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Library: Still Unquiet

I have written previously about Matthew Battle's 2003 book Library: An Unquiet History (Norton)—see this link for text rescued from a previous blog, and page down to January 24, 2011 (or just page-search "Matthew Battles" and it's the second occurence). I took part in a recent informal conversation about this book at a recent library conference, and I enjoyed re-visiting it.

Battles seeks to "read the library" (page 14).

I explore the library's intertwined relations of fancy and authenticity, of folly and epiphany, of the Parnassan and the universal. My method . . . mirrors that of Eugene Gant [a character is Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River]: I pick up a volume . . . . [and] follow a trail. . . I drop on passage to follow another, threading my way among the ranges of books, lost among the shelves. . . . What I'm looking for are points of transformation, those moments where readers, authors, and librarians question the meaning of the library itself.

pages 20-21

Battles does not seek either a reductive account nor a comprehensive exposition of the history of libraries, but points out transformations of text, reader, author, and librarian. His pursuit takes him to ancient Mesopotamia and classical antiquity, ancient China, the Aztec realm and its predecessors and successor, Renaissance and early modern Europe, all the way to Nazi Germany and the ethnic wars of southeast Europe. His most recent example is probably the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban which sought iconoclasm and destruction to enforce their lethal, ideologically pure, and ethnically cleansed mockery of Islam.

One of Battles' major points is that the same insight that has led some cultural, political, or military leaders to found, build, and sustain libraries is the insight that has led to their destruction: a library is a source of power, prestige, and memory, and when power changes hands, prestige is re-distributed, and memories (in the new leaders view) must be extinguished, libraries are destroyed. Whether or not the library of Alexandria was in fact torched by Romans, Muslims, or Christians, whether or not the First August Emperor (Shi Huangdi) of China in fact destroyed all records of previous states as well as élite or Mandarin writings, libraries have withered and been dispersed as surely as they have been built. Nazi German librarians made a Faustian bargain to preserve themselves, some of their books, and their profession by subordinating it to fictions of Volk, blood, and soil, only to see themselves even further marginalized in war and the subsequent re-founding of the German states (Jahre Null). Libraries have an unquiet history not despite their development and success, but exactly because of it.

The years since Battle's 2003 publication have only confirmed this, alas. Islamist insurgents fleeing Timbuktu before advancing French soldiers torched two library buildings in 2013, destroying priceless and unique Sufi manuscripts --the Sufis insufficiently Islamist in their view (many of the manuscripts were subsequently found to have survived). Many other manuscripts of this center of Islamic learning had been (or have been) moved and recorded elsewhere (and subjected to the dangers of humidity levels never occurring in Mali). In 2012 and after, manuscripts had to be protected again, in a remarkably multi-pronged and multi-part effort brilliantly described in Joshua Hammer's The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or Syria, ISIL or ISIS or Daesh) destroyed many cultural artifacts of ancient civilization in their crude, terroristic, and bigoted reign, including the Central Library of Mosul, the University of Mosul, the library of a 265-year-old Latin (Dominican) Church, and the Mosul Museum Library. The Peoples' Republic of China has determined to destroy Uighur culture and many artifacts and collections of Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang, a remarkable example of Han Chinese racism and bigotry that goes hand-in-glove with Han Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture.

Digital destruction is also certainly possible of a kind that marginalizes Nicholson Baker's carefully enacted, idiosyncratic, and self-hyped outrage at the "loss" of newspapers that were already acidifying (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001). By "digital destruction" I mean the promulgation of (anti-) social media and its assault on any concepts of truth, such that cultural memory is relegated to the memory hole. The infuriating, bland shallowness of Mark Zuckerberg leads as example one, but many others follow, including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Steven Huffman and Alex Ohanian of Reddit, who celebrated "freedom from the press." These panglossian, superficial, and flashy developers with the sketchiest, and most desultory, slap-dash notions of "freedom of speech" and neo-liberal deregulation have unleashed hordes of edge-lords whose only real goal is to burn it all down: language, truth, discourse, respect for other points of view, and tolerance for disagreement. They join the insufferably woke of right and left to rend any democratic policy and polity, and to worship authoritarian ideologies masquerading as enlightened thinking. Their red pills become the cyanide tablets concealed by the romantic spies of the thrillers. All this digital destruction is as assuredly an assault on the web of language, concepts, habits, skills, and dispositions that build and enact libraries and inquiry, as the depredations of Communist Chinese, Islamists, and fascists of every stripe and country, an assault that moves forward 24/7/365.

What might save libraries? Ironically: burial, or going off-line, inaccessible, and impossible to locate. What goes around comes around, in the long run, but it can be a very long run. The arc of history may or may not bend towards justice, but it does oscillate between truth, power, brutality, and lies, and in the end the truth is surprisingly durable. How else did anything at all survive from antiquity, whether classical, Asian, or Meso-American? One of the keys is librarians —who remain slightly suspect and patronized by academic leaders because they know, deep down, that librarians don't only work for them and their institutional goals and objectives. Librarians have something bigger in mind —as Michael Moore knows, and said ten years ago when HarperCollins attempted to intimidate him, and require a re-write of his book Stupid White Men to tone down his criticism of George W. Bush.

I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.
They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?

Daily Kos, October 20, 2009

Well, not the ass end of everything. Rather like Balaam's Ass (Numbers 22:21-39): inconvenient both to Balaam and the rulers of the Moabites, seeing an angel blocking the narrow passage to the future, and pointing out injustice, inaccuracy, and lies. It's a tougher job than many might think, rarely recognized, and frequently obscured by librarians' own professional commitments —but speaking through the unlikely and the disparaged, and shining a light on truths, nevertheless. Caveat lector.