How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (9 page)
In reading his notes in order to comment on these texts— which he may not remember reading, and even if he does, whose contents he may have forgotten—Montaigne finds himself in a contradictory position. The commentary he is reading is not exactly his, without its being foreign to him either. He conveys to his reader the reaction he had to these books on an earlier occasion, without taking the trouble to verify whether that reaction coincides with what he might experience today.
For Montaigne, an inveterate practitioner of the art of quotation, this is an unprecedented situation: instead of citing other writers, he cites himself. Indeed, at this extreme the distinction between quotation and self-quotation vanishes. Having forgotten what he said about these authors and even that he said anything at all, Montaigne has become other to himself. He is separated from the earlier incarnation of himself by the defects of his memory, and his readings of his notes represent so many attempts at reunification.
However surprising we may find Montaigne’s reliance on this system of notes, he is, after all, only drawing out the logical consequence of something known to anyone familiar with books, whatever the state of his memory. What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.
The reader of Montaigne has still more surprises ahead of him. The author goes on to reveal that as forgetful as he may be of other people’s books, to the point where he cannot even recall whether he has read them, he is no more capable of remembering his own:
It is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive.
9
Incapable of remembering what he has written, Montaigne finds himself confronted with the fear of all those losing their memory: repeating yourself without realizing it, and knowing the anguish of losing mastery over your own writing only to remain unwittingly all too faithful to yourself. His fear is all the more justified in that the
Essais
address not topical subjects, but timeless questions. These may be broached on any occasion, and a writer without memory is thus vulnerable to treating them again without knowing it, and in identical terms:
Now I am bringing in here nothing newly learned. These are common ideas; having perhaps thought of them a hundred times, I am afraid I have already set them down.
10
These “repetitions,” which Montaigne finds regrettable in an author like Homer, seem to him even more “ruinous” in texts like his own, “which attract only superficial and passing attention,”
11
and which he risks rewriting word by word, from one chapter to the next, without even perceiving it.
But fear of repeating himself is not the only embarrassing consequence of forgetting his own books. Another is that Montaigne does not even recognize his own texts when they are quoted in his presence, leaving him to speak about texts he hasn’t read even though he has written them.
For Montaigne, therefore, reading is related not only to defective memory, but also, given the contradictions that arise from it, to the anguish of madness. While reading is enriching in the moment it occurs, it is at the same time a source of depersonalization, since, in our inability to stabilize the smallest snippet of text, it leaves us incapable of coinciding with ourselves.
With his repeated sense that his self is being eclipsed, Montaigne, more than any of the other authors we have thus far encountered, seems to erase any distinction between reading and non-reading. Indeed, if after being read a book immediately begins to disappear from consciousness, to the point where it becomes impossible to remember whether we have read it, the very notion of reading loses its relevance, since any book, read or unread, will end up the equivalent of any other.
However extreme his case may be, Montaigne’s relationship with books reveals the true nature of the relationship we all have with them. We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. In the end we are left with falsified remnants of books, analogous to the screen memories discussed by Freud, whose principal function is to conceal others.
Following Montaigne, we should perhaps use the term
unreading
rather than reading to characterize the unceasing sweep of our forgetfulness. This process involves both the disappearance and the blurring of references, and transforms books, often reduced to their titles or to a few approximate pages, into dim shadows gliding along the surface of our consciousness.
In every consideration of reading, we should remain mindful that books are linked not only to knowledge, but also to loss of memory and even identity. To read is not only to inform ourselves, but also, and perhaps above all, to forget, and thus to confront our capacity for oblivion.
The
reading subject
that emerges in this essay of Montaigne’s is not a unified and self-assured figure but an uncertain one, lost among fragments of texts he can barely identify. For this figure, no longer able to distinguish his own texts from those of others, each encounter with a book becomes terrifying, for it threatens to bring him face-to-face with his own madness.
As agonizing as it may be, Montaigne’s experience may nonetheless have the salutary effect of reassuring those to whom cultural literacy seems unattainable. It is vital to keep in mind that the most conscientious readers we might speak to are also, just like Montaigne, involuntary non-readers, and that their forgetfulness extends even to books that in all good faith they believe themselves to have mastered.
To conceive of reading as loss—whether it occurs after we skim a book, in absorbing a book by hearsay, or through the gradual process of forgetting—rather than as gain is a psychological resource essential to anyone seeking effective strategies for surviving awkward literary confrontations. Having defined the different kinds of non-reading, it is to these social situations that we now turn our attention.
1
. SB and HB++.
2
. The
Complete Essays of Montaigne
, translated by Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 296.
3
. Ibid., p. 494.
4
. Ibid., p. 305.
5
. HB++.
6
. Montaigne, op. cit., p. 305.
7
. UB+.
8
. Montaigne, op. cit., p. 306.
9
. Ibid., p. 494.
10
. Ibid., p. 734.
11
. Ibid.
(in which Graham Greene describes a nightmarish
situation where the hero finds himself facing an
auditorium full of admirers impatiently waiting for
him to speak about books that he hasn’t read)
H
AVING EXAMINED THE PRINCIPAL KINDS
of non-reading, which, as we have seen, may take more subtle forms than a simple absence of reading pure and simple, let us now consider several common situations in which the reader (or rather, the non-reader) finds himself forced to speak about books he hasn’t read. It is my hope that these reflections, inspired by my personal experience, will be of use to the nonreader in negotiating such situations himself.
The most common literary confrontations are those that occur in our social lives, and of these the most vexing are those in which we are expected to express ourselves in front of a group. On such occasions, the conversation may turn to a book we have not read. If the book in question is assumed to be known by all cultivated individuals, or if we make the error of blurting out that we
have
read it, we may find ourselves forced to try to save face.
This is an unpleasant situation, no doubt, but with a little finesse we may extricate ourselves from it at no great cost— by changing the subject, for example. But it’s easy to imagine such a situation turning into a nightmare, in which the person being forced to speak about a book he hasn’t read is subjected to the rapt attention of an entire audience eager to know his thoughts. Such circumstances bring to mind what Freud calls the “examination dream,” in which the terrified dreamer imagines himself summoned to an exam for which he is not prepared, and which calls back to consciousness a whole series of buried childhood fears.
1
This is indeed what happens to Rollo Martins in
The Third
Man
, the Graham Greene novel that inspired Carol Reed’s celebrated film. At the beginning of the book, Martins, the story’s protagonist, arrives in postwar Vienna, which has been divided into four sectors respectively controlled by France, England, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
Martins has traveled to Vienna to find his childhood friend Harry Lime, who has asked Martins to come meet him. But when he arrives at Lime’s home, he discovers that his friend has just died in an accident, struck down by a car as he left his house. Martins heads to the cemetery where the funeral is being held, and there meets Anna, Lime’s mistress, along with a military police officer named Calloway.
In questioning various witnesses in the days that follow, Martins notices a number of contradictions, and he becomes convinced that his friend was the victim not of an accident, but of a murder. Calloway also has doubts about the circumstances of Lime’s death, but for other reasons. He knows that Lime was not only the considerate friend Martins remembers, but also an unscrupulous profiteer who took advantage of the postwar period to sell tainted penicillin, whose effects were fatal for those who consumed it.
Meanwhile, Martins has fallen in love with Anna. One day, as he leaves her apartment building, Martins notices a man standing watch in the street, who turns out to be Lime. He is, in fact, still alive and has staged his own disappearance with the help of a few accomplices out of fear of being arrested by the police.
