'Non-reading' for Bayard, is 'a genuine activity'. It implies an engagement with literature and is different from mere 'absence of reading'. A 'true reader' is simply 'one who cares about being able to reflect on literature'. With so little time and so many books, he argues, it is better to spread the net wide and settle for a general sense of the multitude.
Bayard invokes Paul Valery - 'that master of non-reading' - who, rather like Oscar Wilde, claimed the critic depends 'neither on the author nor the text'. Readers must be creative, for to read is to interpret which is also, by necessity, to write. Just as Flaubert once wrote a book 'about nothing,' so, too, should the 'true reader' be able to opine about nothing. Excessive reading, for Valery, 'stripped France of its individuality'.
Bayard's approach is Derridean: a focus on the relation between objects and the systems that support these. He perceives books themselves as a 'system', important only in so far as they are received within society: the gossip that they generate; the ideas that they spawn; the conflicts that they provoke. 'Relations among ideas are far more important than the ideas themselves,' he insists. Thus, it is only ever necessary to get a rough sense of what any particular book is about - and where to place it in the 'collective library'.
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Topic: Never read Ulysses? Me neither (Read 1255 times)