Hypocrite lecteur.("Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?" by Pierre Bayard)(Book review)

Pierre Bayard Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus. Editions de Minuit, 198 pages, 15 [euro]

One of the great intellectual enterprises of the last century has been the destruction of boundaries. It is as if the triumphant bourgeoisie--from which, of course, the vast majority of intellectuals emerged--grew tired of the restraints that they had imposed upon themselves as the bourgeois virtues, and sought a justification for throwing them over in both metaphysics and the very structure of the universe. Thus the marginal became central, and the central marginal. Everything became fluid, nothing remained categorical, at least in theory: though bank accounts, for example, remained as categorical as ever.

In Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus, Pierre Bayard, a distinguished French critic, has found a new boundary to dissolve: the difference between having and not having read a book, and that between talking from knowledge and talking from ignorance. His book is a vindication of ignorance.

It is, however, extremely amusing and clever--though here I must add that I use the word "clever" at least partially in its English sense, that is to say meretriciously and ostentatiously intelligent rather than deeply so; it is more a search for applause than truth. It is a playful book, but speaking personally, I prefer play to take place in the playground rather than between the covers of books.

It is not easy to guess how far the author is being tongue-in-check. Nevertheless, there is a serious point behind the book, and it is wrong. The peroration at the end of the last chapter, in which the author appeals for the overthrow of the tyranny of culture so that everyone may release his creativity, and become a writer rather than a passive reader, is redolent of the very worst pedagogy of the 1960s that has produced an educational disaster in more than one country. The philosophy of culture that underlies the book might be summarized by adapting a phrase from Rousseau: man is born creative, but everywhere he does not create. His inherited culture, for which he has an exaggerated reverence, is to blame.

The author starts from several indisputable observations. We know the contents of many books that we have not read by means of hearsay, reviews, general knowledge, and so forth; we leaf through others in the attempt to extract their gist. We read books and forget most of their contents almost immediately, indeed in the very act of turning the page, unless we have photographic memories, which most of us do not; Montaigne tells us, and he is right, that we who write forget even that which we have written. Having read a book, we may remember fragments, but they are more likely to accord with our own psychological needs rather than to the actual contents of the book. In any case, even if we manage to hold in our minds a great deal of a book that we have read, our interpretation of its meaning and significance will, in all probability, differ considerably from that of another person with a similarly detailed grasp of it. Moreover, we should never forget that if we were to read one book a day during our entire adult lives, we should read no more than approximately 18,000 books. There are 200,000 books published per year in Britain alone. Thus the lacunae in our culture and knowledge are always vastly greater in size than our actual knowledge or accomplishment.

In the light of all this--supported by brilliantly chosen extracts from Graham Greene, Paul Valery, Montaigne, Balzac, David Lodge, Oscar Wilde, and others--the categories of books that one has read and those that one has not read dissolve into each other. It is perfectly ...