Never read Ulysses? Me neither

Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is an invaluable guide to subverting the reading classes, says Toby Lichtig Sunday January 6, 2008 in The Observer

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Readby Pierre Bayard;

translated by Jeffrey MehlmanGranta £12

Pierre Bayard is a Paris-based professor of French literature. As such, he is a practised charlatan, a literary bullshitter, a professional 'non-reader'. 'Because I teach literature at university level,' he says, regretfully, 'there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened.'
Bayard is infiltrating a 'forbidden subject', an area equivalent to 'finance and sex' in its secrecy. Despite society's 'worship' of reading, he avers, we are most of us heathens, even among the literary elite. And quite right, too: why waste time reading Joyce and Proust when you can talk about them - or skim the work of others? Taking it as given that no one actually reads for the pleasure of the process, Bayard proceeds to investigate the meaning of bibliographic cultural capital.

'Non-reading' for Bayard, is 'a genuine activity'. It implies an engagement with
literature and is different from mere 'absence of reading'. A 'true reader'
is simply 'one who cares about being able to reflect on literature'. With so
little time and so many books, he argues, it is better to spread the net
wide and settle for a general sense of the multitude.
Bayard invokes Paul Valery
- 'that master of non-reading' - who, rather like Oscar Wilde, claimed the
critic depends 'neither on the author nor the text'. Readers must be
creative, for to read is to interpret which is also, by necessity, to write.
Just as Flaubert once wrote a book 'about nothing,' so, too, should the
'true reader' be able to opine about nothing. Excessive reading, for Valery,
'stripped France of its individuality'.

Bayard's approach is Derridean: a focus on the relation between objects and the systems that
support these. He perceives books themselves as a 'system', important only
in so far as they are received within society: the gossip that they
generate; the ideas that they spawn; the conflicts that they provoke.
'Relations among ideas are far more important than the ideas themselves,' he
insists. Thus, it is only ever necessary to get a rough sense of what any
particular book is about - and where to place it in the 'collective
library'.

This is particularly true given the frailties of subjectivity. Each reader is haunted by their 'inner
book' - 'the set of mythic representations... that come between the reader
and any new piece of writing'. Then come the problems of memory. Bayard
leads us, via Montaigne, to the somewhat undergraduate argument that to read
is inevitably to forget. 'At this point, saying we have read a book becomes
essentially a form of metonymy.'

The rest of the review is here.