that I read How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. It’s a solid selection for those who are interested in thinking about the relationship between books and cultural literacy and about the implications and consequences of reading/non-reading.
Now it’s time for me to take a holiday non-posting break. Happy holidays to all, and I’ll return to post about my reading again in the new year!
Take away quote:
“…culture is above all a matter of orientation. 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…It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books”
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