-How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard

Thank you Pierre Bayard! A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I have been freed from any number of unspoken complexes and secret fears. There may be a slight residual anxiety at the fact that I failed to read the original French version, but since I got the English translation as a stocking-filler I think I'm in the clear! Actually, the author's stylised irony works very well in English. Seemingly frivolous and lightweight, his rapier thrusts cut to the quick.

His basic point is almost embarrassingly obvious. Given the almost impossible number of books in existence, however many I read, I will barely be able even to scratch the surface. Books I have read thoroughly quickly return to the oblivion from which they emerged, books I claim to have read I only ever half-read, many books I just skimmed, and there are any number of books I have heard about and that's about all. Bayard maintains that, for other than specialists, this has to be the case for absolutely everyone, so there is no reason for cultural shame. He goes so far as to suggest that superficiality is indispensable to an overview, the sense of what fits in where, which is probably more important and useful than a detailed reading of what must necessarily be an extremely limited number of texts. He makes the ruthless point that most books are in fact "screen" books, upon which we project our own attitudes and prejudices. He goes so far as to suggest that books are far more "plastic" than we realise, their contents bending and stretching under the influence of discussion and debate.

...what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books (which is the only way, in all probability, to speak well about them)...

There is an amusing list of abbreviations at the beginning of the text, including:

UB book unknown to me

SB book I have skimmed

HB book I have heard about

FB book I have forgotten

And one particularly liberating paragraph:

To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

-Kafka, a Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Ronald Gray (Twentieth Century Views)

While studying Dutch at Leuven University, I followed a lecture series in Film and Literature - mostly about what happens when you turn a book into a film. The highlight of the course was a case study of Orson Welles' film of Kafka's "The Trial". The film is a stunning work in its own right, but what was particularly rewarding was the opportunity of a serious reading of the original book. I had read "Metamorphosis" in my youth, remembering only the oddly prosaic portrayal of a man turned into a giant beetle. I knew and had shamelessly made use of the expression "Kafkaesque". I knew "The Trial" was a tale of non-specific guilt and uncomprehending and incomprehensible bureaucracy. What I now experienced in returning to the original was the strangely compelling atmosphere of the tale, the totally convincing way in which the author's rigorous and concrete prose depicts a situation of nightmarish absurdity. All one's instincts grope for a key to what one feels must surely be an analogy, a parable for the modern age, but plausible-seeming symbols ultimately remain contradictory and impenetrable. And yet "The Trial" is pregnant with the sense of a sincere and earnest pursuit of meaning perpetually frustrated. Above all it has, for want of a better expression, the ring of truth.

That a definitive interpretation of "The Trial" should remain tantalizingly beyond any intellectual grasp is surely the author's deliberate intention, but, coming across this collection of essays on Kafka in a second-hand bookshop, I delved straight into it in the search for clues to the Sphynxian riddle. To summarize brutally, there are three basic schools of thought about Kafka's writings. 1. He is a profound religious thinker. 2. He is seeking to give expression to the existential dilemma of modern man, alienated in the new mass society. 3. He is an oversensitive loser with a neurotic compunction to depict, in detail, his own state of loserdom. Of course, he is all of these things at once! I had read Nicholas Murray's admittedly rather workaday biography. [The crit-quotes on the back of the book remain priceless examples of how to damn with faint praise. My personal favourite is "Sound, compact, refreshingly judicious" which must be a euphemism for "Dull, short, hopelessly timid"!] Throughout his life, Kafka struggled with outer circumstance and inner demons - his scrupulous demands of his own writing, his recurring bouts of tuberculosis, his sense of personal isolation, his work as a lawyer for a workers' insurance society, his difficult relationship with his father, his complex attitude to his own Jewish background, his situation as a member of the German-speaking minority in Prague, his tormented relationship with his fiancée, his need to create the conditions in which he could write. It would be impossible for these influences on and resultants of his own temperament not to find their way into his writings. The state of society in general and the specific conditions in post First World War Czechoslovakia, as part of Kafka's experience, are inevitably reflected in his work. But the real point is ultimately a simple one, it seems to me. All of this material is processed through the artistic sensibility in order to be reshaped into the work. And the work is about a quest for order and meaning - in Kafka's case, apparently a fruitless one. But a fruitless quest is still a quest and any sincere quest, I would maintain, demands in and of itself a religious attitude. I mean, no attitude of quest is required to conclude that life is utterly devoid of meaning and purpose! And it may be that, in the final analysis, Kafka is less pessimistic than he appears on the surface. In an essay entitled "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka", Albert Camus quotes Kirkegaard (much admired by Kafka): "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope."

Not so much a New Year's Resolution, more a self-defence mechanism. I'm going to have to write up books as I read them if I'm to avoid a repeat of the (still unfinished) marathon of the December entry! So, here goes...

- Oliver James, "Affluenza"

If this book is a bestseller, which is what is claimed on the cover, then it's pretty ironic, given that it is an out and out attack on the consumer society. A perfect illustration really of just how there is no escape from the amorphous but ubiquitous Shopping Monster which sucks all human hopes and aspirations into its omnivorous maw. It looks like Oliver James is getting rich telling us how money doesn't make us happy! If, however, we can will ourselves to suspend our awareness of this awkward fact, "Affluenza" tells an interesting story. Oliver James argues, convincingly, that there is a straight correlation between the superficial values induced by what he calls in his shorthand "Selfish Capitalism" and emotional distress expressed in depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and personality disorders. His research is based on individual interviews carried out in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York, which throw light on the extent to which the different nations are afflicted by what he terms the "Affluenza Virus" - the placing of a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame. Inevitably we arrive at the foregone conclusion: the more you got the virus, the unhappier you are. His method is scarcely scientific, extrapolating as it does from the specific to the general. But his results, however obvious, cannot be stated too often or too emphatically. He implies that the creation of artificial "needs" is all a sort of corporate conspiracy aimed at inculcating in us the false values which are indispensable to sustaining demand for superfluous goods and services. Well, like obviously, duh! If you're selling, you need to convince the customer to buy. Beyond certain basic essentials, most purchases are made in order to satisfy psychological needs of greater or lesser sophistication. James proposes ways in which we can insulate ourselves from the virus. Basically they boil down to asking yourself whether you really need something before you buy it. Could be quite a puritan programme! Frivolous consumption is surely innocent enough within limits. Sound advice includes not buying more house than you can easily afford, so as not to become a mortgage slave. All right in theory, but, for many, even the most modest accomodation will turn them into mortgage slaves. His most important recommendation is that we revalue the status of motherhood. It is absurd that the most important role in all our lives is now somehow faintly embarrassing. Oh, is that all you do?

I enjoyed this book, cheering inwardly as I read it. However, to my mind, his conclusions don't go far enough. The problem, as I see it, is that we all of us have an inner emptiness which needs to be filled. In the apparent absence of any alternative, failing to comprehend our real need, we fill that emptiness with the random bric-à-brac of the consumer society. If that inner space were nourished by a profound sense of the meaning and pupose of our lives, we could be as rich as Croesus and still remain inwardly untouched.

New Year's Resolutions. As the years pass, the cloak of good intentions with which we cover our inadequacies grows increasingly threadbare. I must be more organised, I must lose weight, I must get fit, I must finish off any number of half-started projects, I must stop being sarcastic, I must eradicate self-pity, I must avoid ill-temper etc. etc. All pretty pathetic really! In the final analysis it amounts to a sort of "I must be good", like lines at Infant School. In fact, I have always suspected that there is something deeply pretentious about trying to pull oneself up by one's own moral bootstrings. It implies that I am, potentially at least, a far better person than I actually am, that my sometimes base or passive behaviour is some sort of temporary aberration from a Platonic idea which is my norm. It is certain that the world is full of people who are utterly convinced of the fact that they in some way actually embody moral perfection. That way lies the burning of heretics.

And yet the desire to improve in some way is something that is deeply rooted in us all. We are all inhabited, I am sure, by a sense that we are somehow incomplete beings. In a way it is this constant state of "want" which is the clockwork motor which keeps us moving. And not just in the moral dimension. In the society of relative plenty in which we live today, it is the force which powers the consumer society. Once I get the house/car/I-pod/ exotic holiday etc. etc., then I shall be complete. It's a joke, but a joke to weep bitter tears over.

What to do? It seems to me that the first thing we need to try is to stop trying to do something about it. Any effort based on a fiction of how I would like to be, of how I would like to appear to myself and others, is part of the problem, not part of the solution. All the great teachings in the history of humanity point in the same direction. The only escape from the hamster-wheel scrabble of life in the ordinary dimension of time is through the cultivation of Being. Since we are alive in every second, this state is not so far away. Try it. I dare you. Just drop "doing" for a moment and BE - HERE - NOW. Sense the relaxation of the body. Don't permit automatic thoughts to distract. Don't comment or explain. Dare not to know. Dare to be.

If I have a resolution, it is this: I shall remember. I shall remember to turn from automatic "doing" and satisfy my real want. I shall remember to be.