From Alexandria to Babel / 도서관 이야기

From Alexandria to Babel

ALBERTO MANGUEL

Alice Crawford, editor
THE MEANING OF THE LIBRARY
A cultural history
336pp. Princeton University Press. £19.99 (US $35).
978 0 691 16639 1

TLS, Published: 2 December 2015

The Bodleian Library; an illustration from Alfred Beesley’s History of Banbury, 1841

 

We hope you enjoy this piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. Also in this week’s issue: how to measure fiction; the story behind Mass-Observation; a journey through Britain’s folklore landscapes; an unsettling Nazi legacy caught on camera; Archibald Motley’s kaleidoscopic palette at the Whitney Museum – and much more

We are intrinsically nostalgic animals for whom mourning is a form of recognition. Our preferred genre is the elegy. As long as something remains obviously present, we pay little attention to it, but as soon as we believe that it’s fading away, we feel irresistibly attracted to the ruins. The examples are many. When, in the mid-twentieth century, the automobile became our principal means of locomotion, Bill Bowerman, an athletics coach at the University of Oregon, published Jogging, the book that first celebrated the use of our own two feet. A few decades after film became the most popular form of entertainment, theatre, considered moribund, was revived, re-examined and redefined by Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud. And in the late fifteenth century, when the recent invention of printing seemed to threaten the survival of the manuscript, handbooks of calligraphy began to flourish, collections of letters (such as those of Cicero) became bestsellers, and scribes produced manuscripts for avid collectors by copying texts from newly printed books.

 

Today, when electronic technology announces (perhaps prematurely) the death of paper and promises us unfading memory of many millions of texts and images, as well as apparently limitless storage in cyberspace, the question “What is a library?” pops up with satisfying frequency on our bookshelves, both virtual and concrete. I count more than 150 books on the subject of libraries published between 2010 and 2012, a period during which 140 public libraries were closed in Britain alone. one of the latest volumes to be published on this potentially mournful subject is a wonderfully informative, erudite and entertaining collection of essays edited by Alice Crawford, The Meaning of the Library, whose subtitle, A cultural history, goes a long way to hinting at an answer. These essays, “full of oppositions”, as Crawford says in her introduction, were collected between 2009 and 2013, and originally formed part of a series of lectures given at the University of St Andrews Library to celebrate the birthday of the venerable King James Library, founded in 1612 by James VI and I. At least in print, resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia.

 

Whatever its true story, the Library of Alexandria – colossal, ghostly, universally celebrated – has come to embody the answer to the question of a library’s identity

 

For our ancestors, the question would have appeared inane, if not unnecessary. So obvious would the answer have seemed that even as far back as the Library of Alexandria, which stood for many centuries as the incarnation of human knowledge, neither historians nor travellers saw any great need to tell their readers about that most emblematic library of all, founded by the Ptolemaic kings in the third century BC. The scraps of information that have come down to us reveal almost nothing about the way the famous library was set up, about its stacks and desks, its rules and regulations, its users or their reading practices. Even its precise location remains unknown to us, whether it stood in the Musaeion, the House of the Muses, or in a separate building, or in several. Its end is as mysterious as its physical appearance, and over time a number of legends were concocted to remedy this lack of trustworthy information, casting Julius Caesar, the fanatical Bishop Cyril, or the Arab invaders in the seventh century as the book-burning villains. Whatever its true story, the Library of Alexandria – colossal, ghostly, universally celebrated – has come to embody the answer to the question of a library’s identity: a symbol of the society that houses it, an emblem of its power, a depository of its experience. Also, as Edith Hall remarks in the first essay of the collection, Alexandria gave us

 

“the actual concept of the library as an institution where the whole resource constitutes something infinitely greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are the individual records left by individual writers; the whole is something far more ambitious: an instrument designed to preserve intact the memory of humankind.”

 

What we do know is the magnitude of the Alexandrian ambition. The Ptolemaic kings set out to collect every book they could lay their hands on, whether in the farthest outreaches of the realm or in the holds of the ships that docked in the port (the books were taken away to be copied and the originals, or sometimes the copies, then returned to their owners). Famously, they convinced the authorities of Athens, against a huge guarantee in cash, to lend them the archives of Greek dramas, and then kept the precious originals, willingly forfeiting the deposit. We might not be as ambitious as the Ptolemaic kings, but every library, public or private, incarnates this intellectual greed: to hold materially what can be apprehended mentally, to possess, if not the wisdom, then the possibility of wisdom contained in books. This gathering frenzy entails certain dangers. Perhaps among the earliest texts to make fun of those who accumulate books but don’t care about their contents is the Satire of the Trades, an early Egyptian text composed between 2025 and 1750 BC; the mockery echoes through the works of Lucian, Juvenal and Seneca, and achieves its classic depiction as Sebastian Brant’s Book Fool of 1494, who has books but doesn’t read them: the first among the passengers on the Ship of Fools.

 

Hall begins her essay with another sort of Book Fool, who appears in a comedy by Aristophanes performed in 425 BC: the dramatist Euripides, sitting on a tangled nest of papyrus strips from his famous plays – an erudite muddle intended to reflect comically the chaos of the intellectual mind. This image, the earliest we have (according to Hall) of a “certain literary response to a library”, is emblematic both of the library as a source of intellectual creation and of the need to find some method in the madness. A library can be nothing but sterile accumulation (as Brant suggested) or a treasure trove that allows the seeker to find a way to the desired answers. Then, as today, an efficient search tool was necessary. The poet Callimachus, one of the earliest librarians of Alexandria, responded to this evident requirement by compiling a sort of annotated catalogue, the Tablets or Pinakes, of which only a few scraps survive.

 

The Pinakes was not just a list of titles but a document that implicitly assumed a chosen hierarchy and a specific overview of the knowable world. Richard Gameson, taking as his subject the image of the medieval library, notes that all libraries “are simultaneously collections of books, spaces in which books are kept, and concepts”. Gameson scrutinizes the “comparatively rare” depictions of libraries in medieval and early Renaissance art, and concludes that they were intended less as realistic representations of book collections than as emblems of learning for a society in which libraries were treasured as sources of knowledge both worldly and spiritual. only towards the mid-fifteenth century, he notes, do the depicted libraries denote freedom of thought and knowledge “for its own sake”.

 

In the following century, faced with what Andrew Pettegree in his essay calls “the challenge of print”, institutional libraries underwent “something of an existential crisis”. Readers who previously had sought out the collections of schools and universities for the books they wished to consult now realized that they could find them closer to (or even at) home. As Pettegree points out, a junior scholar of Oxford or Cambridge in the mid-1500s, a century after the invention of print, might have owned a collection of more than a hundred books, which would have been considered a decent size for a college library a few decades earlier. Printing empowered a new class of readers, and “men and women who could previously not have hoped to own a single book could now own many”. We might add to Pettegree’s observations that print also allowed for the development of a new kind of book such as Orazio Toscanella’s Armonia di tutti i principali retori (Venice, 1569) conceived as a “rhetorical machine” that facilitated the practice of the mnemotechnic and associative arts. So Gutenberg’s technology helped to clarify one of the library’s roles as a purveyor of carefully organized information and aids to memory (something explored by Lina Bolzoni in her superb study The Gallery of Memory: Literary and iconographic models in the age of the printing press, 2001).

 

Pettegree observes that the “democratization of a previously luxury item” meant that the existence of the library as a privileged place for the book (and for the reader) was no longer entirely justified and, towards the end of the sixteenth century, its prestige as an exclusive realm of aristocratic or monastic power began to decline. Robert Darnton, always keen on finding a better question for considering an old problem, looks at the resurgence of libraries during the Enlightenment not through the egalitarian effects of print that faintly blurred class distinctions, but through the lens of the booksellers who provided the textual knowledge that librarians then organized on their bookshelves. Some of the enlightened philosophers seem to have been opposed to the notion of making books available to all. Darnton reminds us that Voltaire, in his role as a rich landowner, argued that peasants should not busy themselves with reading but continue to till the soil. The presses, however, seeking a larger market, began printing books on the popular subjects that were emerging on the eve of the French Revolution – economics, political science, psychology, sociology and medicine – and the agents responsible for distributing them throughout Europe and the colonies were the itinerant booksellers. The librarians of Alexandria sent their emissaries in search of new books to the furthest corners of the kingdom. The librarians of the eighteenth century received their books from the hands of enterprising booksellers, thus satisfying what Darnton calls “a huge demand” among readers for the power that books can grant. Both the booksellers and the librarians, concludes Darnton, “created the foundations for the world of knowledge that is available to readers today”.

But how extensive and, above all, how serviceable, was this “world of knowledge” provided by libraries? That depends on what we mean by knowledge. The subscription libraries in Georgian Britain, to take the example given by David Allan in his essay, were excellent providers of what he calls, after Addison and Lord Shaftesbury, “polite sociability”. They were places where readers, such as Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, could marvel at being given the choice of reading whatever they liked, while at the same time doing so within the limits of what the rules of the Wakefield Library (for example) would call in 1830 “a profound reverence for the principles of revealed religion”, refraining “from the ｅxpression of any sentiments or views hostile to the British constitution”. By the middle of the nineteenth century, public libraries were attracting working-class readers whom Dickens welcomed with “the earnest hope that the books made thus available” would “prove a source of pleasure and improvement in the cottages, the garrets, and the cellars of the poorest of people”. But books such as those by Dickens himself (as John Sutherland notes in his amusing chapter) were regarded by the public library’s custodians “as something dangerous to the working-class mind – too exciting”. Excitement was considered unhealthy: Samuel Smiles, in his popular Self-Help (1859), hinted at a poisonous relationship between reading novels and self-abuse. But such restrictions were not, of course, particular to the Victorian age. Sutherland suggests that all libraries across all ages suffer from some form of book-banning, a strain that persists, he says, “in [their] DNA”. The history of censorship has always run intertwined with that of reading, and the bonfires of the censors have long lit our library stacks.

 

Three essays consider the library in fiction, poetry and film. Marina Warner, with her habitual learned charm, starts, as is proper, with the Epic of Gilgamesh and its reconstruction in the mid-nineteenth century from a progressively discovered library of tablets. Warner extends the meaning of library to that of collections of tales, and notes the links between the Semitic epic and Indo-European literature, especially in the narrative process that moves “from the song, the recitation, the performance, and the scene of storytelling” into the manuscript text, finding echoes of the methods of the poet of Gilgamesh in those of the compilers of the Arabian Nights. Both works depend, says Warner, on a “library of stories” whose archetype is Borges’s “Library of Babel”, the mysteriously ordered library depicted sub specie aeternitatis. The library in poetry is discussed by Robert Crawford, who begins with a simple image of transformation inscribed on a flagstone at the entrance to the Palacky University Library in the Czech Republic: “Turn the arsenals into libraries”. The sentiment is echoed in certain poems quoted by Crawford, by Abraham Cowley and Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Douglas Dunn, all of whom find singular ways to word this subversive metamorphosis in images of ghostly libraries born from almost anything in our cultural imaginaire: an ark, a garden, a vessel, a church, a battlefield. Laura Marcus, in her essay on the library in film, notes that “it is striking how so many films have taken up these questions of order and of mystery or confusion, as well as ideas of haunting in relation to the book and the library”. Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders and Orson Welles are only a few of the directors Marcus mentions who have lent the library something like a renewed sense of visual symbolic power.

 

The concluding section of this book addresses the question of the library “now and in the future”. Stephen Ennis reflects on the role of today’s library as a repository not only of the published works of a writer but also of the attendant material – early drafts, letters, personal memorabilia – and how this role can adapt to the requirements of an age in which much of the writer’s scribbling exists only in cyberspace. John P. Wilkin finds that a library (in his case, a research library) in the twenty-first century retains “four enduring areas of work” that electronic technology helps render effective: curatorial obligations; engagement with research and learning; publishing; and the creation and management of spaces for readers to work in and collections to be housed.

 

Unfortunately, time and time again, these wishful imaginations of what a library should be . . . are ignored, ridiculed or violently rejected even by those who should know better

 

Finally, James H. Billington addresses the notion of a library in what he optimistically calls a “global democracy”. “Libraries”, Billington argues, “are places for the pursuit of truth”, and he proceeds to explore, like Pontius Pilate, that most slippery of words. In a heartfelt paean to libraries, Billington writes: “Books are our guardians of memory, tutors of language, pathways to reason, and our golden gate to the royal road of imagination”. He adds: “Libraries are antidotes to fanaticism”. Would that this were so. Unfortunately, time and time again, these wishful imaginations of what a library should be, of powerfully envisioned places that offer us the possibility of becoming better and wiser, are ignored, ridiculed or violently rejected even by those who should know better. Over the past century, the ruins of the libraries of Warsaw, Nan-k’ai, Leuven, Dresden, Belgrade, Baghdad, Sarajevo and hundreds of others stand as shameful examples of our refusal to embrace the notions that Billington lovingly sets forth. A lesser-known example of our infamy is emblematic of our madness: when Israeli troops began occupying the Palestinian territories after the Six Day War, the soldiers looted private houses and requisitioned many books. Attempts by the exiled owners to recover their books from the Israeli authorities were met with silence or refusal, but functionaries at the National Library in Jerusalem have acknowledged that many of the looted volumes can be found today on the National Library shelves.

 

We must agree with Billington that these qualities of a library, however wishful, however difficult to achieve, are necessary – even vital. They vindicate our sense that libraries should be preserved, multiplied, respected and helped to grow. The injustice and misery of this world are almost impossible at times to bear, and no amount of books will remedy a single instance of deliberately inflicted suffering. Libraries, however – these assemblies of books that we have sheltered from the dilapidations of time since the days of Alexandria – may help us remember who we are, and where we are, and the many things we have done wrong, and the few things we have got right. “Collecting: to assert control over what’s unbearable”, wrote Ruth Padel. Perhaps this is the ultimate meaning of a library, and its modest justification.

Alberto Manguel’s recent books include With Borges, 2004, A Reader on Reading, 2010, and Curiosity, which was published earlier this year.