bayard-how_to_talk_about

Through the analysis of this virtual space and its protective function, we see clearly that it is not just shame, linked to sce­ narios from childhood, that is in the offing when we dare to speak about books we haven't read, but a more serious threat to our self-image and the image we convey to others. In the intellectual circles where writing still counts, the books we have read form an integral part of our image, and we call that image into question when we venture to publicly announce our inner library's limits.

In this cultural context, books—whether read or unread— form a kind of second language to which we can turn to talk about ourselves, to communicate with others, and to defend ourselves in conflict. Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of ex­ cerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. We cannot coincide completely with the image the total­ ity of our reading presents; whether the image makes us look better or worse than we should, behind it all our particu­ larities vanish. And especially since books are often present within us only as little-known or forgotten fragments, we are often out of phase with the books that are our public face; they are as inadequate in the end as any other language.

In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is

imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambi­ guity and play.

In this regard, this ambiguous social space is the opposite of school—a realm of violence driven by the fantasy that there exists such a thing as thorough reading, and a place where everything is calibrated to determine whether the stu­ dents have truly read the books about which they speak and face interrogation. Such an aim is, in the end, illusory, for reading does not obey the hard logic of true and false, of waving off ambiguity and evaluating with certitude whether readers are telling the truth.

When Ringbaum insists on transforming that realm of play in which books are discussed, that space of constant negotia­ tion and intermittent hypocrisy, into a realm of truth, he locks himself into a paradox that will lead him into madness. Unable to tolerate the indecisiveness of the space within which the dis­ cussion about books takes place, he insists on seeing himself re­ flected in the other players' eyes as the best—which, given the particularity of Swallow's game, is to say the worst. He suc­ ceeds, on his own terms, in assuming this image that is less un­ settling to him, because it is less ambiguous; but in the end it leads him, reconciled with himself though he may be, to his ruin.

To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed

by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to our­ selves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

X

Imposing Your Ideas

(in which Balzac proves that one key to imposing your point of view on a book is to remember that the book is not a fixed object, and that even tying it up with string will not be sufficient to stop its motion)

A s LONG AS you have the courage, therefore, there is no rea­ son not to say frankly that you haven't read any particular book, nor to abstain from expressing your thoughts about it. The experience of not having read a book is the most com­ mon of scenarios, and only in accepting our non-reading without shame can we begin to take an interest in what is ac­ tually at stake, which is not a book but a complex interpersonal situation of which the book is less the object than the conse­ quence.

Books are not insensitive to what is said around them, in fact, but may be changed by it in just the time it takes us to have a conversation. This mobility of the text is the second great uncertainty of the ambiguous realm that is the virtual library. It compounds the kind of uncertainty we have just

examined—our uncertainty about how well those who talk about books actually know them—and will be crucial to our delineation of what strategies to adopt in these situations. These strategies will be all the more relevant in that they will not depend on an image of books as fixed objects, but instead assume that the participants in a fast-moving discussion, especially if they have the strength to impose their own points of view, can change the text itself.

Lucien Chardon, the hero of Balzac's novel Lost Illusions,1 is the son of an apothecary from Angoulême who dreams of retrieving the aristocratic name of his mother, who was born de Rubempré. Having fallen in love with a woman of the local nobility, Madame de Bargeton, he follows her to Paris, leaving behind his best friend, the printer David Séchard, who has married Lucien's sister Eve. But he is also heading for the capital with an eye to making his name in the world of letters, and he brings with him his first texts, a collection of poems called Les Marguerites2 and a historical novel called

L'Archer de Charles IX?

In Paris, Lucien finds his way into the small circle of intellectuals in control of publishing and the press and quickly discovers the reality—far removed from his illusions—of the milieu in which literature and art are produced. Its true nature

1. SB, H B , and F B + .

2. U B — .

3. U B + .

Only when she declares herself bored by what she calls "au­ thor's sentences" does he start to take the book seriously and ask the bookseller for a new copy so that he can write a favorable article.

Here we encounter once again some of the varieties of non-reading that we have already identified, in which we either surmise what a book is about without knowing it at

materials—it would tear them to shreds. N o w listen, let's stop talking shop. You see this mark?" he asked, pointing to the manuscript of Les Marguerites. "I've inked a line in between the string and the paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he certainly won't be able to put the string back along the line. So your man­ uscript is as good as sealed. It's not a bad dodge for the experiment you want to make. One more thing, just remember that you won't get into that sweatshop by yourself and without a sponsor: you'd be like those

young hopefuls who go round to ten publishers before they find one who'll even offer them a chair . . ."8

Thus does Lousteau pitilessly pursue the task of disillu­ sioning his friend, advising him, before Lucien submits his poetry manuscript to one of the most important publishers in Paris, to devise a test—a piece of ink-stained string that binds the book shut—of not only whether Dauriat has read it, but whether he has even opened it.

When Lucien returns to see Dauriat and asks whether he's read the poems, Dauriat gives him hardly any hope of being published:

"Indeed I have," said Dauriat, leaning forward in his arm­ chair like an oriental potentate. "I've glanced through the collection of poems and got a man of taste, a good judge, to read them, for I don't claim to be a connoisseur in po­ etry. I, my friend, buy ready-made reputations as an En ­ glishman buys ready-made love. You are as great a poet, my boy, as you are a handsome youngster. On my word as an honest man—I don't mean as a publisher, mind you— your sonnets are magnificent and you've put good work into them, a rare enough thing when one has inspiration and verve. In short, you know how to rhyme—one of the qualities of the modern school. Your Marguerites make a fine book, but there's no money in them, and I can only go in for very big undertakings."9

8.Ibid., p. 259.

9.Ibid., p. 353.