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Monday 1 December 2008

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Omissions and admissions

Philip Hensher reviews How to Talk about Books

This truth is startlingly borne out by Finnegans Wake, which so many people fail to read through excessive attentiveness. If you try to puzzle out every word, you will turn yourself into a copy editor and have no idea where the story is going. The trick with this one is to train your eye to move over the lines at roughly the same pace as it would over an ordinary classic novel, allowing the confusions and blurrings their space; then, of course, it becomes, as well as everything else, the funniest novel in the world. Over-attentiveness can result in the failure to read a book.

Pierre Bayard has written a small study which tries to establish what degree of neglect can be attained by a reader, who can still claim that he has read the book in question. Could one possibly not have read a book at all, and yet still count as a reader of it? Can one talk sensibly about books one hasn’t read at all?

My lack of acquaintance with Moby-Dick, for instance, is all but total. I’ve read the first three chapters about five times. I’ve seen the first 20 minutes of the film before getting totally bored. And yet I could talk quite happily about the Burtonesque marriage of encyclopaedia and novel, about the homoerotic roots of all American fiction, citing the punning chapter on sperm, about the Faust component in the later stages and the romantic theme of the double, and even, if pushed, about the musical effects of the Melville sentence.

Bayard has plenty of examples of energetic bluffing, including, hilariously, Paul Valéry on Proust. Valéry’s obituary comments suggest something about the state of French journalism at the time. No newspaper editor would have any doubt, reading Valéry on Proust, that the author was talking about a book he hadn’t read: ‘Others will speak with authority and penetration of the power and subtlety of Proust’s work...’ When Valéry goes on, in the same 1923 article, to claim that ‘The interest of his work lies in each fragment. We can open the book wherever we choose: its vitality does not depend on what went before…’ it is quite clear what is happening. He is describing not what the reader can fruitfully do, but what he himself has bothered to do, and cheekily found a virtue in it.

Clearly, however, the experience of reading Proust is only partly made up of letting your eyes pass over the words on the page. The augustly vague distillation of the on-dit that Valéry goes in for is still part of the vital experience of reading. When a reader of Proust starts enthusing about the madeleine and the petite phrase, we are not very likely to know whether he has read the thing or not. He wouldn’t need to in order to find out that those are the things Proustians are supposed to get excited over.

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