How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Read Online Free Page B

‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.”
    But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.”
    “They do in my country,” I snapped.
    The old man quelled the babble of disbelief that arose immediately and told me with that insincere, but courteous, agreement one extends to the fancies of the young, ignorant, and superstitious, “No doubt in your country the dead can also walk without being zombis.” From the depths of his bag he produced a withered fragment of kola nut, bit off one end to show it wasn’t poisoned, and handed me the rest as a peace offering. 8
    And despite all the concessions Bohannan makes, the whole play parades by without her succeeding at all in bridging the cultural distance to the Tiv and constructing, based on Shakespeare’s play, a discursive object that she and they can share.

    Even if they’ve never read a line of Hamlet , the Tiv are thus able to gain a number of specific ideas about the play, and so, like my students who haven’t read the text I’m lecturing on, they find themselves perfectly capable of discussing it and offering their opinions.
    Indeed, if the play offers a good occasion for the expression of their ideas, these ideas are neither simultaneous nor subsequent to it and thus do not, at the end of the day, need it at all. Their ideas are instead actually prior , in the sense that they constitute a whole and systematic vision of the world, in which the book is received and given a place.
    In fact it is not even the book that is received, but those fragments of the book that circulate in every conversation or written commentary and come to substitute for it in its absence. What the Tiv end up speaking about is an imaginary Hamlet . And despite her being better informed about Shakespeare’s play, Laura Bohannan’s version is caught up in its own organized set of representations, and thus is no more real than theirs.
    I propose the term inner book to designate the set of mythic representations, be they collective or individual, that come between the reader and any new piece of writing, shaping his reading without his realizing it. Largely unconscious, this imaginary book acts as a filter and determines the reception of new texts by selecting which of its elements will be retained and how they will be interpreted. 9
    As can be seen clearly in the case of the Tiv, the inner book contains one or more foundational stories that have an essential value for its bearer, particularly since they speak to him about origins and endings. Bohannan’s reading of Shakespeare clashes with the theories on origins and survival that are contained in the collective inner book of the Tiv and that serve to bind the group together.
    It is not, then, the story of Hamlet that they hear, but whatever in that story conforms to their notions of the family and the status of the dead and might serve to comfort them. In the places where the book does not conform to their expectations, the alarming passages are either ignored, or they undergo a transformation that allows the largest possible overlap between their inner book and Hamlet —or rather, not Hamlet , but the image transmitted to them of Shakespeare’s play through the prism of another inner book.
    Since they are not discussing the work that Bohannan wants to talk to them about, the Tiv have no need for direct access to it. The references to Hamlet that the anthropologist manages to convey to them are sufficient to allow them to participate in a debate between two inner books—a debate in which Shakespeare’s play serves both sides as, more than anything else, a pretext.
    And since they are speaking primarily about their inner book, their comments on Shakespeare, like those of my students in similar circumstances, can very well begin before they acquire any knowledge of the work—which is itself, in any event, destined to melt and gradually disappear into the inner book.

    In the case of the Tiv, the inner book is more collective than