How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard Read Free Book Online Page A

the day before, who greets him with the same words.
    In this way, Phil gradually realizes that he is reliving the previous day. The remainder of the day is, in fact, an exact repetition of all the scenes he experienced twenty-four hours earlier. He encounters the same beggar asking him for money and is then approached by the same college friend—whom he hasn’t seen in years, and who has now become an insurance salesman bent on selling him a policy—before stepping in the same puddle of water. And having arrived at the location where the groundhog ceremony is being filmed, he observes the same scene as the day before, in which Phil the groundhog delivers the same verdict.
    During the third day of his stay in Punxsutawney, on hearing the same radio program for the third time as he awakes, Phil begins to realize that the temporal disorder plaguing him has not caused just one repetition, but that he is condemned to relive the same day eternally, without any hope of escaping either the small town or the time period that has enveloped it.
    His entrapment is airtight, for even death has ceased to offer any deliverance. Resolved to put an end to the sequence of identical days, Phil, after consulting a physician and a psychoanalyst both unable to intervene in this unprecedented clinical case, despairingly kidnaps the other Phil (the groundhog), steals a car, and, during a police chase, hurls himself with the animal into a ravine—before waking the next morning to discover himself unharmed, in his bed, listening to the same radio program at dawn of the same day.

    This temporal disorder is the source of a whole series of highly original situations, and linguistic situations in particular. Present on two stages—that of the day itself and that of other identical days, past and future—Phil is free to play continually on the double meanings permitted by his immobility in time and, for example, to declare to the woman he loves, as he carves an ice sculpture of her face, that he has spent some time studying her.
    If reliving the same day an infinite number of times has its inconveniences, the situation is not without its advantages. It allows you, for example, to perform actions that are possible only because of a detailed knowledge, right down to the split second, of the organization of each day. Hence Phil notices a moneybag left unattended for a few seconds in the back of an armored vehicle parked in front of a bank and, during that brief moment of inattention, makes off with it.
    The situation also ensures total impunity, since Phil is certain that whatever he does, his crimes and misdemeanors will be expunged in the night. He can thus exceed the speed limit, drive his car on train tracks, and be arrested by the police without its making any difference, since he will wake up without any of those events having occurred.
    A stoppage in time also allows you to use the strategy of trial and error. So, for instance, when Phil meets a young woman he finds attractive, he asks her to tell him her name, what high school she went to, and the name of her French teacher. When he runs into her again “the next day,” he passes himself off as an old school friend and refers to their supposedly shared memories of adolescence, thus increasing the likelihood of a conquest.

    Having gradually fallen in love with Rita, the show’s producer, Phil attempts to seduce her through the constantly improving technique accessible only to those whose actions are without consequence due to the eternal repetition of time. While having a drink with her one evening, he takes note of her favorite drink, so that he can deliberately order the same thing “next time.” And after committing the error—one that is less than fatal only in this subset of space-time—of proposing a toast to Phil the groundhog, to the scorn of his beloved, who tells him frostily that she drinks only to world peace, he improves his performance “the next day” by proposing a toast