(Bayard)

Reading Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read feels something like holding one’s breath and stepping over some vaguely forbidden line. This candid apology for non-reading, made all the more audacious by the profession of its author – a literary academic – not only exposes, but openly claims ownership of talking about (and indeed, writing journal articles about) books perused and beheld from a distance, but never read, as a legitimate and logical scholarly practice.

Canvassing the various obligations attached to literature which render non-reading taboo, Bayard makes a point of recognising the desire to know all books as a practically unfulfillable one, and casts about for other options. What he seems to arrive at, is the conclusion that students for of literature (who read not for escapism or edification or aesthetic experience, but consciously within the canonical framework), it is more important to know that The Odyssey and Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway are connected, than arduously reading each text from beginning to end (or at all).

This attitude (and its attendant behaviour of non-reading) is exemplified by the character of librarian in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, a figure whose role is loaded with idealistic connotations of knowledge-keeping and literary reverence, yet who admits readily (and with disarming candour) to scanning only titles and contents pages amongst the thousands of volumes within his custody. His logic: that given the sheer number of books in existence, even the most diligent reader will find him or herself commenting on texts they haven’t read, and that therefore “reading any particular book is a waste of time compared to keeping our perspective about books overall” (pp.3).

Perhaps what is so engaging about this assertion is that Bayard’s description connects directly with the experience of his readers, who might find themselves nodding and humming in agreement at various points in his writing.  For not only is non-reading perpetuated as an anathema in popular discussion (only a few says ago I was chastised for being a ‘literary person’ i.e. an English major, and not having read Great Expectations), but also widely practiced – becoming more rife, in fact, as individuals move further beyond their immediate reading experience to become one of those “specialists…amongst whom mendacity is the rule” (pp. 15).

Yet whilst Bayard’s argument is an attempt to take what initially appears as intellectual hypocrisy and repackage it as academic efficiency, the cost of non-reading is no less grave. Being an imposter in a culture of counterfeit reading practice is permissible, perhaps, but it is the underlying value – of reading a text from start to finish and thus experiencing it first-hand - that is more saliently at stake.  For in reality, the experience of entering into and emerging from a carefully crafted text is not merely grounds for commentary or the key to a reputation of being ‘well-read’. It is rather a practice which serves a purpose beyond sheer enabling – an experience which reaffirms and perpetuates the centuries-old conviction that is important to talk about books – whether you have read them or not – in the first place.

(O’Brien)

Offering a view of literature alternative to the discursive framework of Bayard and the dissassociative philosophising of Barthes, this excerpt from O’Brien’s The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading exults in the experiential, aesthetic and sentential dimensions of encountering a text in-person.

Beginning with the interchangeable notions of construct and reality which shape the reading experience of children, O’Brien identifies a reflex of text-inhabitation – that is, the re-contextualising of fictitious events, characters and sensations within the realm of one’s own experience and family -  as a way of understanding and connecting with narratives.

Pursuing this emphasis on personal response, O’Brien continues to explore the actual physical encounter with the book-as-object, specifically, the tension between each volume’s physical smallness (both in terms of the space it occupies and the diminutive printed letters on each page) and the epic, sprawling concepts which are signified within. This is reflected, he argues, also in the temporal nature of literature, with each book representing a kind of “a victory over time” in condensing lifetimes and voyages into a few hundred pages and even fewer hours of reading. It is upon this basis of grandeur-contained-in the-microcosm that O’Brien presents the book as “a box with the world in it”, romanticising the physical entity as a kind of portal into other worlds and souls. In this sense therefore, literature becomes animated - a dynamic sphere within which “life teems”.

This aliveness, however, is not merely restricted to the reader, O’Brien argues - but also pertains to the interrelationships between books.  Collectively forming a fluid community of connections and correlations, these literary objects are to be identified as specific coordinates within a vast literary landscape – ones which reference one another with awareness of their place within the whole (just as Chandler’s protagonists read Hemingway and Proust, or Dostoevsky’s read the Bible or Bakunin). O’Brien describes this interchange as “the murmur of overlapping conversations…as if the books read each other”.

Just as books mutually illuminate one another, so too, O’Brien asserts do they reveal the interior world of the author out of which they were written. In fact, they may not be composed for a readership at all, but rather as a means by which to better absorb the world, make sense of its complexities, or escape from them. A work of literature exposes the texture of a person’s thoughts, both as a window into the mind of the writer and mirror held up the reader.

As a series of fragments and impressions itself, The Browser’s Ecstasy comes close to replicating the very experiences it describes – guiding its audience through a multiplicity of descriptions, speculations and observations with effusive and (often rapturous) prose. Not only this, but in surveying the experience of the child who imagines themself into worlds, the reader who becomes a connoisseur of foreign places, the writer who sits alone and uses words to travel deeper into reality, O’Brien effectively simulates each incarnation of the ecstatic browser’s experience for the audience of his text – thus sketching a microcosmic experience of the act of entering the microcosm.

(Tartt)

On the back cover of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a description which presents this, the original American campus novel, as a work which “recounts the terrible price we pay for mistakes made on the dark journey to adulthood”.  Reading the book itself however, I found this not even remotely salient in the novel’s web of argument and exploration. Instead, from the very first page, I encountered The Secret History as a questioning and cautionary work concerned with the perils of a particular kind of reading practice.  

Tartt’s circle of protagonists read Classics rather than English literature (and thus deal more with history than the subjective sphere of fiction). Yet their approach to the discipline – as a portal into a realm of symbolism and fascinating ambiguity, to derive meaning from, speculate about and escape into– renders their experience of scholarship similar to that of literary study. What distinguishes this particular practice, and characterises the kind of reading that Tartt warns against, is a tendency to behold the boundary between text and reality as a fluid one enabling the former to pervade and infuse the latter. The result is an individual who beholds the entire world as a text, a perpetual reader who is forever engaged in the act of decipherment, analyses, of the recognition and construction of the aesthetic.

In the novel itself, this manifests in characters who seize upon classical details in the every-day: an obsession with the weather, repeated references to omens (Charles interprets ravens as: “Three of them for three of us. That’s an augury, I bet”), constant allusions to the classical world (i.e.  Henry glances “up at the hole in the ceiling. ‘Yes,’ he said brusquely. ‘Like the Pantheon.’) and the incorporation of the past into the mythology of identity (“…imagine what heroes you’d be… ‘Demigods,’ said Francis, laughing. ‘We could sit on the thrones in the town square.”). Ultimately, however, this transformation of reality into construct is none too apparent than in the occurrence of murder.

Tartt prefigures the cumulative expression of what Richard describes as the “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (a concern for the idea or look of a thing rather than its actual implications and empirical reality) in theoretical statements offered in the scholarly environment (i.e. “Aristotle says in the Poetics,’ said Henry, ‘that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art’.”) and ones which indicate an obsession with the aesthetic of murder at the cost of grasping its moral weight (“…too easy to beguile myself with the Medicis, the Borgias, all those poisoned rings and roses…”). Death itself, by extension, becomes unreal, like something written into being:  “the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry’s feet”.  There is therefore, Tartt seems to be saying, a kind of scholarship, a kind of reading, which knows no limits – which in training the individual to fix their eyes upon the text, render it impossible to behold the world through any other gaze; one which is so fixated upon aesthetics and quotation and meaning, that it is tragically (and dangerously) detached from reality itself.

(Barthes)

In his landmark post-structuralist essay The Death of the Author, Barthes launches an argument against the traditional practices of scholarship whereby textual explanation is “always sought in the man or woman who produced it”. Observing the long and widely-held academic tendency to trace all in-text meaning back to “the author, his person, his life, his taste, his passions”, Barthes constructs authorship as semantically tyrannical - to the extent that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit of that text.”

For Barthes, readers who would interpret Prospero as the Bard himself, or strive to connect the melancholy of the Brontë novels with the authoresses’ gloomy, secluded milieu simply perpetuate their own interpretative oppression. It is inadequate, he argues, to attribute the style and content of Van Gogh’s paintings to his bipolarity, or to assert that “Baudelaire’s work is a failure of Baudelaire the man”. The text and the one who wrote it are to be fundamentally disconnected if the readers themselves are to exercise any autonomy over their own experience.

From this point, the essay cites a number of key movers in support and advancement of this particular argument. Instrumental individuals noted include French symboliste Stéphane Mallarmé (who insists that “it is language that speakers, not the author”) and Marcel Proust (who inverted the art-imitates-life paradigm by making “his very life a work for which his own book was the model”). The cultural movement of surrealism, by promoting the practice of automatic writing and “ceaslessly recommending the abrupt dissapointment of expectationsof meaning” further contributes to this, in addition to the field of linguistics, which has asserted that the act of enunciation constitutes the existence of the enunciator, in the same way that “nothing is other than the instance of saying”.

Following on from this last principle in particular, the death of the author gives birth to what Barthes titles “the modern scriptor” - a being which is purely performative, and thus existent only in the moment of performance itself.

What this means in effect, is that the meaning of a text can never be objectively absolute – for in the absence of a speaker whose identity is characterised by authority (“the Author-God”), the intended significance of any (now disembodied) voice is rendered obsolete.  Instead, the text becomes the product not of a person, but of a multidimensional collective in which a fragments and quotations from “innumerable centres of culture” (always “anterior, never original”) are drawn together in “dialogue, parody and contestation”. In fact, the reader himself/herself becomes the very space upon which such multiplicity is inscribed, divested of personality in much the same way as the individual writer - to become “someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constitutes”. This direct access to meaning without hierarchy or limitation, the freedom to experience and interpret at will is what Barthes announced as the ‘birth of the reader’, a right to self-governance won at the involuntary sacrifice of the Author.