Excerpt of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
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Ways of Reading: Books You Don't Know
(in which the reader will see, as demonstrated by a character of Musil's,
that reading any particular book is a waste of time compared to keeping our
perspective about books overall)
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to
open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such
total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been
published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to
books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more
than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist. As a result, unless he
abstains definitively from all conversation and all writing, he will find
himself forever obliged to express his thoughts on books he hasn't read.
If we take this attitude to the extreme, we arrive at the case of the absolute
non-reader, who never opens a book and yet knows them and talks about them
without hesitation. Such is the case of the librarian in The Man Without
Qualities, a secondary character in Musil's novel, but one whose radical
position and courage in defending it make him essential to our argument.
Musil's novel takes place at the beginning of the last century in a country
called Kakania, a parody of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A patriotic movement,
known as Parallel Action, has been founded to organize a lavish celebration of
the upcoming anniversary of the emperor's reign, a celebration that is intended
to serve as a redemptive example for the rest of the world. The leaders of
Parallel Action, whom Musil depicts as so many ridiculous marionettes, are thus
all in search of a "redemptive idea," which they evoke endlessly yet in the
vaguest of terms—for indeed, they have neither the slightest inkling of what the
idea might be nor how it might perform its redemptive function beyond their
country's borders.
Among the movement's leaders, one of the most ridiculous is General Stumm (which
means "mute" in German). Stumm is determined to discover the redemptive idea
before the others as an offering to the woman he loves—Diotima, who is also
prominent within Parallel Action: "You remember, don't you," he said, "that I'd
made up my mind to find that great redeeming idea Diotima wants and lay it at
her feet. It turns out that there are lots of great ideas, but only one of them
can be the greatest—that's only logical, isn't it?—so it's a matter of putting
them in order."
The general, a man of little experience with ideas and their manipulation, never
mind methods for developing new ones, decides to go to the imperial library—that
wellspring of fresh thoughts—to "become informed about the resources of the
adversary" and to discover the "redemptive idea" with utmost efficiency.
The visit to the library plunges this man of limited familiarity with books
into profound anguish. As a military officer, he is used to being in a position
of dominance, yet here he finds himself confronted with a form of knowledge that
offers him no landmarks, nothing to hold on to: "We marched down the ranks in
that colossal store house of books, and I don't mind telling you I was not
particularly overwhelmed; those rows of books are not particularly worse than a
garrison on parade. Still, after a while I couldn't help starting to do some
figuring in my head, and I got an unexpected answer. You see, I had been
thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I
would be bound to get to the end sometime and then, even if I had to skip a few,
I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. But what do you
suppose the librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in
sight, and I asked him how many books they had in this crazy library? Three and
a half million, he tells me. We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or
so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I'll spare you the details,
but I checked it out later in the office, with pencil and paper: it would take
me ten thousand years to carry out my plan."
Excerpted from How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre Bayard Copyright © 2007 by Pierre Bayard. Excerpted by
permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
