Phantoms on the Bookshelves (5 page)

Or take another writer, and potential Nobel candidate from the same generation as Andri
č
, Miroslav Krleza—whose name has sometimes been written in France as “Karleja,” to help French people pronounce it, a fruitless attempt at literary marketing since this great writer remains unknown there. He was in some cases said to be translated from “Serbo-Croat,” as in the Calmann-Lévy publications of
The Return of Philip Latinowicz
, 1957, and
The Banquet in Blitva
, 1964; and in others as from “Croatian,” as in the Calmann-Lévy edition of
Mars, dieu croate
(Mars, a Croatian god), 1971, and
Les Ballades de Petritsa Kerempuh
(Ballads of Petritsa Kerempuh), Publications orientalistes de France, 1975. In the last example, the title page tells us that it was in fact translated from Kaikavian, a dialect from northern Croatia.
L'Enterrement à Theresienbourg
(Burial at Theresienburg), published by Minuit in 1957, was even cited as being translated by Antun Polanscak out of something called “Yugoslavian”—a hitherto unknown language that has definitely disappeared. So in this case too, I have swept under the carpet the political upheavals following the collapse of the Soviet empire and kept my Yugoslav section (an exception to my classification by language), mixing up Serbs and Croats with Slovenian and Bosnian writers. The Montenegrins and Macedonians do not figure here, but that is because after a careful inspection of the section, I am obliged to admit, to my embarrassment, that my library contains no books translated from these two languages.

Of course, I have no diplomatic dilemmas to face in my own home, but I can imagine the anxiety of cataloguers in public libraries when they have to face situations like this.

To return to Perec's list, one could try straightforward “alphabetical order.” But what is one to do with collective or anonymous works, or those written by two authors? Do you shelve the book under Fruttero or Lucentini? Boileau or Narcejac? Zerner or Rosen? Bourdieu or Passeron?
¹

And in any case, that is to ignore exotic scripts like Mandarin, where the rules for transcription have been modified over time. If we choose instead continent or country, the first is too vast a category, while the second, as we have just noted, poses its own problems. Shelving by color was the system adopted by Valery Larbaud, a method he devised at the end of his life, so as to be able to spot the original languages of the books in his library. The problem there was that it would mean having everything rebound or covered, and there are more languages than there are easily-distinguishable colors. Shelving “by date of acquisition” would mean a meticulous set of records, and you would have had to establish the system from the very start, in other words at a time when it was impossible to anticipate the catastrophe to come. (At 39
the age of eighteen, one does not take a conscious decision to be burdened with 40,000 books one day in the future.) After that, it is too late to be able to follow the rule reliably. “Classification by size” means that by definition there are only exceptions. “By date of publication” means choosing between the date of the first edition—not always easy to establish—and that of the copy you happen to own. And what about translations? “By genre” is a category very difficult to stick to: if you interpret it too widely it becomes useless, and if you employ it too narrowly, it leads to Byzantine discussions. Sorting books “by literary period” will not work internationally: literary periods are often quite independent of one another, depending on country or language, and the definition is never clear-cut. “By frequency of consultation” will apply only to a select number of books and will change over time too. Classifying “by binding” is an option open only to bibliophiles. “By series” leaves out the countless books that come in no series at all.

So the solution I propose—and it's stupid even to do so, since all owners of huge libraries have already chosen how to classify them, and the others won't bother—is to combine several of these orders, allowing some latitude to one's own rules. A principle you could extend, of course, to life in general.

Human reality sometimes intrudes strangely into the principles of classification. Christian Galantaris quotes the following extract from the rules of an English library of 1863: “The perfect mistress of a household will see to it that the works of male and female authors are decently separated and placed on different
shelves. Unless the parties are married to one another, their proximity is not to be tolerated.” This confirms the view that the principle of ordering one's books may be a warning sign of the owner's mental disorder—in the case above, that of Victorian society as a whole. In the case of the hero of
The Paper House
, the principle applied is that of “affective relationships.” Carlos Bauer does indeed try to avoid two authors who dislike each other finding themselves neighbors on his bookshelves:

… for example, it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by García Lorca, whom the Argentine writer once described as “a professional Andalusian.” And given the dreadful accusations of plagiarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the series in his collection [Elizabethan drama]. Nor of course could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes, after the two friends had fallen out, or Vargas Llosa alongside García Márquez.

On the other hand, he also puts together some curious bedfellows, a course which he likes to justify (“Dostoevsky ended up closer to Roberto Arlt than he did to Tolstoy. And again: Hegel, Victor Hugo and Sarmiento deserve to be closer together than Paco Espinola, Benedetti and Felisberto Hernández”). In the same way, a certain
Henri Quentin-Bauhart (mentioned by Galantaris) thought of “marrying” various books to each other: by that he meant he would bring together in his library two books equally cherished. For example, he brought together a 1532 edition of Clément Marot with a Louise Labbé of 1555 and so on. We do not know what effect on this arrangement would have been produced by the recent revelation that Louise Lab[b]é may never have existed—that perhaps “her” works were written by a group of poets from Lyon (Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Jacques Pelletier du Mans and others) who all frequented the printing house of Jean de Tournes, as postulated by Mireille Huchon in
Louise Labé, une créature de papier
(Louise Labé, a paper creation). Perhaps Labbé would no longer have been judged worthy to be placed next to Marot. As for Alberto Ruy Sanchez, author of
Mogador: the Names of the Air
, he crossed a further threshold regarding the potential intimacy between two books on a shelf: “It is said that if at night, in certain very pleasant sections of the Mogador library, two books which have affinities with one another are placed together, next morning one will find three of them …”

While on the subject of ultra-subjective ways of classifying books, one should not omit to mention the great art historian Aby Warburg, who also had some serious psychological problems. The son of a wealthy Hamburg banker, he had, the story goes, sold to his brother Max his birthright as eldest son to run the family bank, in return for unlimited credit with which to buy books for the whole of his lifetime. That led to the 100,000 volumes of the
Warburg Institute, now housed in London, which has occupied such an important place in the history of art in the twentieth century. Originally private, Aby Warburg's library evolved continually, according to its owner's mental itinerary and his principle of the “law of good neighborliness.” His chief concern was the “survival of the ancient” and Fritz Saxl, who was the first librarian of the collection, himself testified that, “The arrangement of books on the shelves was disconcerting: anyone walking in would have found it odd, to say the least, that Warburg wore himself out moving them around all the time.” Ernst Cassirer, who had worked there, said at Warburg's funeral in 1929: “From the sequence of books there emerged, in ever clearer fashion, a series of images, themes and original ideas. And behind their complexity, I eventually came to see taking shape the clear and dominating figure of the man who had built up this library, and his personality as a researcher destined to have a far-reaching influence.”

More modestly, I can now offer a precise example of classification, the one I know best: my own. My library is arranged by genre and sub-genre, with books being placed alphabetically within sections. There are three main categories: literature; non-fiction (a terrible Anglicism, which unfortunately does not have a French equivalent); and the arts.

Literature is subdivided into languages, but the Catalans are in the Spanish section, Frédéric Mistral (who wrote in Provençal) is in the French section, and if the Scandinavian section contains books translated from Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and even
Norse, it also contains Finnish literature which, strictly speaking, ought to be shelved with Hungarian, or—why not?—with Estonian. But this would have been to infringe a kind of literary taboo, comparable, I must admit, to the very outdated theory of climate, and which would in any case have faced me with another problem: Finnish authors who write in Swedish. So the language of expression would have trumped the cultural community, something I refused to allow to happen. (The owner of a large library quickly becomes a kind of autocrat, going so far as to interfere even with other people's books. Visiting a colleague, I own up to having surreptitiously rearranged different volumes of a work which have got out of order, or turned a book round if it is lying on its side so that its title is upside down!) And I confess I have not yet found an acceptable solution for Frisian—for example, I have a copy of
Tjerne le Frisian
by Gysbert Japicx, translated into French by Henk Zwier. The translator tells us that Frisian is a language belonging to the Germanic group, very close to Old English, and that it is mostly spoken in the northern Netherlands. The book was oddly enough in the Scandinavian section when I finally traced it, but I am not sure I will put it back there! And I should perhaps say that I have an entire subsection bringing together, without any distinction of language of origin, all my crime novels and thrillers.

My non-fiction section has two main divisions, which are far from rigorous: abstract (consisting of philosophy, theology, history of religions, science, psychoanalysis, psychology, literary criticism, linguistics, literary history) and concrete (history, politics,
anthropology, autobiography, biography, and documents). I know, I know, this raises subtle questions of definition. Above all, there is the dilemma posed by authors both of theoretical works and of other books which take us closer to the material world. Should I put Norbert Elias's
What is Sociology
? next to his more historical works? Should Paul Veyne's
Comment on écrit l'histoire
(Writing history) be next to his studies of sexuality and euertegism (gift-giving) in ancient Rome?

The arts section is perforce much subdivided: music, cinema, photography, painting and drawing, architecture, exhibition catalogs and—for reasons of size—art history, criticism and aesthetics. These subdivisions are further divided: painting is by school (French, Italian, Flemish, German, etc.), the catalogs are split between museum catalogs by country, one-man shows, and thematic exhibitions (
Art in Medieval France; Pictures within Pictures; Melancholy
—and these are shelved chronologically). There is a whole bookcase containing art books that do not fall into any category. I will stop at this point, to spare the reader, but I could go on forever, pointing out exceptions or tricky cases—does Picasso count as French or Spanish? Modigliani as Italian or French? Giacometti as Swiss? Do I treat Bernini as a painter or a sculptor (oh yes, sculpture is another sub-section)—or, indeed, as an architect? And what am I to do with Michelangelo?

Finally, there is a large wall behind my worktable where I have shelved all my reference works—dictionaries of all kinds, lexicons (philosophical, psychoanalytic, gastronomy, etc.). But the
1970 edition of the
Encyclopedia Universalis
has recently had to be moved to a nearby room, for reasons of space (I had to make some room for works on French painting because there has been such a rapid expansion recently in the activities of museums and art publishers).

This apparently impeccable ordering is in fact unsettled by many individual cases that present knotty problems—these have been resolved in a particular way but might equally well have been decided otherwise—as well as by a number of perhaps more logical exceptions. It was very tempting to put all my Pléiade editions [a uniform series, leather-bound and on bible paper, published by Gallimard] in a special bookcase suited to their size, but some of them are in fact shelved with the other works by a given author. Some complete collections have interrupted the purely alphabetical order of their section. Periodicals are shelved in a special bookcase, but these too are sometimes placed by genre. Volumes in a collection called Les Cahiers de l'Herne, which has a particular shape, are in theory placed together, but since I have run out of space, some of them are with the other books by the author in question.

I can only find my way around because I have personally placed each book in its position, one by one, down the years, and any changes were thought about long enough at the time to enable me to remember them. But all this doesn't prevent me from sometimes searching high and low when trying to find, say, a book translated from Romanian or Dutch (including Flemish), while the
Walloons are in the French section. (The hypothetical partition of Belgium, so often talked about, has become fact in my library.) These sections are too specific to be easily included with others, but small enough to be moved from time to time, and too limited in number to be picked out at a glance. Sometimes I spend time looking for a book for which the logical place has been overtaken by events. Or failing to find a book that I know I have somewhere. Have I mis-shelved it or is it lost? I cannot always answer that question, or else it is answered too late, when I have already bought another copy. When that happens, should I keep both of them? And if not, then which one?