Literary Criticism: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read By Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman Granta, 185pp. £12Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all? I open several books a day, I answered. You open your granny, said my uncle.
'The student", the seedy hero/narrator (or one of them) of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, might on several counts recommend himself to Pierre Bayard as the ideal reader.
First, though as a student he is expected by his uncle, acting in loco parentis, to be fully occupied by his prescribed university texts, he is at the moment of the exchange quoted above far more interested in reading a letter he has just received from his racing tipster - thus defying the frankly authoritarian demands society places on us (or some of us) in insisting we should consume the contents of the world's supposed great books in order to become educated or "cultured".
Second, in returning his uncle's invasive sarcasm with his own evasive literalness, he is positing the notion that there may be a different, and perhaps equally valid, method of reading a book from starting at the beginning and sticking it out to the end.
Third, his uncle having departed and the letter from Newmarket perused, the narrator takes to his bed, closes his eyes and retires to "the kingdom of [ his] mind", where he is engaged in creating his own book, a work of endless ramification and infinite jest about Finn Mac Cool, Mad Sweeney the bird king and the tyrannical moralising novelist Trellis, whose characters rebel against his direction of their lives.
Pierre Bayard is a literature professor at the University of Paris and a psychoanalyst, and it is perhaps his background in the latter discipline that prompts him to feel it is his duty "to assist others in overcoming their fear of culture, and in daring to leave it behind to begin to write". The word "write" here, like much else in the book perhaps, is not to be taken quite literally: Bayard does not necessarily wish us to persecute literary agents and publishers with our stories and novels. Rather he wishes us to "write ourselves", to engage in and pursue the work of self-invention, freed from what he calls "the burden of culture".
TO DO THIS effectively, he argues, we must first free ourselves of guilt, and the evasions and lies which it inevitably forces upon us. Thus purified we will be prepared to agree with him that it is "totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven't read - including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn't read it", or that "it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven't read it". Actual books (and Bayard is talking chiefly about books from the literary canon, the books we feel we should have read) may help us in our self-invention, but only as so many props: it is not necessary to waste time reading - still less re-reading - them when a sketchy idea of their content and/or place in literary culture will serve our purpose equally well (if not better).
Suspicious readers may by this stage be wondering if Bayard is (a) mad, (b) taking the piss, or (c) simply French. The easiest of these questions is the first: no, he is not mad. Certainly he is French, darkly and handsomely so as the photograph on the dust jacket attests, and he is of course part of that intellectual tradition (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and so on) which a generation ago began to lay mines under the settled procedures of Anglo-Saxon academic inquiry. There is also no doubt that he is something of a provocateur.
What is not 100 per cent clear is whether his book is to be read as a provocation in whole or merely in part. As it is a largely likeable and often amusing piece of work one would prefer to guess the former. For if it is asking to be regarded as in any sense a serious argument it must be said that it makes only one worthwhile point: that we should perhaps try not to be so anxious or sensitive about the inevitable gaps in our personal culture and simply get on with it.
APART FROM THIS commonsensical notion, the book's thesis is built on a series of short chapters outlining, sometimes quite stylishly, various common ways of non-reading or incomplete reading, followed in each case by sets of conclusions which cannot really be derived from what has gone before, all of it underpinned by a general theory of the social psychology of reading which might have been banged up by a few bright postgraduate students during a pleasant evening in the pub. It is perhaps in his method of reasoning that Prof Bayard is at his most French, using his "evidence" not as solid material to stand on the shoulders of but as something to leap rather prettily high above.
A warning to the book-buyer: How to Talk About Books is not, as its title might suggest, a bluffer's guide to important books, the perfect gift for the poseur in your life; rather it is an entertaining, though occasionally complex, piece of Gallic flimflam.
If you wish to buy it and add to Prof Bayard's already considerable earnings from the French edition, by all means do so. If on the other hand you simply want to talk about it - what are you waiting for?
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist and joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books (www.drb.ie)