How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  The day takes its name from a ceremony, widely reported in the media, that happens in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, every year on February 2. On that date, a groundhog named Phil ( just like Phil Connors) is pulled from his hutch, and based on his reactions, it is determined whether the winter is about to end or will continue for six more weeks. The groundhog consultation ceremony is rebroadcast throughout the country, alerting the nation to whatever bad weather is in store.

  Having arrived on the eve of the ceremony with his crew, Phil Connors spends the night in a bed-and-breakfast. The next morning, he goes to the spot where the segment is to be shot and provides his commentary on the behavior of the groundhog, which indicates that winter will continue. With little desire to steep in small-town life any longer than necessary, Phil Connors resolves to head back to Pittsburgh that very day, but the crew’s vehicle gets stuck in a blizzard as they try to leave town, and the three journalists are forced to resign themselves to spending another night in Punxsutawney.

  Everything begins for Phil the following morning, if that phrase makes any sense, since the following morning is exactly what fails to arrive. Awakened at six o’clock by the music of his alarm clock, Phil notices that the music is the same as that of the previous day, but is not particularly concerned. His anxiety begins when he realizes that the broadcast that follows is also identical to that of the day before, and that the scenes he is seeing from his window are those he saw a day earlier. And his uneasiness increases when, upon leaving his room, he runs into the same man as the day before, who greets him with the same words.

  In this way, Phil gradually realizes that he is reliving the previous day. The remainder of the day is, in fact, an exact repetition of all the scenes he experienced twenty-four hours earlier. He encounters the same beggar asking him for money and is then approached by the same college friend—whom he hasn’t seen in years, and who has now become an insurance salesman bent on selling him a policy—before stepping in the same puddle of water. And having arrived at the location where the groundhog ceremony is being filmed, he observes the same scene as the day before, in which Phil the groundhog delivers the same verdict.

  During the third day of his stay in Punxsutawney, on hearing the same radio program for the third time as he awakes, Phil begins to realize that the temporal disorder plaguing him has not caused just one repetition, but that he is condemned to relive the same day eternally, without any hope of escaping either the small town or the time period that has enveloped it.

  His entrapment is airtight, for even death has ceased to offer any deliverance. Resolved to put an end to the sequence of identical days, Phil, after consulting a physician and a psychoanalyst both unable to intervene in this unprecedented clinical case, despairingly kidnaps the other Phil (the groundhog), steals a car, and, during a police chase, hurls himself with the animal into a ravine—before waking the next morning to discover himself unharmed, in his bed, listening to the same radio program at dawn of the same day.

  This temporal disorder is the source of a whole series of highly original situations, and linguistic situations in particular. Present on two stages—that of the day itself and that of other identical days, past and future—Phil is free to play continually on the double meanings permitted by his immobility in time and, for example, to declare to the woman he loves, as he carves an ice sculpture of her face, that he has spent some time studying her.

  If reliving the same day an infinite number of times has its inconveniences, the situation is not without its advantages. It allows you, for example, to perform actions that are possible only because of a detailed knowledge, right down to the split second, of the organization of each day. Hence Phil notices a moneybag left unattended for a few seconds in the back of an armored vehicle parked in front of a bank and, during that brief moment of inattention, makes off with it.

  The situation also ensures total impunity, since Phil is certain that whatever he does, his crimes and misdemeanors will be expunged in the night. He can thus exceed the speed limit, drive his car on train tracks, and be arrested by the police without its making any difference, since he will wake up without any of those events having occurred.

  A stoppage in time also allows you to use the strategy of trial and error. So, for instance, when Phil meets a young woman he finds attractive, he asks her to tell him her name, what high school she went to, and the name of her French teacher. When he runs into her again “the next day,” he passes himself off as an old school friend and refers to their supposedly shared memories of adolescence, thus increasing the likelihood of a conquest.

  Having gradually fallen in love with Rita, the show’s producer, Phil attempts to seduce her through the constantly improving technique accessible only to those whose actions are without consequence due to the eternal repetition of time. While having a drink with her one evening, he takes note of her favorite drink, so that he can deliberately order the same thing “next time.” And after committing the error—one that is less than fatal only in this subset of space-time—of proposing a toast to Phil the groundhog, to the scorn of his beloved, who tells him frostily that she drinks only to world peace, he improves his performance “the next day” by proposing a toast befitting a true pacifist.

  It is in the context of Phil’s day-by-day perfection of himself as a romantic interest that the scene relevant to our inquiry occurs—a scene that shows the role unread books may play in the genesis of a love affair. After many days of practice, Phil has managed to have a conversation with Rita that she finds totally satisfying—and for good reason!—in which her suitor articulates, one by one, every sentence she dreams of hearing in an ideal world of love. He is thus able, for instance, despite his being happy only in cities, to mention in her presence his dream of living in the mountains, far from all civilization.

  At this point, Phil suffers a moment of distraction and, forgetting to watch his words, makes a new mistake. In a moment of shared confidences, Rita confides to him that her college studies did not initially incline her toward a career in television, and when Phil asks for details, she tells him, “I studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry.” Her response causes Phil to burst out laughing and blurt without thinking, “You must have had a lot of time on your hands!”—at which Rita gives him an icy look, and he realizes his blunder.

  But there is nothing irreparable in this world in which everything always begins identically anew and in which mistakes can be rectified so quickly. The next time Phil hears Rita confess her passion for nineteenth-century Italian poetry— having ransacked the local library for material in the meantime, presumably—he is able to recite, with considerable pathos, excerpts from the libretto of Rigoletto,2 as the young woman looks on admiringly. Forced to talk about books he hasn’t read, all he has to do is to stretch the few seconds of his reply by one day, and he is able to comply perfectly with his beloved’s desire.

  Phil’s attempt to seduce Rita goes beyond literature. Phil takes advantage of his halt in time to learn how to play the piano and goes faithfully to his lesson “every day.” He has learned that Rita’s ideal man plays a musical instrument. Based on intensive training during a single time slot that extends over days, he is able, one evening when Rita goes to a party with live music (as she does, by definition, every night), to appear with the band as a jazz musician.

  Conversely to our other examples, Groundhog Day’s complex narrative device allows it to play out a fantasy of completion and transparency in which we see two individuals communicate about books, and thus about themselves, without any sense of loss. Having the time to study the essential books of another person, to the point where we come to share the same ones, might perhaps be what is necessary to achieve a genuine exchange on cultural matters and a perfect overlap between the two inner books.

  In the numerous situations where we find it necessary to charm another person, such a method might allow us to indicate to him or her that we share a common cultural universe. By training hi
mself in Rita’s preferred reading material and thus penetrating as deeply as possible into her private world, Phil is straining to create the illusion that their inner books are the same. And perhaps an ideal and deeply shared love should indeed give each lover access to the secret texts of which the other is composed.

  But the images and fragments of text that are the stuff of our inner books are so singular to each of us that only through an indefinite extension of time might two inner books find communion—for to do so is to achieve a melding of two people’s private worlds. In the slow-motion existence Phil is living, language is no longer an uninterrupted and irreversible flow, and it becomes possible, as in the scene of the toast to the groundhog, to stop at every sentence and examine its origin and value, connecting it to the biography and inner life of the other.

  Only such an artificial halting of time and language would allow someone else to reproduce the texts buried within us; in real life, these texts are caught up in an irresistible movement that transforms them constantly and renders all hope of overlap impossible. For if our inner books, like our fantasies, are relatively stable, the screen books about which we speak endlessly are perpetually being modified, as we shall see, and it is futile to imagine we can put a stop to their metamorphoses.

  The fantasy of overlap can thus be staged only by way of recourse to the supernatural. As we have seen, most of the time our discussions with others about books are necessarily and unfortunately based on fragments reworked by our private fantasies, and hence on something quite different from the books written by writers, who in any case don’t generally recognize themselves in what their readers say about them.

  Beyond the humor of certain situations, there is something frightening in the way Phil sets out to seduce Rita, since it effectively suppresses the uncertainty that is normally part of communication. Endlessly telling the Other the words she wants to hear, being exactly the person she expects, is paradoxically to deny her as an other, since it amounts to no longer being a subject, fragile and uncertain, in her presence.

  Since there is a moral in films, if not in life, it is not through his possession of Rita, but through his dispossession of himself, that Phil will finally achieve his ends. If the slow accumulation of the words awaited by the Other allows Phil to kiss Rita, getting the girl is not sufficient to set time back in motion; no matter how much progress he makes with his beloved, Phil continues to wake up on the same day.

  But as time goes by and events repeat identically, Phil changes and loses his arrogance toward others. He begins to take an interest in them, to ask them questions about their lives, to do them favors. The days continue to repeat, but they are now devoted to helping others, with Phil using his method for personal improvement for benevolent purposes, such as preventing an old man from freezing to death in the street or catching a little boy who falls out of a tree.

  In becoming interested in others, he himself becomes interesting, and he manages, through his kindness, to win Rita’s heart in a single day. And after falling asleep alongside her in the room where he has been waking up every day without progressing in time, he has the surprise, one day, of reawakening to discover the young woman still with him and to hear, for the first time, different music streaming from his alarm clock. Thus does he manage at last to cross the border, in one unsurpassable moment, that separates his day from the days to come.

  1. Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

  2. FB++.

  Ways of Behaving

  IX

  Not Being Ashamed

  (in which it is confirmed, with regard to the novels of David Lodge, that the first condition for speaking about a book you haven’t read is not to be ashamed)

  WE NOW ARRIVE at this book’s raison d’être: having detailed the different modes of non-reading and studied several of the situations in which the need to discuss unread books may occur, it is now time to discuss the various means of extricating ourselves from these situations with grace. Some of these solutions have already been mentioned in preceding chapters or derive logically from my remarks, but the moment has come to examine the structure of these methods more closely.

  As we have seen, talking about books has little to do with reading. The two activities are completely separable; I for one speak at greater length and with greater perception about books that I have more or less stopped reading, which grants me the necessary distance—Musil’s overall perspective—to speak about them accurately. The difference between talking about books and reading them is a function of the fact that the former implies a third party, whether present or absent. That implied third party has palpable effects on the act of reading as well, by suggesting that an outside presence might be able to change how our reading unfolds.

  As I have attempted to show in the previous section through a number of concrete situations, our discussion of books is the stage for a conflict in which our relationship with the Other, whatever its nature may be, ultimately wins out over our relationship to the text—which is itself inevitably affected by the struggle.

  There is no doubt that teaching is one of the professions that exposes us most relentlessly to the obligation to comment on unread books. Almost all of us, in fact, find ourselves having to talk about books that we lack the time—or more simply, the desire—to read. And the risk is ever present of having to speak about a given text with the author himself, or with other specialists whom it is not easy to deceive.

  A teacher himself and thus attuned to the habits of the profession, the English novelist David Lodge has reflected at least twice in his books about what attitude we should adopt with regard to books we haven’t read. The two examples figure in two novels—Changing Places1 and Small World 2 —that explore the intellectual and sentimental worlds of an academic microcosm, novels that have helped to establish a specific literary genre known as the campus novel.

  The first case, which occurs in Small World, involves a rather unusual dialogue. One of the denizens of this campus microcosm, Robin Dempsey, carries out a discussion with a computer he has borrowed, one so advanced that it can sustain a normal conversation.The machine, which answers to the name ELIZA and thus seems to be female, gradually becomes his most intimate confidant.

  Having at last discovered someone to whom he can open his heart without fear of indiscretion, Dempsey confides to ELIZA the full fury and contempt he feels for one of his colleagues, Philip Swallow:

  Robin Dempsey: I’m not feeling any better.

  ELIZA: Why is that?

  R.D.: This business about Philip Swallow.

  ELIZA: Tell me about Philip Swallow.

  R.D.: I already told you about him.

  ELIZA: Is there anything you would like to add to your previous remarks?

  R.D.: Swallow epitomizes the unfairness of life to me. At Rummidge he got the senior lectureship I should have got. Then he got the chair there by a lucky fluke. Now he’s having a great success with this pathetic book about Hazlitt.3

  All those who believe themselves to have been the victim of injustice in their academic careers will understand Dempsey’s anger. And they will recognize themselves even more in the lines that follow:

  ELIZA: Tell me about Hazlitt.

  R.D.: I’m not interested in Hazlitt. I haven’t even read Swallow’s rotten book. I don’t need to. I sat through enough tedious examiners meetings with him to know what it’s like. The idea of his being a serious candidate for the UNESCO Chair is preposterous.4

  These lines represent quite accurately the kind of goodwill that tends to prevail in academic communities, particularly when it comes to evaluating our colleagues’ work, which most often we haven’t read anyway. Clearly, David Lodge is speaking about a world he knows well.

  Like Dempsey and a number of others in the academy, I have spent enough time in meetings with my colleagues to have an idea, be it positive or negative, of the value of their books without having to read them. Contrary to the celebrat
ed Proustian argument dissociating the work from the author— or rather, contrary to a certain reading of that argument—a book is not a meteorite or the product of a hidden self. It is often, more simply, an extension of the person we know (on the condition, obviously, that we take the trouble of getting to know him), and it is quite possible to forge an opinion of it, like Dempsey, merely by spending time with the author.

  What Dempsey is saying here—and probably David Lodge as well, through him—is well known in circles where books are common. As we have established, it is not necessary to read a book to have a clear sense of it and to talk about it, not just in general terms but even in detail. For there is no such thing as an isolated book. A book is an element in the vast ensemble I have called the collective library, which we do not need to know comprehensively in order to appreciate any one of its elements (Dempsey, after all, has a keen sense of what kind of book he is dealing with). The trick is to define the book’s place in that library, which gives it meaning in the same way a word takes on meaning in relation to other words.

  We are never dealing with just the book in our hand, but with a set of books common to our particular culture, where any individual book in the set might be lacking. So there is no reason not to tell the truth: to acknowledge that we haven’t read some specific element in the collective library, which in no way prevents us from having an overall view of the library and remaining one of its readers. It is the entire library that is called into play through each book, which serves as a kind of temporary shimmering prism through which we see the whole. Dempsey’s view of his colleague’s book is thus perfectly reasonable, as far as subjective opinions go, and it is unlikely that it would be noticeably different if he had taken the time to read it.