But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical hierarchy of exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus’s 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides, only 18 (if we include the Rhesus, of doubtful authenticity); of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be. Even within the strictest circumscriptions, any choice of books will be greater than its label, and an inquiring reader will find danger (salutary or reprehensible) in the safest, most invigilated places. Our mistake, perhaps, has been to look upon a library as an all-encompassing but neutral space. “The keepers,” wrote the American poet Archibald MacLeish during his posting as librarian of Congress, “whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.”126 Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.
A book-burning in Warsaw, Indiana.
This implicit censorship starts with the earliest Mesopotamian libraries we know of, from the beginning of the third millennium B.C.127 Unlike official archives, set up to preserve the daily transactions and ephemeral dealings of a particular group, these libraries collected works of a more general nature, such as the so-called royal inscriptions (commemorative tablets of stone or metal that retold important political events, akin to the broadsheets of seventeenth-century Europe or today’s current events best-sellers). In all probability these libraries were privately owned—personal spaces set up by lovers of the written word, who would often instruct the scribes to copy the owner’s name on the tablets as a mark of possession. Even libraries attached to a temple usually carried the name of a high priest or some other important personage responsible for the collection. So as to preserve the order established by a particular shelving or cataloguing method, certain library books carried a warning colophon intended to dissuade anyone wishing to tamper with the assigned category. A dictionary from the seventh century B.C. carries this prayer: “May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet nor place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building.”128 I have placed this warning on the wall of my own library to ward off borrowers in the night.
Most of the owners of these collections were of royal blood, and they kept their libraries stocked through the agency of buyers and looters. King Ashurbanipal, in order to supplement his already considerable library, was known to dispatch representatives throughout his vast kingdom to search for whatever volumes might be missing. He had no guiding principle defined by categories (later imposed on the collection); his was a haphazard hoarding of anything at hand.129 We have a letter in which Ashurbanipal, after listing the books he is seeking, insists that the task should be carried out without delay. “Find them and dispatch them to me. Nothing should detain them. And in the future, if you discover other tablets not herewith mentioned, inspect them and, if you consider them of interest for the library, collect them and send them on to me.”130 A similar all-inclusive impulse governed the composition of other Mesopotamian lists and catalogues. Commenting on the celebrated Code of Hammurabi, that compendium of laws from the eighteenth century B.C., the historian Jean Bottéro stressed the fact that it included in its enumerations “not only the common and commonly observable reality, but also the exceptional, the aberrant: in the end, everything possible.”131
Though a library such as that of Ashurbanipal was the visible expression of earthly power, no single person, however royal, could hope to read through it all. To read every book and to digest all the information, the king recruited other eyes and other hands to scan the tablets and summarize their findings, so that in reading these digests he might be able to boast that he was familiar with the library’s entire contents. Scholars extracted the meat from the texts and then, “like pelicans,” regurgitated it for the benefit of others.
Four centuries after Ashurbanipal, in the first half of the second century B.C., a couple of the principal librarians of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium and his disciple Aristarchus of Samothrace, decided to assist their readers in a similar fashion. Not only did they select and gloss all manner of important works, but they also set out to compile a catalogue of authors who, in their opinion, surpassed all others in literary excellence.132 The qualifications of the two scholars were impeccable. Aristophanes had edited the works of Homer and Hesiod,133 and to his edition of the latter he had added brief critical notes in which he listed other writers who had dealt with the same material; these notes, known as hypotheseis, were essentially annotated bibliographies that allowed readers a quick and exact overview of a certain subject. Aristarchus had also edited the works of Homer, with a rigour that was legendary, so that any exacting critic who followed him became known as an aristarchus. These lists of “best authors” (lists which, almost two thousand years later, the scholar David Ruhnken would call “canons”134) were copied out well into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and granted the included authors literary immortality, since their works were sought after and assiduously studied. On the other hand, authors not present in these lists were considered unworthy of attention and were allowed to fade into ashes and oblivion. This lengthy, never-compiled catalogue of neglected authors haunts us by its absence.
A contemporary cartoon depicting a book-burning in Nazi Germany.
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order or space. In the library of my Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, we felt it behind the imposing wooden doors, in the welcoming gloom, and under the green-shaded lamps that reminded me vaguely of the lamps in sleeping-car compartments. Up the marble staircase, down the tiled floor, between the grey columns, the library seemed a parallel universe, both fearful and comforting, in which my own story had other adventures and other endings. Above all, absence (of the books deemed improper, dangerous, provocative) gaped in the dark holes that pierced the countless shelves of books towering up to the ceiling.
And yet, many seemingly innocent titles deceived the librarian’s censorious eye. I remember, in the silence broken by whispered snatches of conversation, the pages at which certain books would spontaneously fall open: Lorca’s Romancero gitano at “The Unfaithful Bride,” La Celestina at the brothel scene, Cortázar’s Los Premios at the chapter in which a young boy is seduced by a wicked sailor. How these forbidden texts had found their way into our scrupulous library we never knew, and we wondered how long it would be before the librarian discovered that, under his very nose, generation after generation of corruptible students filled the absence on the shelves by selectively reading these scandalous books.
Warning sign in the library at Le Presbytère.
It may be, as Primo Levi suggests in his memoirs, that the unspoken purpose of librarians is to make sure that only those truly wishing access to books be allowed into the sanctum. For Levi, the library of Turin’s Chemical Institute in the 1930s was
at that time, like Mecca, impenetrable to infidels and even hard to penetrate for such faithful as I. One had to think that the administration followed the wise principle according to which it is good to discourage the arts and sciences: only someone impelled by absolute necessity, or by an overwhelming passion, would willingly subject himself to the trials of abnegation that were demanded of him in order to consult the volumes. The library’s schedule was brief and irrational, the lighting dim, the file cards in disorder; in the winter, no heat; no chairs but uncomfortable and noisy metal stools; and finally, the librarian was an incompetent, insolent boor of exceeding ugliness, stationed at the threshold to terrify with his appearance and his howl those aspiring to enter.135
Like Levi’s unwelcoming library, and like the far less forbidding one of my school, every library, including those under strictest surveillance, contains secretly rebellious texts that escape the librarian’s eye. As a prisoner in a Russian camp near the polar circle doing what he called “my own time in the North,”136 Joseph Brodsky read W.H. Auden’s poems, and they strengthened his resolve to defy his jailers and survive for the sake of a glimpsed-at freedom. Haroldo Conti, tortured in the cells of the Argentinian military of the 1970s, found solace in the novels of Dickens, which his jailer had allowed him to keep.137 For the writer Varlam Chalamov, sent by Stalin to work in the gold mines of Kolyma because of his “counter-revolutionary activities,” the prison library was itself a gold mine that “for incomprehensible reasons, had escaped the innumerable inspections and ‘purges’ systematically inflicted upon all of Russia’s libraries.” On its miserable shelves Chalamov found unexpected treasures such as Bulgakov’s writings and the poems of Mayakovski. “It was,” he said, “as if the authorities had wished to offer the prisoners a consolation for the long road ahead, for the Calvary awaiting them. As if they thought: ‘Why censor the reading of those condemned?’”138
Sometimes, those who take upon themselves the task of guarding the entrance to the library’s stacks find danger where others see none. During the hunt for “subversive elements” under the military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s, anyone in possession of a “suspicious” book could be arrested and detained without charge. “Suspicious” were the poems of Neruda and Nâzim Hikmet (they were communists), the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (they were Russian) and any book with a dangerous word in its title, such as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black or the sixteenth-century Japanese classic Comrade Loves of the Samurai. In fear of sudden police raids, many people burnt their libraries by lighting bonfires in their toilets, and plumbers became suddenly perplexed by an epidemic of broken toilet bowls (the heat of burning paper causes the porcelain to crack). “He has children who saw him burn his books” is how the novelist Germán García defines the generation that was killed, tortured or forced into exile.139
Those in power can ban books for peculiar motives. General Pinochet famously excluded Don Quixote from the libraries of Chile because he read in that novel an argument for civil disobedience, and the Japanese minister of Culture, several years ago, objected to Pinocchio because it showed unflattering pictures of handicapped people in the figures of the cat who pretends to be blind and the fox who pretends to be lame. In March 2003 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who was to become Pope Benedict xvi) argued that the Harry Potter books “deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”140 Other idiosyncratic reasons have been given for banning all manner of books, from The Wizard of Oz (a hotbed of pagan beliefs) to The Catcher in the Rye (a dangerous adolescent role model). In the words of William Blake,
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.141
As I’ve said, any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the stern Jesuit Jacob Gretser published a defence of censorship under the explicit title Of the Laws and Customs Concerning the Banning, Expurgation and Destruction of Heretical and Noxious Books. Gretser’s erudition led him to be appointed advisor to the Catholic Church when the Index of Forbidden Books was being compiled in Madrid in 1612; he employed that same erudition to support the argument (evident to many) that censorship of books is common to all peoples in all times. Gretser’s infamous genealogy begins with the pagans who burned Cicero’s treatise On the Nature of the Gods (for being too inclined to monotheism, according to an old, unproven story), and leads up to the book-burnings of the followers of Luther and Calvin.142 Had Gretser been able to look into the future, he could have added to his list the “degenerate” books condemned to the pyre by the Nazis, the works of the “bourgeois” writers proscribed by Stalin, the publications of the “Communist scribblers” exiled by Senator McCarthy, the books destroyed by the Taliban, by Fidel Castro, by the government of North Korea, by the officials of Canada Customs. Gretser’s book is in fact the unacknowledged history of those colossal libraries that whisper from the gaps on the bookshelves.143
Earlier, I mentioned the legend that accused Amr ibn al-As of ordering Caliph Omar I to set fire to the books in Alexandria. Omar’s apocryphal response deserves to be quoted here because it echoes the curious logic of every book-burner then and now. He is said to have acquiesced by saying, “If the contents of these books agree with the Holy Book, then they are redundant. If they disagree, then they are undesirable. In either case, they should be consigned to the flames.”144 Omar was addressing—somewhat stridently, it is true—the essential fluidity of literature. Because of it, no library is what it is set up to be, and a library’s fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.
This is true of the native literature of the Americas, of which hardly anything has reached us. In Mexico and Central America, particularly, the great libraries and archives of the pre-Columbian peoples were systematically destroyed by the Europeans, both to deprive them of an identity and to convert them to the religion of Christ. The Australian poet A.D. Hope tells the story of how the Spanish conquistadores set fire to the books of the Maya:
Diego de Landa, archbishop of Yucatán
—The curse of God upon his pious soul—
Placed all their Devil’s picture books under ban
And, piling them in one sin-heap, burned the whole;
But he took the trouble to keep the calendar
By which the Devil had taught them to count time.
The impious creatures tallied back as far
As ninety million years before Eve’s crime.
That was enough: they burned the Mayan books,
Saved souls and kept their own in proper trim.
Diego de Landa in heaven always looks
Towards God: God never looks at him.145
Diego de Landa’s contemporary Friar Juan de Zumárraga, “a name that should be as immortal as that of Omar,” says William Prescott in his classic Conquest of Mexico,146 did likewise with the books of the Aztecs. Zumárraga was born in Durango, Spain, in 1468 and studied in the Franciscan monastery of Aránzazu, in the Basque Country. Appointed to the Most Holy Office of the Inquisition, he received his first inquisitorial commission from the Emperor Charles v “to hunt the witches of Biscay” in northern Spain. Zumárraga proved himself so successful that shortly afterwards he was posted to the Viceroyalty of Mexico as bishop-elect. In 1547, Pope Paul II crowned him first archbishop of Mexico.
A nineteenth-century engraving based on a sixteenth-century portrait of Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga.
Zumárraga spent seven years as head of the Mexican Inquisition, from 1536 to 1543, during which time he wrote a catechism for native neophytes and a brief manual of Christian doctrine for use in the missions, supervised the translation of the Bible into a number of native languages and founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, where the sons of the native nobility were taught Latin, philosophy, rhetoric and logic so that they could become “good Christians.” Zumárraga’s name, however, is mainly associated with two events that profoundly affected the history of Mexico: he was responsible for creating the first printing press in the New World, and for destroying most of the vast literature of the Aztec Empire.
Zumárraga had long been convinced of the need to print locally the books required for the conversion of the natives, since he felt that it was difficult to control, across the ocean, the accuracy of translations into native languages, and the contents of doctrinal books for a native audience. In 1533, on a return voyage to Spain, he visited several printers in Seville in order to find one willing to assist him in establishing a printing press in Mexico. He found his partner in the person of Jacobo Cromberger, a converted Jew with long experience in the making of books, who was willing to invest in the overseas enterprise “a press, ink, type and paper, as well as other implements of the trade, the whole estimated at 100,000 maravedís,”147 and to send as his representative one of his assistants, an Italian known as Juan Pablos or Giovanni Paoli.
The ways of censors are mysterious. Zumárraga’s obligation as Inquisitor was to seek out and punish all those perceived to be enemies of the Catholic Church—idolaters, adulterers, blasphemers, witches, Lutherans, Moors and Jews—and he did so with extraordinary ferocity. Converted Jews had, since the days of Columbus, been denied permission to establish themselves in the colonies. But since the financial capital required to set up business in the New World was often in the hands of Jewish and Moorish converts, illegal immigration became common in the early years of the sixteenth century, and by 1536 there was a sizable Jewish community in Mexico. The first Mexican ordinance against heretics and Jews dates from 1523, decreeing that those who denounced a converted Jew who practised his religion secretly would benefit from a third of the Jew’s confiscated property (the other two-thirds going to the royal treasurer and to the judge). Accordingly, accusations flourished, and Zumárraga in particular persecuted the Jews with relentless determination, often condemning them to be burnt at the stake on the flimsiest of evidence.148 It is therefore puzzling to learn that Zumárraga chose the services of a converted Jew to establish his Mexican press. Though he must have been aware of his partner’s bloodline, Zumárraga left no comment on his choice, and we can wonder, at a distance of almost five centuries, how the Inquisitor justified his relationship with the “impure” Cromberger.
Nor do we know whether Zumárraga understood the paradox of on the one hand creating books, and on the other hand destroying them. Shortly after his appointment as head of the Inquisition, he sent troops to the farthest corners of the colony to ferret out anyone suspected of possessing Aztec religious objects or illuminated books. Through bribes and torture he discovered the location of important collections of art and entire native libraries the Aztec notables had hidden away, “especially from Tezcuco,” Prescott writes, “the most cultivated capital in Anahuac, and the great depository of the national archives.” Finally, after an astonishing number of paintings and books had been collected by his emissaries, Zumárraga had them piled in a tall heap in the marketplace of Tlaltelolco, and burnt. The fire, witnesses say, lasted several days and nights.
Thanks to the efforts of other, more enlightened Spaniards (of Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, for example, who preserved and translated a number of Aztec texts), we have an approximate idea of what was lost: a complex vision of the universe, with its theology, its songs, its stories, its historical chronicles, its works of philosophy and divination, its scientific treatises and astronomical charts.149 Among the treasures that miraculously survived, in 1924 scholars discovered, in the so-called Secret Archives of the Vatican, fourteen of the thirty chapters of the Book of Dialogues, the last major work in Nahuatl (one of the many languages spoken in the Aztec Empire), written in the mid-sixteenth century. In this book, a group of native priests and scholars defend the Aztec view of the world against Catholic dogma, in a dramatic series of dialogues reminiscent of those of Plato. Works like the Book of Dialogues (and there were no doubt many) would have helped Europeans understand the people they were encountering, and allowed for an exchange of wisdom and experience.
Even from a political and religious point of view, the destruction of an opposing culture is always an act of stupidity, since it denies the possibility of allegiance, conversion or assimilation. The Spanish Dominican Diego Durán, writing shortly before his death in 1588, argued that in order to attempt to convert the natives of the New World it was necessary to know their customs and religion, and he blamed those who, like Diego de Landa and Zumárraga, burnt the ancient books:
Those who with fervent zeal (though with little prudence) in the beginning burned and destroyed all the ancient Indian pictographic documents were mistaken. They left us without a light to guide us—to the point that the Indians worship idols in our presence, and we understand nothing of what goes on in their dances, in their marketplaces, in their bathhouses, in the songs they chant (when they lament their ancient gods and lords), in their repasts and banquets; these things mean nothing to us.150
Few of those in power paid attention to Durán’s warnings. The destruction of the books of pre-Columbian America exemplify the fear that those in power have of the subversive capabilities of the written word. Sometimes they believe that even committing books to the flames is not enough. Libraries, in their very being, not only assert but also question the authority of power. As repositories of history or sources for the future, as guides or manuals for difficult times, as symbols of authority past or present, the books in a library stand for more than their collective contents, and have, since the beginning of writing, been considered a threat. It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality. “We scorn,” wrote Tacitus in the first century, “the blindness of those who believe that with an arrogant act even the memory of posterity can be extinguished. In fact, the sentence increases the prestige of the noble spirits they wish to silence, and foreign potentates, or those others who have used similar violence, have obtained nothing other than shame for themselves and lasting fame for their enemies.”151
The libraries that have vanished or have never been allowed to exist greatly surpass in number those we can visit, and form the links of a circular chain that accuses and condemns us all. Three and a half centuries after Omar’s riposte, the notorious Abi-Amir al-Mansur, Moorish regent of Córdoba, condemned to the flames a rare collection of scientific and philosophical works collected in the Andalusian libraries by his predecessors. As if answering across the ages Omar’s pitiless judgment, the historian Sa’id the Spaniard was moved to observe, “These sciences were despised by the old and criticized by the mighty, and those who studied them were accused of heresy and heterodoxy. Thereafter, those who had the knowledge held their tongue, went into hiding and kept secret what they knew for a more enlightened age.”152 We are still waiting. Five centuries later, in 1526, Ottoman soldiers led by Sultan Suleiman 11 rode into Buda and set fire to the Great Corvina Library, founded by King Matthias Corvinus in 1471 and said to have been one of the jewels of the Hungarian crown, in an attempt to annihilate the culture of the people they had conquered.153 A further three centuries after that destruction, in 1806, Suleiman’s descendants emulated them by burning the extraordinary Fatimid Library in Cairo, containing over a hundred thousand precious volumes.154
In our time, a government’s methods of censorship are less drastic but still effective. In March 1996 the French minister of Culture, Philippe Douste-Blazy, objecting to the cultural policies of the Mayor of Orange, a member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right-wing party, ordered the inspection of the municipal library of that city. The report, published three months later, concluded that the Orange librarians were under orders from the mayor to withdraw certain books and magazines from the library shelves: any publications of which Le Pen’s followers might disapprove, any books by authors critical of the party, and certain foreign literature (North African folk tales, for example) that was considered not part of true French cultural heritage.155
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Congress of the United States passed a law, Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, allowing federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed at any public library or bought at any private bookstore. “Unlike traditional search warrants, this new power does not require officers to have evidence of any crime, nor provide evidence to a court that their target is suspected of one. Nor are library staff allowed to tell targeted individuals that they are being investigated.”156 Under such requirements, a number of libraries in the United States, kowtowing to the authorities, reconsidered the purchase of various titles.
Sometimes, it is nothing but a random act that determines the fate of a library. In 1702, the scholar Arni Magnusson learned that the impoverished inhabitants of Iceland, starving and naked under Danish rule, had raided the ancient libraries of their country—in which unique copies of the Eddas had been kept for over six hundred years—in order to turn the poetic parchment into winter clothes. Alerted to this vandalism, King Frederick iv of Denmark ordered Magnusson to sail to Iceland and rescue the precious manuscripts. It took Magnusson ten years to strip the thieves and reassemble the collection, which, though soiled and tailored, was shipped back to Copenhagen, where it was carefully guarded for another fourteen-odd years—until a fire reduced it to illiterate ashes.157
Will libraries always exist under such uncertainties? Perhaps not. Virtual libraries, if they become technologically resilient, can circumvent some of these threats; there would no longer be any justification for culling, since cyberspace is practically infinite, and censorship would no longer affect the majority of readers, since a censor, confined to one administration and one place, cannot prevent a reader from calling up a forbidden text from somewhere faraway, beyond the censor’s rule. A caveat, however: the censor can employ the Internet as his own instrument and punish the reader after the act. In 2005 the Internet giant Yahoo! provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a journalist, Shi Tao, for supposedly using a New York–based website to obtain and post forbidden texts, for which he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.158
But in spite of such dangers, examples of the freedom offered by the Web are numerous. In Iran, under the tyranny of the mullahs, students could still read on-line all kinds of forbidden literature; in Cuba, dissidents have Internet access to the published reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations; in Rhodesia, readers can open onscreen the books of banned writers.
And even paper and ink can sometimes survive a death sentence. One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves of Achilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or of poor literary quality. A few words were, however, miraculously preserved. “In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia,” Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, “in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children.”159 I trust that book-burners’ dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book’s survival.