Opening Up Frontiers

(in which we discover that the inhabitants of Formosa get around on hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses)

After having studied the different types of nonjourney and some of the situations which might lead us to talk about them, the time has come to put forward some suggestions on how to acquit ourselves in such situations, which as we’ve seen are more frequent than you might think, and which each of us risks having to face at some moment or other.

Seldom having traveled myself and already having found myself having to talk about imaginary places on many an occasion, I am not badly placed to offer some tips to those who fear being confronted with the necessity of having to reinvent space without being contradicted. And we can see that far from falling victim to the situation, it is possible to profit from it and gain a better knowledge of the places in question and of oneself.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an inhabitant of Formosa1 called George Psalmanazar appeared in London and was an immediate sensation, rapidly gaining huge popularity.

He said he had been kidnapped from his island by Jesuits who had taken him to France and tried in vain to convert him to Catholicism. He spoke both Latin and English, and the religious persecution he’d suffered immediately won the hearts of the Anglican community in London, who took him under their wing.

Psalmanazar took it upon himself to promote his native island, largely ignored in Europe. He soon became very successful, partly because of his original style of dress—he wore exotic, baroque outfits—and his diet—he ate only raw meat—but above all for the novel information he was able to supply on his home country. His stories were mind-blowing.

His reputation grew even more after the 1704 publication of his work An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan. It had been preceded by an autobiography, which had swiftly been reprinted and was translated into several languages. The success of the book, which was due to the revelations it contained, led the author to give lectures to learned societies and increased his fame even more, not only in England but across Europe.

It is true that Psalmanazar furnished a considerable amount of firsthand information on this country about which little was known at the time. He made it known that Formosa, whose capital was Xternetsa, was a dependency of Japan and not of China, as had been incorrectly believed for a long time, and that the ruling regime was a monarchy.

Psalmanazar also provided some original insights into the country’s customs. It was thanks to him that we learned that the inhabitants wore clothes that accurately reflected their social rank, that they were polygamous, that they ate their wives if they discovered them to be unfaithful and that human sacrifice was practiced regularly.2We also discovered through Psalmanazar that the inhabitants of Formosa mainly ate snakes, that they lived underground in circular houses, and they didn’t only use horses and camels to get around but also rode hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.3

But Psalmanazar didn’t content himself with providing precious information on life and customs on Formosa. He also allowed us to study its language.4 Not only was he a fluent speaker, but he could also write it without difficulty. He explained that it used twenty characters, different from the characters used in China or Japan; it had six distinct tenses; and variations were made by using auxiliaries and tones.

In order to improve our knowledge, he was able to provide a translation of the Lord’s Prayer which began with the words, “Amy Pornio dan chin Ornio vicy, Gnayjorhe sai Lory, Eyfodere sai Bagalin, jorhe sai domino apo chin Ornio.” Formosa’s language aroused keen interest among intellectuals, including Leibniz, and because of its rigor, continued to be studied by linguists decades after Psalmanazar’s fraud had been brought to light.

Of course Psalmanazar didn’t come from Formosa. Born in France, he had adopted this ersatz identity after first having passed for an Irish pilgrim in order to travel around Europe more freely. He was happy to explain himself in his Memoirs, a book in which he recounted in detail the circumstances that led him to create this fiction.

Despite the success of his deception and the lack of criticism he received, it seems that Psalmanazar ended up feeling guilty about the way he had made fun of the English intelligentsia. While he didn’t denounce himself during his lifetime, he dedicated himself to the study of theology and became a specialist in issues related to the Hebrew religion. It might be assumed that this was what led him to participate in a dictionary of religions for which he provided the entry on Formosa in which he criticized Psalmanazar’s trickery, writing of himself in the third person.

When you think of the number of improbabilities with which he embellished his stories, it is astonishing that Psalmanazar was able to construct this pretense and maintain it for several years. For example, there was the number of children he claimed were sacrificed each year on Formosa—twenty thousand—which led certain skeptical spirits to remark that at that rate, the population would rapidly become extinct.

Moreover, even if few people visited the island at that time, some Europeans did go there and their accounts were radically different from Psalmanazar’s, who, with great composure, replied that they had only visited part of the island, never having ventured beyond the west coast.

The most surprising thing was that Psalmanazar, who had pale skin and blond hair, didn’t correspond in the slightest to the picture one might have had of an inhabitant of Formosa. But the majority of his interlocutors didn’t seem surprised by this—at that time, the concept of race wasn’t decisive in the perception of otherness. And Psalmanazar explained eruditely that members of the intellectual class on the island were pale skinned because they lived underground.

How did Psalmanazar go about fooling so many people? The first reason he managed to convince so many intellectuals and for such a long period of time was the verisimilitude of his description of Formosa and his own personal investment in the simulation.

With Psalmanazar, we rediscover the play of intertwined places that I noted earlier. For the real country of Formosa, which was difficult to visit at the time, Psalmanazar substituted an imaginary country that he knew how to reinvent in every aspect without ever having been there. But this substitution doesn’t become intelligible until we take into account what I proposed calling the “inner landscape” of the author and the eternally lost “original place” that he never stops searching for in vain through all of his confabulations, just like every one of us.

It is notable in fact that Psalmanazar, by engaging in this deception, isn’t only looking for the tangible social benefits he might gain from describing a virtually unknown land; he also attempts to construct a true romance of his origins by inventing for himself a new identity and a new history, going so far as to develop a new language whose rules he had better know, given that he is the only person in the world who can speak it.

To this end, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is a compromise formation in the Freudian sense, like a dream or a delirium. Psalmanazar recreates himself through an imaginary Formosa that allows him to deploy an infantile fantasy of omnipotence—just as Rosie Ruiz and Jean-Claude Romand did in their own ways. He invents his own origins and those of everyone close to him and creates a comprehensive family saga of which he is the hero.

Psalmanazar’s second quality is the possession of a fertile imagination. In this, he fits into the tradition of authors like Marco Polo and Margaret Mead’s female informants—like them he is capable of inventing a plethora of picturesque elements that capture and retain the public’s attention.

It is impossible to hope to speak with any conviction of places you haven’t been to without a vivid imagination. The capacity to dream and to make others dream is essential to anyone wanting to describe an unknown place and hoping to capture the imagination of their readers and listeners.5

This imagination is deployed in several ways that appear contradictory. First of all, Psalmanazar invents a country to suit his taste, gives it a political system, an economy, a language, customs, and even endows it with a unique animal husbandry. What he constructs is a complete world, capable of functioning, like the imaginary realms that populate travelogues and children’s games.

This imagination relies upon a strong sense of faux realism, or what one might call true detail. Like Chateaubriand, with his detailed descriptions of the flowers and insects of parts of America that he took good care not to explore, Psalmanazar nurtures the tiniest elements of his stories to create a credible illusion of an alternative reality.

But, as specific as it is, the place invented by Psalmanazar cannot clearly be situated in any particular locality. Although it has a determined geographical location, it could just as easily be found anywhere at all. The truth is that Psalmanazar combined several travelogues from different continents, and his montage contains elements from the Aztec and Inca civilizations—starting with human sacrifices—as well as from the Japanese and Chinese.6

It is no trivial matter that Psalmanazar transports hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses to Formosa, anticipating Henri Michaux’s gesture when he added camels to his description of Honfleur.7 Transporting animals or objects from one country to another, prevalent in the accounts of armchair travelers, shows that there is a different kind of space here than the one that prevails in the real world, a place that is much more flexible and mobile than the one in which we operate on a daily basis.

This apparently contradictory mixture of precision and ambiguity is essential to the invention of a haven of refuge conducive to the imagination. The details guarantee the existence of the imaginary place and the veracity of the account; the ambiguity allows the reader or listener to project themselves individually according to a particular hook offered by the account and to find a singular space that chimes with their own inner landscape.

But personal investment and imagination would not have been sufficient to explain—any more than in Margaret Mead’s case—that such an absurd fiction could be sustained for so long and accepted by the scientific community like a realist document. A model of individual compromise, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is also, when you take a closer look, a model of collective compromise.

If you think about it, the description of Formosa is just as much a plural work as a singular fiction. As we have already seen, the conversations we can have about places we don’t know do not only concern the places and ourselves, but also involve the people we are addressing ourselves to, often benevolent accomplices.

Michael Keevak showed in the book he wrote on Psalmanazar that the latter’s success can be explained by the fact that Psalmanazar addressed a disquisition to the English that they wanted to hear, particularly in terms of religion, and offered them an image of themselves that they found recognizable:

Psalmanazar, in short, wasn’t just the perfect response to the start of a period of fascination for exotic chinoiseries, but also the solution to a growing desire amongst Europeans to meet exotic specimens who weren’t overly exotic: as Linda Lomeris wrote, foreigners should function as a kind of mirror of the subjective preoccupations of Europeans. Psalmanazar might have been a stranger who ate raw meat and spoke a completely foreign language, but he didn’t present the slightest menace. After all, he was a noble savage, he was Anglican, and (in particular?) he was white.8

Psalmanazar’s Formosa functioned as a collective compromise in the sense that it allowed an entire community—who weren’t necessarily, on the unconscious plane, as fooled as they led us to believe—to think about their relationship to a remote foreign country. As such, this fiction allowed real psychological work to be done, in the same way that Margaret Mead’s imaginary Samoans offered Americans a transitional place onto which they could project their unconscious desires and be a step ahead in thinking about sexual liberation.

Hence the importance of the spatial jamming that Psalmanazar engages in by presenting a place that is just as specific as it is unsuitable. His rewriting of Formosa is all the more liable to please a vast audience because it isn’t too limited geographically, nor too personal in terms of fantasy, but caters to all. In doing this, he places Formosa in the universalized space of a collective mythology in which numerous readers can find themselves.

The bric-a-brac country that Psalmanazar constructs with the support of his benevolent audience shows that, like numerous armchair travelers, he doesn’t play with the real geographical place addressed by science, but with an aberrant space that is the same as the one literature invents to describe the world.

This aberrant space is resolutely atopic—that is to say, it doesn’t experience the limitations that organize the geography of the real world. It possesses great mobility, like dreams do, dominated as it is in the same way by the primary processes of the unconscious. It is possible to move at full speed from one location to another as Rosie Ruiz did, as though no distance was insurmountable.

It establishes communication between geographical places that are not adjacent to each other in the real world but separated by large distances by renewing the frontiers. It is therefore not surprising that in this space, animals are able to move without difficulty from one continent to another and settle in new territories where one would never come across them normally.

And it is equally likely that, profiting from the mobility of the literary space and this opening of frontiers that disrupts circulation in the real world, the characters of certain works of fiction profit from this by passing from one text to another and settling in a world that seems more hospitable to them.

If we don’t take into account the atopic character of literary space, we cannot hope to understand the extent to which it involves a different space from that of the real world, nor grasp the multitude of discrete events that occur, sometimes without even the writer’s knowledge, and which merit our attention.

Paying attention to the atopic character of literary space is essential when describing places you haven’t been to, since this atopia and the new traffic rules it establishes between worlds encourage a generous opening up of the field of descriptions by no longer limiting them to a single evoked area.

In fact, it encourages supplementing described areas with elements borrowed from other real or imaginary worlds as Psalmanazar does, elements that it might be desirable to have in the story in order to make the descriptions of the place one hopes to have others experience more sensitive and relevant.

1.    UP–

2.    Psalmanazar’s book, published in 1704, was reissued in 1705 in a new version that accentuated the cruelty of Formosa’s morals. See the analysis of the two versions in Richard M. Swiderski’s The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 66.

3.    See Swiderski on Formosa’s abundant fauna, which included lions, bears and wolves (ibid., 75).

4.    For a detailed analysis of the language of Psalmanazar, see Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 61.

5.    And Psalmanazar does it with enough conviction to win the support of his interlocutors. In his Memoirs, he tells how he had resolved that, once having made an assertion, he would never to go back on it, whatever unlikelihood might be revealed or contradiction made by witnesses (George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa. Written by Himself in Order to Be Published after His Death (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Ecco Print Editions, Dublin, 2011), 141.

6.    Formosa’s language is a montage, too. Its articles (oi hic, ey haec, ai hoc) are inspired by Latin (see Swiderski, 75).

7.    “In the past I had too much respect for nature. I placed myself in front of things and landscapes and I let them be.

That’s over, from now on I’m going to intervene.

I was at Honfleur and I was bored. So I resolutely added some camels. It wasn’t really called for. Never mind, it was my idea. Besides, I went about this with the greatest prudence. I introduced them first of all on very busy days, on Saturdays in the marketplace.” Henri Michaux, La nuit remue (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1967). English translation by Michele Hutchison.

8.    Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 53.

Pierre Bayard

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Does Sherlock Holmes Exist?

 

THERE IS A TWOFOLD mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles, then. The first concerns the identity of the murderer; the second has to do with the circumstances around the book’s creation and the reasons why Conan Doyle allowed so many improbabilities to exist within it. In my opinion, we have to clear up this second mystery before we have any chance of solving the first.

In order to grasp what is at play deep down in this book, that which has escaped the all-too-rational critics, we must try to understand the tormented relationships Conan Doyle shared with his characters—especially his greatest character, Sherlock Holmes. These relationships were tinged with madness, and, in the case of this novel, ended up influencing the plot to the point of making it indecipherable to the writer himself. It is as if, having lost control of his own work, Conan Doyle hid his own confusion behind that of his characters.

We should not underestimate the bonds that can form between a creator and his characters, bonds whose fierceness makes us wonder to what extent these characters might possess a form of existence like our own. This question about the independent lives of literary characters is all the more acute for Sherlock Holmes; in fact, the celebrated Holmes is the best example we can point to of the difficulties, and at times dramatic consequences, inherent in separating real people from fictional beings.

This tricky distinction is not the product of current criticism; rather, it is an idea readers have struggled with since ancient times. In his book Fictional Worlds,53 Thomas Pavel retraced the history of the schools of thought that, since antiquity, have reflected on the separations between the world of reality from the world of fiction, and on the intersections that might exist between them.*Commenting on an excerpt from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Pavel notes that although the reader knows perfectly well that Mr. Pickwick does not exist, he is still caught, while reading the passages devoted to him, with an irrepressible feeling of reality:

The reader [ . . . ] experiences two contradictory intuitions: on the one hand he knows well that unlike the sun, whose actual existence is beyond doubt, Mr. Pick-wick and most of the human beings and states of affairs described in the novel do not and never did exist outside its pages. On the other hand, once Mr. Pickwick’s fictionality is acknowledged, happenings inside the novel are vividly felt as possessing some sort of reality of their own, and the reader can fully sympathize with the adventures and reflections of the characters.54

All of us who try to define the status of fictional characters are confronted with this feeling of reality—which is also, in many respects, a feeling of unsettling strangeness. But the attempt to define a character’s status is indeed the heart of the problem. These characters do not precisely inhabit our world, but they unquestionably occupy a certain place in it, which is not so easy to define.

In a book devoted to listing a full range of the possible theoretical stances, it is interesting that the character of Sherlock Holmes plays a large role; Pavel cites various authors who use the example of Holmes to question the degree of validity of statements concerning fictional beings. Thus Pavel quotes Saul Kripke stating that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, but noting that “in other states of affairs he would have existed.”55 Less hospitable, Robert Howell notes that if the character of Sherlock Holmes is made to achieve the geometric impossibility of drawing a square circle, his world stops being a possible world.56 And Pavel postulates that “there are worlds where Sherlock Holmes, while behaving as he does in Conan Doyle’s stories, is a secret but compulsive admirer of women.”57Other characters might occupy the same symbolic function: the names Hamlet and Anna Karenina turn up many times in Pavel’s work. But Holmes has become so famous that he takes on a special form of existence, one that blurs the boundaries between literature and fact. Sherlock Holmes seemed such a part of reality that when Conan Doyle tried to make his creation disappear, there arose among his readers a collective sense of trauma. Conan Doyle did not realize that for some readers the character was decidedly not a matter of fiction—that his elimination amounted to an actual murder.

On this question of the boundaries between the real world and the fictional world there are essentially two contradictory positions, with a number of intermediate positions between them. At one pole are those Thomas Pavel describes as “segregationists”:

Some theoreticians promote a segregationist view of these relations, characterizing the content of fictional texts as pure imagination without truth value.58

In the opinion of the segregationists, a watertight barrier exists between these two worlds, thereby limiting the freedoms of fictional characters. For hard-line segregationists, statements concerning fictional characters must necessarily be void; they can carry no inkling of truth, since the things that they speak of do not exist.

Pavel shows how segregationism has evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century and has become progressively more fluid, even though it remains fundamentally intolerant toward the creations of the writerly imagination. According to classic segregationists like Bertrand Russell, “there is no universe of discourse outside the real world. Existence [. . .] can be ascribed only to objects of the actual world.”59 But Russell is not content merely to question their right to existence; he also means to deny the possibility of truth in any statement made about them.60Some more broad-minded segregationists take each sort of potential argument into separate consideration. For example, a sentence like “The present king of France is wise” may either be subjected to true/false evaluation or simply rejected outright as absurd, depending on the circumstances under which it is uttered—particularly given the current political system in France.61 But segregationists are much more prudent in determining the truth of statements about beings like Sherlock Holmes, who exist only in the realm of fiction.

By agreeing, however, that it is not possible to evaluate the truth of a statement without inquiring into the conditions in which it was made, segregationists open a breach. And through that breach scurries a brigade of theoreticians who are both more relativist in their view of the truth and more hospitable to alternate worlds and the creatures who inhabit them.

Other critics are less closed to fictional worlds; for them, Pavel offers the term “integrationist”:

[T]heir opponents adopt a tolerant, integrationist outlook, claiming that no genuine ontological difference can be found between fictional and nonfictional descriptions of the actual world.62

The “integrationists,” who likewise form a group made up of varied sensibilities, are ready to recognize a certain form of existence both in fictional characters (they “assume that Mr. Pickwick enjoys an existence barely less substantial than the sun or England in 1827”63) and in the potential truth of statements made about them; they do not regard such things as inherently absurd speculations.

On the other hand, for the same reason that integrationists grant fictional texts a status comparable to nonfiction, they tend to deny the latter its privileged place with regard to truth. Believing every statement obeys conventions, they are inclined to undercut the distinction between fiction and the other types of discourse.64

Pavel seems to have placed himself in this more tolerant group when he notes (following the example of John R. Searle especially) that the fictional quality of a text can be changed according to the circumstances, and that “fictional texts enjoy a certain discursive unity: for their readers, the worlds they describe are not necessarily fractured along a fictive/actual line,.65 He means that fiction is only one particular form of the play of language, and a given text may seem fictional or actual depending on the context in which we encounter it. The same is true for oral performances. Pavel takes the example of a theatrical scene wherein an actor mimics the gestures of a priest and pretends to bless the audience. There is nothing effective about this blessing in most contexts, but it can become effective in certain circumstance: imagine, for example, a dictatorship in which religion is banned and in which a theater audience, having kept the old faith, experiences the actor’s gesture as authentic, transforming this fictional scene into a scene of real life.66For partisans of integration of fictional characters, there’s no point in fortifying the borders between worlds, and denying these characters their existence. On the contrary: in a society that is increasingly inclusive of formerly sidelined groups, it seems preferable to also recognize fictional persons’ innate legitimacy, and to admit that they form part of our world, which implies, as it does for all its inhabitants, a certain number of duties, but also of rights.

The difficulty in taking a stance on these debates, which can reach a high degree of philosophical or linguistic complexity, stems from the fact that the various authors, resorting to ideas as vague as “reality” or “truth,” do not always sound as if they’re talking about the same thing.

In my opinion, however, there are two major arguments in favor of the theory of the integrationists and their tolerance toward fictional characters. The first is of a linguistic order. It comes down to noting that language does not allow us to make a separation between real beings and imaginary characters, and so the integration of characters is inevitable, whether one has an open mind or not.

Language is full of what are called “mixed sentences,”67 statements that cross between worlds by combining fiction with reality. These statements allow imaginary entities to wander through our world—as in a sentence like “Freud psychoanalyzed Gradiva”—or, conversely, grant beings and objects from the real world the right to inhabit fiction, as in “Sherlock Holmes walks down Baker Street.”

In other words, even if some beings are native, and are born and live in one of the worlds without traveling, there exist many immigrants who pass from one world to the other, to stay there for a brief time or to settle there for a longer period.* Whatever the borders and their fortifications may be, it is hopeless to forbid these passages between worlds, which, as we will see, occur in both directions.

It is more or less impossible, in fact, to avoid these mixed sentences; even the segregationists’ demonstrations are thick with them (even if they are there to be dismissed). To say that “Sherlock Holmes does not belong to our world” is already a mixed sentence in itself, since it juxtaposes the real world and a fictional character, uniting the two for a brief while.

By speaking in the same way about what exists and what does not exist—by conferring an identical degree of reality on the two—language is an agent forever sneaking across the border between worlds. To be in a position to establish a clear distinction between the worlds, as the segregationists dream of doing, we would have to imagine a being or a state of affairs about which it would not be necessary to speak.

The second argument in favor of the integrationist theory is a psychological one. It amounts to noting that although fictional characters might not possess a material reality, they certainly have a psychological reality, which leads undeniably to a form of existence.

Our relationship to literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.

Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject’s life can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people, especially if we are in a relationship marked by transference; “real” people reach us only through the prism of a kind of novel in which they are the heroes or monsters.

What’s more, many of us are deeply marked by literary characters, to the point where we are no longer able to tell the difference between reality and fiction. This phenomenon is richly illustrated by works like Don Quixote or Madame Bo-vary. (In fact, it could be described as “bovaryism.”) In this state, the subconscious fails to recognize the fictive quality of literary characters and comes to see them as just as real as the inhabitants of our world, and perhaps even more so.

For this reason, it is impossible to agree with the segregationist theory that literary characters have no existence. To do so would neglect what we have learned from the life of the mind, which, in its depths, is located at the intersection of different worlds and could even perhaps be defined as the meeting place between reality and fiction.

As you will have guessed, the author of these lines places himself without the slightest hesitation in the camp of integrationists, and, within this camp, in the part that’s most tolerant of that original form of existence embodied by literary characters.

My tolerance toward fictional creations can be explained by two chief notions. The first is the certainty of a great permeability between fiction and reality. There is no point in trying to patrol the borders between these worlds, for passages between them occur constantly, in both directions. Not only, as we will see, can we inhabit one fictional world or another, but the inhabitants of this world also at times come to live in ours.

The second notion—which I’m afraid would not be shared by even the most open-minded of integrationists—is my profound conviction that literary characters enjoy a certain autonomy, both within the world in which they live and in the travels they make between that world and our own. We do not completely control their actions and movements. Neither the author nor the reader can do so.

If you do not accept this twofold hypothesis of the permeability of borders and the autonomy of literary characters, it is impossible in my opinion to hope to solve the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles any better than Sherlock Holmes did.

* See also the summary of this question by Bertrand Westphal, in La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace, Paris: Minuit, 2007, pp. 126–182.

* These categories of “native” and “immigrant” were coined by Terence Parsons, who also uses the term “surrogate,” for when a fictional account mentions a real object, substantially modifying its properties (Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong

Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles

Pierre Bayard

In Sporting Endeavors

 

(in which we wonder whether Philippides would have used public transport after the Battle of Marathon if given the opportunity)

Like anthropology and journalism, sport provides fertile ground for those wishing to describe places they haven’t been to. If numerous sports take place in enclosed arenas and therefore aren’t directly concerned, a substantial number of risky practices like mountaineering, sailing or motor races, aeronautical escapades or hunting in faraway countries1 necessarily lead their devotees to ask themselves whether it is worth throwing themselves into a dangerous, exhausting venture if they can instead limit their efforts to the essential and concentrate on the story.

It is well within their interests to develop skills that will allow them to speak with accuracy about a sporting performance they have refrained from making and produce a convincing line about it that includes plenty of descriptions of the places they have been to, in order to remove all doubts from those suspecting that they may have taken a shortcut or stayed at home.

In 1980, a woman by the name of Rosie Ruiz, a young American of Cuban origin, twenty-six years old, entered the annals of athletic history for two different reasons. The first one, purely sports related, was that she won the women’s division in an important athletic challenge, the Boston Marathon, also setting the third-fastest time for a woman in any marathon.2

This event is one of the oldest distance races and one of the most famous in the world. It usually takes place on the third Monday in April. It has the characteristic of not being open to all candidates but only to preselected runners who have achieved a minimum qualifying time in another official marathon, ensuring an exceptional sporting standard.

It is still easy today to peruse the images that have survived of this historical course and the triumphant arrival of Rosie Ruiz. We discover a young woman in a yellow shirt, wearing the number W50, running the last few meters of the race with a stumbling stride before collapsing into the arms of spectators who help her, half-fainting, across the line. After this, two policemen take over and support her under her arms to prevent her from collapsing entirely.

Next we see her answering a journalist’s questions. Carrying the laurel wreath that right until 1986 was the only reward given to winners of this race and holding a silver cup, Rosie Ruiz, clearly in a state of euphoria, struggles to catch her breath and only briefly responds to the questions. Asked whether anyone helped her, she replied that she trained alone and was her own coach.

Rosie Ruiz’s sporting performance was remarkable in any case because she ran the marathon in two hours, thirty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds, which was the best female time ever recorded at the Boston event and the third best time ever run by a woman in an official marathon. This fact alone made her an instant celebrity, something she was to remain.

However, it wasn’t Rosie Ruiz’s exceptional time that brought her so much fame. She mainly went down in history for having lost her title again so quickly, after being accused of not actually having run the full course.

One of the things that attracted the organizers’ attention was the exceptional time Rosie Ruiz made compared to her previous performance at the New York City Marathon. An even more revelatory indication in their eyes was the fact that the young woman recovered so rapidly after having crossed the finish line and could give no other explanation for her stunning physical condition than that she’d got up that morning brimming with energy.

Worse still, the officials sitting at various points around the race could not remember seeing the young woman pass by and wondered what mysterious, unknown path she had taken to be able to cover the distance between the start and the finish in record time.

The scandal reached greater proportions when the officials, looking into the New York Marathon—which had enabled Ruiz to qualify for the Boston event—became convinced, with witnesses to support it, that the young woman had covered part of the course by metro.

Accused of having cheated, Rosie Ruiz was disqualified from the Boston Marathon and the runner up, Jacqueline Gareau, was awarded the title. But Ruiz never admitted the fraud and continued to calmly affirm, despite all the evidence, that she had completed the legendary marathon in first place.

I personally have difficulty understanding the reasons that lead the organizers to strip Rosie Ruiz of her title. As someone who is rather insensitive to sporting disciplines and remains perplexed by the idea of anyone spending part of their life trying to run a certain distance in a minimum amount of time, it isn’t easy to understand the reproaches made to this young woman.

In terms of history, in any case, she doesn’t seem to have lacked respect for the spirit of the marathon, which consisted of finding the best way of getting from one place to another in a limited amount of time. When Philippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Areopagus that the Persian army had been defeated, he chose the only method that was available to him, but it is obvious that he would have chosen a faster way if he’d had the opportunity.

In terms of sporting logic, aside from the fact that I doubt that using public transport is expressly forbidden in the marathon’s rules, it would be naive to suppose that Rosie Ruiz was an isolated case. Other similar cases have been identified—suggesting that the number of frauds is actually quite high.3 One only needs to leaf through the abundance of literature dedicated to exploits in inaccessible places with something of a critical mind to guess that some of these texts, like those of Marco Polo and Chateaubriand, were written at a fireside, and that the writers should be judged for their literary performance, not their sporting prowess.

The strangest thing about this story is that Rosie Ruiz was primarily reproached for her lack of imagination. The organizers considered it to her detriment that she was incapable of accurately describing certain parts of the route, in particular a girls’ college that all the competitors should have passed—Wellesley College—whose students traditionally cheer with rapturous enthusiasm.

It is somewhat paradoxical that part of the charge against her was Rosie Ruiz’s inability to describe the route, as if to criticize her refusal to resort to the particular kind of fiction—artistically fertile but unacceptable in sports—that is literary truth. The argument can easily be turned around because it would be just as easy to think that, if she’d really wanted to cheat, Rosie Ruiz would have gone to the trouble of gathering information on the route.

As for myself, I would have no trouble, if asked, recounting the time I took part in the Boston Marathon some years ago.

For example, I have clear memories of the start of the race in the small town of Hopkinton, the gentle descent toward Ashland and going past the clock tower, then the train depot at Framingham, before skirting Lake Cochituate on our left and hearing, around the twenty-kilometer mark, the screams of the Wellesley students in the distance, carried by the wind.

How would it be possible to forget those groups of enthusiastic female students, frantically brandishing placards bearing inscriptions as encouraging as “I love you!” or “Marry me!” in front of the magnificent campus lost amid squirrel-filled trees. I can even give you a detailed description of the young blond woman wearing a blue suit and a red scarf who took it upon herself to run alongside me for several meters, spraying my face with a bottle of water.

And I can still remember, after we’d passed the park with the kangaroos, the hills before Newton, in particular the most difficult to climb, Heartbreak Hill, which precedes the prestigious Boston College, whose gothic tower spiked with four spires irresistibly reminds all Parisian competitors of the slender silhouette of the Saint-Jacques Tower.

Finally, I remember the route’s gentle decline toward Boston after that last climb that heralds the Charles River, and how, although exhausted, my companions and I were transported by an increasing mass of spectators who were more and more enthusiastic the closer we got to the finish line, where we were taken into the care of an army of volunteers who carried us off to rest and regain our strength.

Despite appearances, Rosie Ruiz’s fraud, if ever proven; the fantastical filter Marco Polo used to describe China to his beloved; and Margaret Mead reinventing the Samoan Islands with her playful young friends have more than one thing in common.

The first thing they have in common is the fact that we are talking about what I earlier called an imaginary realm, even if in one example a city is concerned. Undoubtedly we find ourselves faced with a different scenario than that of China or the Samoan Islands since a proliferation of concrete details is set against an abstract representation of loci here, reduced to a cord stretched across a finish line. But what the experiences do have in common is the rewriting of space, or, if one prefers, its reconfiguration, allowing the subjects to find themselves in a new place, more fulfilling in terms of fantasy.

The imaginary realm invented by Rosie Ruiz, where, like Peter Pan, she is capable of overcoming the laws of nature and achieving improbable sporting exploits, is modeled on that of childhood, whose privileges she rediscovers for a while. It is a realm where everything is possible: there are no barriers, no limits; dreams can rapidly become reality. It is a place where it is conceivable, for example, to transport oneself, without difficulty and seemingly without time, from one place to another in a city that has become a purely psychological space.

It is this experience of infantile omnipotence that Rosie Ruiz acts out in an imaginary place, completely constructed around the instant she triumphantly crosses the finish line to a cheering public, experiencing a jubilation that presumably resonates with the most distant of her experiences. There is neither distance nor time between desire and its realization in this fantasy space with its dreamlike construction where the pleasure principle overrides the reality principle.

In both cases, this rewriting has an identical goal: to highlight the subject in a state of absolute pleasure. The amorous scenes with Chinese women dreamed up by Marco Polo and the multiple sexual encounters Margaret Mead imagines taking place over the entire Samoan Islands, transformed into a kind of primitive “general scene,” are condensed in this moment of unique self-celebration, its intensity multiplied by the prism of the media, in absolute narcissistic happiness.

So the example set by Rosie Ruiz shows how talk of imaginary realms cannot be understood without introducing a third notion corresponding to the unconscious life of the subject, that of the inner landscape.

Freud used this expression for a while to describe what was repressed in the mind, though finally it wasn’t retained by psychoanalytic theory. “Repression,” he wrote in his Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933), “is for me an inner foreign country (inneres Ausland), just as reality, if you will allow me to use an unusual expression, is an outer foreign country (äusseres Ausland).”4Thus he evoked the image of an inner country or landscape and other related images like those of regions and provinces5 in his search for tropes that would allow him to describe unconscious reality and the words best suited to showing it and thinking about it. It is an image that is a continuation of the propositions he often used to represent the interior of the psyche as a spatial form.

If the notion of an inner landscape is fitting, it is because it expresses how the interior of the psyche is certainly of a topological order, as Freud imagined and as Lacan further intuited with his idea of topology. It can also be thought of in geographical terms, with its landscapes, its elevations, its pits and even its inhabitants, which could include those parts of ourselves that seem to lead their own lives and, at times, be ready to seize autonomy at our expense.6And it is to this fantasy image of an inner landscape that we refer to more or less consciously when we represent the insides of our minds like a region, a country or a city, open or fortified but separated from the others by frontiers that are more or less easy to cross and that assure our protection from the external world, even if we sometimes let down our barriers to certain privileged people.

The inner landscape, which might be another name for the unconscious, has both a collective and an unconscious dimension and is not isolated from the real world. On the contrary, it is behind the transformations to which we subject our representations of reality. And it is when the subject does not find peace there that he undertakes to substitute an imaginary world for the real one, whose geography is influenced by that of the inner landscape, becoming a place where he invents a realm that suits his needs.

If it isn’t possible to know Rosie Ruiz’s inner landscape with any accuracy—that is to say, her unconscious life with its spaces and its inhabitants—we can still try to gain an idea from the traces left in her transformation of the real landscape of Boston into an imaginary realm, reduced in its totalitarian fiction to a space contracted around herself and her virtual exploit.

It is an inner realm that she would have complete mastery of and where she would also have control over space and time, as each of us secretly dreams. It is a place where she would rule without sharing, adored by subjects overwhelmed by admiration, retransmitting to her in a kind of infinite refraction that glorious image that certain self-obsessed rulers have others build for them in the form of statues in all the public spaces in their countries so as to have the pleasure, when walking, of being reflected back at themselves continually.

As we can see, the reproach made to Rosie Ruiz of being incapable of accurately describing the route of the Boston Marathon can be understood in two different ways. First of all, it can be understood in the traditional way as a reproach for having tried to appropriate a title for herself that she had no right to.

But, according to a different kind of logic, it can also be understood as a reproach for not having been enough of a writer and not managing, by attaining that particular kind of truth that literature aims at, to reconfigure space in a sufficiently convincing manner for her readers and listeners to be able to accept it as their own and attempt to inhabit it in their minds.

1.    See the example the eponymous Tartarin de Tarascon sets in Alphonse Daudet’s novel.

2.    VP+

3.    One celebrated case is that of the 1906 Tour de France, in which four cyclists were disqualified for taking the train from Nancy to Dijon.

4.    Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenburg Verlag, 1981), 50. Unfortunately, the recent Presses Universitaires de France translation has used the expressions “territoire extérieur interne” and “territoire extérieur externe.”

5.    “Superego, ego and id, these are the three empires, regions (Gebiete), provinces (Provinzen), between which we share the psychic apparatus of the individual, and now we are going to focus on their interrelationships.” Ibid., 62.

6.    Later in the text of Neue Folge, Freud constructs a complete allegory around the inner country and its different regions: “I imagine therefore a country whose terrain presents a varied configuration: there are hills, plains and lakes. The population is composed of Germans, Magyars and Slovaks performing various activities. Let us suppose the Germans, cattle-breeders, live on the hills, the Magyars, farmers and winegrowers, live on the plains, and the Slovaks, fishers and weavers, on the edge of the lakes. If this distribution was tidy and absolute, a Wilson would be delighted; geography would be easy to teach. But it is likely that when visiting the region, you would find less order and more confusion. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks sometimes live all mixed up, it is possible to have arable land on the hills and cattle on the plains.” Ibid., 63.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Pierre Bayard

Encounters with Someone You Love

(in which we see, along with Bill Murray and his groundhog, that the ideal way to seduce someone by speaking about books he or she loves without having read them yourself would be to bring time to a halt) 

CAN WE IMAGINE two beings so close that their inner books come, at least for a while, to coincide? Our last example of literary confrontation brings up quite another kind of risk from that of appearing to be an impostor in the eyes of a book’s author: that of being unable to seduce the person you have fallen for, because of not having read the books he or she likes.

It is a commonplace to say that our sentimental life is deeply marked by books, from childhood onward. First of all, fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.

It is a strange adventure indeed that befalls Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), the hero of Harold Ramis’s film Groundhog Day.1 The star weatherman of a major American television station, Connors is sent in the dead of winter, accompanied by the program’s producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman, to cover an important event of American provincial life, Groundhog Day.

The day takes its name from a ceremony, widely reported in the media, that happens in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, every year on February 2. On that date, a groundhog named Phil ( just like Phil Connors) is pulled from his hutch, and based on his reactions, it is determined whether the winter is about to end or will continue for six more weeks. The groundhog consultation ceremony is rebroadcast throughout the country, alerting the nation to whatever bad weather is in store.

Having arrived on the eve of the ceremony with his crew, Phil Connors spends the night in a bed-and-breakfast. The next morning, he goes to the spot where the segment is to be shot and provides his commentary on the behavior of the groundhog, which indicates that winter will continue. With little desire to steep in small-town life any longer than necessary, Phil Connors resolves to head back to Pittsburgh that very day, but the crew’s vehicle gets stuck in a blizzard as they try to leave town, and the three journalists are forced to resign themselves to spending another night in Punxsutawney.

Everything begins for Phil the following morning, if that phrase makes any sense, since the following morning is exactly what fails to arrive. Awakened at six o’clock by the music of his alarm clock, Phil notices that the music is the same as that of the previous day, but is not particularly concerned. His anxiety begins when he realizes that the broadcast that follows is also identical to that of the day before, and that the scenes he is seeing from his window are those he saw a day earlier. And his uneasiness increases when, upon leaving his room, he runs into the same man as 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 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 buried within us; in real life, these texts are caught up in an irresistible movement that transforms them constantly and renders all hope of overlap impossible. For if our inner books, like our fantasies, are relatively stable, the screen books about which we speak endlessly are perpetually being modified, as we shall see, and it is futile to imagine we can put a stop to their metamorphoses. 

The fantasy of overlap can thus be staged only by way of recourse to the supernatural. As we have seen, most of the time our discussions with others about books are necessarily and unfortunately based on fragments reworked by our private fantasies, and hence on something quite different from the books written by writers, who in any case don’t generally recognize themselves in what their readers say about them.

Beyond the humor of certain situations, there is something frightening in the way Phil sets out to seduce Rita, since it effectively suppresses the uncertainty that is normally part of communication. Endlessly telling the Other the words she wants to hear, being exactly the person she expects, is paradoxically to deny her as an other, since it amounts to no longer being a subject, fragile and uncertain, in her presence.

Since there is a moral in films, if not in life, it is not through his possession of Rita, but through his dispossession of himself, that Phil will finally achieve his ends. If the slow accumulation of the words awaited by the Other allows Phil to kiss Rita, getting the girl is not sufficient to set time back in motion; no matter how much progress he makes with his beloved, Phil continues to wake up on the same day.

But as time goes by and events repeat identically, Phil changes and loses his arrogance toward others. He begins to take an interest in them, to ask them questions about their lives, to do them favors. The days continue to repeat, but they are now devoted to helping others, with Phil using his method for personal improvement for benevolent purposes, such as preventing an old man from freezing to death in the street or catching a little boy who falls out of a tree.

In becoming interested in others, he himself becomes interesting, and he manages, through his kindness, to win Rita’s heart in a single day. And after falling asleep alongside her in the room where he has been waking up every day without progressing in time, he has the surprise, one day, of reawakening to discover the young woman still with him and to hear, for the first time, different music streaming from his alarm clock. Thus does he manage at last to cross the border, in one unsurpassable moment, that separates his day from the days to come.

1. Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

2. FB++.

How to Talk About 

Books You Haven’t Read 

PIERRE BAYARD

In the Bosom of the Family

(in which we see how Emmanuel Carrère manages to move a city to the edge of a lake)

Family life, like the different professions we have just examined, offers a number of notable situations in which the ability to speak of places you haven’t been to might be required. At least two of these situations—in which it is important to know how to make others believe that you were elsewhere—are worth calling to mind.

The first is adultery. If led to describe his daily activities, the person telling fibs to his official partner will necessarily be obliged at some point to talk about places he hasn’t been to, since he is unable to talk about those he really went to at that time.

The second, murder, is fortunately less common, but any one of us might become confronted with the necessity of having to take this route to ensure our peace and quiet one day. The way of proving that you were somewhere other than the place where the murder was committed has a name, an alibi, and it is often crucial for the accused to be able to furnish one that seems valid.

The term alibi moreover could refer to the whole set of issues studied in this book if we think about it, since all armchair travelers go about things in the same way assassins do, situating themselves fictionally in a different place from wherever they were in reality.

Many people know the terrible story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who led his family and friends to believe for twenty years that he was a medical specialist, occupying an important position at the World Health Organization in Geneva, while in reality, he never made it through the second year of university.

Romand wasn’t happy with just pretending to hold a prestigious medical position. He invented for himself—and without doubt ended up believing—a complete alternative existence in which he often traveled abroad, brushed shoulders with important figures in scientific research and politics and shone like a diamond in the salons and corridors of power.

To survive for such a long time without any income while living the kind of lifestyle befitting a medical specialist employed by an international organization, Romand was reduced to practicing scams—for example, divesting his family-in-law of all their savings by claiming to have invested them, and selling fake cancer medicines.

Curiously, during all those years, none of the people close to Romand, nor anyone he came across or conversed with about his imaginary life, ever seemed to have noticed the improbability of his accounts, nor tried to verify what he said by inquiring at the WHO or consulting a medical directory, for example.

Yet sensing that the moment was approaching when he would be unmasked once and for all, and no longer able to handle his financial situation, Romand decided to bring his life to an end, as well as his wife’s, his children’s and his parents’. But, though he killed his relatives, he failed at his own suicide, was tried and given a nonreducible life sentence of a minimum of twenty-two years.

Just a few days after this multiple murder, the writer Emmanuel Carrère became interested in the Romand affair, which he had read about in the papers:

On the morning of Saturday, January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our oldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal. I usually devote Saturday afternoons and Sunday to my family, but I spent the rest of that weekend alone in my studio because I was finishing a book I’d been working on for over a year, a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The last chapter described the days he spent in a coma before his death. I finished it on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning opened my newspaper to the lead article on the Romand case.1As the parallel between their two lives suggests, Emmanuel Carrère soon felt moved to action by the Romand affair and even came to experience a kind of fascination for the murderer, expressed in the first letter he sent to him in prison, six months later:

I am a writer, the author to date of seven books; I enclose a copy of my latest work. Ever since reading about your case in the newspapers I have been haunted by the tragedy of which you were the agent and sole survivor.2Although equally interested in setting up a meeting, Romand, on his lawyer’s advice, waited for the investigation of his case to be closed before entering into correspondence with Carrère and agreeing for the latter to write a book about him.

Carrère then undertook to investigate the affair, reconstructed Romand’s life and visited its primary locations, followed the trial, met the murderer on several occasions and, after many years of work which he almost abandoned due to the psychological stress of it all, managed to write and publish The Adversary.

In his book on the Romand affair, Emmanuel Carrère doesn’t just reconstruct the murderer’s life, he tries to get on the inside, taking advantage of his emotional closeness to the man to experience and have his reader experience what his protagonist felt. More than just an investigation, it becomes a simultaneous, double investigation Carrère makes not just into Romand, but also into himself.

During this quest, Emmanuel Carrère grows particularly interested in the periods that seemed to him to mark the essence of Romand’s existence, namely the interminable days he was forced to spend away from home in complete indolence, due to the lack of a professional occupation:

In the beginning he went to WHO every day, later on less regularly. Instead of the road to Geneva, he’d take the one to Gex and Divonne or the one to Bellegarde, that leads to the motorway and Lyon. He’d stop at a news-stand to buy an armful of papers: dailies, magazines, scientific journals. Then he’d go and read them, either in a café—he was careful to change cafés often and to choose them far enough from home—or in his car. He would park in a carpark or at a service station and stay there for hours, reading, taking notes, dozing. He’d have a sandwich for lunch and continue reading throughout the afternoon in a different café, at a different service station.3At other times, Romand prepared his virtual trips abroad and Carrère imagines scenes in which he researches places he hasn’t been in order to be able to convincingly describe his travels to his family:

Lastly, there were the trips—conferences, seminars, symposiums, all over the world. He would buy a guide to the country; Florence would pack his suitcase. He’d drive off in his car, which he would supposedly leave in the long-term carpark at Geneva airport. In a modern hotel room, often near the airport, he would take off his shoes, stretch out on the bed, spend three or four days watching television and the planes taking off and landing outside his window.4Romand didn’t just buy travel guides for the countries he was supposed to be visiting. He put together the entire story of his trip in order to be believed by his loved ones when he returned:

He studied the guidebooks so he wouldn’t make any mistakes in his stories when he got home. He telephoned his family every day to tell them what time it was and what the weather was like in São Paulo or Tokyo. He’d ask how things were going in his absence. He’d tell his wife, his children, his parents that he missed them, was thinking of them, sent them a big kiss. He phoned no one else: whom would he have called? After a few days, he went home with presents bought in an airport gift shop. Everyone made a fuss over him. He was tired from jet lag.5And so there are—aside from the interior place where he sought permanent exile—a multitude of imaginary realms that, during his alternative existence, Romand undertook to reinvent to maintain his wealthy identity and protect the bond he had with his loved ones from an unbearable reality.

Even more than in the previous cases, we see how the opposition of real and imaginary places, and the partial or complete substitution of one for the other, only make sense when they are discussed in the context of that third space I suggested calling the “inner landscape,” after Freud. Here in this case of absolute mythomania (compulsive lying), the inner landscape has become all pervasive.

Whereas in the previous examples, it only interfered with a limited part of the reality it played a part in distorting, here the inner landscape has become the subject’s alternative reality and that of those close to them. Where Margaret Mead let herself go in a fantastical reverie about an imaginary island, where Jayson Blair reconstructed places he might have been to, where Rosie Ruiz invented the ideal moment of bliss by erasing the surrounding space, Romand goes much further by forging all the parts of a second personality that allows him to survive. This second personality even becomes necessary, to the point of having to resort to murder when it risks being unmasked.

The same issue is at work in each of these different examples, whether the discourse on places these armchair travelers have not visited leads to success or to failure. For them it is a matter of finding, in greater or lesser denial of a disappointing reality, an ideal, fantasy place—that of the narcissistic pleasure an infant experiences in his mother’s gaze and which is lost forever.

This unfindable ideal site of primitive pleasure, which we might call an original place, is something Romand won’t stop trying to reinvent; he doesn’t just limit himself to a single episode in his life but transforms the entire world in his mind to fit his purpose. We might suppose that he found shades of the lost bliss of the child in the dazzled eyes of his own children, filled with admiration like Wendy in Peter Pan as they listened to the tales of his heroic exploits on the other side of the world.

And it is no trivial matter that it was to his children—and to the child inside himself who hadn’t wanted to grow up, we can surmise—that Romand recounted his travels to imaginary realms he’d never visited, as though he himself, like Peter Pan, hadn’t managed to evolve, or feared that his children too would be confronted with the pain of becoming adults one day.

If I wholeheartedly support Margaret Mead’s struggle to introduce libertinage to the Samoan Islands and Rosie Ruiz’s attempt to legitimize the right to use public transport during sporting activities, if I can understand that Jayson Blair, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, described places in the United States he hadn’t visited, there can obviously be no question of approving Jean-Claude Romand’s behavior, especially once you know of its dramatic conclusion.

The fact remains that one can understand Carrère’s fascination with Romand, a fascination that was so great he dedicated several years of his life to writing Romand’s story and started to feel like he was losing his sanity. Interestingly enough, Romand has several things in common with writers, and in particular novelists. To start with, both handle questions of identity to a great degree. Just as novelists project themselves onto their imaginary characters, allowing themselves to limit denial to one area of their thoughts, Romand invented the entire persona of a great doctor, which he then acted out to perfection over many years. Similarly, the question of knowing who we are is something that has haunted Carrère for his entire literary career, starting with his early novel The Mustache (1987), and has since become its major theme.

Who are we, and more particularly, what is the nature of that dark side that threatens to engulf everything? Carrère recounts how Romand didn’t really feel comfortable with him until he read his novel La classe de neige, a frightening story in which a child begins to realize, little by little, that his father is a murderer. But the question of knowing who we are is evidently not just about our internal dualities, it is also about the criminal potential that can arise in us in certain circumstances and whose uncontrollable power Romand experienced.

However, it is not just the question of identity that brings the two men together, it is also a form of relationship to space. Returning to his own passion for the Jean-Claude Romand case, Carrère suggests several times that there are commonalities between his life as a writer and the falsified existence of a killer, one of which is their relationship to place.

Evoking the endless days that Romand spent bored and alone—a duration of the kind that fascinates him, situated outside of any temporality—he proposes a significant parallel to the days spent by any writer:

I reread the letter he’d sent me with directions, I looked at the water, looked up at the grey sky to follow the flight of birds whose name I didn’t know—I can’t identify birds or trees and I find that sad. It was chilly. I started the engine to get some heat. The hot air made me sleepy. I thought about the studio where I go every morning after driving my children to school. This studio exists, people can visit me and phone me there. That’s where I write and piece together screenplays that usually get filmed. But I know what it’s like to spend all one’s days unobserved: the hours passed staring at the ceiling, the fear of no longer existing. I wonder what he felt in his car? Pleasure? A mocking exultation at the idea of so masterfully fooling everyone around him? No, I was sure of that.6In the passage that immediately follows this one, he evokes Romand’s imaginary travels. Carrère explains that one of the places the fake doctor went to during his extratemporal peregrinations was the town of Divonne,7 which is where one of his earlier novels, Hors d’atteinte?, is set, a novel that describes how a teacher slowly succumbs to a gambling obsession:

Divonne is a small spa near the Swiss border best known for its casino. I once used it as a setting for a few pages of a novel about a woman who lives a double life and tried to lose herself in the world of gambling. The novel was meant to be realistic and well-researched but, since I hadn’t visited all the casinos I wrote about, I put Divonne on the shores of Lake Geneva when it’s really about six miles away. There is actually something there referred to as a lake, but it’s only a small sheet of water next to the place where Romand often parked. I parked there, too. It’s the clearest memory I’ve kept of my first trip to the landscape of his life.8

In so doing, the writer rewrites the world and transforms it in the same way the mythomaniac killer does, albeit on a completely different scale. Both are confronted with the difficulty of inhabiting a space and neither of them succeeds in finding an adequate place—that is to say, a balance between the inner landscape and the real world—both of them finding themselves compelled to rewrite places in order to construct a makeshift identity.

Carrère’s studio and Romand’s car are nonspaces that they are forced to inhabit through professional necessity, but also because they respond to a profound psychological inability to invent an autonomous space that would allow them to establish their identity in a permanent manner.

Rewriting places, practiced to varying degrees by both of these men, has to do with the fact that they feel, probably more sorely than anyone else, that the space they inhabit deep down does not correspond to the real space that existence has led them to occupy, hence them finding themselves constantly driven to reshaping it in order to inhabit it.

The major difference between the two situations is that Carrère’s empty studio, however anguishing it may be, is a place of research and self-exploration, while the car Romand uses to endlessly roam the roads for years is nothing but the burial chamber of an identity lost in the imaginary sparkle of his invented accounts.

So we are dealing—writers undoubtedly more often than others—with complex spaces with indistinguishable boundaries that can only be imperfectly superimposed on the spaces of the real world, spaces we never stop transforming to suit our travels through our inner landscapes.

Based on the idea that writers, more than ourselves, live in aberrant spaces irreducible to real ones, I now propose in a final section to move on to some practical advice, taken from my long experience of armchair travel, for anyone finding themselves in a situation where they have to describe, for whatever professional or criminal reason, places they have never been to.

1.L’Adversaire (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 9. Published in English as The Adversary in a translation by Linda Coverdale (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).

2.    Ibid., 36.

3.    Ibid., 96.

4.    Ibid., 97.

5.    Ibid.

6.    Ibid., 99.

7.    UP–

8.    Ibid., 98.

From:

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been

By PIERRE BAYARD

Books You Have Forgotten

 [Chapter]

(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read) 

AS WE HAVE NOW SEEN, there is not much between a book that has been “read”—if that category still has a meaning— and one that has been skimmed. But Valéry has even better grounds than this for merely flipping through the works he discusses, and Baskerville, likewise, for commenting on books without opening them, which is that the most serious and thorough reading quickly metamorphoses after the fact into summary. To appreciate this, we must take into account a dimension of reading neglected by many theorists: that of time. Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.

Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances.

No reader is safe from this process of forgetting, not even the most voracious. Such was the case for Montaigne, who is fundamentally associated with ancient culture and libraries and who nevertheless presents himself, with a frankness that anticipates Valéry, as an eminently forgetful reader.

The flaws of memory are, in fact, a persistent theme in the Essais,1 if not the best known. Montaigne complains endlessly about his memory trouble and the unpleasantness it causes him. He tells us, for example, that he is incapable of going to look for a piece of information in his library without forgetting on the way what he is looking for. When speaking, he finds it necessary to maintain a tightly ordered discourse so as not to lose his train of thought. And he is so unable to remember names that he resolves to refer to his servants according to their jobs or countries of origin.

The problem grows so serious that Montaigne, always on the brink of an identity crisis, occasionally fears that he will forget his own name. He even goes so far as to ponder how he will navigate daily life on the inevitable day that such a misadventure occurs.

This general faultiness of memory plainly affects the books he has read. Toward the beginning of his essay on his reading, Montaigne unhesitatingly acknowledges his difficulty in keeping track of what he has read: “And if I am a man of some reading,” he declares, “I am a man of no retentiveness.”2

Montaigne experiences a progressive and systematic erasure that attacks every component of the book from the author to the text itself, each vanishing one after the other from his memory as quickly as it entered:

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.3This effacement, in other words, is the flip side of an enrichment. Having made the text his own, Montaigne rushes to forget it, as though a book were no more than a temporary delivery system for some general form of wisdom and, its mission accomplished, might as well disappear. But the fact that the implications of forgetting are not altogether negative does not solve all its associated problems, especially the psychological ones. Nor does it dispel the anguish, intensified by the daily obligation of speaking to others, of not being able to fix anything in one’s memory.

It is true that we all experience mishaps of this sort, and that all literature ends up providing us only a fragile and temporary kind of knowledge. What seems particular to the case of Montaigne, however, and indicates the breadth of his problems with memory, is his inability to recall whether he has read a specific book:

To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.4

The memory deficit is revealed as even more acute in this case, since it is no longer just the book but the experience of reading that is forgotten. Here, the forgetting erases not just the contents of the object—whose general shape, at least, can still be called to mind—but the act of reading itself, as though the radical nature of the erasure had ended up affecting everything related to the object. We would be justified in such circumstances in wondering whether reading that we cannot even remember performing still deserves to be called reading.

Curiously, Montaigne displays a relatively precise memory of certain books he dislikes; he is, for instance, capable of distinguishing different kinds of texts by Cicero or even the different books of the Aeneid.5 One gets the impression that these texts in particular—conceivably because they made a deeper impression than the others—have escaped oblivion. Here, too, the affective factor proves decisive in the substitution of a screen book for the hypothetical real book.

Montaigne finds a solution to his memory problem through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading. We can assume that another function of the notes is to assure him that he has indeed read the works in which they were inscribed, like blazes on a trail that are intended to show the way during future periods of amnesia.

What follows in this essay about reading is even more astonishing. After explaining the principle behind his notational system, Montaigne unflappably presents the reader with a few excerpts. In doing so, he tells the reader about books that it is hard to say whether he has read, since he has forgotten their contents and must rely on his own notations—writing, for example, “Here is what I put some ten years ago in my Guicciardini (for whatever language my books speak, I speak to them in my own).”6The first author “discussed” is indeed the Renaissance historian Guicciardini, whom Montaigne deems to be a “diligent historiographer,” and all the more trustworthy in that he was himself an actor in the events he recounts and seems little inclined to flatter those in power. His second example is Philippe de Commines, for whom Montaigne has unstinting praise, admiring his simplicity of language, narrative purity, and absence of vanity. Third, he evokes the Memoirs7 of du Bellay, an author whose work in public office he admires, but who, he fears, is too much in the service of the king.8

In reading his notes in order to comment on these texts— which he may not remember reading, and even if he does, whose contents he may have forgotten—Montaigne finds himself in a contradictory position. The commentary he is reading is not exactly his, without its being foreign to him either. He conveys to his reader the reaction he had to these books on an earlier occasion, without taking the trouble to verify whether that reaction coincides with what he might experience today.

For Montaigne, an inveterate practitioner of the art of quotation, this is an unprecedented situation: instead of citing other writers, he cites himself. Indeed, at this extreme the distinction between quotation and self-quotation vanishes. Having forgotten what he said about these authors and even that he said anything at all, Montaigne has become other to himself. He is separated from the earlier incarnation of himself by the defects of his memory, and his readings of his notes represent so many attempts at reunification.

However surprising we may find Montaigne’s reliance on this system of notes, he is, after all, only drawing out the logical consequence of something known to anyone familiar with books, whatever the state of his memory. What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.

The reader of Montaigne has still more surprises ahead of him. The author goes on to reveal that as forgetful as he may be of other people’s books, to the point where he cannot even recall whether he has read them, he is no more capable of remembering his own:

It is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive.9Incapable of remembering what he has written, Montaigne finds himself confronted with the fear of all those losing their memory: repeating yourself without realizing it, and knowing the anguish of losing mastery over your own writing only to remain unwittingly all too faithful to yourself. His fear is all the more justified in that the Essais address not topical subjects, but timeless questions. These may be broached on any occasion, and a writer without memory is thus vulnerable to treating them again without knowing it, and in identical terms:

Now I am bringing in here nothing newly learned. These are common ideas; having perhaps thought of them a hundred times, I am afraid I have already set them down.10

These “repetitions,” which Montaigne finds regrettable in an author like Homer, seem to him even more “ruinous” in texts like his own, “which attract only superficial and passing attention,”11 and which he risks rewriting word by word, from one chapter to the next, without even perceiving it.

But fear of repeating himself is not the only embarrassing consequence of forgetting his own books. Another is that Montaigne does not even recognize his own texts when they are quoted in his presence, leaving him to speak about texts he hasn’t read even though he has written them.

For Montaigne, therefore, reading is related not only to defective memory, but also, given the contradictions that arise from it, to the anguish of madness. While reading is enriching in the moment it occurs, it is at the same time a source of depersonalization, since, in our inability to stabilize the smallest snippet of text, it leaves us incapable of coinciding with ourselves.

With his repeated sense that his self is being eclipsed, Montaigne, more than any of the other authors we have thus far encountered, seems to erase any distinction between reading and non-reading. Indeed, if after being read a book immediately begins to disappear from consciousness, to the point where it becomes impossible to remember whether we have read it, the very notion of reading loses its relevance, since any book, read or unread, will end up the equivalent of any other. 

However extreme his case may be, Montaigne’s relationship with books reveals the true nature of the relationship we all have with them. We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. In the end we are left with falsified remnants of books, analogous to the screen memories discussed by Freud, whose principal function is to conceal others.

Following Montaigne, we should perhaps use the term unreading rather than reading to characterize the unceasing sweep of our forgetfulness. This process involves both the disappearance and the blurring of references, and transforms books, often reduced to their titles or to a few approximate pages, into dim shadows gliding along the surface of our consciousness. 

In every consideration of reading, we should remain mindful that books are linked not only to knowledge, but also to loss of memory and even identity. To read is not only to inform ourselves, but also, and perhaps above all, to forget, and thus to confront our capacity for oblivion.

The reading subject that emerges in this essay of Montaigne’s is not a unified and self-assured figure but an uncertain one, lost among fragments of texts he can barely identify. For this figure, no longer able to distinguish his own texts from those of others, each encounter with a book becomes terrifying, for it threatens to bring him face-to-face with his own madness.

As agonizing as it may be, Montaigne’s experience may nonetheless have the salutary effect of reassuring those to whom cultural literacy seems unattainable. It is vital to keep in mind that the most conscientious readers we might speak to are also, just like Montaigne, involuntary non-readers, and that their forgetfulness extends even to books that in all good faith they believe themselves to have mastered.

To conceive of reading as loss—whether it occurs after we skim a book, in absorbing a book by hearsay, or through the gradual process of forgetting—rather than as gain is a psychological resource essential to anyone seeking effective strategies for surviving awkward literary confrontations. Having defined the different kinds of non-reading, it is to these social situations that we now turn our attention.

How to Talk About 

Books You Haven’t Read 

PIERRE BAYARD

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

 Foreword 

PIERRE BAYARD PUTSHIS readers—this reader—in a uniquely paradoxical position. Having just read his witty How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I have now discovered that there was no reason for me to have read it in the first place. But without having read it, how would I have known that I could just as well have skimmed it, or perhaps heard about it somewhere, or possibly formed a sense of the book based entirely on what other readers have said about it, on the sort of received opinions about a work that float around in the culture? In addition, not having read the book shouldn’t—or so Pierre Bayard has assured me—prevent me from talking confidently and learnedly about it, or even from writing these brief, introductory words of appreciation. But how would I have known that without Bayard’s sage advice, which I could only have found in his wise and original volume?

In any case, the fact remains that I am very glad I did read Bayard’s book. Had I skimmed it too rapidly, I might have missed the chapter in which he gives us the thrilling examples of literary doublespeak with which Paul Valéry eulogized Marcel Proust and Anatole France while making it quite clear that he had hardly read a word of their work. Had I not read Bayard, I would not have found myself determined not only to read—but to reread—Graham Greene’s The Third Man, as well as the essay in which Montaigne lamented his failing memory and its effect on his ability to read and retain what he had read. I would not have been so thoroughly entertained by Laura Bohannan’s attempt to discuss Hamlet with a group of West African tribesmen whose responses were hilariously and informatively out of synch with the instant, cross-cultural recognition of Shakespeare’s universality that she expected. Nor would I have been so pleased to discover that Bayard’s advice to those who meet writers of books they have not read confirms, so very gratifyingly, my own observation and experience: “Praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book, and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.”

Having read such passages, I can only hope that I am not being insufficiently ambiguous when I say that what I liked best about Pierre Bayard’s sly meditation on the permissibility, the importance, and the sheer necessity of not reading is how, without our quite being aware of it, it becomes a study of the psychology of reading and of the purposes of literature, and a hymn to the pleasures of reading and to all the reasons why we cannot live without it.

—Francine Prose