(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Bayard is a French professor of literature and a psychoanalyst.
The richness of a novel arises from its incompleteness. Fictional worlds are necessarily incomplete, so as readers we must intervene through our interpretations. A “text is illegible unless the reader gives it final form, for instance by imagining, consciously or unconsciously, innumerable details that are not directly provided” (Motte 2011, 270 (quoted in)). We’re obliged to complete the fictional world.
For example, when Bayard identified a miscarriage of justice in a detective novel, he believed that it needed to be redressed not only in the fictional world but, especially, in the real world, because when we accept it without protest it affects our world by something like contagion (p. 272). We should engage in “detective criticism”: active intervention that does not “merely register the weaknesses of the texts and cast doubt on presumed killers, it dares to pursue its consequences to the end, as it seeks the real killers” (pp. 273–4 (quoted in)). We shouldn’t merely observe a fictional world, but inhabit it, imagine what would result from us intervening in specific ways. Engaging with a text in this way can make us more attentive to scandals in the real world.
Between this fictional world and ours there is an “immense intermediate world” (p. 278 (quoted in)). Bayard’s deeply intuitive approach to interpretation sees “secret passages” between even the most distant texts. Each work is a small part of a universe of universal texts (ibid. (quoted in)):
In a sentence, in the corners of a novelistic structure, in the unexplained gesture of a character, lie openings that one may take to sneak into another work, or to import therefrom into the one where one resides elements that might enrich it
That we complete the fictional world means that our interpretations are indelibly stamped with our consciousness. No text is independent of our subjectivity: “neutral reading does not exist” (p. 275 (quoted in)). Further, “every literary work represents us unconsciously, or, if you prefer, speaks essentially about us” (ibid. (quoted in)). It contains something of us before we even read it because we belong to its universe. A critical reader strolls through the work, becomes one its characters, and come to terms with themselves.
Viewing fiction in this way leads Bayard to assert the autonomy of fictional characters: “they are not mere paper figures, but living beings who lead an autonomous existence, sometimes going so far as to commit murder unbeknownst to the author” (p. 286). We inhabit their world, and they inhabit ours: the boundary between them is porous, passages traverse it in both directions. Characters are neither wholly controlled by the writer nor the reader, so the fictional world is even more incomplete, and even more difficult to limit in extent. They constantly interpenetrate because both worlds are largely constructed through language (p. 288 (quoted in)):
We must conclude that one cannot distinguish real people and imaginary characters through language, and that consequently the integration of those figures is inevitable, whether one be open-minded or not
Interpretation is legitimated by faithful introspection. When speaking of books he hasn’t read, or “recounting incidents which, strictly speaking, do not occur in them”, he articulates (p. 277 (quoted in)):
a subjective truth, describing with the greatest possible accuracy what I saw in them, faithful to myself, and remaining attentive to the moment and the circumstances in which I felt obliged to invoke them
This theme is continued in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, where Bayard considers cultural literacy. Against these notions of autonomous characters and universal texts, he suggests that it’s ambiguous to classify a book as having been read. Rather, there’s a continuum between never having heard of a particular book, vaguely skimming it, and performing a close reading (Bayard 2007, xviii). Instead of conceiving the reading of a book in binary terms, he proposes non-mutually-exclusive designations: UB (unknown to you), SB (ones you’ve skimmed), HB (ones you’ve heard of), and FB (ones you’ve forgotten) (ibid.).
This is necessary in part because every act of reading is accompanied by forgetting and misremembering (p. 157). We may remember only fragments, often fused together and inscribed on our memories intertwined with our fantasies, or reduce a book to its metadata or approximate accounts of a few pages (p. 56). Bayard terms “non-reading” as an activity greater than the absence of reading: a stance toward the impossibility of reading all that we want to—accepting that there are too many books to ever read but a fraction (pp. 12–13). Such a reader abstains from reading a particular book in order to grasp how it connects with literature as a whole—its place in our culture’s collective library—out of respect for the book (ibid.). This is what we do when we imagine what a book is about without knowing much if anything about it, skim it, or form an opinion based on others’ (p. 135).
If we begin to forget what we read almost as we’re reading, may not be certain whether we have read a given title, and may have misremembered key elements, to what extent does the act of reading credit us with any particular authority on the book (pp. 47, 55–57, 30)? On the other hand, many books have had a strong influence on us despite us never having read them (p. xvi). Whether or how we have read a book implies neither our knowledge nor ignorance of it.
The activities of reading and discussing books are entirely distinct on this view (p. 113). Indeed, when we consider how we forget what we read, and how our previous experiences and personalities shape our recollections and interpretations this is how it must be: in a conversation ostensibly about a book, “often the various interlocutors will not have read the book they are talking about, or will only have skimmed it, in which case they are each actually talking about a different book”, or even when “each person has held the book in his or her hands and truly knows it, the discussion is less about the book itself than about a fragmentary and reconstituted object” unlikely to overlap with that which other readers have formed (p. 72). Our discussions often focus on the discussions of others about the book, or the book as a symbol or exemplar, rather than the details its text presents (pp. 45–46, 73). In talking about books, then, their content is less important than their connections to, and correlations with, other books (pp. 9, 10). This is the concept of universal texts again: a book’s place in our collective library gives it meaning through context, in the same way we infer the meaning of words (p. 117).
Accordingly, reading risks us losing our perspective of literature as a whole—we can only appreciate the true meaning of a book by maintaining a reasonable distance from it (pp. xv, 31). Perhaps skimming books is the most efficient approach to absorb them without getting lost in their details (p. 15)? Being too familiar with a book’s content can be inimical to responding creatively or discussing it with others. For discussion, the book is just a pretext, so the more knowledge we require our interlocutor to have of the text, the more awkward and constrained the conversation will be (pp. 162, 156). Normally, this interlocutor will, like us, have few or fragmentary facts on hand, so we risk embarrassing them by requiring either that they admit they haven’t met the corresponding cultural touchstone, or that they lie about having done so (p. 126). We should refrain from commenting too precisely about books that arise in conversation and welcome the ambiguities so that they retain all of their potential: “we open up what comes from the book—title, fragment, genuine or fake quotation” (p. 163). In this way “books are replaced by fictions of books” (p. 126).
We subscribe to “the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps”, and Bayard is passionate about countering our sense of shame or guilt in this context where we are anxious about how our knowledge compares to our interlocutors such that all parties pretend more expansive knowledge than they have; instead he wishes to defend and teach the stance of non-reading (pp. 129, 12–13). We endlessly invent books, so by freeing ourselves of guilt about this, accepting that we can evaluate a book without reading it, “talking about unread books invites us into a realm of creativity” (pp. 157, xviii–xix, 166).
Our creativity and cultural literacy is threatened by reading too much (p. 178). We risk “vanishing in other people’s books” (p. 25). Following Oscar Wilde, Bayard suggests that “the appropriate time span for reading a book is ten minutes, after which you risk forgetting that the encounter is primarily a pretext for writing your autobiography” (p. 166). In this sense books should be a stimulus, an inspiration to which one responds reflectively—reading to produce oneself. Bayard sees a paradox here: “the path toward ourselves passes through books, but … this must remain a passage”, so a good reader traverses books knowing that every book is the bearer of part of themselves, and can give them access to this part, if only they’re wise enough not to end their journey there (p. 178).