Bayard and Non-reading

My first reactions to the opening chapters of Bayard’s book were relief and vindication, and I think that as a student of literature, and a confessed non-reader, my own experience is a valid way to open discussion of Bayard. The two best English essays I have written at university were both on novels that I had not “read” fully (although I am starting to doubt whether, had I even managed to turn every page of each of those books, I would have actually “read” them at all). For both of them, the marker praised my ability to situate the novel’s concerns within a broader framework of ideas, something I believe I did have a grasp of as I had spent most of my time “reading around” the novels in an attempt to compensate for having not actually read them. In contrast, I wrote one of my worst essays at university on a novel that I read closely, twice. Whilst I am not suggesting that reading or not reading those novels are the sole explanation for the marks they received, as there are obviously myriad reasons to explain that, I think that Bayard’s ideas, when viewed in the context of our experiences as students of literature, raise interesting questions.

[As a brief side note, I believe that Bayard’s work, whilst popular, is in fact situated in the realm of critical discussion, and so I will not be analysing his argument from a lay-reader’s perspective, but from our perspective as students of literature engaging with works critically].

One of the key assumptions that Bayard’s argument makes is that we can rely upon critical material alone to form our opinion of a work of literature, as Valéry does, judging Proust’s work based on the opinions of André Gide and Léon Daudet. To a very large extent, “Other people’s views are…an essential prerequisite to forming an opinion of your own” (18), something that many, if not most students of literature, would certainly hope to be true. As Bayard points out, we cannot possibly have read everything we will ever be called on to discuss as students of literature; it is unlikely we will get to even skim a number of the books we will discuss in our lives. And as he argues, we shouldn’t have to. Whilst very few people (with the possible exception of Valéry) would suggest that we should be writing our essays on literature having not read the work in question, what Bayard argues is that the critical material surrounding the work is as, if not more, useful in helping us situate it, an argument I think he largely succeeds in making.

Beyond helping us situate works in their relation to other works, critical material also introduces and familiarises us students with the central ideas that a work raises. Whilst originality is sought after in critical analysis, as undergraduates, very few of us would be so confident as to suggest that we could simply read the primary material and then form an original thesis that contributes validly to the discourse surrounding a work. Ultimately, critical thought is engagement with this discourse, and so by familiarising ourselves with the discourse, Bayard argues that this may, in some instances, be more helpful than familiarising ourselves with the work itself. And as Bayard suggests that knowledge of location may be a sufficient substitute for knowledge of content, familiarising ourselves with the work and the discourse may be equally interchangeable. It is a practice that the majority of us would be familiar with.

The flaw in this approach, however, is that by simply approaching literature macroscopically, as Musil’s librarian does, and to place primary importance on “totality” and “exhaustiveness” (8-9), we risk losing sight of the mutable relationships that works of literature have with each other. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that texts engage in a continual discourse with one another, constantly informing and being informed by preceding and succeeding works. T.S. Eliot similarly believed in a continuum of literature, one where the past and present altered each other in a continuous dialogue. What can be taken from such an approach is the likelihood that the relations between individual works of literature change depending on how they engage with the continuum of literature, and the context in which they are interpreted and critiqued. Over-reliance on critical material potentially discourages something that is completely necessary in literary criticism: constant reference back to close readings of the original material. Reading around works, whilst occasionally appropriate, will never be totally sufficient.

It is important to note where Bayard’s ideas are situated. Whilst it is easy to conclude that he is not presenting his thesis as a recommendation for academic practice, but as a method for the attainment of cultural literacy, the book has only received popular acclaim serendipitously. It was originally written for an audience of Parisian academics (Sage), and whilst it engages with the debate over the humanities and cultural literacy, the argument’s heavy reliance on critical material, whilst largely acceptable, provokes questioning. At the least, it should remind us that, in order to assuage our guilt, someone has to keep on doing the close reading.

Works Cited

Bayard, Pierre. How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Granta, 2007.

Sage, Adam. The Times. 5 February 2007. 12 August 2010 <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1329421.ece>.