How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  III

  Books You Have Heard Of

  (in which Umberto Eco shows that it is wholly unnecessary to have held a book in your hand to be able to speak about it in detail, as long as you listen to and read what others say about it)

  THE LOGICAL IMPLICATION of this theory—that cultural literacy involves the dual capacity to situate books in the collective library and to situate yourself within each book—is that it is ultimately unnecessary to have handled a book to have a sense of it and to express your thoughts on the subject. The act of reading is disassociated from the material book; the important thing is the encounter, which might just as easily involve an immaterial object.

  Besides actually reading a book, there is, after all, another way to develop quite a clear sense of its contents: we can read or listen to what others write or say about it. This tactic (which, as you may recall, Valéry freely employed in the case of Proust) can save you a lot of time. It can also be necessary when a book is lost or has disappeared, or, as we shall see, when the quest for it imperils the life of the person wishing to read it.

  This is, in fact, the extent to which we have access to most books, most of the time. Many of the books we are led to talk about, and which have, in certain cases, played important roles in our lives, have never actually passed through our hands (although we may sometimes be convinced of the contrary). But the way other people talk to us or to each other about these books, in their texts or conversations, allows us to forge an idea of their contents, and even to formulate a reasonable opinion of them.

  In The Name of the Rose,1 a novel set in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco describes how a monk named William of Baskerville, accompanied by a young man named Adso— who writes the story many years later, when he himself is an old man—arrives to conduct an investigation in an abbey in northern Italy, where a suspicious death has occurred.

  At the center of the abbey an immense library has been built in the form of a labyrinth; its holdings are the largest in all of Christendom. This library occupies a major place within the religious community and thus within the novel—both as a place of study and reflection, and as at the heart of a whole system of interdictions governing the right to read, since books are delivered to the monks only after authorization.

  In his search for the truth about the murders, Baskerville finds himself in competition with the Inquisition and its formidable representative, Bernard Gui, who is convinced that the crimes are the work of heretics—specifically, the adepts of Dolcino, the founder of a sect hostile to the papacy. Through torture, Gui wrests from several monks confessions that support his views. Baskerville, meanwhile, remains unconvinced of the accuracy of his reasoning.

  Indeed, Baskerville has arrived at a different conclusion. He believes that the deaths have no direct relation to heresy, and that the monks have been killed for having attempted to read a mysterious book guarded jealously within the library. He gradually formulates an idea of the contents of the book and the reasons why its guardian has resorted to murder. His violent confrontation with the murderer, in the last pages of the novel, sets off a massive fire in the library, which the monks save from destruction only at great cost.

  In this final scene, then, the investigator comes face-to-face with the murderer. This turns out to be Jorge, one of the oldest monks in the abbey, who has lost his sight. Jorge congratulates Baskerville for having solved the mystery and, apparently admitting his defeat, hands him the book that has led to so many deaths. A heterogeneous volume, the book includes an Arabic text, a Syrian text, an interpretation of the Coena Cypriani2—a parody of the Bible—and a fourth text in Greek, the one responsible for the murders.

  This book, hidden among the others, is the lost second volume of Aristotle’s celebrated Poetics.3 In this second volume, which at the time was not yet listed in bibliographies, the Greek philosopher is known to have continued his reflections on literature, this time exploring the theme of laughter.

  Jorge responds strangely to Baskerville’s accusations. Rather than preventing the investigator from consulting the book, he instead challenges him to read it. Baskerville agrees, but first takes the precaution of arming himself with a pair of gloves. Thus equipped, he opens the book to discover the first lines of a text that he believes to have claimed several victims:

  In the first book we dealt with tragedy and saw how, by arousing pity and fear, it produces catharsis, the purification of those feelings. As we promised, we will now deal with comedy (as well as with satire and mime) and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion. That such passion is most worthy of consideration we have already said in the book on the soul, inasmuch as—alone among the animals—man is capable of laughter. We will then define the types of actions of which comedy is the mimesis, then we will examine the means by which comedy excites laughter, and these means are actions and speech. We will show how the ridiculousness of actions is born from the likening of the best to the worst and vice versa [ . . . ] We will then show how the ridiculousness of speech is born from the misunderstandings of similar words for different things and different words for similar things, etc.4

  It would seem to be confirmed, especially given the evocation of other titles by Aristotle, that this mysterious work is indeed the second volume of the Poetics. After reading the first page and translating it into Latin, Baskerville attempts to leaf through the following pages. But he encounters a material difficulty, since the deteriorated pages are stuck to each other and he cannot separate them while wearing gloves. Jorge exhorts him to keep leafing through the book, but Baskerville firmly refuses to do so.

  He has understood that to keep turning the pages, he would have to take off his gloves and moisten his fingertips, and that in so doing he would poison himself, just as the other monks who had come too close to the truth. Jorge has decided to dispatch troublesome researchers by applying poison to the upper part of the book, where the reader places his fingers. It is an exemplary murder, in which the victim poisons himself to the very extent that he violates Jorge’s ban and continues to read.

  But why systematically execute those who are interested in the second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics? When William questions him, Jorge confirms what the monk-detective has intuited. The murders were committed to prevent the monks from gaining knowledge of the contents of this book. Rather than condemning laughter, the book dignifies it as an object worthy of study—and to Jorge, laughter is antithetical to faith. By reserving the right to turn anything into an object of derision, it opens the path to doubt, which is the enemy of revealed truth:

  “But what frightened you in this discussion of laughter? You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.”

  “No, to be sure. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humors and distracts from other desires and other ambitions . . . Still, laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians [ . . . ] But here, here”—now Jorge struck the table with his finger, near the book William was holding open—“here the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the learned of the world are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy and of perfect theology.”5

  Laughter is thus a threat to faith in that it serves as a vehicle for various forms of doubt. This threat is all the more significant in that the book’s author is Aristotle, whose influence was considerable in the Middle Ages:

  “There are many other books that speak of comedy, many others that praise laughter. Why did this one fill you with such fear?”

  “Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries. The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then
Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter [ . . . ] Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the world. But he has not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become . . . had become an object for interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”6

  So it is not laughter alone, but the stamp of Aristotle’s approval that, for Jorge, constitutes a danger for religion and justifies the murders. With the backing of a philosopher of such stature, the theory that laughter is beneficent—or simply not harmful—risks being broadly disseminated, which might subliminally undermine Christian doctrine. From Jorge’s point of view, keeping the book out of the hands of the monks is a pious deed well worth a few victims. Their lives are the price paid for rescuing true faith and protecting it from interrogation.

  How did Baskerville arrive at the truth? He has not held the book in his hands until this last scene—in which, moreover, he takes care not to have any direct physical contact with it— and much less has he read it. But he has, all the same, formed a relatively exact sense of it, so much so that he is able to describe its contents to Jorge:

  “Gradually, this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai—that is, from the peasant villages—as a joyous ceremony after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it [ . . . ] Is that it?”7

  It is possible, then, to speak with relative precision (“I could tell you almost all of it”) about a book one has never held in one’s hands, a point of no small interest in a case where touching the book would be fatal. We derive this ability from the fact that every book is governed by a certain logic, that logic so interesting to Valéry that he embraced it to the exclusion of all else. Aristotle’s book functions first of all as an extension of his Poetics, which Baskerville knows well. Having intuited the subject of the second book, and knowing the trajectory of the first one, Baskerville is able to predict the forbidden book’s general outlines.

  The book obeys a second kind of logic, that of its internal development, which Baskerville is also able to reconstitute based on Aristotle’s other books. A book’s means of progression is never completely idiosyncratic. All works by the same author present more or less perceptible similarities of structure, and beyond their manifest differences, they secretly share a common way of ordering reality.

  But a third and equally important element, this one not intrinsic to the work, but external, makes it possible to gain a sense of the contents of Aristotle’s book—namely, the reactions that it has provoked. A book is not limited to itself, but from the moment of dissemination also encompasses the exchanges it inspires. To observe these exchanges, then, is tantamount to gaining access to the book, if not actually to reading it.

  It is through just such exchanges that Baskerville has come to know the contents of Aristotle’s book. When Jorge, in astonishment and admiration (“Not bad,” he says8), asks him how he reconstituted a book he has never held in his hands, Baskerville explains that his inspiration was the research conducted by Venantius, the murdered monk who preceded him in his quest and left certain clues behind:

  “[I was helped by several notes left by Venantius.] At first I didn’t understand their significance. But there were references to a shameless stone that rolls over the plain, and to cicadas that will sing from the ground, to venerable fig trees. I had already read something of the sort: I verified it during these past few days. These are examples that Aristotle used in the first book of the Poetics, and in the Rhetoric.9 Then I remembered that Isidore of Seville defines comedy as something that tells of stupra virginum et amores meretricum . . .”10

  Through these written exchanges about the book (Venantius’s notes), but also through spoken exchanges (comments by those who approached the mysterious book, sometimes without realizing it), and reactions to it (beginning, of course, with the murders), Baskerville has gained an increasingly clear sense of the volume before it enters his possession, enough, even, to re-create it in its absence. However original and scandalous it might be, this book, like any other, is not an isolated object but part and parcel of the collective library.

  This book, moreover, figures in a collective library whose foundations it stands to undermine, and it is for precisely this reason that Jorge resorts to murder. The book is a threat to the abbey’s library, first of all, since it risks attracting the monks to that site of discovery and perdition that is culture. But from Jorge’s perspective, Aristotle’s second volume also jeopardizes another library without walls—the collective library of man. Our reading of the other books in that library, starting with the Bible, would forever be modified by Aristotle’s work. Within the interminable chain that links all books together, a single book has the capacity to displace every other one.

  The celebrated plot of The Name of the Rose obscures two important and related elements in Eco’s novel that bear on our subject. First of all, it is not through implacable logic (as the name of the investigator and his precise conclusion about the contents of Aristotle’s book might lead one to think) but, in fact, through a series of false deductions that Baskerville arrives at the truth.

  If the final conversation with Jorge allows Baskerville to unmask the alleged murderer, it also shows him the extent to which he has gone astray in his reasoning. Based on his analysis of the first deaths, Baskerville has concluded that the murderer was literally following the prophecies of the Apocalypse, and that the nature of the crimes was in keeping with the text on the seven trumpets.11

  In reality, as is revealed only after the fact, his search for the truth has been further confounded by the fact that Jorge, spying on Baskerville and seeing him home in on his Apocalypse-based interpretation of the murders, decided to lure him further into error by planting a number of false clues designed to encourage him in his thesis. To make matters even more dizzying, in deceiving Baskerville the murderer ended up deceiving himself, becoming persuaded that the deaths were indeed occurring according to a providential plan.12 Thus Baskerville is led to observe that he has reached the truth, but only thanks to the random accumulation of his errors:

  I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it. And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail.13

  Baskerville’s many false deductions raise another problem, which the book does not confront directly but only suggests: namely, it invites us to wonder whether his ultimate solution is correct after all. If we admit that Baskerville has succeeded in identifying the culprit and the book not through correct reasoning but through a series of erroneous deductions, then there is no guarantee that his conclusions are accurate. Given an investigator who never ceases to get things wrong, we may be forgiven for not accepting his final conclusions at face value.14

  We cannot exclude the possibility of a twofold error about both the book and the murderer, then, nor can we reject the notion that Baskerville may have gotten things right in one case and wrong in the other. That Jorge is the murderer remains to be proven; meanwhile, he may have every reason to encourage Baskerv
ille in the illusion that the mysterious book is indeed the second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly if he is intent on protecting an even more formidable book. The ironic attitude Jorge maintains until the end, without ever truly authenticating Baskerville’s solution, casts a shadow of doubt over a conclusion that, in the wake of so many accumulated errors, seems at the very least impossible to verify.

  Eco’s novel illustrates that the books we talk about are only glancingly related to “real” books—indeed, what else would we expect?—and are often no more than screen books.15 Or, if you prefer, what we talk about is not the books themselves, but substitute objects we create for the occasion.

  On a purely material level, Aristotle’s book is largely a virtual object, since neither Jorge nor Baskerville has access to it. Jorge lost his vision many years before the story begins, and so his notion of the book is based solely on memory, which is further distorted by his madness. As for Baskerville, he can do no more than rapidly skim the book and is forced to rely primarily on his reconstruction of it, the uncertainty of which has already been demonstrated. Without question, then, the two men are speaking about two different books, each having constructed an imaginary object based on his own personal agenda.

  The impossibility of accessing the text only serves to highlight its projective nature, as the book becomes the receptacle of both characters’ fantasies. To Jorge, Aristotle’s book is a locus for his anxieties about threats to the Church, while for Baskerville it provides support for his relativistic reflections on faith. Their fantasies are all the less likely to overlap, other than through shared illusion, in that neither of the two men has, properly speaking, the text in hand.

  To convince yourself that any book we may talk about is a screen book, a substitute element in the endless chain of all books, perform the simple experiment of comparing your memory of a book cherished in childhood with the “real” book. The invariable differences demonstrate the extent to which our memory of books, most particularly those that matter to the point where they become part of us, is endlessly reorganized by the unconscious stakes of our present circumstances.