A couple of weeks ago, instead of going to church, I fell asleep on the sofa finishing How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. Jamey, who was with me when I discovered the book at Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago, will be glad to know that the public library did have it.
The book was accessible, amusing, snide. I finished it in a matter of days in spite of illness.
The point of the entire book seems to be that the efficacy and value of reading is questionable. As a matter of fact writing seems to be the only worthwhile activity with respect to books, in which case it is not the production of literature that matters, but rather the production of criticism, said criticism being of value only when its writing is divorced from any reference to literature whatsoever.
Bayard argues that when we talk about books we are never discussing them as they exist, but instead we discuss an imaginary approximation of the text. Thus we may discuss literature even more accurately if we have in fact failed to read the text in question.
It's so difficult to know what Bayard is really saying. Either he is discussing something he considers to be the ideal, or he is ironically discussing the reality of criticism as though it were the ideal, if only we could perfect it. The proof of the ironic nature of his discussion seemed to be his use of Oscar Wilde to make his point. In my experience, meagre as it may be, Oscar Wilde is an author who can never be understood unless the reader reads between the lines. In other words, he will never directly say what he means--it is up to the audience to interpret what isn't there.
Bayard allows me to say definitive things about Oscar Wilde, whether I have any experience with him or not.
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