Adventures in cultural criticism

Laurent Wolf is a culture critic with the Swiss daily Le Temps. He is a subtle observer of culture and society, but no one is infallible. In his first column of the year, published Tuesday, Laurent told this story (my simplified summary; the longer French version is here, for subscribers only):

I received last Summer from a publisher a review copy of a small book called "Everybody should write", authored by Georges Picard. The cover was sober, the publisher serious. But when I started reading it, I discovered that it was blank. I mean: all pages were white. Not a word, not a trace of ink. I started imagining: maybe, like Wittgenstein suggesting that what can't be said shouldn't be said, the publisher is telling me that what can't be written shouldn't be written. Or maybe he is astutely offering white pages for everybody to write on, inviting the "readers" to become "writers" - as the title suggests. Marveling at this wisdom, I wrote three months ago a short commendatory piece telling my readers about this laconic literary work - and pointing out the whiteness of the pages.

Except that a few days later, browsing a bookstore's aisles, I discovered that the copies of Picard's book on sale there were actually full of words, and that my copy was just the result of an industrial mistake. I started expecting an amused note from the author, or from the publisher, or some reader's letter highlighting my journalistic shallowness.

But nothing came. Not a complaint, not a word. Nobody had noticed.

Comments

[Paul J. Thomas]

...this seems to be a sad and beautiful accident.