The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [121]
This remarkable paragraph is often assumed by hasty readers—especially those who associate it with deconstruction and thus, by a series of leaps, with nihilism—to be a rejection of the idea of truth rather than a genealogy of truth’s maturity. In fact, we could read the passage as “the biography of truth.” One of its lineal relations is Francis Bacon’s “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.” Nietzsche’s essay doesn’t say that there is no such thing as truth, but that what is true may change over time, depending upon the intellectual and cultural framework. “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Human beings, Nietzsche claims, “lie unconsciously” in this way, and “precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth.”83
Enough About Me
The art of biography, for all the reasons we’ve noted, seems to be at an interesting crossroads. We have entered a time when books about the lives of writers sometimes elect to take the form of memoirs, describing the author’s experience of reading. Consider two striking cases in point, both about Marcel Proust (and both published in 1997): Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, and Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. Rose is a biographer by profession, the author of well-received books on Victorian marriages and on the black jazz performer Josephine Baker. De Botton is a fiction writer and cultural critic. Like his book’s title, his chapter headings read, cleverly, like the titles of self-help books: “How to Suffer Successfully”; “How to Express Your Emotions”; “How to Be Happy in Love.” If not Proust Lite, or even Proust Without Tears, this is Proust Without the Eggheads. And, to a certain extent, Proust Without the Proust.
Like the famous Bette Midler line, “But enough about me. What do you think of me?,” these snapshots of readers watching themselves reading—or living—are engaging on first bounce. In a review of Rose’s memoir, Victor Brombert remarks that despite the presence of Proust’s name in the title, “he plays a minimal role” in the book, and observes that this decision may have discouraged readers not familiar with Proust’s work and frustrated those who were.84 (Brombert’s review begins by recalling André Malraux’s comment in Anti-Memoirs: “What do I care about what only I care about?”)
Michiko Kakutani described de Botton’s book as “quirky” but possessed of a “certain genial charm,” and she noted that its author had “hit upon a formula for talking about art and highbrow concerns in a deliberately lowbrow way.”85 De Botton went on to “expand upon that formula” with The Consolations of Philosophy, finding helpful hints in the works of philosophers like Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Socrates. The book begat a television program in England, where its author was metamorphosed into a philosophical advice-giving figure known as Dr. Love. This is presumably one of the uses of literature, after a fashion. How-to is definitely use; whether these adapted sound bites from Montaigne (or Proust) retain their tang as literature or have crossed over into the soothing realm of banality is another question.
Perhaps inevitably, Pierre Bayard’s book on how not to read a book (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read)86 focuses, at the outset, on Proust, an author Bayard is proud not to have read, and who—as he hastens to tell us—Paul Valéry also hadn’t read and made much of not reading. Bayard gets lots of mileage in this short book by citing long passages from writers who discuss not reading. Whether he himself has read these books (or skimmed them, or heard of them, to use two of his book’s chosen designations) is unclear and, in the long (or short) run, unimportant. What