How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (5 page)

If he had hoped to live on in the thoughts of others, Anatole France would have done well to find some other eulogizer than Valéry, who employs all of his ingenuity in the oration so as not to pay tribute to France. His speech is an endless series of perfidious jabs at his predecessor, barely disguised as compliments:

The public could not thank my illustrious predecessor enough for giving them water in the desert. By contrast with the highly complex and explosive styles being developed on all sides, the measured cadences of his writing proved mildly and agreeably surprising. It was as though fluency, clarity, and simplicity, the patron goddesses of the average man, had returned to earth. Those who prefer the sort of writing that gives them pleasure without requiring much thought took an immediate fancy to his work, whose seductive charm lay in its totally unaffected appearance, whose limpidity sometimes allowed a deeper thought, but nothing to mystify: his work remains, however, unfailingly readable, if not wholly reassuring. He perfected the art of brushing lightly over the most serious ideas and problems. Nothing in his book gives the least difficulty unless it be the wonder itself of encountering none.
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It is hard to imagine a denser assemblage of injurious implications in so few lines. France’s work is successively characterized as “gentle,” “agreeable,” “refreshing,” “measured,” and “simple,” terms that in literary criticism do not generally pass for compliments. What is more, and this is the kicker, France’s work is apt to please everyone. It can be savored mindlessly, since ideas are only “brushed over”—an evaluation to which Valéry adds:

What could be more precious than the delectable illusion, created by such clarity, that we are enriching ourselves with ease, deriving pleasure without pain, comprehending without giving our attention, enjoying a free show?

Blessed are those writers who relieve us of the burden of thought, and who dexterously weave a luminous veil over the complexity of things.
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If Valéry’s tribute to France is a protracted exercise in nastiness, its most brutal achievement may be its vagueness; it is as though Valéry wished to convey that to read Anatole France’s work at all would be a betrayal of his low opinion. Not only are no titles mentioned, but his speech is unblemished by even a single allusion to any of France’s works.

Worse yet, Valéry is careful never to mention the name of the individual whose chair he is preparing to occupy, designating him through circumlocution or allusively by way of a play on his name: “He himself could have been possible and even conceivable only in France, whose name he adopted as his own.”
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Valéry’s refusal to give the impression that he has read Anatole France may also be a function of the greatest fault he imputes to his fellow author: that he read too much. He characterizes France as an “infinite reader”—which, coming from Valéry, sounds like an insult—who, in opposition to his successor in the Académie, was inclined to lose himself among books:

I must say, gentlemen, that the mere thought of all those immense stacks of printed pages mounting throughout the world is enough to shake the stoutest heart. There is nothing more likely to confuse and unbalance the mind than scanning the gilt-lined walls of a huge library, no sight could be more painful to the mind than those shoals of volumes, those parapets of intellectual produce that rise along the quais, the millions of tomes and pamphlets foundered on the bank of the Seine like waste, abandoned there by the stream of time thus purging itself of our thoughts.
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This excessive reading, he implies, stripped France of originality. Indeed, in Valéry’s eyes, such is the principal risk of reading to the writer—that of subordinating him to others:

Your learned and subtle colleague, gentlemen, did not feel this unease in the face of great numbers. He had a stronger head. Unlike those who are subject to statistical vertigo and revulsion, he did not need to take the precaution of reading very little. Far from being oppressed, he was stimulated by all this wealth, freely drawing upon it to direct and sustain his own art, with happy results.

More than one critic has taken him to task rather harshly, and naïvely, for being so knowledgeable and for not being unaware of what he knew. What was he supposed to do? What did he do that had not always been done? Nothing is newer than the standard of absolute newness imposed as an obligation on writers.
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Key to this passage is the condition, so antithetical to France’s way of proceeding, of “being unaware of what you know.” With cultural literacy comes the inherent threat of vanishing in other people’s books, a threat it is vital to escape if we are to create any work of our own. France, who never managed to blaze a path of his own, perfectly epitomizes the damage that stands to be done by reading; small wonder, then, that Valéry is careful not only never to quote or evoke his work, but never even to say his name, as though this alone might curse Valéry with a similar diminution of self.

The problem with these “tributes” to Proust and Anatole France is that in effect they cast doubt on all of Valéry’s other writing about writers, forcing us to question whether he has read their work or barely skimmed it. Once Valéry acknowledges that he hardly reads at all and yet doesn’t hesitate to offer his opinion, even his most innocuous critical declarations become suspect.

The tribute he offers to the third great name of French letters in the first half of the century, Henri Bergson, is hardly calculated to set our minds at ease. This text, entitled “A Discourse on Bergson,” is drawn from a lecture delivered at the Académie Française in January 1941, on the occasion of the philosopher’s death. It begins, rather traditionally, with an evocation of Bergson’s death and funeral, before launching into a list of his qualities, described in the most wooden terms imaginable:

He was the pride of our Society. Whether or not we were attracted by his metaphysics, whether or not we had followed him in the profound researches to which he devoted the whole of his life, and in the truly creative evolution of his thought, which became steadily bolder and more independent, we possessed in him the most authentic example of the highest intellectual virtues.
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One would expect, after such an introduction, that these compliments might receive a bit of justification, and—why not?—that Valéry might specify his positions in relation to those of Bergson. But this illusion is swift to evaporate, for the formula that begins the following paragraph is one customarily reserved for commentaries on texts that have not been read:

I do not propose to discuss his philosophy. This is not the moment to undertake an examination which would need to be searching and which could only be so if it were done in the light of brighter days and by means of the full and unfettered exercise of thought.
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We may well fear, in the case of Valéry, that his refusal to examine Bergson’s philosophy is not just figurative but literal. The remainder of the text is far from reassuring:

The very ancient and for that reason very difficult problems with which M. Bergson dealt, those of time, memory, and above all the evolution of life, were through him given a new beginning, and the position of philosophy as it appeared in France fifty years ago has undergone a remarkable change.
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Saying that Bergson worked on time and memory—what philosopher has not?—can hardly be passed off as a description, even a succinct one, of his work in its originality. With the exception of a few lines on the opposition between Bergson and Kant, the rest of the text is so vague that, although it describes Bergson perfectly well, it could equally apply to many other philosophers:

A very lofty, very pure and superior exemplar of the thinking man, and perhaps one of the last men who will have devoted himself exclusively, profoundly, and nobly to thinking, in a period when the world thinks and meditates less and less, when, with each day that passes, civilization is further reduced to the memories and vestiges we keep of its multifarious riches and its free and abundant intellectual production, while poverty, suffering, and restrictions of every kind discourage and depress all intellectual enterprise, Bergson seems already to belong to a past age and his name to be the last great name in the history of the European mind.
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As we see, Valéry is unable to resist ending on a malevolent note, the warmhearted phrase “the last great name in the history of the European mind” mitigating only with difficulty the harshness of the one preceding it, which cordially consigns Bergson to “a past age.” Reading these words, in full recognition of Valéry’s passion for books, one may well worry that he chose to emphasize the philosopher’s outmoded position within the history of ideas in order to dispense with opening any of his works.

This practice of criticism without reference to author or text is in no way absurd. In Valéry’s case, it is based on a reasoned conception of literature, one of whose principal ideas is that not only is the author useless, but the work itself is really a bit gratuitous as well.

This embarrassment around the work may be related first of all to Valéry’s whole notion of literature, what he calls, following Aristotle and others, a
poetics.
More than anything, he is concerned with developing the general laws of literature. It follows that the position of each text becomes ambiguous: it can serve as an example within the elaboration of that poetics, to be sure, but at the same time it is also just what may be put aside to achieve a view of the whole.

We may thus follow William Marx in noting that what interests Valéry is less a specific work than its “idea”:

Just as academic criticism sought to accumulate the greatest number of documents possible and accorded to extra-literary sources (correspondences, private papers, etc.) preeminent importance in its efforts, criticism in the mode of Valéry sought to limit its object to the maximum extent possible, to the point where it no longer retained in its field of observation anything but the work itself, or even less than the work: the simple idea of the work.
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According to this model, we have all a greater likelihood of grasping this idea, this “less than the work,” if we do not get too close to it, where we risk getting lost in its details. To take this theory to its extreme, what is interesting about a text—which is not the work itself, but the qualities it shares with others— might be best perceived by a critic who closes his eyes in the presence of the work and thinks, instead, about what it may be. On these grounds, any overly attentive reading, if not indeed all reading, is an obstacle to our deepest understanding of a book.

With this poetics of distance, Valéry offers rational grounds for one of our most common ways of interacting with books: skimming. When we have a book in our hands, it is rare that we read it from cover to cover, assuming such a feat is possible at all. Most of the time, we do with books what Valéry recommends doing with Proust: we skim them.

The notion of skimming or flipping through books can be understood in at least two different senses. In the first case, the skimming is linear. The reader begins the text at the beginning, then starts skipping lines or pages as, successfully or not, he makes his way toward the end. In the second case, the skimming is circuitous: rather than read in an orderly fashion, the reader takes a stroll through the work, sometimes beginning at the end. This second method implies no more ill will on the part of the reader than does the first. It simply constitutes one of our habitual ways of relating to books.

But the fertility of this mode of discovery markedly unsettles the difference between reading and non-reading, or even the idea of reading at all. In which category do we place the behavior of those who have spent a certain amount of time on a book—hours, even—without reading it completely? Should they be inclined to discuss it, is it fair to say of them that they are talking about a book they haven’t read? The same question may be raised with regard to those who, like Musil’s librarian, remain in the margins of the book. Who, we may wonder, is the better reader—the person who reads a work in depth without being able to situate it, or the person who enters no book in depth, but circulates through them all?