How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (17 page)

Believing he is conversing with a mere machine, Dempsey reveals himself in all his naked truth to one of the people who most strongly motivate his instinct for self-protection. First of all, he reveals his true hatred for one of his colleagues, a feeling that the rules of polite society and above all of academia oblige him to disguise. But second, he reveals another truth that lurks behind academia’s polite conventions about culture: that the way we approach cultural objects is often both violent and approximate.

As long as we strive for an image of cultural literacy that only serves to disguise us from others and ourselves, our more or less unconscious shame about the real nature of our interaction with books will weigh on all our relations with them and everything we say about them. If we really intend to find adequate solutions to our daily confrontations with our shortcomings, we need to recognize this shame and analyze its foundations. Only in doing so can we hope to survive the avalanche of fragments of books that threatens to engulf us, in the face of which our deepest identity is revealed to be in permanent danger.

If Dempsey is disinclined to confess—except to a computer— that, like the rest of us, he sometimes talks about books he hasn’t read, this is not the case for the characters in another of Lodge’s novels,
Changing Places
, who stage a veritable game of truth about unread books.

The game is the invention of the same Philip Swallow whose possible appointment to the UNESCO Chair so appalled Dempsey in
Small World.
In
Changing Places
, which unfolds several years earlier, the British professor Swallow (at a humbler phase of his career) exchanges academic positions with a brilliant American professor from the West Coast, Morris Zapp. The job swap is quickly compounded by the two men swapping wives as well.

During his stay in California, Swallow initiates a few students into a game he calls Humiliation:

He taught them a game he had invented as a postgraduate student, in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn’t read, and scored a point for every person present who
had
read it. The Confederate Soldier and Carol were joint winners, scoring four points out of a possible five with
Steppenwolf
⁶
and
The
Story of O
⁷
respectively, Philip in each case accounting for the odd point. His own nomination,
Oliver Twist
^8—
usually a certain winner—was nowhere.
⁹

One sees why the game is called Humiliation. To score points, each person has to come up with books that nearly everyone has read, but which he hasn’t. Contrary to the ordinary goals of parlor games, especially in academia, where displaying one’s cultural sophistication is usually the goal, the game is based on exhibiting one’s lack of cultural knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the way our displays of culture in social settings, before the mirror of others, awakens unreasonable feelings of shame.

The game thus consists in humiliating yourself as much as possible: the more you humiliate yourself, the more likely you are to win. But there is an additional twist, which is that victory also depends on sincerity. To win, you must not only give the name of a well-known book, but also convince the others that you have told the truth about not having read it. If you give the name of a book that is too well known, such that it is actually implausible for you not to have read it, the other players have the right to reject your statement. The chance of winning is thus proportional to the players’ trust in the person confessing his ignorance, and so also in proportion to the genuineness of the player’s humiliation.

Another round of Humiliation is played later on in the novel and is recounted to us by Désirée, the wife of Morris Zapp, the American professor, in a letter to her husband. Désirée has started sleeping with Swallow, the Brit having thus replaced Zapp absolutely. During a faculty gathering, Swallow proposes that they play Humiliation. However, one of the professors present, Howard Ringbaum, finds it hard to swallow the impossible situation in which players are placed, that of being able to succeed only by losing and of gaining prestige only to the extent that they humiliate themselves:

You know Howard, he has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two urges at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture. At first his psyche just couldn’t absorb the paradox and he named some eighteenth-century book so obscure I can’t remember the name of it. Of course, he came last in the final score, and sulked.
¹⁰

Ringbaum withdraws from the game, which is continued with such titles as Milton’s
Paradise Regained
,
¹¹
which the chairman of the English department, to the stupefaction of all present, confesses to not having read. But Ringbaum keeps an eye on what’s going on and abruptly decides, at one point, to intervene:

Well, on the third round, Sy was leading the field with
Hiawatha
,
¹²
Mr. Swallow being the only other person who hadn’t read it, when suddenly Howard slammed his fist on the table, jutted his jaw about six feet over the table and said:

“Hamlet!”

Well, of course, we all laughed, not very much because it didn’t seem much of a joke. In fact it wasn’t a joke at all. Howard admitted to having seen the Laurence Olivier movie, but insisted that he had never read the text of
Hamlet
. Nobody believed him of course, and this made him sore as hell. He said did we think he was lying and Sy more or less implied that we did. Upon which Howard flew into a great rage and insisted on swearing a solemn oath that he had never read the play. Sy apologized through tight lips for having doubted his word. By this time, of course, we were all cold sober with embarrassment. Howard left, and the rest of us stood around while trying to pretend nothing had happened.
¹³

The example of
Hamlet—
arguably the greatest work in the English canon, and whose symbolic import is thus significant—shows the complexity inherent in the game of truth, a complexity that is compounded in the case of academia. In point of fact, a professor of English literature runs only a minimal risk in admitting—or pretending to admit— that he hasn’t read
Hamlet
. For one thing, no one is likely to believe him. And for another, the play is so well known that it is not necessary to have read it to speak about it. If it is true that he hasn’t “read”
Hamlet
, Ringbaum certainly has at his disposal a great deal of information about it and, in addition to Laurence Olivier’s movie adaptation, is familiar with other plays by Shakespeare. Even without having had access to its contents, he is perfectly well equipped to gauge its position within the collective library.

Thus everything might have gone swimmingly if Ringbaum—as a result of the latent violence of the game, but also due to the psychological conflict mentioned by Désirée—had not committed an error, which was to not allow the
ambiguity
on the subject of his knowledge of the play to persist. In insisting on his ignorance, he excluded himself from the indefinite cultural space that we generally allow to reign between ourselves and others, within which we tacitly accord ourselves—and simultaneously accord them—a margin of ignorance. We do of course know at some level that all cultural literacy, even the most highly developed, is constructed around gaps and fissures (Lodge mentions Howard’s fear of “a gap in his culture”) that are no real obstacle to its taking on a certain consistency as a body of information.

This realm of communication about books—and more generally about culture—might be characterized as a
virtual
library
,
¹⁴
both because it is a space dominated by images (images of oneself, in particular) rather than books and because it is not a realm based in reality. It is subject to a number of rules whose goal is to maintain it as a consensual space in which books are replaced by fictions of books. It is also a realm of play, not unlike that of childhood or the theater, a kind of play that can be pursued only if the principal rules are not transgressed.

One of the implicit rules of the virtual library is that we must not attempt to find out the extent to which someone who claims he has read a book has actually done so, for two reasons. The first is that life in the virtual library would quickly become unlivable if not for a certain amount of ambiguity around the truth of our statements, and if we were instead forced to reply clearly to questions about what exactly we had read. The other reason is that the very notion of what sincerity would mean is questionable, since knowing what is meant by
having read a book
, as we have seen, is highly problematic.

In declaring that he hasn’t “read”
Hamlet
, in telling the truth—or what he believes to be the truth—Ringbaum violates the fundamental rule of the virtual library, which is that it is fine to talk about books one hasn’t read. In so doing, he transforms the space of this exchange, through a brutal exposure of his private sphere, into a place of violence. Through this gesture, indeed, he unveils the truth of culture, which is that it is a theater charged with concealing individual ignorance and the fragmentation of knowledge. In so doing, he does not merely expose his nakedness but effects a kind of psychic rape of the others.

The violence of the reaction to which he will be subjected is commensurate with the violence he has exercised on the normally playful stage of the virtual library. In daring to utter the truth about his reading of Shakespeare, but also, as a consequence, about the nature of the space in which we talk about books, Ringbaum finds himself exiled from it. His sanction is not long in coming, as recounted by Désirée at the end of her letter:

A piquant incident, you must admit—but wait till I tell you the sequel. Howard Ringbaum unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read
Hamlet
. The story had been buzzed all round the campus, of course, and there was even a paragraph alluding to it in the
Euphoric State Daily
. Furthermore, as this created an unexpected vacancy in the Department, they’ve reconsidered the case of Kroop and offered him tenure after all. I don’t suppose he’s read
Hamlet
either, but nobody was asking.
¹⁵

As Désirée observes, the question of whether the person replacing Ringbaum—who at this point has no other choice than to kill himself—has read
Hamlet
is secondary. What is important is that he not step out of the intermediary space of virtual books, which allows us to live and communicate with others. And rather than risk any violence to that consensual space, which cloaks us like a protective garment, we may well prefer to avoid asking a candidate, at least in this context, the exact extent of his knowledge of Shakespeare.