This implicit censorship starts with the earliest Mesopotamian libraries we know of, from the beginning of the third millennium B.C.127 Unlike official archives, set up to preserve the daily transactions and ephemeral dealings of a particular group, these libraries collected works of a more general nature, such as the so-called royal inscriptions (commemorative tablets of stone or metal that retold important political events, akin to the broadsheets of seventeenth-century Europe or today's current events best-sellers). In all probability these libraries were privately owned—personal spaces set up by lovers of the written word, who would often instruct the scribes to copy the owner's name on the tablets as a mark of possession. Even libraries attached to a temple usually carried the name of a high priest or some other important personage responsible for the collection. So as to preserve the order established by a particular shelving or cataloguing method, certain library books carried a warning colophon intended to dissuade anyone wishing to tamper with the assigned category. A dictionary from the seventh century b.c. carries this prayer: "May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet nor place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building."128 I have placed this warning on the wall of my own library to ward off borrowers in the night.
Most of the owners of these collections were of royal blood, and they kept their libraries stocked through the agency of buyers and looters. King Ashurbanipal, in order to supplement his already considerable library, was known to dispatch representatives throughout his vast kingdom to search for whatever volumes might be missing. He had no guiding principle defined by categories (later imposed on the collection); his was a haphazard hoarding of anything at hand.129 We have a letter in which Ashurbanipal, after listing the books he is seeking, insists that the task should be carried out without delay. "Find them and dispatch them to me. Nothing should detain them. And in the future, if you discover other tablets not herewith mentioned, inspect them and, if you consider them of interest for the library, collect them and send them on to me."130 A similar all-inclusive impulse governed the composition of other Mesopota- mian lists and catalogues. Commenting on the celebrated Code of Hammurabi, that compendium of laws from the eighteenth century B.C., the historian Jean Bottero stressed the fact that it included in its enumerations "not only the common and commonly observable reality, but also the exceptional, the aberrant: in the end, everything possible."131
Though a library such as that of Ashurbanipal was the visible expression of earthly power, no single person, however royal, could hope to read through it all. To read every book and to digest all the information, the king recruited other eyes and other hands to scan the tablets and summarize their findings, so that in reading these digests he might be able to boast that he was familiar with the library's entire contents. Scholars extracted the meat from the texts and then, "like pelicans," regurgitated it for the benefit of others.
Four centuries after Ashurbanipal, in the first half of the second century B.C., a couple of the principal librarians of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium and his disciple
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A contemporary cartoon depicting a book-burning in Nazi Germany.
Aristarchus of Samothrace, decided to assist their readers in a similar fashion. Not only did they select and gloss all manner of important works, but they also set out to compile a catalogue of authors who, in their opinion, surpassed all others in literary excellence.132 The qualifications of the two scholars were impeccable. Aristophanes had edited the works of Homer and Hesiod,133 and to his edition of the latter he had added brief critical notes in which he listed other writers who had dealt with the same material; these notes, known as hypotheseis, were essentially annotated bibliographies that allowed readers a quick and exact overview of a certain subject. Aristarchus had also edited the works of Homer, with a rigour that was legendary, so that any exacting critic who followed him became known as an aristarchus. These lists of "best authors" (lists which, almost two thousand years later, the scholar David Ruhnken would call "canons"134) were copied out well into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and granted the included authors literary immortality, since their works were sought after and assiduously studied. On the other hand, authors not present in these lists were considered unworthy of attention and were allowed to fade into ashes and oblivion. This lengthy, never- compiled catalogue of neglected authors haunts us by its absence.
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order or space. In the library of my Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, we felt it behind the imposing wooden doors, in the welcoming gloom, and under the green-shaded lamps that reminded me vaguely of the lamps in sleeping-car compartments. Up the marble staircase, down the tiled floor, between the grey columns, the library seemed a parallel universe, both fearful and comforting, in which my own story had other adventures and other endings. Above all, absence (of the books deemed improper, dangerous, provocative) gaped in the dark holes that pierced the countless shelves of books towering up to the ceiling.
And yet, many seemingly innocent titles deceived the librarian's censorious eye. I remember, in the silence
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Warning sign in the library at Le Presbytere.
broken by whispered snatches of conversation, the pages at which certain books would spontaneously fall open: Lorca's Romancero gitano at "The Unfaithful Bride," La Celestina at the brothel scene, Cortazar's Los Premios at the chapter in which a young boy is seduced by a wicked sailor. How these forbidden texts had found their way into our scrupulous library we never knew, and we wondered how long it would be before the librarian discovered that, under his very nose, generation after generation of corruptible students filled the absence on the shelves by selectively reading these scandalous books.
It may be, as Primo Levi suggests in his memoirs, that the unspoken purpose of librarians is to make sure that only those truly wishing access to books be allowed into the sanctum. For Levi, the library of Turin's Chemical Institute in the 1930s was
at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library's schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness, stationed at the threshold to terrify with his appearance and his howl those aspiring to enter.135
Like Levi's unwelcoming library, and like the far less forbidding one of my school, every library, including those under strictest surveillance, contains secretly rebellious texts that escape the librarian's eye. As a prisoner in a Russian camp near the polar circle doing what he called "my own time in the North,"136 Joseph Brodsky read W.H. Auden's poems, and they strengthened his resolve to defy his jailers and survive for the sake of a glimpsed-at freedom. Haroldo Conti, tortured in the cells of the Argentinian military of the 1970s, found solace in the novels of Dickens, which his jailer had allowed him to keep.137 For the writer Varlam Chalamov, sent by Stalin to work in the gold mines of Kolyma because of his "counter-revolutionary activities," the prison library was itself a gold mine that "for incomprehensible reasons, had escaped the innumerable inspections and 'purges' systematically inflicted upon all of Russia's libraries." On its miserable shelves Chalamov found unexpected treasures such as Bulgakov's writings and the poems of Mayakovski. "It was," he said, "as if the authorities had wished to offer the prisoners a consolation for the long road ahead, for the Calvary awaiting them. As if they thought: 'Why censor the reading of those condemned?'"138