Diana Manister wrote:
> 
> Dear Nancy,
> 
> What could a "total library" possibly be? I'm surprised at
> this illusion that texts could somehow be totalized. I understand the
> intention to be more complete, but "total"?
> 
> I haven't read "The Library of Babel" but surely he qualifies the
> notion of totalization in it? I'll search it out.

I haven't read it either, but surely the title suggests that what
follows will be the illusory taken seriously? It would weaken the force
of "Babel" to propose anything but a "total" library. And if, as Nancy's
sources argue, he was influenced by "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," then it would not be true to his source to propose relistic
qualifications, for that essay with a straight face proposes that _all_
the existing monuments from Homer exist simultaneously. But of course
some of the existing monuments no longer exist: e.g. most of the plays
of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

A realistic library of all the books that can reasonably be collected in
it is a banal affair. But a _total library_! That makes the imagination
reel; it generates thought. It offers a perspective on the existing
"libraries" -- that is, those that exist in the heads of reders. You
have a library in your head consisting of books you have read, books you
have not read but know about, books that you have not read and know abut
and plan to read, trivial books that you have mostly forgotten but
fragments of which float in your consciousness, books you know about and
others think you should read but which  you have no intention of
reading, and so on.

Moishe Postone, _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_ (Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1997[?]). Chapter on the history of time. In the whole of human
history prior to developments in Europe between the 14th and 17th
centuries, and in most of the world until the 19th century, events
measured time rather than time measuring events. Medieval Europe as an
example: There were 24 events in the daily schedule of a monastery; 12
occurred at night; 12 occurred in the day. Each measured an hour. The
result was that a medieval hour was the same as our hour only at the
fall and spring equinoxes, because as fall turned to winger, the night
hours measured more than 60 minues and the day hours measured less than
60 minutes.

Now, whether you ever read it or not you  have another book in your
library. And your sense of it will be pretty confused, grounded only in
my very crude paraphrase of a long and complex chapter in the book.

Books exist only if they are preserved and made available. In principle
a library contains all those books. In vulgar practice, as you say, that
doesn't and can't happen. But surely there is nno way to seriusly think 
about actual libraries if we don't have a some kind of knoweldege ot THE
LIBRARY (or the existing monuments).

Carrol


> 
> Diana
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 22:04:34 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Interesting examples--Eliot and internationalism
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> I agree with this commentary, though I wonder how it can be made to
> exist in the current state of publishing.  Possibly one could have a
> total virtual library--though I love paper but could print out I
> assume--but how do you see a reader finding a way through a total
> library?  This is a real question--I think Borges is right, but the
> books that have been recovered have, ironically, been the ones in
> libraries.  Recovery has to include some distribution.
> Cheers,
> Nancy
> 
> >>> 01/03/10 7:55 PM >>>
> One strength of Borges' conception of the open, inclusive library is
> that texts disfavored at the time of their creation or subsequently
> but widely read and appreciated by later audiences and then again
> disfavored would have a perpetual home in the tradition, available for
> recovery and rereading. That approach would avoid the need for
> scholars like Judith Fetterley to "recover" and resurrect even
> relatively recent texts that a male dominated publishing industry has
> rendered unavailable. Borges' library is a helpful precondition for
> the preservation of work by incompletely or never enfranchised
> writers. It avoids the problem of Gray's unseen blushing rose and
> renders us the richer while at the same time permitting the
> possibility of learning from a wider range of thought than that
> allowed by a patriarchal tradition implicitly driven and limited by
> contemporary bias and the limits of market capitalism.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nancy Gish <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 4:37 pm
> Subject: Interesting examples--Eliot and internationalism
> 
> I think these are just examples of points of departure. [both come
> from the conclusions of the articles if you wish to check them.]  But
> both strike me as ways of thinking that are not present in most of
> what we read.  I do not have any investment in either claim; I just
> find them deeply interesting and unlike most Anglo-American
> discussions, though I think Hugh MacDiarmid took a line much like that
> of Borges in his vision of worldwide inclusion. I would love to hear
> reactions:
> 
> From "Jorges Luis Borges Rewrites Eliot" by Juan E. De Castro:
> 
> More than Eliot's Eurocentric and rather abstract literary order,
> Borges's tradition is a 'library, where ideally everything is
> preserved and where the system of preservation makes no distinction at
> all between good books and bad' (Guillory 1995, 240). The library is
> one of the central figures in Borges's writings; indeed, in 'Poem of
> the Gifts', he claims "I imagined paradise as a library' (1996m 146).
> Borges explored the notion of the 'total library'--a library that
> includes every possible book--in his essay of the same name and, in
> nightmarish terms, in his story, 'The Library of Babel'.
> 
> 
> . . .
> 
> Borges's conceptualization of tradition as a library implies a denial
> of qualitative classification based on influence, content, place of
> origin, language or putative quality.  Moreover, he hints at the
> possibility of a non-Eurocentric version of literary tradition that
> would include, but not be limited to, the literary monuments of
> Europe.  His denial of chronology and his privileging of the act of
> reading in the constitution of tradition is designed to empower
> writers from apparently marginal or supposedly new countries.  In
> this, as in his ability to combine Eutopean cultural elements with
> local Argentine and non-Western elements, Borges is indeed, as
> Aizenerg maintained, a 'postcolonial precursor', who is 'for
> postcolonial writers . . . a reference point beyond his general
> preeminence in a European-North American repertoire of culture'.
>      Yet it is necessary to keep in mind that Borges's vision of
> tradition is a modification--even radicalization--of ideas found in
> Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. Like Eliot, Borges is
> ultimately concerned with reconciling an awareness of literary
> tradition with innovation, in other words, of transforming the
> European and World traditions from cultural dead weights into sources
> of literary productivity and innovation.  By using Eliot as the
> theoretical starting point for conclusions that contradict the poet's
> Eurocentric vision of tradition, Borges exemplifies the manner in
> which European texts can be used against their grain.  At the same
> time, the very fact that Borges's critical innovations stem from the
> Anglo-American poet's influential essay testifies to the richness of
> Eliot's critical writings.
> ****************************
> 
> or from "T. S. Eliot and La Nouvelle Revue Française," by William
> Marx:
> 
>      Eliot's assertion of classicism, then, made it difficult for his
> French colleagues to understand his position.  The writers of the NRF
> could not reconcile the conservatism of Eliot's classicism with the
> radical modernism of his poetry, which seemed by French standards to
> embody a sort of anti-classicism.  The idea that Eliot's modern poetry
> could change the English tradition while supporting it seemed
> contradictory to French critics, for whom rejection was requisite to
> progress.  Anglo-Saxon modernism issued from a supple, ever-changing
> tradition, while French modernism rose up against classicism's
> limits.  Like any other French movement, it began as anti-classic, and
> was accepted as part of the classics only when a new movement rose up
> to defy it.  There are two different modernisms because there are two
> different ways of relating to the past, with rupture or with
> continuity: this was Eliot's lesson from La Nouvelle Revue Française.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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