Talking books are not read by Pierre Bayard L'art de la lecture. On ne lit well lit dans ce qu'on some purpose other personnel. This may be to acquire such power. This may be the hatred of the author. ; Paul Valéry. Tel quel have long wanted to read this book by Pierre Bayard
. Like him, a time I gave courses on literature and, like him, that activity put me in the position of having to talk about books they had read. At that I looked like my students and my students were like students
Bayard. The truth is that todos -o al menos "todos los que leemos libros", como decía
de Quincey al inicio de una obra célebre que no acabé de leer- alguna vez nos hemos visto en la necesidad de pronunciarnos acerca de libros que no hemos leído.
Pero es que entre haber leído o no un libro no hay tanto dos polos opuestos como una vasta gradación de experiencias, que van de una no-lectura radical (no abrir el libro) a formas diversas de lectura que -de acuerdo con la propuesta de
Bayard- terminarían siendo, más bien, formas de no-lectura. Más que un manual del tipo cómo desenvolverse en sociedad y dárselas de esnob, o cómo seducir mujeres cultas, more than a misrepresentation or incitement to an invitation to laziness, Bayard's book
offers a lucid and suggestive theory of reading, inviting her as a non-
experience of reading or deslectura . (Do not forget that times are not to read this book, from the title, is not without irony.)
parts of a set of obvious facts: 1) and we devoted a lifetime to the reading, the number of books not read will be infinitely greater than the books we read; 2) is not required to read a book from beginning to end (at times not even opening it) to have an appreciation of the content, and 3) much of what we read, almost everything falls into oblivion just spent the page.
of notorious incidents such as these,
Bayard follows that perhaps others are not in first instance: 1) a book is not a fixed and inert object but a living and moving, it tends to vary and transform before your eyes each reader. 2) To speak of a book is necessary (and inevitable) to make something of yourself and keep a distance from the book from which we intend to speak. 3) If you read much of what is buried in the waters of Lethe, for purposes comment no big difference between a book read and forgotten and one that we have never opened.
Underlying this conception of reading as a loss. Write
Bayard :
"The fact that books are not linked to knowledge but also memory loss, including loss of identity is an element that should be considered in any reflection about reading (. ..) Reading is not only informed, too, and perhaps above all, to forget, and means therefore face what is in us forget ourselves. " Since Plato
in his letter seventh (I read but do not remember), I saw in writing the cause of a forgetting despicable, if by divine philosopher "knowing is remembering, reading is no more than to forget what we know: the written sign is a false memory, in addition to being outside. Bayard
well for , before joining the knowledge, reading is the site of a loss and evanescence, the epicenter of ignorance.
librarian is "The Man Without Qualities, Musil's novel
(a character who, despite his profession, only know the title of the books that protects a librarian who does not read) who provides the example of a non-radical reader, however, knows perfectly oriented in the not too directional library world, knowing that the books relate to each other, apart from its content, for its pasta and lapels, and especially the back of their titles. That is, to the extent that every book is linked to other books, it is important to discern-and building-the context that the experience of each will be linked this or that reading, equivalent to building, as
categories Bayard, a kind of "inner library" from a "collective library."
With the figure of Paul Valéry , that while he had the face of a scholar
Bookworm was rather an inveterate non-reader, Bayard
illustrates another way of (not) reading: the flip. According to the author of the marine cemetery
to advance in the dense forest without missing letters farrago that are succumbing to the too many books, we must not fail to see that the essence of literature (or what he meant by that) will never be contained in one book (this is where Valéry
Mallarmean says no to the ideal of "The Book"),
could not be grasped without an overall vision that allowed us to walk properly oriented the universe of Babel infinite library. De Montaigne
to Oscar Wilde
of Balzac
to
David Lodge, to Soseki Natsume
and Umberto Eco, between authors whose works
Bayard presumed to be browsed or ignore, go shelling the keys to a theory of reading is an invitation to see it as an exercise of invention, an act of creation and encounter with oneself, in short, to see reading as a non-reading.
If I wanted to be in the Bayard
book this would be a diatribe against
passive reader. Yes as I said
Lichtenberg, there are people who read for not having to think, this is done with some ingenuity. So, we invented what we read and what we invent and we have read. In this sense, all potential library is a machine-to-do-fiction. Bayard's book
looking also reduce the alleged reader crushing weight of "culture" as well as free of the inhibitions that result from not having read (or have read more, as the case may be) works that dictate the fees to be read. In a world where we read so little, lives under the banner of
"must read ", reading a book like this is an emulsion invigorating.
While the word appears
psychoanalysis to the end (and that is that, contradicting the spirit of the post, I must confess that I read the book
Bayard to the last line, because I loved it), reading theory surrounding this trial is linked to the analytic experience. Among other things,
Bayard suggests that the subject of reading is not unitary, is populated , for a polyphony of voices and fragmented, divided by a series of oversights, adds that each Reading brings us to relate, rather than with a book "real" - with an "inner book", which functions as a "book-screen (in the sense that
Freud spoke of" memories -screen ") that separates us from the objective book. In the same fate, when I write this I distance myself from this book whose title promises to tell us how to discuss books we have not read, and project a white surface (the screen blogger) the features of the "book display" I have built as a palliative to oblivion resulting from my experience after having read the book
Bayard. Is that might say, and in the vein of the author, that every book there is just like a phantom object in the intimate library throughout life will inhabit each reader. Now that I
courses topology the number of books that I talk is greatly reduced. However, years ago that if someone asks in front of the shelves of my library: Have you read all these books?, I have found a better start to say:
people who do not think you read all the books are for read. I think the response from a reader-no-reader to an obvious question-no-reader. In any case, is a response whose relevance has confirmed me this essay-fiction
Pierre Bayard .
Here you can read an interview where the author comments on the reception of his book.
P. Bayard, How to discuss books that have not read, Anagram, Col. Compact, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2011, 195 pp.
