How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (13 page)
1
. SB and HB++.
2
. “Shakespeare in the Bush,”
Natural History
,August/September 1966. On the Web:
http://www.fieldworking.com/library/bohannan.html.
3
. Ibid.
4
. Ibid.
5
. Ibid.
6
. Ibid.
7
. Ibid.
8
. Ibid.
9
. The second of the three “books” studied in this essay, the
inner
book influences all the transformations to which we subject books, turning them into
screen books
. The term
inner book
appears in Proust with a meaning close to the one I am giving it: “As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them, no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us [ . . . ] This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been printed in us by reality itself.”
Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past
, vol. 3, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 913–14.
10
.
Enquête sur Hamlet
.
11
. Ibid.
(in which Pierre Siniac demonstrates that it may
be important to watch what you say in the
presence of a writer, especially when he himself
hasn’t read the book whose author he is)
W
HEN YOU DO NOT
necessarily know the book you’re talking about, there is a person even worse to encounter than a teacher—the person at once the most interested in your opinion of a particular book, and the most likely to know whether you are telling the truth about having read it. This person is the author of the book, who is assumed a priori to have read the book himself.
One might think that you would have to have a stroke of incredible bad luck to find yourself in such a situation. Indeed, many people spend a whole lifetime of non-reading without encountering a single writer, never mind the exceptional case of the author of a book they haven’t read while pretending the contrary.
But everything depends on your professional context. Literary critics regularly come into contact with writers—all the more so, of course, in that the two groups overlap. Given that both groups often include the same people, critics move within a world so insular that in commenting on a book, they have hardly any other choice than to praise it to the skies.
Such is also the case, to my misfortune, with university professors. Very few of my colleagues, in fact, do not publish and do not feel obliged to send me their books. Every year I thus find myself in the delicate situation of giving my opinion to authors who know their own texts and who are, moreover, experienced critics, skilled in evaluating to what extent I have actually read the books, and to what extent I am bluffing.
The public remarks about books made by the two heroes of
Ferdinaud Céline
,
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Pierre Siniac’s celebrated thriller, might best be described with the word
ambiguous.
In the opening pages of the novel, Dochin and Gastinel, the two authors of the best seller
La Java brune
,
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appear as guests on a literary television program and behave rather strangely, to say the least, in their exchanges with the host. It is as though they both prefer not to answer the questions they are being asked about a book that ought to be a source of nothing but joy for them, since it has earned them a fortune and gotten them invited on television.
The younger and physically slighter of the two authors, Jean-Rémi Dochin, seems manifestly ill at ease during the broadcast:
Dochin, for his part, seemed more and more to be falling asleep, completely out of it. He seemed to be having trouble following. Before the cameras, he seemed hesitant, uncomfortable, almost never completing the few sentences he managed to say.
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It turns out Dochin has an excellent reason to appear, in the narrator’s words, “more than at sea”
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on the subject of his own book. He has been dispossessed of the book that he has supposedly cowritten by Gastinel, who is as physically imposing as his companion is slender, and who has forced his own name onto the cover with Dochin’s.
Originally approached by the writer Dochin as a possible publisher, Gastinel read the manuscript and immediately became convinced he had a huge success on his hands; he became determined to put his own name on the book as coauthor, despite not having written a word. To force Dochin to consent, Gastinel decided to blackmail him. With this goal in mind, he seduced a girl at a dance, then took her to his country house along with Dochin, whom he got drunk. After raping the young woman and running her over with his car, he filmed Dochin bending over her corpse, on which he had discreetly planted the writer’s ID.
Based on a tape closely guarded by Gastinel, Dochin is thus under constant threat of being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, but which he allowed to happen without intervening. He finds himself forced to abide by the wishes of his blackmailer, who has, in exchange for his silence, appropriated the right to be credited as coauthor of the book and to pocket half the royalties.
Though neither laying claim to another writer’s manuscript nor committing a murder seems to pose much of a moral problem to Gastinel, he is nonetheless uncomfortable at the thought of speaking about the book to a large audience. He has therefore exacted a pledge from the program’s host not to mention the contents of the book, a promise of which Gastinel reminds him as soon as the questions get specific enough to present a threat:
“Don’t forget the little deal we made before the program. Dochin and I do not in any way want to give away the plot of our novel. So, if you don’t mind, let’s talk about the authors instead. At bottom, I think that’s what your viewers are interested in anyway.”
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Gastinel’s behavior is even more surprising in that he is quite eloquent on the subject of the duo’s follow-up book, the as yet unwritten sequel to
La Java brune
, to the point of publicly recounting several of its episodes. What is clearly out of the question, at least in the presence of Dochin, is for Gastinel to speak about Dochin’s work.
As it turns out, Gastinel’s discretion is completely justified. That he prefers not to speak about the book is not due to not having read it, like many other characters we have encountered; it is because Dochin, who is nevertheless the book’s author, has not read it. In effect, Siniac’s novel constructs an unlikely situation in which one supposed coauthor is speaking about a book he has read without having written it, while the other is speaking about a book he has written but hasn’t read.
To truly understand the situation in which the two characters find themselves during this first scene, the reader must know that Dochin is not the victim of just one trap— Gastinel’s blackmail to appropriate royalties—but of two, the second of which is revealed only in the novel’s final pages and which illuminates it retrospectively. Whereas the first trap explains Dochin’s strange attitude, only in discovering the second one do we come to understand Gastinel’s.
While he was working on the manuscript of
Java brune
, Dochin, who at the time had no permanent address, was taken in by Céline Ferdinaud, the madam of a seedy hotel. Having barely begun to read the text, Céline was overcome with enthusiasm and urged Dochin to complete and publish it. She even offered to help on a practical level, by retyping the poorly typed pages that Dochin gave her each day.
The problem is that Céline seized the opportunity of this secretarial work to write a completely different novel, which she gradually substituted for Dochin’s, retaining only the title, the period during which the story took pace, and the first names of the two child protagonists. Day by day, she replaced Dochin’s poorly written and unpublishable pages with a much more carefully composed text of her own.
What is the point of this stratagem? The name Céline Ferdinaud is in fact an alias for a notorious collaborator in the Occupation, Céline Feuhant. With an eye to blackmailing a number of prominent fellow collaborators who had peacefully resumed their lives, Céline had decided to publish her fictionalized memoirs. But at the Liberation she had agreed, in exchange for a promise of impunity, to desist from calling attention to herself. Unable to publish the book as it was lest she be recognized, she discovered her lodger’s third-rate manuscript and hit upon the idea of publishing her own book under his name, without the author—if we can call him that—realizing it.
Thus two texts bearing the same title continually circulate throughout Siniac’s novel, each by turns substituting for the other. Dochin, like the reader, fails to understand how his own text—which he quite rightly judges to be execrable— could have aroused the enthusiasm of the entire critical community, which has, in fact, been given the other manuscript, written by Céline. For the duration of the ruse, then, Gastinel, who is in on the plot, is inclined to remain as vague as possible when speaking of the book in Dochin’s presence, so that Dochin will not find out that the book causing all the excitement is one he has never read.
Dochin thus finds himself in the position of having to speak about a book that is unknown to him, although he believes himself to be its author. Unlike Rollo Martins, who knew that he was not speaking about the same author as the members of his audience, Dochin has no idea he is participating in a dialogue of the deaf, since Gastinel is doing his best (failing to give him a copy of his book, among other measures) to prevent Dochin from discovering that
La Java brune
is not
La
Java brune.
It is essential for Gastinel—who has read the same book as his audience, but who must at any cost prevent his partner from being too explicit, lest the host’s reaction tip Dochin off to the substitution of the manuscript—that the comments made during the broadcast be as ambiguous as possible. One of his solutions is to insist on speaking of something other than the text, such as the lives of the authors or their next book.
Another option for Gastinel is to make sure that the discussion touches only on the few superficial aspects of the text that are shared by the two books. This is the case for the Occupation period that serves as a backdrop for both works, as well as for the two child heroes, Max and Mimile, whom Céline has made sure to retain in her version of
La Java
brune
:
[The host] came charging back: he was dying, it was clear, to talk about the novel. Gastinel rebuffed him, then consented, all the same, after emitting a declamatory sigh, to say two or three words on the work [ . . . ] It was thus agreed to say two or three little things—which were not at all compromising, there was still this obsession with not giving away the plot—about the Max and Mimile characters, whereupon the portly author directed the discussion authoritatively, as though he himself were the host of the discussion, to the Occupation in Paris in general, the raids, the restrictions, the lines in front of the poorly stocked shops, the curfew, the lists of hostages posted on the walls, the anonymous denunciations, and the entire litany of daily miseries of those four interminable years. There was nothing inappropriate in doing so, besides, since this oppressive, lugubrious atmosphere was the constant backdrop for the book.
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