Henry Granville Widener FROM LEGACY TO HERITAGE:
the Oliveira Lima Library’s journey abroad
ABSTRACT: As evidenced by the work of Hallbwachs (1992) and Pollak (1989; 1992) the boundary between individual and collective memories represents a place of dispute, disagreement and contention. When one or both parties desire to resolve these contentions, a process of integration begins which must necessarily involve negotiation, compromise and a systematic reworking of terminologies, documents and their meanings and use. The Oliveira Lima Library presents us with an important opportunity to observe this process of integration into the larger Brazilian consciousness.
KEYWORDS: information preservation and access strategies, preservation policies for cultural patrimony, historical memory institutions, case studies
Introduction Memory is a means of survival. As a biological function, it is the means through which genetic information passes on to future generations. In human society, it is a crucial means of social cohesion which provides individuals and groups with roles and identities. Without memory, nothing can survive. Memory is stored, preserved and disseminated through various interfaces which are altered and expanded with the advance of technology. In the organism, memory is transmitted through DNA (Gallagher, 2013). At its beginning, both collective and individual human memory was passed on through oral communication. With the development of written documents, the capacity for memory increased and in turn became the basis for the study of history, which today has come to embrace the value of a vast diversity of objects, from geological records to songs and mythologies and “all of that which man says, writes, creates or touches can and should inform us about him.” (LeGoff, 1990, p. 89) These informational objects, the foundation of memory, require maintenance and care in order to survive. Indeed, memory and access are two sides of the same coin which without being preserved or accessed cannot fulfill their social function. (Galindo, 2014, p. 6) It is here, in the interest of preserving information and thus maintaining memory, that the interests of History and Information Science converge. By exploring their interactions and mutual interests, both Information Science and History can hope to advance and achieve their goals. 19th/20th century Brazil The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent a remarkable period of change in Brazilian history. By 1889, a republic had replaced the monarchical system which had previously and curiously withstood the successful bid for colonial independence over 60 years before. A shift in economic production had, by the end of the 19th century, firmly established coffee as Brazil's primary export and shifted both economic and political focus to the states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Brazilian diplomacy, after having finally achieved the long-unfulfilled task of fixing Brazil's borders, achieved greater international prestige, a position of leadership in Latin America and shifted its axis away from Europe and into the United States. As a result of all of these factors, and more, Brazilian national identity was significantly altered. Rather than looking outward, as they had previously, towards Europe for inspiration, the emergent class of political and cultural leaders in Brazil began an intense, if not long in the making, effort to emphasize and exalt their unique origins. These monumental social and political changes require a critical revision of the past. (Pollak, 1989, p. 3) The essence of Brazilian culture ceased to be based on European traditions and instead focused on the contributions of Indian, African as well as European cultures to the formation of Brazilian society. Through the efforts of men like Sílvio Romero, Aluízo Azevedo and Graça Aranha, Brazilian national consciousness embraced its mixed roots and even expressed the idea that the Americas suffered, rather than benefited, from the evils of the Old World. (Burns, 1993, p. 275) As Maurice Halbwachs explains, in order to rework or modify the framework of their memory to satisfy contemporary needs, societies may either deliberately ignore or avert their attention from the past. (1992, p. 134-135) This is certainly the case with early 20th century Brazilian diplomacy in its efforts to align itself with the United States. Thus, Brazil's longtime dependence on Europe, particularly England, could be ignored in favor of the creation of the idea of "traditional," and historically unsubstantiated, friendship between the United States and Brazil. (Burns, 1966, p. IX) As this analysis implies, these revisions of memory due to emergent contemporary needs, were also acutely dependent on documents, particularly the publication of literary works and the creation and signing of treaties, but also the formation of contracts and legislation. Of course, while creating new advantages and opportunities for new social groups and people within these groups, massive political change also removed these opportunities from others. With the rise of the Republic came the fall of the monarchy and many of its supporters, both formal and informal. Economic shifts which decisively put coffee and the coffee producing states at the center of Brazilian society also decisively marked the end of the once powerful, a long-struggling, Brazilian sugar barons of the northeast. As emergent, newly prominent social groups embark on the massive task of altering collective memories, the "memory of a period clearly at an end no longer finds reinforcing elements in its midst." (Halbwachs, PDF 142) This situation leads to a period of silence, though not forgetfulness, by the groups out of power who "molded by the anxiety…of being misunderstood" (Pollak, 1992, p. 7) begin to safely and jealously guard their memories. These memories also anchor themselves in documents and must also be cared for and organized to be preserved. It is here, in the completion of this task, that we encounter Manoel de Oliveira Lima and the Oliveira Lima Library. Manoel de Oliveira Lima Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on Christmas Day of 1867 in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, son of a Brazilian mother and a Portuguese father. In 1873, at the age of six, Manoel's father returned with his family to his native country, to the city of Lisbon, where Manoel would spend the rest of his adolescence. Though distant from Brazil, Oliveira Lima would later write that throughout his childhood his family would remain Brazilian at heart and in the kitchen, and that even his Portuguese father was always ready to refute any disparaging remarks about Brazil. "And so I grew up" Oliveira Lima writes in his Memories "in intimate exaltation of Brazil." (Lima, 1986, p. 11) Oliveira Lima's lifelong career in the Brazilian foreign ministry would likewise keep him distant from his dear native land, although proudly in its service. Beginning as an attaché at the age of 23 in Lisbon, Manoel de Oliveira would move on to Washington in 1896 under ambassador Salvador de Mendonça. From Washington he would move to London, Berlin, Tokyo, Stockholm, Brussels, and Caracas. Manoel de Oliveira Lima's diplomatic career placed him in the company of some of Brazil's most important political figures. In London alone, Oliveira Lima would work alongside the likes Joaquim Nabuco, Eduardo Prado and Graça Aranha. Beginning in 1902, Oliveira Lima would serve under foreign minister José Maria da Silva Paranhos Jr., the Baron of Rio-Branco, under whose leadership the Brazilian Foreign Ministry entered an exceptional period of success. From an early age, Manoel would foster a love of letters and of history. At 14, while still in preparatory school in Lisboa and with a "sense of reality" which would later characterize his intellectual/diplomatic efforts at promoting Brazil internationally (Memórias, p 16), Manoel de Oliveira would found a monthly review entitled Correio do Brasil. By the end of his career, Lima had authored over 20 books, including "Dom João VI of Brazil" (1908) and "The Evolution of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America" (1914) Just as with his diplomatic career, Oliveira Lima's literary activity put him in dialogue, both publicly through his prolific literary production and privately through correspondence, with such literary greats as Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre. Throughout his life, Manoel de Oliveira Lima would form great friendships, one of the most enduring and significant of which was formed in 1917, when a curious young prep school student came knocking at the door of Oliveira Lima's home in Recife, nervous but intent on asking the intellectual a few questions. This student, none other than Gilberto Freyre, would later write of that day and the intimate friendship that would follow for the rest of Lima's life. "I can't think of any other master, except [Franz] Boas, who would come to exercise such a powerful, formative influence on me…his house in Washington…would be a bit my house, his books, still a bit disorganized, would be in part, my books." (Lima, 1986, p. 3) Thanks in part to his direct nature, and courageous, yet risky personal and political attitudes Oliveira Lima did not lack enemies, from the Baron of Rio-Branco, to Joaquim Nabuco and Graça Aranha. Accused, not unjustly, by Pinheiro Machado of monarchism, Oliveira Lima's political career suffered a downturn. In 1913, Manoel de Oliveira Lima retired from diplomatic service. In 1920, he moved with his wife and lifelong companion Flora, to Washington , D.C., where he took up a position as a professor of international law at the Catholic University of America. In 1928, while in the midst of writing several books, Manoel de Oliveira Lima passed away and was buried in Mount Olivet under a headstone which reads simply "here lies a friend of books." The Oliveira Lima Library Testimony to Oliveira Lima's love of books and history can be found in the collection of over 40,000 print and non-print materials housed today in the Oliveira Lima Library at Catholic University of America. The Oliveira Lima Library is a profound resource for Brazilian studies, particularly of the colonial and Empire periods. Used by scholars such as Rudiger Bilden, American scholar Bradford E. Burns and preeminent Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre, the collection has helped produced significant, even monumental, works on the history of Brazil. As assistant coordinator Maria Angela Leal notes, the collections diversity and breadth offer "intersections of two or more genres of primary/secondary sources" which "give ample testimony of Lima's contributions to Brazilian history as a prodigious collector and conservator of historical materials intended for use by future generations of scholars." (Leal, 2004, p. 91) The Oliveira Lima Library is also a national patrimony of immeasurable value. This has been recognized in recent years by articles published in some of Brazil's most widely-circulated publications, which have called the library "an exuberant collection…whose importance rivals the 40,000 volumes that bibliophile José Mindlin left the University of São Paulo." (Petry, 2013, p. 44) Those national treasures collected by Oliveira Lima include landscape paintings by artists such as Franz Post and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay as well as rare books such as a 1507 edition containing the first account of Pedro Alvares Cabral's arrival in Brazil and Gaspar Barleu's account of the Dutch occupation of Brazil under Maurice of Nassau, in which the phrase ultra aequinoctialem non peccari appeared and which would later be translated and brought to national popularity by singer Chico Buarque as "não exists pecado do lado de baixo do Equador." The library collection also, of its very essence, represents the personal life and opinions of its collector, a diplomat, distinguished intellectual, lover of history, bibliophile and fervent Brazilian nationalist in a high point of national feeling. Through the correspondence, historical, literary and artistic works contained in his collection, we may get a closer view of the personal life of Oliveira Lima and the people with whom he interacted. By doing so, we will gain great insight into one of the most significant periods in Brazilian history. This personal aspect of the Oliveira Lima library also provides insight into the selective, constructive and conflictive nature of memory in both groups and individuals within groups. As Maurice Halbwachs notes, memory is acquired, "recalled, recognized and localized" within societies. (PDF 43) Memory is a means of participating in groups. By expanding on this point, we also see that memory is a source of conflict which assigns legitimacy, establishes spatio-temporal limits and must always be formed in consideration of "criteria of acceptability, admissibility and credibility which is done via direct negotiation with others." (Polla, 1992, p. 5) Furthermore, citing the work of Bienveniste, we see that insight into an individual's sense of belonging can be extracted by the use of personal pronouns: while fellowship, attachment to or agency within a group may be marked by the use of the 1st person, the impersonal use of 3rd person in reference to oneself signals a feeling of detachment and loss of control. (Pollak, 1992, p. 14) This is evident in Manoel de Oliveira Lima, whose gravestone, as we'll remember, leaves neither name nor date but a simple epitaph written almost as to a stranger. This suggests not only a sense of detachment but also of intellectual objectivity, a lack of participation in the business of politics. This sense is reflected in the collection. Despite its undeniable value, the Oliveira Lima Library exists in relatively inadequate, if not deficient, conditions. On-site access to the library is limited by both the physical conditions of the library and personnel. The majority of the collection remains in boxes in four cramped rooms on the basement level of Catholic University of America's Mullen Library Building. With a staff of only two, library access is restricted by appointment and thus must not realistically exceed more than a handful of guests and researchers. Because library materials must remain in the library and cannot be checked out, the collection must circulate in very small circles. Those unable to access the collection in person may do so by various means. A majority of the library's more than 16,000 printed materials are available online via the Online Computer Library Center. Furthermore, various findings aids and catalogs are available in print at several Brazilian institutions including the Brazilian National Library. While these resources may provide secondary information about items in the collection, its research value is limited. With the growing interest in the study of Brazil due to "the ascent of Brazil to the world stage," (Petry, 2013, p. 45) this presents an issue that must be changed. The library has responded to these shortcomings in various ways. A digitization project in partnership with Gale-Cengage Learning, which hopes to one day digitize the entire collection, has made the Oliveira Lima LIbrary's rich collection of pamphlets available online for a monthly fee. This digitized collection offers user created tags and annotations, advanced viewing settings and text analysis tools which greatly expand the collection's research potential and make it available to user's and institutions worldwide. In other cases, particularly valuable items have been lent out to other institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art, which currently houses Franz Post's landscape of Pernambuco. While this measure may certainly increase visibility of individual items and possibly advertise the library, it is also worrisome in that it compromises the collection's integrity. Despite these attempts to make the collection available to users who are unable to visit the collection in person, Leal notes that "the on-site visit will undoubtedly remain the most productive and enriching way to access the library's multifaceted collection." (2004, p. 91) If this is the case, changes must be made to the collection's physical condition in order for the collection to realize its true potential. Problems The Oliveira Lima Library, much like its founder and namesake, presents us with various contradictions and problems: as an institution, it is an academic treasure whose conditions prevent it from being fully exploited; it is also one of the world’s premier centers of Brazilian national and cultural heritage, housed in the capital of the United States of America. The Oliveira Lima Library also presents the memory of a man who devoted his professional and academic life in admiration and service to a country in which he only sporadically lived and which, at the end of his life, had alienated him enough to cause him to live out the rest of his life and entrust his legacy to a foreign country. The contradictions stimulate broader questions as well. If, as the work of Henry Rousso and Michael Pollak suggests, part of the work of collective memories is the establishment of frontiers with frames and points of reference, and furthermore, that national memory is the "most complete form of collective memory," (Pollak, 1989, p. 10) then we must ask, what are the limits of national memories? Can they exist beyond the physical borders of a nation? Moreover, do the borders of national memories of former European colonies expand further than those of their colonizers? Are they more fluid? Finally, how has the digital age affected these frontiers? How are these limits reflected in information systems, particularly in regards to access, usability, search terms and controlled vocabularies? Does the Oliveira Lima Library fit within the boundaries of Brazil's national memory? Both answers indicate intriguing questions. If the library does not, and one might argue that this was the case for many years following its establishment, how did Brazil deal with this enormous lack of memory? What happens when the others to whom we must formulate our own identities and memories (Pollak, 1992, p. 5) have created an established idea of us? If the collection does fit within Brazilian national memory, and I believe that today it does, then we must deal with the problem of forgetfulness. As Plato once retold in Phaedrus, in which he recounts a dialogue between the Egyptian god Thoth and the king Thamus, when memory is "external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside" its permanence is greatly threatened. (Plato) If this is true, then it is of utmost importance to create information systems and policies which combat this forgetfulness. Finally, the Oliveira Lima Library begs reflection on the nature of collections/memory institutions. What are the characteristics of public (and by this, I mean, intended for and used by the public) and private (and by this I mean intended for and used by private individuals and groups) collections? What are the social responsibilities of public and private memory institutions? Do these characteristics and responsibilities differ? Once a private institution has been accepted or subsumed into the larger collective memory, which, I will argue, is the case of the Oliveira Lima Library, what process does it undergo? How can we measure this process? As the work of Maurice Halbwachs and Michael Pollak has argued, individual and collective memories are intertwined. Collective memory is the result of conflictive and disputed as well as constructive interactions. As Halbwachs explains, individual memory, when completely isolated from the collective memory, is fragmented, mutilated and thus incomplete memory. (1992, p. 41) Thus, in private or formerly private collections, there must always exist a balance between individual needs and greater demands. I believe the boundaries between the two are established by access and use and are reflected in the systems which organize memory and make it available. Final Considerations/Conclusion We can investigate the process of integration by which private libraries and memory institutions become public through comparative study. In the case of Brazilian memory, we will juxtapose the origins, history and use of the Oliveira Lima Library and the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin at the University of São Paulo. Their respective systems of retrieval (including controlled vocabularies, subjects, titles, finding aids, online presence) number of users and amount of citations and cited works will give insight into how well-integrated each collection has become into the greater national memory of Brazil. Furthermore, each system’s preparedness to confront and minimize risk factors will grant us further insight into how well each institution is fulfilling its social function as a memory institution. I expect that the José Mindlin Library will be found to be both better integrated into Brazil’s national memory as well as better fulfilling its social task.
References
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