Of course, I haven’t read this book, but PW’s review of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read claims the central thesis is that “the act of reading is less important than knowing the social and intellectual context of a book.”¹

That argument sounds a lot like Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, in which he asserts that there is a common body of knowledge that a culture shares, and one must know about it in order to become fully functional and literate within that culture.  Many have read Hirsch as suggesting that knowing about these things is the same as knowing these things, and that knowing about literature is enough.² This idea is at least partially responsible for the reliance on standardized, multiple-choice testing as a measure of intelligence and academic worth.

I don’t completely disagree with either argument: the social and intellectual context of a work, and the cultural tags associated with it, are important (else Cultural Studies majors and critics in any school other than New Criticism would have nothing to talk about).  And we can think, sometimes deeply and rewardingly, about ideas presented in a work, or about the idea of the work itself, without having read that work.  I’m doing that to some degree in this post.

The problem is, there are important things I miss by doing so: the development of my thinking on the topic is limited because it’s not rich in detail (details that the reading, one hopes, would supply); the mental connections surrounding the ideas are also limited (because the details are limited); and nuances within the argument are flattened, leading to an oversimplified understanding and oversimplified thinking.

Ray Bradbury attacked this idea in Fahrenheit 451 and suggested that there’s more than one way to burn a book, not reading it being one of them.  Faber talking to Montag:

Do you know why books such as this are so important?  Because they have quality.  And what does the word quality mean?  To me it means texture.  This book has pores … Telling detail.  Fresh detail.  The good writers touch life often.  The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.  The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies …

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.  We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.³

I’m not calling Bayard a book-burner.  I know his argument is built on a given: there are too many books worth reading to have time to actually read them all.  And so, the real question becomes: is it better to gloss the ideas or not read them at all?

I say, go for the gloss, but remember what you have and don’t have as a result.  To forget that is dangerous.  Then find a few good books and sink way down into the rich loam of their details.

1. ”Were We Right or Were We Right?: Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” Publishers Weekly 18 November 2007 <http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6501611.html>.  PW not only lists its own review here, but also the reviews of others.  It then asks for readers to comment on which review is “right” … if you’re interested. [back]
2. His argument is more complex than this, but that’s the danger of this line of thinking: the complexity is often missed. [back]
3. Ray Bradbury,  Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Del Rey, 1991) 83. [back]

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