How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (20 page)
As in Lodge’s game, shame remains an essential component in the organization of the virtual library, but in this case its function is ironically reversed. Humiliation no longer threatens the individual who hasn’t read a book, but the one who has; reading is seen as a degrading task that may be left to a woman of the demimonde. But this space still remains organized around the feeling of shame, and the resulting world, beyond its apparent playfulness, is remarkably psychically violent.
In Balzac as in Lodge, the game is played for positions of power. The importance of power in the reception of texts is easy to perceive in
Lost Illusions
, for it is directly and immediately connected to a book’s literary value. A favorable review contributes to power, while inversely, power guarantees favorable reviews. It can even serve to confirm, as in Lucien’s case, the quality of the text.
In a way, the universe described by Balzac is the reverse of Lodge’s. Whereas the world of the British academic is characterized by the taboo of non-reading (so much so that the character who dares to flaunt it is promptly excluded from the cultural space), the transgression of the taboo is so generalized in Balzac that non-reading becomes the rule, and a kind of taboo ends up being placed on reading, which is considered humiliating.
Two forms of transgression are pervasive in this world. First, it is permitted, and even recommended, that critics should speak about books without opening them, and Lucien is subjected to ridicule when he suggests that the situation could proceed otherwise. The transgression of non-reading is such a commonplace here that in the end it is no longer a transgression; no one even thinks of reading a book anymore. Only when a person unacquainted with journalistic behavior enters the world of letters do its habitués momentarily evoke the possibility of reading—and then only to reject it immediately.
This first transgression, that of universal non-reading, is compounded by a second one, which insists that any opinion you sustain about a book is equally valid. In a world where opening a book in order to talk about it is laughable, any opinion is fine as long as you can defend it. The book itself, reduced to pure pretext, has, in a sense, ceased to exist.
This double transgression of the conventional rules of talking about books is a sign of a perverse society wherein all books, and all the endlessly reversible judgments of books, end up being the equivalent of any others. But the position held by Lucien’s friends in this case, even if it resembles sophistry, nevertheless reveals certain truths about reading and the way we talk about books.
Lousteau and Blondet’s attitude in encouraging Lucien to write contradictory articles would be shocking if the two articles were about exactly the same book. What Balzac is suggesting is that it is not exactly the same in the two cases. To be sure, the physical book remains identical to itself, but no longer represents the same knot of relationships once Nathan’s position in society evolves. Similarly, once Lucien has attained a certain social position, his
Marguerites
becomes a rather different collection of poems.
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. He caricatures this importance, certainly, but his portrait has the merit all the same of showing how determining it can be. To allow context to become part of the equation means remembering that a book is not fixed once and for all but is a moving object, and that its mobility is in part a function of the set of power relations woven around it.
If the author changes and the book changes as well, can it at least be said that we are always dealing with the same reader? Nothing is less clear, judging by the speed with which Lucien alters his opinion of Nathan’s book after his talk with Lousteau:
Lucien was stupefied as he listened to Lousteau’s words: the scales fell from his eyes and he became alive to literary truths of which he had not even guessed.
“But what you tell me,” he exclaimed, “is full of reason and relevance.”
“If it were not, how could you make an attack on Nathan’s book?” said Lousteau.
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A brief conversation with Lousteau is thus sufficient for Lucien to form a different opinion about Nathan’s book, and that without even looking at it anew. It is not the book as such that is in play, therefore (since Lucien cannot know what he would feel if he were to reread it), but the interplay of comments about it in society. That new opinion becomes so much his own that he can no longer modify it, and when Lousteau proposes to him that he ought to write a second, favorable article, he tries to recuse himself, claiming that he is now incapable of writing a single word of praise. His friends, however, intervene to unsettle him once more and give him fresh access to his initial sentiment:
Next morning, it turned out that the previous day’s ideas had germinated, as happens with all minds which are bursting with sap and whose faculties have as yet had little exercise. Lucien derived pleasure from thinking out this new article and set about it with enthusiasm. From his pen flowed all the fine sallies born of paradox. He was witty and mocking, he even rose to new reflexions on feeling, ideas, and imagery in literature. With subtle ingenuity, in order to praise Nathan, he captured the first impressions about the book . . .
21
We may thus wonder whether Lucien is anxious less about the mobility of the book than about his own inner mobility and what he is little by little discovering about it. He can assume the different intellectual and psychic positions that Blondet proposes to him without any harm, successively and even simultaneously. It is less his friends’ contempt for books that is unsettling than his own unfaithfulness both to others and to himself, an unfaithfulness that will, in the end, lead to his downfall.
22
The acknowledgment that books are mobile objects rather than fixed texts is indeed destabilizing, since it reflects back our own uncertainty—which is to say, our folly. In facing that confrontation more forthrightly than Lucien, however, we may be able to simultaneously approach works in their richness and reduce the awkwardness of our discussions about them.
Indeed, to acknowledge both the mobility of a text and our own mobility is a major advantage, one that confers great freedom to impose our judgments of books on others. Balzac’s heroes demonstrate the remarkable plasticity of the virtual library and the ease with which it can be bent to the requirements of anyone who—having read a book or not—is determined to persevere through the remarks of so-called readers to assert the truth of his perceptions.
1
. SB, HB, and FB+. UB--.
2
. UB
3
. UB+.
4
. UB-.
5
. UB--.
6
. Balzac,
Lost Illusions
, translated by Herbert J. Hunt (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 255.
7
. Ibid., p. 258.
8
. Ibid., p. 259.
9
. Ibid., p. 353.
10
. Ibid., p. 355.
11
. Ibid.
12
. Ibid., p. 357.
13
. Ibid.
14
. Ibid., p. 358.
15
. Ibid., p. 359.
16
. Ibid., p. 366.
17
. Ibid., p. 367.
18
. Ibid., p. 372.
19
. Ibid., p. 372.
20
. Ibid., p. 358.
21
. Ibid., p. 377.
22
. Having first rallied to the liberals, Lucien later attempts a rapprochement with the monarchists, and he finally ends up with everyone against him.
(in which, reading S
seki, we follow the advice of
a cat and an artist in gold-rimmed spectacles, who
each, in different fields of activity, proclaim
the necessity of invention)
I
F A BOOK
is less a book than it is the whole of the discussion about it, we must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about the book without reading it. For it is not the book itself that is at stake, but what it has become within the critical space in which it intervenes and is continually transformed. It is this moving object, a supple fabric of relations between texts and beings, about which one must be in a position to formulate accurate statements at the right moment.
The constant modification of books affects not only their
value
(we have seen in the example from Balzac how quickly this may shift along with the place of the author in literary politics), but also their
content
, which is no more stable, and which undergoes palpable variation as a result of the things said about it. This mobility of the text should not be understood as a drawback. To the contrary, for someone prepared to turn it to his advantage, it offers a remarkable opportunity to become the creator of the books he hasn’t read.
In the novel
I Am a Cat
,
1
perhaps his best-known work, the Japanese writer Natsume S
seki entrusts the narration of his tale to a cat, who begins his autobiography with these words:
