The Library of the Disaster Daniel Rosenberg

THE LIBRARY OF THE DISASTER

Be severe as the time that fies; be inexorable as posterity. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, The Year 2440

he death of the author is a persistent preoccupation of literature. As a Tprojective exercise, literature is a willing toward the future, and as a gesture toward posterity, it is also an admission of mortality. The idea of the French academicians as “immortals” aches with this very idea. And, under certain historical pressures, such as those of structuralism, themes of authorial death become compelling in a larger cultural frame. When Roland Barthes pronounced his historical moment to be that of the death of the author, he was not asserting that an author passing in his day had more importance than in earlier times; to the contrary, with structuralism, the question of the mortality of individual authors receded, yet the power of Barthes’s formulation responded to the generally held assumption that the lives and deaths of individual authors do matter. In distancing himself from this assumption, Barthes simultaneously exemplifed the modernism that he expounded. While Barthes’s formulation was novel, the symbolic killing of the writer was not. Indeed, this gesture is fundamental to literature in modernity. And parallel structures may be observed in literature, philosophy, and historiography in the eighteenth century, a period in which visions of past and future literatures are separated from the present by paroxysms erasing the knowledge of authors, works, and entire traditions of literature. The importance of fantasies of the destruction of literature during the Enlightenment is striking. This was, after all, the foundational moment of the modern idea of progress. Yet, among the most important works of the period, visions of literary and intellectual catastrophe are common. In part, of course, this is because catastrophe makes for good storytelling: readers in the eighteenth century were both attracted to and horrifed by accounts of disasters of all kinds. But a good case can be made that accounts of disaster play a conceptually central role in key works of the period and that accounts of disasters visited on literature play a central role within the larger category. Some of the most notable works of the period that revolve around accounts of disaster include Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1722), Voltaire’s

The Romanic Review Volume 103 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 318 Daniel Rosenberg

Mercier’s Tableau de Paris rescued from oblivion by the genius of time. Engraving by Balthasar Anton Dunker, from the 1787 Bern edition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris.

Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon (1755), and Johann Winckelmann’s accounts of the excavations at Herculaneum (1762), each of which raises philosophical questions about continuity and loss and about the role of events of great destruction in the larger scheme of history. Here I focus on only one kind of catastrophe, one that pales in destructive force in comparison with earthquakes, epidemics, volcanic eruptions, and so forth, but which nonetheless held special resonance for the Enlightenment—the destruction of books and libraries. I examine how stories of these irruptive events in literary and intellectual history fgure in the self-conception of the Enlightenment. Books are fragile. And the big natural disasters with which Voltaire and Winckelmann were concerned were certainly responsible for their share of book burning. In fact, some of the very important things that we know today about Roman libraries come from the excavations at Herculaneum described by Winckelmann, Charles de Brosses, and other philosophical travelers of the eighteenth century. Though no scrolls were recovered intact from the site, libraries were identifed there, along with shelves and other housing for books, and this helped historians specify the place of literature in the ancient Roman world. But not all disasters are natural, and, as we have seen in recent years, the destruction of cultural artifacts is often the result of human acts. In wartime, books and other works of art come under particular threat. And this has been true as long as there have been books and works of art. Ironically, in times of confict, the very institutions created to preserve cultural artifacts may put The Library of the Disaster 319 them in danger, since these are often politically symbolic and physically close to centers of power. Even when they are not primary targets of destruction and plunder, libraries, museums, and other institutions of cultural preservation are often situated in harm’s way. This was most famously the case at the Library of Alexandria—in its day, perhaps the world’s greatest collection of books and, after it, a persistent topos for stories of literary destruction. It is peculiar that during the Enlightenment that the idea of a massive destruction of books aroused fantasies and fears in apparently equal measure and frequently in the same text. A striking and notorious vision of literary destruction occurs in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel, The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One (1769), a depiction of a utopian, or—more precisely— uchronian, Paris about seven hundred years in the future (that is to say, a hypothetical model society distant in time rather than space). In the novel, a Frenchman from the eighteenth century falls asleep (as Washington Irving would have his Rip Van Winkle do about a half century later) and awakens in the year 2440 in a Paris that is handsomer, healthier, and better governed. For Mercier’s time traveler, the new city is disorienting. But Paris remains Paris, and after a bit of reconnoitering, the time traveler gets his bearings and fnds his way to a familiar place, the neighborhood of the eighteenth-century Royal Library. Mercier’s narrator takes a keen interest here, as he suggests that the library is a fundamental link between his own time and the present of 2440. The library as he understands it embodies the highest and most enduring values of the culture. And so it comes as some comfort that the twenty-ffth- century library still stands where the eighteenth-century library did, and that it looks, as he approaches, very much the same. But when he enters the library, Mercier’s time traveler is in for a shock: in the library’s vast galleries, once flled by leather-bound volumes, there are almost no books on view. Mercier’s narrator approaches a librarian whom he discovers in the great hall to fnd out where all the books have gone. “I ventured to ask if some fatal confagration [incendie] had not devoured that rich collection?” says Mercier’s traveler, referring to the holdings of the Royal Library of his own time. “‘Yes,’” replies the librarian, “‘it was a confagration; but we lit it with our own hands’” (187). To Mercier’s narrator, this response is even stranger than the missing books. Why would one choose to burn one’s own books? To what kind of barbarism had France succumbed? For Mercier, book burning could be the result of enlightenment. Thus, his future librarian: “Nothing leads the mind farther astray than bad books, for the frst notions being adopted without attention, the second become precipitate conclusions; and men thus go on from prejudice to prejudice, and from error to error. What remained for us to do, but to rebuild the structure of human knowledge?” (189). As it turned out, not much reconstruction was necessary. The good was sorted out from the bad. And little was left over. 320 Daniel Rosenberg

Mercier’s account of this uchronian literary purge is vivid. According to the librarian, citizens of the realm “brought together, on a vast plain” all the books they judged “frivolous, useless, or dangerous.” “Of these,” he says, “we formed a pyramid that resembled, in height and bulk, an enormous tower; it was certainly another Babel. This tremendous mass we set on fre, and offered it as an expiatory sacrifce to veracity, to good sense, and to true taste. [. . .] Some authors saw themselves burning alive; their cries, however, could not extinguish the fames” (190). Mercier intended his literary auto-da-fé as hyperbole, not as prescription. But this should not distract us from the seriousness of his underlying argument: for Mercier, the values of literary purifcation are real. “We have [. . .] done from an enlightened zeal,” says the librarian, “what the barbarians once did from one that was blind. However, as we are neither unjust nor like the Saracens— who heated their baths with the great works of literature—we have made an election: those of the greatest judgment among us have extracted the substance of thousands of volumes which they have included in a small duodecimo, not unlike those skillful chemists, who concentrate the virtues of many plants in a small phial, and cast aside the refuse” (191). In Mercier’s imagination, the massive elimination of literature serves to focus the reading and writing public on what actually matters. In Mercier’s fantasy, an abominated practice of the past is revived as a tool for making better futures. From a modern point of view, particularly after 1984, Farenheit 451, and other powerful dystopian visions, it is diffcult to contemplate a fantasy of future literary destruction as anything but catastrophe. And, as Mercier’s own analogy with the Saracens suggests, neither was it something with which readers in the eighteenth century could have been entirely comfortable. Less than a decade after the publication of The Year 2440, Edward Gibbon would argue that the burning of the Library of Alexandria at the hands of the Saracens was something that evoked “pious condemnation” from all quarters (9: 440). But Mercier was not alone in his idea. In fact, his fascination with the possible benefts of literary loss was resonant with that of many of his contemporaries, Gibbon included. During the Enlightenment, stories of literary destruction were told and retold. In addition to Mercier, the problem of the Alexandrian library appears in the works of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Gibbon, David Hume, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne, to name only several of the most notable instances. And, in all these cases, the concerns evoked are new. There was, of course, nothing new about moralizing on the Library of Alexandria. As early as AD 47, Seneca argued against the idea of expending energy and resources collecting all literature in one place. To Seneca, who emphasized the importance of reading only good books, the project of the Library of Alexandria was bankrupt to begin with, and its The Library of the Disaster 321

accidental destruction by the retreating troops of Julius Caesar, nothing to especially regret. Similar arguments were made by European writers in the Renaissance, though during this period of classical revival, many more writers found something to regret rather than to appreciate in the destruction. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concern of these stories shifted away from the difference between good books and bad books to the difference between manageable and unmanageable quantities of literature, and the hazards of an explosion of printed books, pamphlets, and newspapers (Rosenberg “Overload”; Rosenberg “Time Machine”). In part, this shift is marked by the emergence of new ways to tell the story of Alexandria that moved the emphasis from the frst two confagrations believed to have consumed it (the accidental fre set by Julius Caesar in 47 BC and the orchestrated assault organized by Theophilus, the archbishop of Alexandria, in AD 391) to a third notional event, found only in European texts from 1650 on. The standard eighteenth-century version of the story is the one alluded to by Mercier. In the year AD 642, shortly after the Arab conquest of Egypt, the fate of the Library of Alexandria was put before the caliph in Damascus by an Arab general who believed that the great library should be preserved. The caliph disagreed. He ordered that the library be dismantled and its books used as fuel to heat the municipal baths. According to this version of the story, the library’s collections were so prodigious that the books burned without cease for six months. Eighteenth-century accounts highlight various aspects of this narrative. But in virtually every case, the story hinges on the rhetorical formulation of the caliph. Perhaps the pithiest version appears in an important note near the conclusion of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). Rousseau tells it this way: “It is said that the Caliph Omar, when asked what should be done with the Library of Alexandria, answered in these terms: ‘If the Books in this library contain things contrary to the Koran they are bad and ought to be burned. If they contain nothing but the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway—they are superfuous’” (61). As one might expect given the argument of the First Discourse, Rousseau fnds Omar’s pronouncement to be philosophical. Rousseau did not aim to defend a scripture, but he had misgivings about the rapidly growing mountain of bad books in his own day and about the “frightful disorders” that he believed these books had already caused. The same themes are evident in what is perhaps the richest historiographical account of the Library of Alexandria in the literature of the eighteenth century, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Unlike Rousseau and Mercier, Gibbon expresses overt skepticism about the truth of the story of Caliph Omar and attempts to trace it back to its origin. Gibbon argues that the tale of Caliph Omar’s decree appears for the frst time 322 Daniel Rosenberg a full six hundred years after the events that it recounts, in the thirteenth- century chronicles of the Syrian writer Gregory Bar-Hebraeus (Abulpharagius). Seventh-century Christian accounts of the conquest of Alexandria make no mention of the event, nor, for that matter, do Muslim ones. And it appears in European literature only with Edward Pocock’s 1650 translation of Bar- Hebraeus. According to Gibbon, not only is there no direct evidence in favor of the truth of the tale, but contextual evidence from the seventh century weighs heavily against it. Nonetheless, Gibbon fnds a way to tell the story of Caliph Omar in a manner that resonates with Rousseau. Gibbon says, “For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the consequences. [. . .] The rigid sentence of Omar is repugnant to the sound and orthodox precept of the Mahometan casuists they expressly declare, that the religious books of the Jews and Christians, which are acquired by the right of war, should never be committed to the fames; and that the works of profane science, historians or poets, physicians or philosophers, may be lawfully applied to the use of the faithful” (9: 440–41). However, Gibbon says, had such an order ever been issued, modern civilization would be no worse off. If the “ponderous mass” of religious tracts contained in the library “were indeed consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the beneft of mankind” (9: 442). Gibbon acknowledged the irony of his position. If the story of Caliph Omar were taken at face value, Gibbon suggests, it would seem to be an account of ignorant fanaticism. “Since the Dynasties of Abulpharagius have been given to the world in a Latin version, the tale has been repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity” (9: 440). Yet how much more ignorant are those who blame the destruction of the library on the Muslims while neglecting the well-attested account of great fre of 47 BC ignited by Caesar’s retreating troops and while excusing the “mischievous bigotry” of the Christians rulers of Alexandria who in 391 ordered the pagan temple in which the library was housed be destroyed. Indeed, Gibbon argues, the purge conducted by the Roman Christians in the fourth century was so thorough that by the time that the Arabs had conquered Egypt, nothing of the former library could have remained. “I should not recapitulate the disasters of the Alexandrian library, the involuntary fame that was kindled by Caesar in his own defense, or the mischievous bigotry of the Christians, who studied to destroy the monuments of idolatry. But if we gradually descend from the age of the Antonines to that of Theodosius, we shall learn from a chain of contemporary witnesses, that the royal palace and the temple of Serapis no longer contained the four, or the seven, hundred thousand volumes, which had been assembled by the curiosity and magnifcence of the The Library of the Disaster 323

Ptolemies” (9: 441). Still, for Gibbon, the great scholar of ancient history, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria was not entirely to be regretted. For him, this was a manifest irony, but it was an irony close to the heart of Enlightenment. Visions of literary confagration were common. Readers of the works of Diderot, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Mercier, and others took note of the powerful images of destruction that they incorporated. Take, for example, an image inserted in the 1787 Bern edition of Mercier’s roving social portrait of the 1770s and 1780s, the Tableau de Paris. Mercier disapproved of illustrating the work, and, in accordance with his wishes, the French editions had no plates. But the publisher of the Bern edition hired the Swiss engraver Balthasar Anton Dunker (1746–1807) to provide a selection of images (Aluff 29–33). None were approved by Mercier—he thought they amounted to treating the reader like a child—yet they provide a useful litmus for what contemporaries, in this case the artist and Mercier’s Swiss publisher, believed to be most notable and engaging in the work (2: 839). Most of the images that Dunker provided for the Tableau de Paris were fairly straightforward and representational, leaning toward social observation and satire like Mercier’s text itself. There was, for example, an image of a wig ftting to go along with Mercier’s visceral account of the deleterious health consequences of placing fashion before function (putrefying scalps). Many of Dunker’s images for the Tableau de Paris have this favor. But in the image that accompanies Mercier’s chapter titled “Newspapers and the True Journalist,” Dunker takes an allegorical turn. The fact that the subject of newspapers drove Dunker in this direction is interesting in itself. The newspaper is, of course, a material object available for a straightforward realistic representation. Dunker could have depicted a print shop, a compositing table, a newspaper being read, or any number of other real-life newspaper scenes. But, for the eighteenth century, the newspaper was much more than the sum of its pages. It was a new medium, and both its novelty and its importance were deeply felt. What is more, the newspaper as much as any single artifact of print culture was identifed with the explosion of print and the utopian/ dystopian fantasies that accompanied it. To Mercier, the rise of the newspaper represented, among other things, the rise of a literary and philosophical punditocracy that day by day produced and demolished intellectual fashions. As he puts it in his chapter on newspapers, “Literary criticism is the most useless thing in the world. As I see it, books are printed, and mistakes are made. But it is time itself, in casting the sterile and the frivolous into oblivion, that serves as the genuine and irrevocable journalist. One cannot subject its judgments to question; it heeds no cabal and no prejudice; it swallows books in its maw or sets them adrift in the abyss” (2: 282). For Mercier, the quotidian character of the newspaper made it problematic as a vehicle for weighty ideas. 324 Daniel Rosenberg

In his analysis, time itself is both a central factor in what makes the newspaper a distinctive form. It is also what makes the newspaper such a signal artifact of the period. In Dunker’s image for Mercier’s chapter on newspapers, no newspaper can be seen at all. In it, an allegory of Time, nude, winged, and muscular, kneels by the side of a great rush of water. The background is spare with rugged mountains rising in the background and a small barren promontory to the fore. In the middle of the image, books bob on the surface of a foodwater. On the ground by the side of the kneeling fgure lies Time’s sickle. He has put it down, and now reaches into the water to rescue a volume. He holds in his hand, dripping, Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. There is nothing in Mercier’s chapter on newspapers to directly authorize this image. And, taken literally, there is nothing in the Tableau de Paris to authorize it either. Dunker’s image draws on a broader understanding of Mercier and his literary context and expresses what Dunker understood to be compelling in Mercier’s vision. Broadly speaking, the image takes up the idea that time, not day-to-day fashions or demands, is the true judge of literary value. It refers broadly to passages such as those found in the Tableau de Paris and The Year 2440, where Mercier’s narrator notes that “instead of looking forward to an august series of ages,” writers of the eighteenth century “rendered themselves slaves to momentary fashion. In a word, they pursued ingenious falsehoods; they stifed that inward voice which cries, “Be as severe as the time that fies; be inexorable as posterity” (The Year 2440 47). At the same time that it draws on the words of Mercier and his contemporaries, Dunker’s engraving also draws from an identifable genre of catastrophic imagery—a manner of food painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin—that, according to eighteenth-century critics, expressed a sense of awe in the face of massive destruction. Take, for example, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s commentary on “The Deluge,” by the British painter Jacob More (1740–1793), which Goethe saw exhibited in 1787, the same year that Dunker’s image was published. Goethe emphasizes the sublime effect of the painting’s topographical structure. He writes, “While other artists have painted the open sea, which conveys the idea of a vast watery expanse but cannot show that the waters are rising, [More] has depicted a secluded valley into which the waters are rushing and flling it up. The shapes of the rocks show that the water level has nearly risen to the summit, and since the valley is closed off diagonally in the background and all the cliffs are steep, the total effect is one of terror” (qtd. in Paley 13). Dunker’s image deploys the same visual vocabulary present in Poussin and More to different ends, but Dunker’s image may be read as a counterstatement. While Dunker begins with the familiar sublime landscape, in his work its function is strictly allegorical: Dunker expresses no interest in the phenomenon The Library of the Disaster 325 of suffering or the place of humanity in relation to the power of nature or God. In fact, the only human elements in this landscape are the books—Mercier’s, which Time has rescued, as the others are being washed away. In the face of the food of history, what mattered to Dunker was the fate of the literary work itself and the possibility of its survival. For him, the catastrophic sublime provided the formal background for construction of a literary Enlightenment. As I have shown, this perspective was not at all peculiar to Dunker. Whatever objections Mercier may have had about the insertion of Dunker’s engravings in his own text, as an interpretation of Mercier’s argument, Dunker hit the mark. The notion that there may be something both inevitable and positive in great moments of literary destruction is developed at length in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, too. In the frst instance, this seems paradoxical. Like the Library of Alexandria, the aim of the Encyclopédie was “to collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth.” For the Ptolemies, who created the Alexandrian library, the acquisition of books was central to this project. But this was not so for Diderot and d’Alembert. Their aim was to gather and to organize knowledge. It was not to account for old books but to construct an epistemological mechanism to unleash a food of useful new ones. And their ultimate position on the usefulness of libraries was ambiguous. In fact, it is clear that Mercier’s account of the concentrated duodecimo in the Royal Library of The Year 2440 derives from Diderot’s account of the growing epistemological importance of the encyclopedia in an age of print. “As long as the centuries continue to unfold,” Diderot writes, “the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as diffcult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe.” And then, pointing to a project such his own, he writes, “Has not this prediction already begun to be fulflled? And are not several of our literary men already engaged in reducing all big books to little ones [. . .]? Let us assume that their extracts have been competently made, and that these have been arranged in alphabetical order and published in an orderly series of volumes by men of intelligence—you [then] have an encyclopedia” (314). Viewed from a certain perspective, such an encyclopedia is not even a book. It is a print mechanism that flls the void created when a food of books fnally washes away the very ground on which traditional literatures were founded. The Encyclopedists believed that during the eighteenth century, scientifc and intellectual progress was accelerating. As they saw it, the circle of knowledge from which the encyclopedia draws its name was rapidly expanding. But for Diderot and d’Alembert, the immediate implications of this expansion of knowledge were undecided. In fact, they repeatedly represent the Encyclopédie as a tool for rescuing an accelerating society from itself. What is more, they 326 Daniel Rosenberg frequently repeat the idea that intellectual revolutions may have negative as well as positive consequences, and that over time knowledge may just as well be lost or confused as clarifed or gained. Hence Diderot’s peculiar dystopian pitch for the Encyclopédie: “The most glorious moment for a work such as this would be that which might come immediately in the wake of some revolution so great as to suspend the progress of science, to interrupt the labors of craftsmen, and to plunge a portion of our hemisphere into darkness once again. What gratitude would not be lavished by the generation that came after this time of troubles upon those men who had discerned its approach from afar, and who had taken measures to ward off its worst ravages by collecting in a safe place the knowledge of all past ages!” (305) It is worth noting the way in which Diderot uses the term révolution in this passage. Here révolution does not signify the epitome or the intensifcation of an imminent historical process but rather its interruption. In the standard American translation of this passage, Jacques Barzun substitutes the word catastrophe for the French révolution. The equivalence is suggestive, but from the perspective of historical semantics, Barzun’s translation also masks something important: on the one hand, the semantic instability of the eighteenth-century concept of revolution and, on the other, its proximity to the idea of catastrophe. Despite presuppositions we may bring, this catastrophic vision is, in fact, essential to the self-conception of the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment imagination of progress more generally. In the Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert explains carefully how it works. Progress, d’Alembert argues, is an idea that manifests differently depending on how you frame the problem of knowledge in time. The method of conjectural history, favored by so many Enlightenment writers, places discoveries in an ideal relation to one another, following a logical order. The method of empirical history, by contrast, reveals relationships among ideas as they occur in time, producing a messier story. For the philosophes, this was a mess that mattered: knowledge, writes the mathematician d’Alembert, is a labyrinth of “sublime obscurity” (25). And understanding this obscurity is part of understanding its process. Human intelligence, he writes, “delves as far as it can into the knowledge of [its] objects, soon meets diffculties that obstruct it, and whether through hope or even through despair of surmounting them, plunges on to a new route; now it retraces its footsteps, sometimes crosses the frst barriers only to meet new ones; and passing rapidly from one object to another, it carries through a sequence of operations . . . as if by jumps. The discontinuity of these operations is a necessary effect of the very generation of ideas” (46). Because it is necessary to the association of ideas, discontinuity is also necessary to the history of ideas. D’Alembert argues that the history of ideas since the Renaissance has followed a natural progression; that is, it has moved The Library of the Disaster 327 from erudition to letters and fnally to philosophy, the highest of the sciences. All of this relies upon and presupposes both the development and loss of ancient learning. While the historical process that proceeds from scholarship to science is natural, it is also secondary. It requires the prior development of intellectual cultures and their prior loss. “The masterpieces that the ancients left us in almost all genres were forgotten for twelve centuries,” writes d’Alembert. “The principles of the sciences and the arts were lost, because the beautiful and the true, which seem to show themselves everywhere to men, are hardly noticed unless men are already apprised of them” (61). As d’Alembert suggests, in the account of the Encyclopedists, the history of knowledge articulates itself forward and backward in relation to a central loss that functions, paradoxically, as its originary moment. This chiasmatic narrative structure is not peculiar to d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse. It reverberates everywhere in the Encyclopédie and, indeed, in the Enlightenment in general: the narrative formula of loss and reconstruction is, of course, the formula of the Robinson Crusoe story. And it is equally the familiar structure of Enlightenment epistemology. In Condillac’s infuential articulation, for example, every epistemological beginning is a rebeginning. It is an act of noticing rather than perceiving, and its object is not the world but the knowledge that one has of the world. In philosophy, as Condillac puts it, “One does in order to undo; and one undoes in order to redo. This is the entire art: it is simple” (Calculs 478). But for Condillac, the fact that the “art of thinking” is simple does not mean that it is easy. To the contrary, in his view, understanding constantly cycles through a central point of uncertainty that can be resolved only through strenuous intellectual effort. In Condillac’s view, this is true equally in the process of an individual’s development and in that of society. “We are born less for the light than for the shadows,” writes Condillac in one of his more brooding moments, “and it is toward this center from which we once distanced ourselves that we always fall back” (Histoire 22). In the work of Diderot and d’Alembert, too, the threat of epistemological loss and instability is ever present. In fact, according to the Encyclopedists, the regular operation of progress requires a regular and parallel process of destruction. And, in some cases, this destruction itself is progress, at least to the extent that it clears the ground for new ideas. For this reason, for example, it is typical to fnd in the work of the philosophes high praise of Descartes not as a thinker to be followed (to the contrary, Enlightenment epistemology is framed as a self-conscious anti-Cartesianism) but as a powerful eradicator of bad ideas. Thus, d’Alembert writes, “when absurd opinions are of long duration, one is sometimes forced to replace them by other errors. [. . .] The uncertainty and the vanity of the mind are such that it always needs an opinion to which to cleave. It is a child to whom one must offer a toy in order to take away a dangerous weapon” (80). For this reason, for Diderot and 328 Daniel Rosenberg d’Alembert, as for Condillac, the education of humanity involves a regular oscillation between possibility and threat. In the history of the arts and sciences, this relationship is expressed through events that the Encyclopedists refer to neutrally as révolutions. “Revolutions are necessary,” Diderot writes. “There have always been revolutions, and there always will be” (303). For the Encyclopedists, these revolutions, whether accidental or structural, are as central to the possibility of Enlightenment as progress itself. What, then, of the author? What of the work? If the formulations of these eighteenth-century writers are to be taken seriously, it seems that in the Enlightenment moment, as in that of structuralism, cherished certainties about the signifcance and the stability of structures of literary authority were being put into question; that in the former as in the latter, this destabilization was identifed with a deep historical process operating below the level of literary acts; that in the former, as in the latter, a tension may be detected between the disavowal of old canons and the literariness of the disavowals themselves. The writers of the Enlightenment did not demand acts of literary destruction, but they believed that in modernity one had to write as if such were inevitable. As in Barthes, in the works examined here, there is pathos in the gesture that makes literary writing modern.

University of Oregon

Works Cited Aluffi, Henriette Mentha, ed. Balthasar Anton Dunker, 1746–1807. Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1990. Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Histoire ancienne. Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, vol. 3. Ed. Georges Le Roy. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–51. ———. La Langue des calculs. Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, vol. 2. Ed. Georges Le Roy. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–51. D’Alembert, Jean le Rond. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Trans. Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Diderot, Denis. “Encyclopedia.” Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works. Trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London, 1791–92. Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais. London, 1774. Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Tableau de Paris. Ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet. Paris: Mercure de France, 1994. The Library of the Disaster 329

Paley, Morton. The Apocalyptic Sublime. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Rosenberg, Daniel. “Early Modern Information Overload.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003): 1–9. Rosenberg, Daniel. “An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine: The Encyclopedia of Diderot.” Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History. Ed. Daniel Gordon. New York: Routledge, 2001. 45–66. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. First and Second Discourses. Trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters. New York: Free Press, 1964.