We Are the Book We’re Talking About
And we are what’s at stake in truth-telling.
We’re taught in school to read the book before we talk about it. But here’s the thing: Even if we do read it, we’ll quickly forget it. So maybe we only skim it. Or maybe we never even open the book — we’ve merely heard of the title and listened to what others say about it.
It turns out that this non-reading is an effective, adequate strategy. Why should we need to read every word if we’re going to forget those words mere minutes later? What we need to know is…well, just whatever we need to know about, which might be a general idea surrounding the book and is not necessarily a fact contained within the book nor a fact describing the book.
This is discussed by Pierre Bayard, professor of French literature at the University of Paris, in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (translated by Jeffrey Mehlman). Bayard approaches this solely in the context of academia and literary criticism. He’s talking to people whose careers are invested in explaining, say, Shakespeare or Proust.
His idea is that “it is ultimately unnecessary to have handled a book to have a sense of it” and that “cultural literacy” is more about having a sense of that book, i.e., knowing what it means to you and being prepared to talk about it. The activity we call…
