B. Venkat Mani
Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various transformations.
W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, published in 2001, recounts the story of Jacques Austerlitz, who arrived in England in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport from the former Czechoslovakia. Speaking to the narrator, Austerlitz proclaims his interest in the “tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts, penal institutions, railway stations, and stock exchanges” (30). In the novel, Austerlitz’s search for monumentalism culminates in detailed descriptions of a library: the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Austerlitz weaves fact and fiction, personal memory and history, and verbal and visual representation to create a narrative about the recuperation of the past. It is simultaneously a fascinating account of public spaces, extending the historical phenomena of the nineteenth century—colonialism, imperialism, and the establishment of a world market—into the twentieth century’s two world wars and the Holocaust. The novel begins in the transitory space of a railway station, but it ends in the classificatory space of the library, where historical and contemporary knowledge is collated, preserved, and disseminated. Bookended by the Antwerp Centraal Station and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Austerlitz suggests that the time of modernism is a time of transition and transformation, order and chaos, knowledge and ignorance. The novel asks readers to consider the relationship between national histories and the national collecting of books.
Modernism had a special relationship with libraries, as Sebald’s novel suggests and as many other works can show us.1 Libraries, I argue in this essay, are historically conditioned, culturally fashioned, and politically charged institutions. Modernists’ engagement with libraries in their works unfolds these multiple facets. We normally distinguish between books and institutions, but many modernist works show us that aesthetic representations of libraries have in fact augmented their position as sociopolitical agents. Institutions may create the occasion for books, but books have also helped generate the meaning and power of institutions.
As a programmatic dissociation with the ancient and the classical and a renewed engagement with the present, modernism’s pluralistic manifestations in art, architecture, cinema, and literature are associated with many features. Modernism provides new ways of expressing the autonomy of the self; it also registers systematic renegotiation of the self within the collective. Modernism resists realist representation to promote imaginations of futurity through originality, innovation, avant-gardism, experimentation, and subjectivity. In Literary Worlds, Eric Hayot suggests that a modernist work “would have to assert a total ontological rejection of the normative world-view of its era” (132). Hayot’s comment captures the shift of focus in recent scholarship, especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century: instead of presenting modernism as a phenomenon exclusive to metropolitan centers of Western Europe or the United States, there is an attempt to understand not merely its reception but also its appropriation and renegotiation in multiple literary and cultural traditions around the world. Recent scholarship draws attention to the linguistically and geographically diverse genealogy of modernism. By examining European modernism in tandem with developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, scholars have begun to position modernism vis-à-vis nations connected to Europe through the history of colonialism and empire building and have shed new light on the transnational dimensions of modernism (Kapur, When Was Modernism?; Bharucha, Another Asia). Simon Gikandi locates the literary form of the postcolonial experience “solely—in the language and structure of modernism” (“Modernism in the World,” 420). Susan Stanford Friedman asks for a rethinking of the periodization of modernism to avoid the exclusion of “the agencies of writers, artists, philosophers, and other cultural producers in the emergent postcolonial world” (“Periodizing Modernism,” 427). The translocalization of modernism is also evident in studies of literature marked by large-scale migration—willful and forced—into Europe after the Second World War. In Cosmopolitan Style, Rebecca Walkowitz sutures the discussion of modernist aesthetics and style in contemporary literature with political features of home, belonging, and cultural citizenship through cosmopolitan interventions in the so-called national styles of modernism. These examples are by no means exhaustive, yet they serve to illustrate transformations in the conceptual and spatial expansion of knowledge about modernism. The fixation on English, American, and European writers is now giving way to multicentered, multidimensional, multidirectional, and multilingual understandings of modernism.
This new conceptual, spatial, and temporal awareness in current scholarship is beneficial for making a case for libraries in studies of modernism. To be sure, libraries are also multiply signified. As I have discussed elsewhere,2 the term “library” has multiple meanings: a house of books, a catalog of titles, a publication series, and, more recently, a virtual space, a digital collection. The definition of the book as “codex”—a technological device with hand-copied or printed pages that can be turned—has now given way to the digital or e-book with a virtual, rather than a physical, identity. Like readers, libraries do not stand outside of the sociopolitical fabric of society. The house of books, the Bibliothek—especially public, but also private—is far from a neutral space. Libraries are sites rife with the politics of literacy and sanctioned illiteracy, historical contingencies that condition accumulation and classification, circulation and distribution, patronage and accession, orderly organization and disorderly contention. If public libraries, sometimes along with museums, serve as major institutions of various forms of local, national, regional, or transnational representations, private libraries come to represent the individual features and idiosyncrasies of their collectors.
Given the diversity of modernist innovations and interventions, it would be difficult to claim that there is a categorically “modernist” approach to libraries. It will, however, be productive to identify instances where modernist thinkers and authors draw attention to libraries as “medial” institutions—as institutions that collect and circulate books and other media of knowledge dissemination—which acquire a far greater intellectual and cultural iconicity than the physical space that they occupy. An attention to the “medial” nature of libraries can serve three purposes: first, it can augment our understanding of “books” as a medium and institution of knowledge and entertainment and assist in asking if there was, in an age of technological innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and cinema, a shift of sensibility for older media and sources of knowledge and information such as books and libraries. Second, print-cultural explorations of modernism can amplify the “publicity” of the modernist movement by drawing our attention to the transformation of social spaces. While extant scholarship has generated interest in the institutionalization of modernism through the city,3 the factory (Wirth and Ciesielski, Die moderne Fabrik), the train station (Presner, Mobile Modernity), and the film theater (Feiereiss, Die Wiener Trilogie und ein Kino), to name just a few, the library somehow has remained outside the scope of the critical spectrum. Were modernist texts able to articulate—as Sebald puts it—the “chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability” (279) that coincides with the otherwise seemingly absolute and perfect concept of a library? Were modernist authors able to use libraries to express, paraphrasing Hayot, a refusal and rejection of a normative worldview? And finally, a curiosity about depictions of books and libraries in modernist texts can assist in expanding the “inventory”—borrowing from Chartier’s politicization of the term in The Order of Books—of modernist interventions and innovations in postcolonial literatures. To what extent did modernist works mobilize libraries to give expression to the unevenness of literary circulation? How did modernism and its postcolonial literary interpretations reflect on the linguistic, aesthetic, and epistemic violence caused by dominant nationalist paradigms? How did modernism set the tone for the creation of a transnational expansion of ideas through books and libraries?
To approach these questions, let us briefly turn to Walter Benjamin: journalist, essayist, chronologist, and above all, book collector.
Walter Benjamin’s media-theoretical writings reflected on the many new media of the twentieth century: film, advertisement, radio plays, newspapers, magazines, and even the telephone. But it is in his writings on books that his understanding of the medium appears with quintessential wit and playfulness. From commentaries on bestsellers and masterpieces, to modernist French authors such as Charles Baudelaire and André Gide, and to classical European authors from Cervantes to Goethe, Benjamin was very aware of the media through which literature is accessed. Especially in the last years of the Weimar Republic (1928–1932), he published several essays on books. Apart from his essay on dime novels of the nineteenth century, children’s books, and reading trends among Germans during the time of the writing of German classics (Medienästhetische Schriften), Benjamin wrote his most famous essay on “Unpacking my Library” (“Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”).
Written on the occasion of moving into a new, partially furnished apartment after his divorce with his wife Dora (Lewandowski), Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my Library” focuses on the ways in which a personal library becomes the site of transformation of the collector and the collected, the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Benjamin locates such transformative forces between the tedious agony of organization and collation and the euphoric ecstasy of the acquisition of books. Benjamin begins his essay with a declaration of an act: the act of unpacking his books, before they find their places on bookshelves. He invites his readers to join the chaos of a library that is dispersed in crates and on the floor, a library that has not taken the form of what is associated with the word: an orderly arrangement of books on display. Benjamin associates this dispersed, strewn-about disorderliness with the chaotic energy of the passion for book collecting. Benjamin’s essay is thus not about the collection itself: “what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, to collecting, rather than the collection” (“Unpacking My Library,” 59–60).
Arbitrary modes rather than exact knowledge, randomness of passion rather than the programmatic energy of rationalism, thus set the tone for Benjamin’s reflections. He calls attention to the “dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder” in the life of a collector (60). What informs his own text, his own recounting of the act of collecting books, as they lie strewn around in his apartment, is a distinct dialectical tension between “fate” and “freedom.” Counterbalancing this tension, as Benjamin further proposes, is the torque of “memory” that resounds in the very act of collecting. Benjamin draws a direct connection between remembering and book collecting: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (60). To collect is to reconstruct the past, “to renew the old age,” but that renewal is dependent on the fate of an object: it is taken from one’s collection and becomes part of someone else’s, and the person who acquires it accumulates a sense of “freedom” in receiving, borrowing, or even purloining a work from someone else’s collection, in order to give a new meaning to the object in the new collection. This is where the art of collecting books becomes a question of accessibility to them, which Benjamin further connects with the act of writing. Having declared earlier that “Collectors are physiognomists of objects” (60), Benjamin states—referencing the protagonist of Jean Paul’s novella Schulmeisterlein Wutz (1790)—“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with books they could buy but do not like” (61). This is a remarkable moment of shift in Benjamin’s essay. His recollection of cities where he acquired specific books, catalogs that informed him of particular books, and memories of coming across those catalogs all become part of the action of collection. In the specific kind of physiognomic exercise carried out by collectors, many moments of chance are involved: the chance of coming across a particularly treasured object, the chance of having that object available for purchase, and the chance that the object will actually be acquired by the collector. Benjamin’s reflections on fate and memory culminate in a sense of a peculiar kind of “freedom” that for him is associated with the act of collecting:
One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it and gave it its freedom—the way the prince bought a beautiful slave-girl in the Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelf.
(64)
It is hard to miss the gendered political tension that is part of Benjamin’s imagination of the freedom that involves the particular “rescuing” of books. The personal library—a confined space—can hardly be seen as a site of freedom from the openness of a market; the condescension invoked by the emancipation of a beautiful slave girl by a prince similarly implies a further exploitation of sexualized labor. Acknowledging these tensions actually helps in identifying the ineluctable power dynamic that is an essential part of any library, private or public. Libraries are founded upon the collector’s sense of an epistemic privilege, a desire to grant an object a new meaning, function, and ambition. It is hardly a surprise that in Benjamin’s essay the thrill of collection, the excitement of acquiring a new and less-circulated item, the heroic sense of purchasing “freedom” for an “enslaved” book and granting it emancipation on one’s own shelf, toward the end is also accompanied by the sense that a collector’s work might never really be recognized during his lifetime “but, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight, only in extinction is the collector comprehended” (67).
Benjamin’s essay calls upon its readers to focus on many issues, especially on the dialectical relationship between order and chaos. But what the reader cannot miss is the dialectical tension between dissemination (Zerstreuung) and accumulation (Sammlung). The entire act of collection simultaneously becomes an act of de-collection, of anticipating a collection. At the center of Benjamin’s essay is a personal library, which becomes a reflection of the collector’s inclinations, proclivities, and even idiosyncrasies. And the freedom of books, as well as the freedom of the collector, stays embedded in equations of asymmetrical power.
Benjamin’s reflections are one instance of a quintessentially twentieth-century relationship with books and libraries. The benefits of the proliferation of the publishing industry in the nineteenth century, in tandem with widespread literacy, the rise of the book market, the expansion of public libraries, and the availability of cheap editions, all augmented public access to books and libraries by the early twentieth century. The classical iconicity of books and libraries—exemplified for example in the opening scene of Goethe’s Faust, part 1, where books are the sole property of the intellectual and are at once portrayed as great sources of knowledge but also as dreary and morose with obscure wisdom—undergoes a gradual displacement. Private libraries come to represent the new Bildungsbourgeoisie; they become spaces that reflect personal passions and idiosyncrasies, which in turn are historically conditioned. Public libraries transform as well. The political purchase of royal libraries of the nineteenth century is recast in the public, democratic currencies of the twentieth century through libraries real and imagined, where multiple social actors claim their stakes, and not entirely in harmonious ways. Modernists have not remained oblivious to these transformations. The multiple significations of “the library”—as an idea, an institution, as well as a material/physical space—have found expression in modernist literature from around the world. Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various transformations. Paying attention to aesthetic representations of libraries can assist in deepening our understanding of libraries as well as of modernism.
In the next section, let us turn to a few examples from literary texts—some canonized as classics of European modernism, others that condition and redefine modernism in specific historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts—to see how understanding global modernism through libraries can be productive. Instead of arranging the authors chronologically, to follow rules of literary history, or alphabetically, as would be expected from an essay on a library, it might be better to follow a Benjaminian chaos, which would hopefully help reveal the role of a library as an agent of the multidirectional, multicentered, and multilinguistic facets of modernism.
In the “Telemachus” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the tension between Buck Mulligan and Haines is palpable, among others, through Haines’s inability to comprehend much of what Mulligan conceives as important undertakings for the day. Mulligan’s suggestion to Stephen, “Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that everyman this day will do his duty” (18), reminds Haines of his own duty, that he has to visit the National Library of Ireland (18). Haines, who “intends to make a collection of [the Irish] sayings if you will let me,” creates an anthropological subject of investigation and study. The National Library invites the reader to examine the fractured sensibilities of national subjugation and cultural pride; the multiple references to many libraries all over Dublin in the novel reiterate these sensibilities.
If Haines’s access to the National Library of Ireland facilitates his epistemic privilege over Buck Mulligan—of collating and classifying everyday speech to produce folkloric knowledge—Virginia Woolf’s lack of access to a university library would reveal asymmetrical power over its gendered subject. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes standing at the entrance of the Trinity College Library at Cambridge, hoping to read essays by Charles Lamb or perhaps even to take a look at the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond, when she is informed that “ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of Introduction” (8). There is no room for a woman author in the library unless legitimized by male companionship, leading her to curse the library, with full awareness of the apathy of the institution of learning: “That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library” (8).
The expression of such hierarchies of access, indeed the politics of accessibility and inaccessibility, can be followed in the postcolonial context in two novels, one originally composed in Hindi, the other in Arabic. The Hindi novelist Amritlal Nagar’s historical novel Karavata starts in 1854, when the protagonist Bansidhar makes three life-altering decisions at the age of nineteen: to renounce his early achievements in Farsi, Arabic, and Sanskrit; to learn English; and to move out of the northern Indian city of Lucknow to Calcutta, the new center of political and economic power in India. Lady Nancy Malcolm—Bansidhar’s father’s acquaintance—promises to write a letter of introduction addressed to Mr. Pincot, an East India Company official in Calcutta, albeit not without stipulating a condition. Bansidhar must acquire for her and for Mr. Pincot “rare Sanskrit manuscripts.” An acquaintance directs Bansidhar to Raina Pandit, a Kashmiri migrant in Lucknow, who reportedly owns the best collection of books in northern India but since the arrival of the British in the city has stopped caring about them. When Bansidhar enters Pandit’s library, he finds himself surrounded by books stacked from floor to ceiling—in Arabic, Farsi, Sanskrit, Kashmiri, and Bangla. Bansidhar tricks Pandit into selling him a few illustrated copies of the Kamasutra, Bhagavad-Gita, and Mahabharata at a bargain price. Books from Pandit’s library soon find themselves on the shelves of Lady Malcolm in Lucknow and of Mr. Pincot in Calcutta. Bansidhar is all set to embark upon his colonial Bildung (Nagar, Karavata, 36–38).
In Nagar’s novel, the library of a British East India Company official, through its acquisition of native (ancient Indian) texts, assures the entry of a colonial subject in the social text of modernity. By contrast, the Sudanese writer Salih al-Tayyib instantiates how the library of a colonial subject is formed through the suppression and rejection of local knowledge. Tayyib’s novel Season of Migration to the North (Mawsim al-Hijrah ilā al-Shamāl, 1962) starts with the narrator’s return to his home in a village in Sudan after he has spent seven years in England. The narrator’s interaction with the civic life of the village is filtered through his recent memories of England and his curiosity about the life of Mustafa Sa’eed, his doppelganger. At the end of the novel, the narrator gains access to the secret of all secrets when he opens the iron door of Mustafa Sa’eed’s rectangular room. He finds “shelf upon shelf, with books, and more books and yet more books” (Tayyib, Season of Migration, 135). Sa’eed’s library includes an eclectic collection of works by Thomas Mann, Thomas Carlyle, Rudyard Kipling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Harold Joseph Laski, among many others. In addition, the library holds copies of the Bible and the Koran in English and other books, all in English, authored by Mustafa Sa’eed, with titles ranging from The Cross and Gunpowder, to Rape of Africa, to Colonialism and Monopoly. “Not a single Arabic book. A graveyard. A mausoleum. An insane idea,” the narrator utters in fury and embarrassment (137).
The private library as a site of contestation of Eastern and Western knowledge systems is at the heart of The New Life (1998), a novel by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Set in Turkey in the mid-to-late 1980s, Pamuk’s novel centers on a fictitious book, also called The New Life. At the beginning of the novel, as the young protagonist Osman first discovers “the book,” the effect is visceral, mesmerizing, radically transformative. Osman’s search for the author of “the book” and the sources of its creation leads him to the private library of Uncle Rıfk ı, a railroad engineer who in fact turns out to be the author. Rıfk ı’s library contains books as diverse as Ib’n Arabi’s Seals of Wisdom, Dante’s La vita nuova, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, among many others (Pamuk, The New Life, 257–258). Both Osman and Rıfk ı transform in Pamuk’s novel into Borgesian “men of the Library.” The readers (admirers) of the book authored by Rıfk ı recognize its multiple social lives, and for them, “Life,” “book,” and “world” become inseparable. The book’s detractors fear its social impact. Their self-proclaimed leader, Dr. Fine, is in an “all-out battle against printed matter” (83) and thinks of Gutenberg as “one of the pawns of the Great Conspirator” (107).
These examples of literary engagements with libraries, readers, and books unfold the aesthetic affinities and liaisons between geoculturally diverse interpretations of modernism while simultaneously highlighting the mutually enriching synergy between the terms “library” and “modernism.”
I started this essay with a brief reading of a novel by a German British author. Let me end with a discussion of another novel, Ja, sagt Molly (Yes, says Molly), by the Turkish-German author Kemal Kurt. Born in 1947 in Çorlu, Turkey, Kurt moved to Germany in 1972 and worked as an essayist, photographer, author of children’s books, translator, and television writer. Kurt’s novel bears distinct marks of large-scale human migration in the late twentieth century; it simultaneously creates an archive of a multidirectional and multilingual modernism through a literary inventory. If the title is a direct citation of the last lines of Joyce’s Ulysses, the frame story refers to another classic modernist text, “The Library of Babel,” by the Argentine modernist Jorge Luis Borges. As is well known, Borges’s narrator organizes the library in indefinite, infinite, hexagonal units. Noticeably, the Library follows the Universe: it appears in parentheses, contained in punctuation marks as the other signifier of the universe, as the universe’s alias, a nomenclature used by undefined “others.” Borges splits the perceivers of the universe and the library, yet, by approving that the universe can indeed be called a library, he blurs the distinction between the two, presents them as interchangeable. It is at this point that the narrator confesses his belonging to a community of “men of the Library” who went looking for “a book”—a single book nonetheless—a “catalog of catalogs” (Borges, “The Library of Babel,” 112).
In Kurt’s novel, characters from literary texts around the world turn into the Borgesian “men of the Library” who go out looking for a book of all books—“das totale Buch” (Ja, sagt Molly, 11)—which would simultaneously serve as an epitome and extract of all other books. The novel begins on a rainy evening in a city with many names: “Eine Stadt mit vielen Namen: London vielleicht, Paris oder Berlin. Oder auch New York, Tokio, Dublin, Istanbul, Toronto, Kalkutta, Kinshasa, Ulan Bator, Samarkand, Astrachan” (“London, maybe, Paris or Berlin. Or also New York, Tokyo, Dublin, Istanbul, Toronto, Calcutta, Kinshasa, Ulan Bator, Samarkand, Astrakhan”; 10). Having established its global locations, the narrator, referring to Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” declares that the “regressive method” suggested by the “blind librarian” where, in order to locate book A, one has to look for book B, will not suffice. And so he begins the writing of that all-encompassing book, which tells the story of the twentieth century through conversations among characters from over 150 literary works written in about twenty-five languages. The opening scene brings the reader to the apartment of Leopold and Molly Bloom (Joyce, Ulysses). Molly, who is about to go to bed, finds Gregor Samsa (Kafk a, The Metamorphosis) on the foot of her bed. At first astonished by Gregor’s presence in her bedroom, Molly ends up inviting him to bed, and as she lies down, Gregor starts his erotic foreplay, slowly discovering her body as he discovers his own sexuality, which was symbolically denied to him in scene 2 of The Metamorphosis, when his mother and sister remove the framed picture of the lady in a fur boa (a reference to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs) from his room. Molly relents to his sexual advances with “Ja, ich will Ja” (10), and thus the last sentence of Joyce’s classic, “yes I said yes I will Yes” (Joyce, Ulysses, 933), becomes the opening line of the story of the twentieth century.
As the reader tries to fathom whether the sexual intimacy between the human Molly and the vermin Gregor is the start of the process of Gregor’s rehumanization or a magical-realist intercourse between species, the novel turns to Jimmy Herf and Congo Jake (Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer). This transfer from Dublin to New York is punctuated in Kurt’s novel by italicized insertions of important global events, telegraphically communicated as headlines of newspapers: the Boxer Uprising is crushed by interventionist forces (Ja, sagt Molly, 18), Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transatlantic wireless transmission of radio waves (20), the financial crisis of 1929 hits the United States (21), Einstein introduces the theory of relativity (22), the plague spreads in India (23), and San Francisco experiences devastation through the earthquake and fire (23). In the midst of these moments of scientific discoveries and financial and natural disasters, Congo reads in the New York Times that the “Library of Babel” is full, that there is no more room for any more books, and under the directorship of a blind librarian a commission of select librarians is making a decision about selecting that one book that will represent all forms of modernism (24).
From this point on, Kurt’s novel recreates the twentieth century through an engagement with its literary history. Disparate and unexpected conversations inhabit the novel: Hans Castorp (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain) experiences the violence of the First World War with O-Lan (Pearl S. Buck, The House of Earth), who finds a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in his pocket (39); Clelia Oitana (Cesare Pavese, The Beach) tells Meuersault (Albert Camus, The Stranger) that as a woman she finds herself alone in a library (44); Zneno Cosini (Italo Svevo, Zneno Cosini) criticizes the Nobel Prize as “one named after the founder of the first weapon of mass destruction in the world” to Harry Haller (Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf) as Hitler comes to power (51); Martin Marco (Camilo Jose Céla, The Hive) discusses the expansion of libraries and the significance of books with William of Baskerville (Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose) (57) during the aftermath of the Second World War; and between the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and the assassination of Ché Guevara, Saleem Sinai (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children), David Caravaggio (Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient), and Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim) meet—where else?—in the house of Mr. Biswas (V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas), as Stevens (Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day), immaculately dressed, serves them tea (70–71).
This is by no means an exhaustive reading of this complex and fascinating novel. Suffice it to say that throughout the rest of the narrative, a variety of actors converge and diverge to reflect on the state of literature and literary criticism as they present books and libraries as historically conditioned and politically charged. Punctuating these conversations is the slow foreplay between Molly and Gregor, which becomes more intense as the twentieth century ends. Toward the end of the novel, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as violence against foreigners rises in Germany, Gregor fantasizes yet another transformation. He wants to be an oil beetle so he can turn Molly crazy (verrückt) by releasing cantharidin (127). Meanwhile a host of intoxicated characters—Rosario (Alejandro Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World), Lambert Strether (Henry James, The Ambassadors), Gora (Rabindranath Tagore, Gora), Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis, Babbit), Sagoe (Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters), Piggy (William Golding, Lord of the Flies), Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke, Malte Laurids Brigge), Querelle (Jean Genet, Querelle), and others—join a procession (125), shouting the slogan, “To the Library! To the Library!” (“Zur Bibliothek! Zur Bibliothek!”, 129). As Czechoslovakia splits into the Czech and Slovak republics and the World Trade Center bombing takes place in New York City, Gregor thinks of ancient Indian erotic texts, Ananga Ranga and Kamasutra, and discovers Molly’s “Yoni” (132–133). The entire history of the twentieth century and the sexual foreplay between Molly and Gregor reach their climax as the crowd of characters reaches Taksim Square, Istanbul, where the library burns in flames.
The libraries depicted in these novels transform modernism—formally and substantially—presenting it at times as a system of exchange and at other times as a difficult conversation about the historical burden of socioeconomic and political domination between Western centers and non-Western peripheries. On the one hand, these examples of engagements with libraries reveal modalities of asymmetrical power and epistemic violence; on the other hand, they point at the diverse temporalities of modernism whereby formal appropriations of modernism are localized to challenge and unravel the permanence of domination and subjugation. Paying attention to the various forms in which libraries emerge in modernist texts, as “myth, order, space, power, imagination, home, to borrow a few keywords from Alberto Manguel’s wonderful characterization in The Library at Night, assists in identifying questions of propriety and patronage within the libraries while revealing at the same time modes of affiliation to and appropriation of modernism in various contexts.
To sum up, engaging with the modernist imagination of libraries as part of a larger print-cultural approach to global modernism serves many purposes. First, it underlines the process, material, and subject, along with the space of reading. Second, the “medial” nature of the library, when subject to scrutiny, reveals the constantly moving boundaries between fact and fiction, history and memory, collection and dispersion, order and chaos. Third, the silent order of the libraries is quickly unraveled to reveal the “constitutional instability,” which becomes a driving force of modernist texts. Fourth, such an approach assists in challenging normative periodization that turns non-Western modernism into a derivative discourse, into a unidirectional flow from Western centers to non-Western peripheries. Finally, a print-cultural approach to modernist texts does not merely decenter Europe; it deepens the understanding of the imbricated relationship between modernist aesthetic approaches and texts while simultaneously making us aware of the multicentric, multidimensional, and multilingual nature of modernism. Shaping this decentered approach is a specific form of “bibliomigrancy,” the physical and virtual migration of books from one geocultural space to another (Mani, “Bibliomigrancy”).
The story of modernism is not a single story. It consists of multiple stories of creation and innovation, interrogation through reformulation, local disposition and worldly orientation. Much like libraries—and it does not have to be the perfect library of all libraries as in Borges—the order and system is coincidently interrupted with contesting narratives of disorder and purposeful disarrangement. As Sebald reminds us, every moment of monumentalism comes with its own set of absurdities. As Benjamin makes us realize, dissemination becomes part of dispersion, and as Kurt reveals through his differential calculus of global modernism, historical chronology is productively interrupted by a renewed circulation of literary works.
Notes
1. See also Cowan, “W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Great Library.” Cowan’s essay provides an excellent commentary on the fictionalized interpretation of history that is central to Sebald’s work.
2. For a longer discussion of libraries and books and in conjunction with world literature, see Mani, “Bibliomigrancy” and “Borrowing Privileges.”
3. There are many studies of modernism and the city, starting with Georg Simmel’s seminal essay “Die Grosstädte und das Gesistesleben.” See also Gold, The Experience of Modernism; Holston, On Modernism and Modernization; Hyde, Constitutional Modernism; and Umbach and Hüppauf, Vernacular Modernism.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus.” 1931. In Medienästhetische Schriften, ed. Detlev Schöttker, 175–182. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.
. Medienästhetische Schriften. Ed. Detlev Schöttker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.
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