One warm afternoon in the late nineteenth century, two middle-aged office clerks met on a bench on the
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A page from Diderot's Encyclopedie, illustrating the entry on "Writing."
Boulevard Bourdon in Paris and immediately became the best of friends. Bouvard and Pecuchet (the names Gustave Flaubert gave to his two comic heroes) discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal, next to which Diderot's achievement appears delightfully modest, they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavour, and cull from their readings the most outstanding facts and ideas, an enterprise that was, of course, endless. Appropriately, Bouvard and Pecuchet was published unfinished one year after Flaubert's death in 1880, but not before the two brave explorers had read their way through many learned libraries of agriculture, literature, animal husbandry, medicine, archaeology and politics, always with disappointing results. What Flaubert's two clowns discovered is what we have always known but seldom believed: that the accumulation of knowledge isn't knowledge.97
Bouvard and Pecuchet's ambition is now almost a reality, when all the knowledge in the world seems to be there, flickering behind the siren screen. Jorge Luis Borges, who once imagined the infinite library of all possible books,98 also invented a Bouvard-and-Pecuchet- like character who attempts to compile a universal encyclopedia so complete that nothing in the world would be excluded from it.99 In the end, like his French forerunners, he fails in his attempt, but not entirely. On the evening on which he gives up his great project, he hires a horse and buggy and takes a tour of the city. He sees brick walls, ordinary people, houses, a river, a marketplace, and feels that somehow all these things are his own work. He realizes that his project was not impossible but merely redundant. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself.
THE LIBRARY
AS POWER
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler, 23 March 1751
The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading. For the Talmudic schools, as for those of Islam, a scholar can turn religious faith into an active power through the craft of reading, since the knowledge acquired through books is a gift from God. According to an early hadith, or Islamic tradition, "one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers."100 For these cultures of the Book, knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, in the words reflected both in the outside world and in the reader's own being.
In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, the celebrated German mathematician, philosopher and jurist, declared that a library's value was determined only by its contents and the use readers made of that contents, not by the number of its volumes or the rarity of its treasures. He compared the institution of a library to a church or a school, a place of instruction and learning, and campaigned in favour of collecting, above all, scientific titles, while doing away with books that he considered merely decorative or entertaining, and therefore useless. "A treatise of architecture or a collection of periodicals," he wrote, "is worth a hundred volumes of literary classics,"101 and he preferred small books to the larger folios because they saved space and avoided, he thought, superfluous embellishments. He argued that the mission of libraries was to help communication between scholars, and he conceived the idea of a national bibliographical organization that would assist scientists in learning of the discoveries made by their contemporaries. In 1690 he was appointed librarian to the ducal library of Brunswick- Luneberg in Hanover, and later he became librarian at the important Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbuttel, a post he retained until his death in 1716. Leibnitz was responsible for transferring the Wolfenbuttel collection from its original site to a building he judged better suited to the housing of books, with a glass roof that let in natural light, and several storeys of shelving space. The wooden structure of the building, however, did not allow for heating, and those readers who bravely sought out the books' wise words during the winter months did so with trembling hands and chattering teeth.102
Despite Leibnitz's contention that a library should be valued strictly for its contents, books as objects have often been granted spurious authority, and the edifice
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The Her%og August Wolfenbuttel Library.
of a library has superstitiously been seen as that authority's symbolic monument. When, in Emile Zola's L'Assommoir, an enthusiast of the Emperor Napoleon iii is shown a book that portrays the monarch as a lecherous seducer, the poor man is incapable of finding words to defend his king because "it was all in a book; he could not deny it!"103 Even today, when little or no importance is accorded to the intellectual act, books, read or unread, whatever their allotted use or value, are often lent such awe-inspiring prestige. Fat volumes of memoirs are still authored by those who wish to be seen as powerful, and libraries are still founded by (and named after) politicians who, like the ancient kings of Mesopotamia, wish to be remembered as purveyors of that power. In the United States, a string of presidential libraries testifies to this desire for intellectual immortality (as well as tax relief). In France, every year offers a crop of confessional writings, candid recollections and even fiction by leading politicians; in 1994 ex-president Valery Giscard d'Estaing went as far as demanding membership in the exclusive Academie Frangaise, reserved for the elite of French intellectuals, on the strength of a slim romantic novel, Le Passage.104 He succeeded. In Argentina, both Evita and Juan Peron prided themselves on their autobiographies—cum—political testaments, which everyone knew had been ghost-written. Wishing to dispel the image of an illiterate ruler, early on in his career Peron had himself invited by the Argentinian Academy of Letters to pronounce a speech on the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Cervantes—an author whose work, he laughingly confessed later in life, he hadn't ever bothered to read,105 but whose large leather-bound,
The last great king ofAssyria, Ashurbanipal.
gold-lettered tomes could be seen behind him in several official photographs.
King Ashurbanipal, Assyria's last important monarch, who ruled from 668 to 633 B.C., was fully aware of the association between rulers and the written word. He boasted that he himself was a scribe, though "among the kings, my forerunners, none had learned such an art." His collection of tablets assembled in his palace in Nineveh, while meant for private use, nevertheless stated in the colophon of tablet after tablet, for all to read, that the power granted by the art of letters had been bestowed into his hands:
Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria, who trusts in Ashur and Ninlil, whom Nabu and Tashmetu gave wide- open ears and who was given profound insight. . . . The wisdom of Nabu, the signs of writing, as many as have been devised, I wrote on tablets, I arranged the tablets in series, I collated [them], and for my royal contemplation and recital I placed them in my palace.106