Sometimes, those who take upon themselves the task of guarding the entrance to the library's stacks find danger where others see none. During the hunt for "subversive elements" under the military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s, anyone in possession of a "suspicious" book could be arrested and detained without charge. "Suspicious" were the poems of Neruda and Nazim Hikmet (they were communists), the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they were Russian) and any book with a dangerous word in its title, such as Stendhal's The Red and the Black or the sixteenth- century Japanese classic Comrade Loves of the Samurai. In fear of sudden police raids, many people burnt their libraries by lighting bonfires in their toilets, and plumbers became suddenly perplexed by an epidemic of broken toilet bowls (the heat of burning paper causes the porcelain to crack). "He has children who saw him burn his books" is how the novelist German Garcia defines the generation that was killed, tortured or forced into exile.139
Those in power can ban books for peculiar motives. General Pinochet famously excluded Don Quixote from the libraries of Chile because he read in that novel an argument for civil disobedience, and the Japanese minister of Culture, several years ago, objected to Pinocchio because it showed unflattering pictures of handicapped people in the figures of the cat who pretends to be blind and the fox who pretends to be lame. In March 2003 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who was to become Pope Benedict xvi) argued that the Harry Potter books "deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."140 Other idiosyncratic reasons have been given for banning all manner of books, from The Wizard of O{ (a hotbed of pagan beliefs) to The Catcher in the Rye (a dangerous adolescent role model). In the words of William Blake,
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white.141
As I've said, any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the stern Jesuit Jacob Gretser published a defence of censorship under the explicit title Of the Laws and Customs Concerning the Banning, Expurgation and Destruction of Heretical and Noxious Books. Gretser's erudition led him to be appointed advisor to the Catholic Church when the Index of Forbidden Books was being compiled in Madrid in 1612; he employed that same erudition to support the argument (evident to many) that censorship of books is common to all peoples in all times. Gretser's infamous genealogy begins with the pagans who burned Cicero's treatise On the Nature of the Gods (for being too inclined to monotheism, according to an old, unproven story), and leads up to the book-burnings of the followers of Luther and Calvin.142 Had Gretser been able to look into the future, he could have added to his list the "degenerate" books condemned to the pyre by the Nazis, the works of the "bourgeois" writers proscribed by Stalin, the publications of the "Communist scribblers" exiled by Senator McCarthy, the books destroyed by the Taliban, by Fidel Castro, by the government of North Korea, by the officials of Canada Customs. Gretser's book is in fact the unacknowledged history of those colossal libraries that whisper from the gaps on
the bookshelves.143
Earlier, I mentioned the legend that accused Amr ibn alAs of ordering Caliph Omar I to set fire to the books in Alexandria. Omar's apocryphal response deserves to be quoted here because it echoes the curious logic of every book-burner then and now. He is said to have acquiesced by saying, "If the contents of these books agree with the Holy Book, then they are redundant. If they disagree, then they are undesirable. In either case, they should be consigned to the flames."144 Omar was addressing— somewhat stridently, it is true—the essential fluidity of literature. Because of it, no library is what it is set up to be, and a library's fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.
This is true of the native literature of the Americas, of which hardly anything has reached us. In Mexico and
Central America, particularly, the great libraries and archives of the pre-Columbian peoples were systematically destroyed by the Europeans, both to deprive them of an identity and to convert them to the religion of Christ. The Australian poet A.D. Hope tells the story of how the Spanish conquistadores set fire to the books of the Maya:
Diego de Landa, archbishop of Yucatan —The curse of God upon his pious soul— Placed all their Devil's picture books under ban And, piling them in one sin-heap, burned the whole;
But he took the trouble to keep the calendar By which the Devil had taught them to count time. The impious creatures tallied back as far As ninety million years before Eve's crime.
That was enough: they burned the Mayan books, Saved souls and kept their own in proper trim. Diego de Landa in heaven always looks Towards God: God never looks at him.145
Diego de Landa's contemporary Friar Juan de Zumarraga, "a name that should be as immortal as that of Omar," says William Prescott in his classic Conquest of Mexico,16 did likewise with the books of the Aztecs. Zumarraga was born in Durango, Spain, in 1468 and studied in the Franciscan monastery of Aranzazu, in the Basque Country. Appointed to the Most Holy Office of the Inquisition, he received his first inquisitorial commission from the Emperor Charles v "to hunt the witches of Biscay" in northern Spain. Zumarraga proved himself so
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A nineteenth-century engraving based on a sixteenth-century portrait of Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga.
successful that shortly afterwards he was posted to the Viceroyalty of Mexico as bishop-elect. In 1547, Pope Paul 11 crowned him first archbishop of Mexico.
Zumarraga spent seven years as head of the Mexican Inquisition, from 1536 to 1543, during which time he wrote a catechism for native neophytes and a brief manual of Christian doctrine for use in the missions, supervised the translation of the Bible into a number of native languages and founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, where the sons of the native nobility were taught Latin, philosophy, rhetoric and logic so that they could become "good Christians." Zumarraga's name, however, is mainly associated with two events that profoundly affected the history of Mexico: he was responsible for creating the first printing press in the New World, and for destroying most of the vast literature of the Aztec Empire.