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individual. It is made up of general cultural representations that draw upon common ideas not only of family relations and the afterlife, but also of reading, how one appropriately approaches a book, and how, for example, to draw the line between reality and imagination.
    We know nothing about the individual members of the Tiv, aside from their elderly leader, and it is plausible that the cohesion of the group tends to unify their reactions. But although a collective inner book would seem to exist for every culture, there also exists, for each member of the collective, an individual inner book, which is equally (if not more) active in the reception—which is to say, the construction—of cultural objects.
    Woven from the fantasies and private mythologies particular to each person, the individual inner book is at work in our desire to read—that is, in the way we seek out and read books. It is that phantasmagorical object that every reader lives to pursue, of which the best books he encounters in his life will be but imperfect fragments, compelling him to continue reading.
    We might further speculate that every writer is driven by the attempt to discover and give form to his inner book and is perpetually dissatisfied with the actual books he encounters, including his own, however polished they may be. How indeed might we begin to write, or continue doing so, without that ideal image of a perfect book—one congruent to ourselves, that is—which we endlessly seek and constantly approach, but never reach?
    Like collective inner books, individual inner books create a system for receiving other texts and participate both in their reception and their reorganization. In this sense, they form a kind of grid through which we read the world, and books in particular, organizing the way we perceive these texts while producing the illusion of transparency.
    It is these inner books that make our exchanges about books so difficult, rendering it impossible to establish unanimity about the object of discussion. They are part of what I have called, in my study of Hamlet , an inner paradigm —a system for perceiving reality that is so idiosyncratic that no two paradigms can truly communicate. 10
    The existence of the inner book, along with unreading or forgetting, is what makes the way we discuss books so discontinuous and heterogeneous. What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.

    That what the Tiv offer is, to say the least, a partial reading of a book they have not read should not lead us to believe either that their reading is a caricature—for it underscores the characteristics of every act of reading—or that it is without interest. Quite to the contrary, the double exteriority of the Tiv in relation to Shakespeare’s work (they haven’t read it and they are from a different culture) places them in a privileged position to discuss it. In refusing to believe in the ghost story, they approach the position of a minority trend—but an active one—in Shakespearean criticism, which casts doubt on the reappearance of Hamlet’s father and suggests that the hero may have been suffering hallucinations. 11 The hypothesis is heterodox, but is at the least deserving of examination, a circumstance facilitated in this case by the foreignness of the Tiv to the play. Not knowing the text—in two different ways—paradoxically gives them more direct access, not, to be sure, to its supposed universal truth, but to one of its many potential riches.
    Thus, to return to the situation I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is not astonishing that my students, without having read the book I am discussing, quickly grasp certain of its elements and feel free to comment on it, based on their cultural notions and personal history. And it is