The Library at Night

by Alberto Manguel

  The looting of the National Library and State Archives of Baghdad.

  Though a good number of objects were returned to Iraq in the months following the looting, by the end of 2004 a large proportion of the stolen books, documents and artifacts had not been recovered, in spite of the efforts of Interpol, UNESCO, ICOM (International Council of Museums) and several cultural agencies around the world. And many irreplaceable texts and objects were destroyed. “In all, what was recovered makes up less than 50 percent of what was stolen,” declared Dr. Donny George, director of the Baghdad Archeological Museum. “More than half of the looted material is still missing, which is a great loss for Iraq and for all of humanity.”293

  Luciano Canfora has argued the importance of documenting not only the history of the disappearance of libraries and books, but the history of the awareness of their disappearance.294 He points out, for example, that in the first century B.C. Diodorus Siculus, commenting on the Greek philosopher Theopompus’s chronicles of the campaigns of Philip of Macedon, noted that the entire book consisted of fifty-eight volumes of which “unfortunately, five are no longer to be found.” Canfora explains that since Diodorus lived most of his life in Sicily, in regretting the loss of Theopompus’s five volumes he meant that they were absent from the local collections, probably from the historical library of Taormina. Eight centuries after Diodorus, however, the Byzantine patrician Photius, compiler of an encyclopedic bibliography under the title Bibliotheka, or Library, remarked, “We have read the Chronicles of Theopompus, of which only fifty-three volumes have survived.” The loss noticed by Diodorus was still true for Photius; that is to say, the awareness of the absence had become part of the work’s own history, counterbalancing, in some small measure, the oblivion to which the lost volumes had been condemned.

  Stele with the Code of Hammurabi.

  Trust in the survival of the word, like the urge to forget what words attempt to record, is as old as the first clay tablets stolen from the Baghdad Museum. To hold and transmit memory, to learn through the experience of others, to share knowledge of the world and of ourselves, are some of the powers (and dangers) that books confer upon us, and the reasons why we both treasure and fear them. Four thousand years ago, our ancestors in Mesopotamia already knew this. The Code of Hammurabi—a collection of laws inscribed on a tall, dark stone stele by King Hammurabi of Babylonia in the eighteenth century B.C., and preserved today in the Louvre Museum—offers us, in its epilogue, an enlightened example of what the written word can mean to the common man.

  In order to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak, in order to give justice to the orphans and widows … I have inscribed on my stele my precious words … If a man is sufficiently wise to maintain order in the land, may he heed the words I have written on this stele. … Let the oppressed citizen have the inscriptions read out…. The stele will illuminate his case for him. And as he will understand what to expect [from the words of the law], his heart will be set at ease.295

  THE LIBRARY

  AS IMAGINATION

  “It is as easy to dream up a book as it is difficult to put it on paper.”

  Balzac, Le cabinet des antiques

  There are two big sophora trees in my garden, just outside my library windows. During the summer, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk under them, sometimes during the day but usually at night. Inside the library, my books distract us from conversation and we are inclined to silence. But outside, under the stars, talk becomes less inhibited, wider ranging, strangely more stimulating. There is something about sitting outside in the dark that seems conducive to unfettered conversation. Darkness promotes speech. Light is silent—or, as Henry Fielding explains in Amelia, “Tace, madam, is Latin for a candle.”296

  Tradition tells us that words, not light, came first out of the primordial darkness. According to a Talmudic legend, when God sat down to create the world, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet descended from his terrible and august crown and begged him to effect his creation through them. God consented. He allowed the alphabet to give birth to the heavens and the earth in darkness, and then to bring forth the first ray of light from the earth’s core, so that it might pierce the Holy Land and illuminate the entire universe.297 Light, what we take to be light, Sir Thomas Browne tells us, is only the shadow of God, in whose blinding radiance words are no longer possible.298 God’s backside was enough to dazzle Moses, who had to wait until he had returned to the darkness of the Sinai in order to read to his people their Lord’s commandments. Saint John, with praiseworthy economy, summed up the relationship between letters, light and darkness in one famous line: “In the beginning was the Word.”

  Saint John’s sentence describes the reader’s experience. As anyone reading in a library knows, the words on the page call out for light. Darkness, words and light form a virtuous circle. Words bring light into being, and then mourn its passing. In the light we read, in the dark we talk. Urging his father not to allow himself to die, Dylan Thomas pressed now famous words on the old man: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”299 And Othello too, in agony, confuses the light of candles with the light of life, and sees them as one and the same: “Put out the light,” he says, “and then put out the light.”300 Words call for light in order to be read, but light seems to oppose the spoken word. When Thomas Jefferson introduced the Argand lamp to New England in the mid-eighteenth century, it was observed that the conversation at dinner tables once lit by candlelight ceased to be as brilliant as before, because those who excelled in talking now took to their rooms to read.301 “I have too much light,” says the Buddha, refusing to say another word.302

  In one other practical sense, words create light. The Mesopotamian who wished to continue his reading when night had fallen, the Roman who intended to pursue his documents after dinner, the monk in his cell and the scholar in his study after evening prayers, the courtier retiring to his bedchamber and the lady to her boudoir, the child hiding beneath the blankets to read after curfew—all set up the light necessary to illuminate their task. In the Archaeological Museum of Madrid stands an oil lamp from Pompeii by whose light Pliny the Elder may have read his last book, before setting off to die in the eruption of A.D. 79. Somewhere in Stratford, Ontario, is a solitary candleholder that dates back (its owner boasts) to Shakespeare’s time; it may once have held a candle whose brief life Macbeth saw as a reflection of his own. The lamps that guided Dante’s exiled reading in Ravenna and Racine’s cloistered reading in Port-Royal, Stendhal’s in Rome and De Quincey’s in London, all were born of words calling out from between their covers; all were light assisting the birth of light.

  In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness, we invent our own stories. Many times, under my two trees, I have sat with friends and described books that were never written. We have stuffed libraries with tales we never felt compelled to set down on paper. “To imagine the plot of a novel is a happy task,” Borges once said. “To actually write it is an exaggeration.”303 He enjoyed filling the spaces of the library he could not see with stories he never bothered to write, but for which he sometimes deigned to compose a preface, summary or review. Even as a young man, he said, the knowledge of his impending blindness had encouraged him in the habit of imagining complex volumes that would never take printed form. Borges had inherited from his father the disease that gradually, implacably weakened his sight, and the doctor had forbidden him to read in dim light. One day, on a train journey, he became so engrossed by a detective novel that he carried on reading, page after page, in the fading dusk. Shortly before his destination, the train entered a tunnel. When it emerged, Borges could no longer see anything except a coloured haze, the “darkness visible” that Milton thought was hell. In that darkness Borges lived for the rest of his life, remembering or imagining stories, rebuilding in his mind the National Library of Buenos Aires or his own restricted library at home. In the light of the first half of his life, he wrote and read silently; in the gloom of
the second, he dictated and had others read to him.

  In 1955, shortly after the military coup that overthrew the dictatorship of General Perón, Borges was offered the post of director of the National Library. The idea had come from Victoria Ocampo, the formidable editor of Sur magazine and Borges’s friend for many years. Borges thought it “a wild scheme” to appoint a blind man as librarian, but then recalled that, oddly enough, two of the previous directors had also been blind: José Mármol and Paul Groussac. When the possibility of the appointment was put forward, Borges’s mother suggested that they take a walk to the library and look at the building, but Borges felt superstitious and refused. “Not until I get the job,”304 he said. A few days later, he was appointed. To celebrate the occasion, he wrote a poem about “the splendid irony of God” that had simultaneously granted him “books and the night.”305

  Jorge Luis Borges at his desk in the Buenos Aires National Library.

  Borges worked at the National Library for eighteen years, until his retirement, and he enjoyed his post so much that he celebrated almost every one of his birthdays there. In his wood-panelled office, under a high ceiling studded with painted fleurs-de-lys and golden stars, he would sit for hours at a small table, his back towards the room’s centrepiece—a magnificent, huge round desk, a copy of one that had belonged to the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, that Borges felt was far too ostentatious. Here he dictated his poems and fictions, had books read to him by willing secretaries, received friends, students and journalists, and held study groups of Anglo-Saxon. The tedious, bureaucratic library work was left to his assistant director, the scholar José Edmundo Clemente.

  Many of Borges’s published stories and essays mention books that he invented without bothering to write them out. Among these are the many romances by the fictional Herbert Quain (the subject of an essaylike fiction), who varies one single plot in geometrical progression until the number of plots becomes infinite; the marvellous detective novel The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, by “the Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali,” supposedly reviewed by the very real Philip Guedalla and Cecil Roberts, and published by the equally real Victor Gollancz in London, with an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers, under the revised title The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu’tasim: A Game with Shifting Mirrors; the eleventh volume of the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, which Herbert Ashe received, shortly before his death, in a sealed and registered parcel from Brazil; the play The Enemies, which Jaromir Hladik left unfinished but was allowed to complete in his mind in a long, God-granted instant before his execution; and the octavo volume of infinite pages, bearing the words “Holy Writ” and “Bombay” on its spine, that (Borges tells us) he held in his hands shortly before retiring from his post as director of the National Library.306

  The collecting of imaginary books is an ancient occupation. In 1532 there appeared in France a book signed by the apocryphal scholar Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais) entitled The horrible and frightening deeds and accomplishments of the much renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsods, son of the great giant Gargantua.307 In the seventh chapter of the second book, the young Pantagruel, having studied “very well” at Orléans, resolves to visit Paris and its university. It is, however, not the learned institution but the Abbey of St. Victor that holds his attention, for there he finds “a very stately and magnifick” library full of the most wonderful books. The catalogue that Rabelais copies for us is five pages long, and includes such marvels as:

  The Giant Gargantua created by François Rabelais.

  The Codpiece of the Law

  The Pomegranate of Vice

  The mustard-pot of Penance

  The Trevet of good thoughts

  The Snatchfare of the Curats

  The Spectacles of Pilgrims bound for Rome

  The Fured Cat of the Sollicitors and Atturneys

  The said Authors Apologie against those who alledge that the Popes mule doth eat but at set times

  The bald arse or peel’d breech of the widows

  The hotchpot of Hypocrites

  The bumsquibcracker of Apothecaries

  The Mirrour of basenesse by Radnecu Waldenses

  The fat belly of the Presidents

  In a letter of advice sent to his son from Utopia, Gargantua encourages Pantagruel to make good use of his skills “by which we may in a mortal estate attain to a kinde of immortality.” “All the world is full of knowing men,” he writes, “of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries: and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is. … I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now, than the Doctors and Preachers were in my time.” The library that Rabelais invents is perhaps the first “imaginary library” in literature. It mocks (in the tradition of his admired Erasmus and Thomas More) the scholarly and monastic world, but, more important, allows the reader the fun of imagining the arguments and plots behind the rollicking titles. On another of his Gargantuan abbeys, that of Thelême, Rabelais inscribed the motto Fays ce que voudra (Do As You Please). On his library at St. Victor he might have written Lys ce que voudra (Read As You Please). I’ve written those words over one of the doors of my own library. Rabelais was born in 1483 or 1484, near the town of Chinon, not far from where I now live. His house was called La Devinière, or The Soothsayer’s House; its original name had been Les Cravandières, after cravant, meaning “wild goose” in the Touraine dialect. Since geese were used to predict the future, the house’s name was changed to honour the birds’ magical gift.308 The house, the landscape around it, the towns and monuments even as far as the thin eleventh-century tower of Marmande that I can see from the end of my garden, became the setting for his gigantic saga. The success of Pantagruel (over four thousand copies sold in the first few months) made Rabelais decide to continue the adventures of his giants. Two years later he published The Very Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, and several other volumes of the saga. In 1543 the Church banned Rabelais’ books, and published an official edict condemning his work.

  Rabelais could read Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and several dialects of French; he had studied theology, law, medicine, architecture, botany, archaeology and astronomy; he enriched the French language with more than eight hundred words and dozens of idioms, many of which are still used in Acadian Canada.309 His imaginary library is the fruit of a mind too active to stop and record its thoughts, and his Gargantuan epic is a hodgepodge of episodes that allows the reader almost any choice of sequence, meaning, tone and even argument. It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom. The ancient scholastic libraries took for granted the truth of the traditional commentaries on the classics; Rabelais, like his fellow humanists, questioned the assumption that authority equalled intelligence. “Knowledge without conscience,” says Gargantua to his son, “is but the ruin of the soul.”

  The historian Lucien Febvre, in a study of the religious beliefs in Rabelais’ time, attempted to describe the writer in sixteenth-century terms. “What was Rabelais like mentally? Something of a buffoon … boozing his fill and in the evening writing obscenities? Or perhaps a learned physician, a humanist scholar who filled his prodigious memory with beautiful passages from the ancients … ? Or, better yet, a great philosopher, acclaimed as such by the likes of Theodore Beza and Louis Le Caron?” Febvre asks, and concludes, “Our ancestors were more fortunate than we are. They did not choose between two images. They accepted them both at the same time, the respectable one along with the other.”310

  Rabelais’ House in Chinon, France.

  Rabelais was able to maintain simultaneously both a questioning spirit, and faith in what he saw as the established tru
th. He needed to probe the assertions of fools, and to judge for himself the weight of truisms. The books he read as a scholar, full of the wisdom of the ancients, must have been balanced in his mind by the questions left unanswered and the treatises never written. His own library of parchment and paper was grounded by his imaginary library of forgotten or neglected subjects of study and reflection. We know what books (real books) he carried in his “portable library,” a chestful that accompanied him throughout the twenty years of his wanderings in Europe. The list—which left him in constant peril of the Inquisition—included Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, the works of Plato, Seneca and Lucian, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly and More’s Utopia, and even a dangerous recently published Polish book, the De revolutionibus of Copernicus.311 The books he invented for Pantagruel are their irreverent but tacit gloss.

  The critic Mikhail Bahktin has pointed out that Rabelais’ imaginary books have their antecedent in the parodic liturgies and comic gospels of earlier centuries. “The medieval parody,” he says, “intends to describe only the negative or imperfect aspects of religion, ecclesiastical organization and scholarly science. For these parodists, everything, without exception, is humorous; laughter is as universal as seriousness, and encompasses the whole of the universe, history, society and conception of the world. Theirs is an all-embracing vision of the world.”312

  Rabelais’ Gargantua was succeeded by a number of imitations in the following century. Most popular among these were a series of catalogues of imaginary libraries published (largely as political satires) in England during the Civil War, such as the Bibliotheca Parliamenti of 1653, attributed to Sir John Birkenhead, which included such irreverent titles as Theopoeia, a discourse shewing to us mortals, that Cromwel may be reckoned amongst the gods, since he hath put off all humanity.313 In that same year Sir Thomas Urquhart published the first English translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the learned Sir Thomas Browne composed, in imitation of Rabelais, a tract he called Musaeum Clausum, or, Bibliotheca abscondita: containing some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. In this “Closed Museum or Hidden Library” are many strange volumes and curious objects: among them an unknown poem written in Greek by Ovid during his exile in Tomis, a letter from Cicero describing the Isle of Britain, a relation of Hannibal’s march from Spain to Italy, a treatise on dreams by King Mithridates, an eight-year-old girl’s miraculous collection of writings in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a Spanish translation of the works of Confucius. Among pictures of “rare objects” Sir Thomas lists “An handsome Piece of Deformity expressed in a notable hard Face” and “An Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back.”314 The clear intention is to mock the popular beliefs of the day, but the result is slightly stilted and far less humorous than its model. Even imaginary libraries can sink under the prestige and pompousness of academia.