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 To be sure, the physical book remains identical to itself, but no longer represents the same knot of relationships once Nathan’s position in society evolves.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.20
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.
XI
Inventing Books
(in which, reading Sseki, 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)
IF 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 Sseki entrusts the narration of his tale to a cat, who begins his autobiography with these words:
I am a cat but as yet I have no name.
I haven’t the faintest idea of where I was born. The first thing I do remember is that I was cr
ying “meow, meow,” somewhere in a gloomy damp place. It was there that I met a human being for the first time in my life. Though I found this all out at a later date, I learned that this human being was called a Student, one of the most ferocious of the human race.2
The novel’s feline narrator, who will remain anonymous throughout the work, has little luck in this first encounter with the human species. He encounters a student who mistreats him, and he wakes up delirious and far from home. He then slips inside an unknown house, where he is fortunate enough to be welcomed by the owner, a professor. I Am a Cat is devoted to recounting his life in that house, where he takes up residence.
Although the point of view of our cat narrator—the feline point of view—is dominant in the book, the reader is granted a relatively complex perspective of his world. The narrator, in fact, is not an uncultivated animal, but a cat endowed with a number of skills, such as the ability to follow a conversation and even to read.
But the cat does not forget his origins; he remains connected to the feline world. He thus enters into protracted relations with two cats from his new neighborhood, the female cat Mike and the male cat Kuro. Kuro is the reigning master of the area, forcing others to respect him through physical strength. But he also occupies a special position in the novel as the animal emblem of a whole series of characters whose common characteristic is boastfulness. Kuro’s bragging centers on various domains important to cats, such as the number of mice caught, an area in which he shows no qualms about exaggerating his prowess.
Kuro has a counterpart among the humans who frequent the professor’s house. The narrator cat refers to that individual, M., as “the artist in gold-rimmed spectacles,” and he has the peculiar habit of recounting whatever stories come into his head, for the sheer pleasure of leading his listener astray.
At the beginning of the book, seeing that the professor is interested in painting and would like to do some himself, M. tells him about the Italian painter Andrea del Sarto and shares with him the theory that del Sarto would have recommended painting as much as possible in imitation of nature and learning first of all how to sketch. The professor puts his trust in this advice, but fails to become a painter. The artist then reveals to him that he has in fact invented all the alleged remarks of Andrea del Sarto and that he often takes pleasure in making up stories and playing on people’s credulity:
The artist was greatly enjoying himself. Listening to all this from the veranda, I couldn’t help wondering what my master would write in his diary about that conversation. The artist was a person who took great pleasure in fooling others. As if he did not realize how his joke about Andrea del Sarto hurt my master, he boasted more: “When playing jokes, some people take them so seriously that they reveal great comic beauty, and it’s a lot of fun. The other day I told a student that Nicholas Nickleby had advised Gibbon to translate his great History of the French Revolution3 from a French textbook and to have it published under his own name. This student has an extremely good memory and made a speech at the Japanese Literary Circle quoting everything I had told him. There were about a hundred people in the audience and they all listened very attentively.”4
The Nickleby story is absurd on two levels. For one thing, it would be more than a little difficult for the fictional character Nicholas Nickleby to give advice to Edward Gibbon, an entirely real British historian. Second, even if the two men did belong to the same universe, they would still not have been able to enter into dialogue, since Nickleby appeared for the first time in the world of letters in 1838, by which date Gibbon had already been dead for nearly fifty years.
If, in this first example, the artist makes up stories without compunction, the situation is slightly different in the next one he gives, which directly concerns our consideration of unread books:
“Then there’s another time. One evening, at a gathering of writers, the conversation turned to Harrison’s historical novel Theophano.5 I said that it was one of the best historical novels ever written, especially the part where the heroine dies. ‘That really gives you the creeps’— that’s what I said. An author who was sitting opposite me was one of those types who cannot and will not say no to anything. He immediately voiced the opinion that that was a most famous passage. I knew right away that he had never read any more of the story than I had.”6
This kind of cynicism raises several questions, one of which the professor asks the artist immediately:
With wide eyes, my nervous and weak-stomached master asked, “What would you have done if the other man had really read the story?”
The artist did not show any excitement. He thought nothing of fooling other people. The only thing that counted was not to be caught in the act.
“All I would have to do is to say that I had made a mistake in the title or something to that effect.” He kept on laughing.7
If you have begun talking about a book imprudently and your remarks are challenged, nothing prevents you from backtracking and declaring that you’ve made a mistake. Our unreading or forgetting plays such a significant role that there is little risk in declaring yourself the victim of one of the many lapses in memory induced by our reading— and non-reading—of books. Even a book that we recall with great precision is in some sense a screen book, behind which our own inner book is concealed. But in this particular case, is it really the best solution for the artist to admit his error?
In fact, Sseki’s text raises an interesting problem of logic. The artist with gold-rimmed spectacles invents a scene about the death of the heroine, so when, instead of challenging the existence of such a scene in Harrison’s book, the other man says approvingly that it is splendid indeed, he is presumed to be revealed as a liar as well. But how can the artist know for sure that he is dealing with a non-reader if he himself has never read the novel?
In the situation described by Sseki, where two non-readers of the same book carry on a dialogue about it, it is actually impossible for either of the non-readers to know whether the other is lying. There can be no conviction that anyone is lying in a conversation about a book without at least one of the participants knowing the book or having at least a vague idea of it.
But is the situation different when one of the two conversationalists, or both, have “read” the book? Sseki’s anecdote, like the game of truth in Lodge, has the merit of reminding us of the first of the two uncertainties of the virtual library, which concerns the competence of readers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know the extent to which the person with whom you are speaking about a book is lying about having read it. Not only because there is hardly another domain in which such pronounced hypocrisy holds sway, but above all because each speaker cannot possibly know the other person’s history with the book and they are thus deluding themselves if they think they can answer the question.
Such a conversation amounts to a game of dupes, in which the participants fool themselves even before fooling others, and in which their memories of books will be marked by the stakes of the situation at hand. It would, after all, be a misunderstanding of the act of reading to try to separate those who have read a certain book and those who are ignorant of it into two camps, as Lodge’s professor foolishly tried to do. It is a misunderstanding both by so-called readers, who disregard the erasure and loss that accompanies every act of reading, and so-called non-readers, who ignore the creative impulse that can arise from every encounter with a book.
To liberate ourselves from the idea that the Other knows whether we’re lying—the Other being just as much ourselves—is thus one of the primary conditions for being able to talk about books with grace, whether we’ve read them or not. In truth, of course, the knowledge at stake in our comments on books is intrinsically uncertain. And the Other, meanwhile, is a disapproving image of ourselves that we project onto our listeners, an image we have internalized based on a culture so exhaustive, and whose importance is so firmly drummed into us in school, that it impedes us from living and thinking.
But our anx
iety in the face of the Other’s knowledge is an obstacle to all genuine creativity about books. The idea that the Other has read everything, and thus is better informed than us, reduces creativity to a mere stopgap that non-readers might resort to in a pinch. In truth, readers and non-readers alike are caught up in an endless process of inventing books, whether they like it or not, and the real question is not how to escape that process, but how to increase its dynamism and its range.
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.
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Page 12
