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Daniel Rosenberg the LIBRARY of the DISASTER 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).
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