The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [122]
The back cover of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read asks which of a group of great books the reader has ever talked about without reading: Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man, A Room of One’s Own, Being and Nothingness, In Cold Blood, The Scarlet Letter, The Man Without Qualities, Lolita, Jane Eyre, The Sun Also Rises. But of this list, Bayard discusses only one, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. This slim volume is full of long block quotations, separated by passages of plot summary for those who haven’t read what Bayard hasn’t read, and occasional in-your-face bromides. If he weren’t French and telegenic, he would never have gotten away with it.
Taken together, de Botton’s book on Proust as a self-help manual and Bayard’s book about the theme of not reading may say something about the cachet of French cultural essayists in the American market, or about the defensive self-congratulation of American anti-intellectualism (here validated by a generation of French “intellectuals” who write in a style distinctly different from the “difficult” Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault) or about what it means to be “after the humanities” in the most negative sense. To the extent that the books discuss the use of literature, that use is turned, however wittily, into a social function rather than an intellectual or aesthetic one. As such, books like these are symptomatic. They are the “On Bullshit” of literary life.
A third book we might put on the shelf of books about repurposing the reading of great books is Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, subtitled, in that explanatory way to which we have become accustomed in subtitles of late, An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read.88 Kelly is not French, and his book even has an index, albeit a brief one. In a series of short chapters (typically three to five pages), he identifies, historicizes, and speculates about lost books by famous writers, from Anonymous and Homer to Sylvia Plath and Georges Perec. For some reason, the most recent authors are listed by their full formal names (Dylan Marlais Thomas, William Seward Burroughs, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV), making them sound vaguely parodic. And not all of the lost works are equally persuasive; Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won is a constant source of speculation, Lowell’s notional epic on the crusades less so. Basically, the book is literary gossip. It’s probably unfair to quote from the jacket flap—which the author almost surely didn’t write—but the cascade of adverbs and adjectives is indicative: “In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination.”
Why do I classify this book with How to Talk and the Proust books? Because all are para-literary, alluding to literature obliquely. None requires that the reader actually have a firsthand encounter with the great works on which they are propped. In the case of Kelly’s book, all the works are conveniently unavailable, objects of speculation rather than contemplation. For Bayard, reading is not only unnecessary but sometimes counterproductive; for de Botton, Proust becomes a sophisticated advice giver, a Dr. Marcel to rival television’s Dr. Phil. Decades after the culture