How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (22 page)

This initial uncertainty about the competence of the people we’re speaking to is compounded by another kind of uncertainty, already observed in Balzac, but here emphasized such that it bears on the book itself. If it is difficult to ascertain what the other person knows and what we know ourselves, this is true in part because it is not that easy to know what is in a text. This doubt not only concerns its value, as in Balzac, but extends to its so-called content as well.

Such is the case for Frederic Harrison’s novel
Theophano
,
⁸
about which, according to the artist with gold-rimmed spectacles, one might theoretically be wrong or mislead someone else. Published in 1904, it belongs to the literary genre that might be called the Byzantine novel. It begins in AD 956 and continues to 969, and it tells of the victorious counteroffensive against Islam led by the emperor of Constantinople, Nicephorus Phocas.

The question then arises of whether the artist is making up stories by commenting on the dramatic death of the heroine (which is, moreover, another way of wondering whether S
seki is talking about a book he hasn’t read). Can one say that the heroine dies, and if the answer is yes, might her death be sufficiently moving to send chills down one’s spine?

This question is not so simple to answer. The historical character one would tend to regard as the heroine— Theophano, the wife of Emperor Nicephorus, whom she helps to assassinate—does not die, but on the last page of the novel, she is imprisoned and exiled.
⁹
We are thus dealing with a kind of death, or at least a disappearance. A reader who
had
read the book might in good faith forget the precise circumstances of her elimination and simply remember that a misfortune befalls her, without it being possible to say that he hadn’t read the book.

The problem is further complicated by the observation that there is not one heroine, but two, in the novel. The second is Princess Agatha, a discreet and admirable heroine who withdraws to a convent upon learning of the death in combat of her beloved, the emperor’s companion Basil Digenes. The passage about this incident refrains from lyrical excess and is all the more successful for doing so. Thus there is a quite moving case of the disappearance of a female character, and an alleged reader’s recollection that she had died would hardly seem like grounds for an evaluation of whether he had really read the book.

At an entirely different level than the factual question of whether the heroine dies, the artist is perfectly justified in praising the quality of the passage describing such an event, since in a certain sense it feels right to him, at least as an unrealized possibility. Few adventure novels of this period do not include a female character, and it is hard to see how the reader’s interest might be sustained for any great length of time without including a love story. And how, in that case, would one not have the heroine die, unless one were telling a story with a happy ending, which literature is rarely inclined to do?
¹⁰

It is thus doubly difficult to know whether the artist has read
Theophano
. In the first place, it is not that far off to say that the book features the death of a heroine, even if the word
disappearance
might be more appropriate. Moreover, being wrong on this point in no way proves that he hasn’t read it. This cultural fantasy of the heroine’s death is so potent that it is unsurprising that he would associate it with the book once his reading is complete, even to the point where it becomes an integral part of the book for him.

The books we talk about, in other words, are not just the actual books that would be uncovered in a complete and objective reading of the human library, but also
phantom books
that surface where the unrealized possibilities of each book meet our unconscious. These phantom books fuel our daydreams and conversations, far more than the real objects that are theoretically their source.
¹¹

One sees how directly the discussion of a book leads us to a point where the notions of true and false, contrary to what the artist with gold-rimmed spectacles believes, lose much of their validity. It is first difficult to know whether we ourselves have read a book, so evanescent is our reading. Second, it is more or less impossible to know whether others have read it, since this would first entail their knowing such a thing. Finally, the content of a text is so fluid that it is difficult to assert with certainty that something is not found in it.

The virtual space of discussion about books is thus characterized by extraordinary uncertainty, which applies to the participants, incapable of stating rigorously what they have read, as much as to the moving target of their discussion. But this uncertainty is not entirely disadvantageous; it can also provide the opportunity, if those in the conversation seize the moment, to transform the virtual library into an authentic realm of fiction.

Fiction
, here, should not be understood pejoratively. What I mean to say is that if its rules are respected by the occupants, the virtual library is in a position to advance an original kind of creativity. Such creativity can arise from the resonances that a book calls up in those who haven’t read it. It can be individual or collective. Its aim is to construct a book more propitious to the situation in which the non-readers find themselves—a book that may have only feeble links to the original (which would be what, exactly?), but one that is as close as possible to the hypothetical meeting point of various inner books.

In another of his books,
Grass on the Wayside
,
¹²
S
seki depicts a painter who has retreated to the mountains to produce a summation of his art. One day his landlady’s daughter comes into his room and, seeing him with a book, asks him what he is reading. The painter answers that he doesn’t know, since his practice is to open the book at random and read the page before his eyes without knowing anything of the rest of the book. Reacting to the young woman’s surprise, the painter explains to her that it is more interesting for him to proceed in this manner: “I open the book at random as though it were a game of chance, and I read the page that ends up in front of me, and that’s what is interesting.”
¹³

The woman suggests that he show her his method, which he agrees to do, eventually translating a passage from the English book in his hand into Japanese for her. The subject is a man and a woman of whom nothing is known other than that they are in a boat in Venice. When the young woman asks who these characters are, the painter replies that he hasn’t the slightest idea, since he hasn’t read the book and insists on not finding out any more:

“Who are that man and that woman?”

“I have no idea. But that’s precisely why it’s interesting. We have no need to be concerned with their relations until then. Just like you and I finding ourselves together, it’s only the present moment that counts.”
¹⁴

What is important in the book is external to it, since it is only a pretext or vehicle for this moment of discussion: talking about a book is less about the book itself than about the moment of conversation devoted to it. The real relationship is not between the novel’s two characters, but between its pair of “readers.” But the latter couple will be better able to communicate if they are less constrained by the book and if it is allowed to retain its ambiguity. Such is the price paid for our inner books to have some chance, as in the distended temporality of
Groundhog Day
, of joining together for even one brief moment.

We would thus be wise to avoid diminishing the books that surface in our encounters by making overly precise comments about them, but rather to welcome them in all their polyvalence. In this way, we allow none of their potential to be lost, and we open up what comes from the book—title, fragment, genuine or fake quotation, or in this case the image of the couple on a boat in Venice—to all the possibilities of connection that can be created, at that moment, between people.

This ambiguity has a certain kinship with the ambiguity of interpretation in psychoanalysis. It is because interpretation can be understood in different ways that it stands a chance of being understood by the subject to whom it is addressed, whereas if it were too clear, it might be experienced as a kind of violence against the other. And like analytic interpretation, a statement about a book is narrowly dependent on the exact moment when it is made and has meaning only in that moment.

A truly effective statement about an unread book also involves a bracketing of conscious, rational thought, a suspension that is once again reminiscent of psychoanalysis. What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and thereby to ourselves.

Letting books keep their ambiguity does not contradict the necessity to be assertive and impose your point of view on a book, as we saw in Balzac’s novel. It might even be its flip side. It is a way of showing that you have grasped the specific nature of the conversational space and the singularity of each participant. Even if it is a screen book that each person is discussing, it is better not to shatter the common space, but instead to leave our phantom books intact, along with our potential to non-read and to dream.