How to Gut a Book

David Lavery

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He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly; a ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more for pleasure: the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

I

"Have you read all these?" I'm sure you recognize the question. Bookish people hear it frequently. We hear it from our mothers. (Mine was concerned that the heavy weight of a then small collection would make the floor of my second story bedroom give way; nor did she approve entirely of the money I was investing in my growing library: "You can only read one at a time," she admonished with a common sense incomprehensible to any aspiring bibliophile.) I hear it from a student who has come to the office for a conference and stares slack-jawed at the shelves of examination copies housed there (books not only unread but unopened). Or we may hear it from those few we occasionally invite to our home and into our usually private studies. But, as I have come to recognize, the inquiry is made in two very different spirits.

If the inquirer is anti-intellectual (and the university at which I teach—a mirror of the population at large—is full of such), then the question means (in a rough, paranoid translation): what kind of weirdo are you? Are you so strange, so abnormal, so much a bookworm as to waste your life reading?" (For, as we all know, we can't learn about life from books, especially if we have never read any.) In the presence of such intruders, in the face of the enemy, I always feel very pointedly my strangeness.

If the question is sincere, however, asked by an aspiring contributor to the life of the mind already in love with books and anxious to emulate the learned, then it has an entirely different meaning. Framed in wonder, and more than a little anxiety, it implies: "How is it possible to read this much? Might I, one day, be as well-read as you?" For such an ephebe, my library symbolizes, in a way an impersonal university or public library cannot, the territory ahead: the landscape which must be explored, then mapped, then made second nature in the apprenticeship of knowledge. Overwhelmed by the task he or she faces, the voice sometimes betrays a kind of intellectual terror—one I recognize very clearly because I experienced it once myself.

I customarily respond to the first kind of inquiry—the anti-intellectual one—with the riposte suggested by Walter Benjamin in his marvelous "Unpacking My Library": "Suffice it to quote the answer," Benjamin advises, "which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, 'And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your fine Sevres every day?'" Such a reply is perhaps too glib and certainly too pedantic, but it does succeed in stifling further comment.

Or, if I have a mind to—and if the questioner has a mind, too—I could cite as well Elias Canetti's profound explanation (in The Human Province) of why certain readers build up storehouses of books that belong only to the future. Long dormancy, Canetti explains, does not mean a book will never be read.

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.

My own library shelves are filled with such mute, dear friends as he describes.[1]

But for the second kind of inquiry—the serious one—I have no ready, no simple answer, though I sometimes quote Benjamin or Canetti to them as well. The problem is just too complex (involving as it does central issues about the nature of texts, the phenomenology [Poulet] and metaethics [Barthes] of reading, and the very nature of knowledge and its dissemination) to deserve anything but an essay reply.

As I have already indicated, I too once stood in awe of my professors’ presumed library conquests. Once I too dreamt of following in their footsteps through the stacks, and yet I found myself nearly paralyzed before what seemed at the time a Herculean task. (The paralysis occasionally returns, atavistically, even today. If I venture into a large university or public library to browse through the stacks or to glance at recent scholarship, I feel immediately its onset and could without difficulty describe the symptoms—a preliminary nausea, a growing numbness in my limbs, early hints of migraine [. . .]—with some precision.)

Now I have become one of those professors I once held so much in awe. I have become one known for and by his books, one about whom several people have said over the years, "You cannot talk to him for five minutes without coming away with a list of a half dozen books to read." And yet—another confession—I am not, by most measures, an avid reader. I "gut" more books than I actually read and am proud of the fact. Allow me to explain.

II

A few years ago I chanced upon a depiction in Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River of its hero Eugene Gant's own book anxiety. The account brought me a reassuring shock of recognition, for it offered a mirror in which I could retrospectively observe, perhaps even understand, my younger self on the way to becoming—heart-set upon becoming—the scholar/teacher I presently am.

While an undergraduate at N.Y.U., Gant (a loosely disguised Wolfe) finds himself intimidated by the task his professors, and his own intellectual ambitions, have set for him. In the university library he is attacked by a kind of intellectual vertigo.

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad; the more he read, the less he seemed to know—the greater the number of books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. Within a period of ten years he read at least 20,000 volumes [. . .] and opened the pages and looked through many times that number. [. . .] Yet this terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and despair increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate.

In the face of this tantalizing Library Sickness, however, Gant refuses to surrender. He responds with intensity. He develops a method.

He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly; a ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more for pleasure: the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl. At first, hovering over book stalls or walking at night among the vast piled shelves of the library, he would read, watch in hand, muttering to himself in triumph or anger at the timing of each page: "Fifty seconds to that one. Damn you, we'll see! You will, will you!"—and he would tear through the next page in twenty seconds.

A century ago, Nietzsche suggested in The Gay Science that thinking—mere thinking—was once such a stupendous, arresting experience that an individual needed to sit down beside the road when a thought struck him. But now, Nietzsche noted presciently, the whole world is learning to think in "the American fashion" with a stop watch in hand. Eugene Gant, please take note, times his reading. So too did I, thirty years ago.

And then I gave up. Sometime in my mid-twenties I began to recognize the impossibility of my own absurd ambition to "read everything that had ever been written about human experience." Though my resignation came gradually, an amazing short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," itself a victim in my predatory quest to read everything, proved to be a watershed. A typically Borgesian, labyrinthine account of a man trapped in an Escher/Piranesi-like infinite library—for every book there is another identical to it but one word longer![2]—its account of the metaphysical-nightmare side of my own pursuits sobered me greatly. But my new accommodation was not merely the result of aversion therapy. I have come to make my peace with books because I have acquired a kind of discipline in my encounter with them.

In a simpler time, before the coming of postmodernism and the now diagnosable, thoroughly Borgesian "information sickness" of the 1970s and '80s, a Mortimer Adler could self-assuredly sermonize on "How to Read a Book." But it is the method of Eugene Gant—his way of "tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl"—that has greater relevance—and more realism—for our own day than the University of Chicago Aristotelian's pontifications. Any self-help book from the pen of Eugene Gant, it seems, would be more appropriately entitled "How to Gut a Book," and, following his lead, I have tried to offer here a brief prolegomenon to (and apologia for) such a self-help book, a text we now badly need.

III

"Oh, it so exhausts me to teach books I've never read," laments Professor Butley as he heads off to wing his way through another class in Simon Gray's satiric, and of course utterly unrealistic, portrait of the tempestuous life of a lecturer at a British university. Who among us would ever teach a book he or she had not read? Cliff’s Notes are for students, not professors. Granted, I once knew a graduate student who bragged that she had never read Moby-Dick, though required to do so in five different courses over the years, and then, as a final challenge to her ability to fake it, actually taught the book in one of her own classes, but surely she was an aberration! And yet the question does give us pause: is it possible that professors do not read?

In David Lodge's Small World, a group of university English faculty under the influence of alcohol at a conference play a game in which each individual must confess the essential books he or she has never read. Each bares his soul and admits to his sins of omission. (My own revelation—I make it now, before God and reader—would include The Faerie Queene, Tom Jones, Das Kapital, The Social Contract, and War and Peace—not to mention Kon-Tiki, about which I fabricated an eleventh grade book report after reading only the dust jacket.) The game progresses good-naturedly enough—confession being good for the soul, even of English teachers—until a young, untenured professor admits that he has never read Hamlet and the game takes an ugly turn. Lodge's novel traces the dire ramifications of this innocent revelation.[3]

It is true, of course, that professors sometimes teach texts they have not re-read, despite our best intentions—perhaps not even in years. After all, under the pressures of department, university, community, and home service, who can even keep up with the reading we assign to our own classes? A review of notes, a survey of our marginalia, after all, usually proves to be adequate preparation for leading discussion of a novel or play or short story or textbook which we cannot be certain our students have read even once. (If we had used our time like this in graduate school, would we have ever finished our degrees?)

We have so little time now to read, let alone to reread, and yet the number of books to be read increases relentlessly. Each new issue of the New York Times Book Review or The Chronicle of Higher Education or The New York Review of Books, each broadcast of All Things Considered or new number of a scholarly journal adds an inch to our list of must-reads about to become never-reads. "The multitude of books," Voltaire could see over two centuries ago (even before the invention of the Quality Paperback Club), "is making us ignorant.”

The Learning Assistance Center at my university gives out book marks and buttons which bear the words "I'd rather be reading," and I have suggested with some seriousness that faculty wear these buttons as a symbol of solidarity and a radical badge of protest to all committee meetings, perhaps even to class. ("School keeps getting in the way of my education," Mark Twain observed, on the way out of his fifth stultifying meeting of the day.)[4]

The act of Not Reading, it is true, does help in a way to normalize us, to bridge the gap between the Ivory Tower and the Real World, where, according to one recent survey, well over one half of the American public (including recent escapees from the Tower) never read a single book during the course of a year. But the increasingly real prospect of professors who no longer have the leisure to read is so demoralizing, so demeaning, that it calls into question the whole enterprise in which we are engaged.

And now, to add insult to injury, modern critical methods—from structuralism to deconstruction and reader response criticism—have greatly complicated the once simple act of reading, teaching us that we have taken far too much for granted in our encounters with texts. We may, in this age of the "death of the author," be witnessing the birth of the reader, as Roland Barthes has suggested; but this New Reader, it seems, greatly misunderstood his or her activity and would have continued to do so without the illumination of contemporary theory. A page, we are now told, is as unstable and indeterminate, as devoid of objective existence, as the atom of modern physics, and equally in need of the participation of the reader, without whom we could never know if a text is a wave or a particle.

"Have you read all these?" Without doubt, the pressures of my profession, coupled with the proliferation of knowledge in our time, and our new, quantum understanding of the act of reading, have made that act more and more difficult, and more ambiguous, to perform, and it is this central irony which has inspired the present reflections. Clearly, we need a new understanding of the nature and meaning of reading. We must forge a fresh plan of attack.

How does one gut a book? I do not intend to lay out any conclusive strategy for doing so. I will be content here if I can establish a foundation for further exploration.

The theoretical difficulties of gutting a book are, of course, pronounced. After all, no author—as Roland Barthes has noted in Pleasure of the Text—can "choose to write what will not be read." Nevertheless, Barthes adds,

it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives; has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust's good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)

In characteristic fashion, Barthes even blasphemously suggests that it is possible to gain access to authors without taking the trouble of actually reading them.[5]

And if I hadn't read Hegel, or La Princesse de Cleves, or Levi-Strauss, or Les Chats, or L'Anti OEdipe?—The book which I haven't read and which is frequently told to me even before I have time to read it (which is perhaps the reason I don't read it): this book exists to the same degree as the other: it has its intelligibility, its memorability, its mode of action. Have we not enough freedom to receive a text without the letter?

As one who reveled in such freedom as an undergraduate, who went about telling everyone that Walden was my bible, even quoting it chapter and verse, although I had read a total of less than fifty pages of it (for it seemed somehow degrading to Thoreau's genius to actually read such a magical book of wisdom!), I understand well the scandalous implications of Barthes' out-of-the-closet admission. Although I took great pains to make certain that my teachers did not see through my charade, I was nevertheless convinced that my motives were sincere. After all, I was not to be confused (and my professors did not confuse me) with those students who refuse to read, who call books "dumb" when in fact they are. Nor did I ever use Cliff’s Notes as a substitute. I was then, and still am, in love with the idea of reading, in love with books.

Even today I often receive a book without the letter. I am, for example, a quotation gatherer, ever on the look for passages that "take the top of my head off" (to borrow Emily Dickinson's wonderful definition of the poetic), and I often skim books in search of likely candidates. (Like Dylan Thomas, "I read indiscriminately, and with my eyes hanging out." A fanatic user of epigraphs in all my writing, I hunt for aspirants, not only for works-in-progress but those not yet even conceived. Or, to cite another example, I am presently at work on three books (which, God willing, I may one day finish), on the behalf of which I constantly skim, read, search, and gut other books in pursuit of material. (The American photographer Edward Weston drove about the United States with his wife at the wheel, in search of photo opportunities. He instructed his wife to wake him whenever she spotted a "Weston photograph.” I journey through libraries in search of Lavery-like ideas, and such quests are essential to the enterprise of the book gutter.)

As a book gutter, I take heart, however, that I am in distinguished company. The late British philologist Owen Barfield (1898-1997) stands, in my estimation, as one of the most well-read, learned minds I have ever encountered. A true polymath, he has authored over a dozen books demonstrating wide and careful reading in literature and literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy, history, history of science, physics, theology, anthropology [. . .] And yet, until his retirement in the 1950s, Barfield was a practicing London solicitor whose intellectual pursuits necessarily played second fiddle to a busy career in the law. Not surprisingly, Barfield has written revealingly about book gutting, and I will take my cue from him.

In Unancestral Voice (1965) Barfield discloses, through his alter ego Burgeon (a solicitor and student of the "evolution of consciousness"), something of his own trade secrets. It is clear that Barfield speaks from experience. "One of the disadvantages of living in the 20th Century," Burgeon explains, is

that, on almost any subject, there is too much reading material available. He had long ago discovered that the only fruitful way of ploughing a furrow through the plethora was to be in pursuit of some particular quarry. It was like dipping a thread into a liquid containing crystals in solution. The crystals gathered round the thread. You selected ruthlessly, but in the process you read much, you read swiftly, and your mind was alert. What you did not retain you were nevertheless more alive to than you would otherwise have been; what you did retain you digested. (72)

"So it came about," Barfield goes on to note (speaking this time unmistakably about himself) "that he spent the first year of his retirement in studying—or perhaps "raiding" would be a less presumptuous term—the history of Western thought. [. . .]" In all my own book gutting, I have discovered no more accurate description, nor a better justification, of our discerning vocation than this. Barfield makes our motives crystal clear and honorable as well.

We must be quite careful, however, not to confuse such book gutting with either of two poor relations.

Book gutting is not speed reading. A slave to the performance principle, speed reading, is founded, as Evelyn Wood pamphlets make apparent, on a reductionistic epistemology, and it remains at base an anti-intellectual pursuit, dedicated to a simplistic obsession with message rather than medium. True book gutters abhor speed reading; they recognize Eugene Gant's use of a stopwatch as an adolescent obsession and know very well when gutting alone will not suffice, when any attempt at getting at a book's meat cannot be accomplished except by way of the pleasure of the text: through the sensuous act of reading itself. (Such unguttable books, their text and texture inextricably interwoven, are, of course, what we customarily mean by "literature.")

And book gutting is not "Bullcrit." "Nobody who can help it reads books anymore," Richard Rosen laments in a sardonic dissection of American reading habits in New York magazine. Instead, those who aspire to travel in "the literary fast lane" succumb willingly to the "reading disorder" he calls "Bullcrit."

Simply put, Bullcrit is talk about books one has never read. It is "the increasingly popular mode of discourse that combines all the virtues of literary expertise with none of the inconveniences of reading book-length material." Bullcrit's now common symptoms are readily identifiable: "judgmentalism without judgment, familiarity without knowledge, received wisdom without emotional response, informedness without information." Indeed, as "book sightings" become more important than book readings, as book reviews come to seem as significant (because more accessible and more easily convertible into Bullcrit[6]) as the book itself, when a book few have read (Rushdie's Satanic Verses)—even those Mullahs who would have its author executed for writing it—becomes the lead story on the nightly news, it becomes unfashionable, even quaint, to actually read books cover to cover.

Rosen detects several primary causes for the rise of Bullcrit. First, the nature of intellectual exchange in a media-saturated world necessitates it. "In the mediacracy, which thrives on the bull consumption and recitation of premium tidbits, an investment on the scale of reading an entire book [. . .] could not possibly pay a conversational and informational dividend high enough to make it worthwhile." Second, books have taken on a new symbolic value in the culture: no longer merely signs of knowledge, books have instead become "more than ever [. . .] status symbols, fashion accessories, interior-decorative touches, matching gewgaws; they accent the coffee tables of our consciousness." Third, books are out of sync with our postmodern sense of time and with the flow of information as a whole: "the act of reading a book today," Rosen writes, "requires an almost archaic gentility, a nineteenth-century obliviousness to the lava of product belching out of the nation's publishers, film studios, and television networks."

But Rosen's condemnation is too sweeping. He makes no distinction between Bullcrit and book gutting. Unlike speed readers and Bullcritters, book gutters love books, not as proof of accelerated access-time to bookish information systems, not as coffee table objets d'art, not primarily for the pleasure of the text (though they are likely to appreciate and even to indulge in such literary hedonism).

Book gutters, I would suggest, understand the book as an evolutionary phenomenon; we see them as repositories of memes. We crack them open in search of the memes encapsulated within.

When asked how it was that Native Americans were able to discover—without the aid of modern science—the medicinal properties of hundreds of indigenous herbs and plants, the Shoshone healer Rolling Thunder explained that the secret was quite simple: a medicine man addressed the plant and asked it, in the "I and thou" dialogue of his "concrete science," what it was good for, what power it contained. We must learn, without embarrassment, to do the same with books. Andrei Codrescu has suggested that we need to learn to "use books as oracles. Ask them a question: open them up."

"Properly, we shd. read for power," Ezra Pound insisted. "Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hands."