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

befitting a true pacifist.
    It is in the context of Phil’s day-by-day perfection of himself as a romantic interest that the scene relevant to our inquiry occurs—a scene that shows the role unread books may play in the genesis of a love affair. After many days of practice, Phil has managed to have a conversation with Rita that she finds totally satisfying—and for good reason!—in which her suitor articulates, one by one, every sentence she dreams of hearing in an ideal world of love. He is thus able, for instance, despite his being happy only in cities, to mention in her presence his dream of living in the mountains, far from all civilization.
    At this point, Phil suffers a moment of distraction and, forgetting to watch his words, makes a new mistake. In a moment of shared confidences, Rita confides to him that her college studies did not initially incline her toward a career in television, and when Phil asks for details, she tells him, “I studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry.” Her response causes Phil to burst out laughing and blurt without thinking, “You must have had a lot of time on your hands!”—at which Rita gives him an icy look, and he realizes his blunder.
    But there is nothing irreparable in this world in which everything always begins identically anew and in which mistakes can be rectified so quickly. The next time Phil hears Rita confess her passion for nineteenth-century Italian poetry— having ransacked the local library for material in the meantime, presumably—he is able to recite, with considerable pathos, excerpts from the libretto of Rigoletto , 2 as the young woman looks on admiringly. Forced to talk about books he hasn’t read, all he has to do is to stretch the few seconds of his reply by one day, and he is able to comply perfectly with his beloved’s desire.
    Phil’s attempt to seduce Rita goes beyond literature. Phil takes advantage of his halt in time to learn how to play the piano and goes faithfully to his lesson “every day.” He has learned that Rita’s ideal man plays a musical instrument. Based on intensive training during a single time slot that extends over days, he is able, one evening when Rita goes to a party with live music (as she does, by definition, every night), to appear with the band as a jazz musician.

    Conversely to our other examples, Groundhog Day ’s complex narrative device allows it to play out a fantasy of completion and transparency in which we see two individuals communicate about books, and thus about themselves, without any sense of loss. Having the time to study the essential books of another person, to the point where we come to share the same ones, might perhaps be what is necessary to achieve a genuine exchange on cultural matters and a perfect overlap between the two inner books.
    In the numerous situations where we find it necessary to charm another person, such a method might allow us to indicate to him or her that we share a common cultural universe. By training himself in Rita’s preferred reading material and thus penetrating as deeply as possible into her private world, Phil is straining to create the illusion that their inner books are the same. And perhaps an ideal and deeply shared love should indeed give each lover access to the secret texts of which the other is composed.
    But the images and fragments of text that are the stuff of our inner books are so singular to each of us that only through an indefinite extension of time might two inner books find communion—for to do so is to achieve a melding of two people’s private worlds. In the slow-motion existence Phil is living, language is no longer an uninterrupted and irreversible flow, and it becomes possible, as in the scene of the toast to the groundhog, to stop at every sentence and examine its origin and value, connecting it to the biography and inner life of the other.
    Only such an artificial halting of time and language would allow someone else to reproduce the texts