Dreams of the Universal Library Andrew Hui What is every bibliophile’s fantasy if not the dream of an infinite library? The ending of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710) contains precisely this. As the German thinker’s only published book in his lifetime, the Theodicy responds to some of the most pressing questions of early modern philosophy—the compatibility between reason and faith, the goodness of God, human freedom, the origins of evil. After some three hundred pages of sustained (if at times digressive) ratiocination, the reader is presented with one of the more poetically arresting finales ever penned in a philosophical tract. The grand philosopher decides to tell a fable. Theodorus, a high priest, perplexed by how human freedom and divine foreknowledge can coexist, is summoned to a great “palace of the fates” by Pallas Athena.1 “Here,” the goddess says, “are representations not only of that which happens but also of all that which is possible.” He is led into different rooms, each containing “a great volume of writings.” Athena tells him to read anyone he pleases, for each page contains “in all its detail” the life of Sextus Tarquinius (T, pp. 370, 371, 372). Sextus had been distraught by a prophecy that foretold that his rape of Lucrece would bring an end to the Roman monarchy. He goes to the temple to ask why. He is Dedicated to John L. Logan, literature bibliographer extraordinaire at the Firestone Library of Princeton University. This paper was first presented to the Yale English Department Renaissance Colloquium. I thank Ayesha Ramachandran for the invitation and the incisive comments of David Quint, Eve Houghton, Ben Card. I am also grateful to the participants of an online forum for their very helpful suggestions: Morgan Ng, Timothy Kircher, Eric Song, Kristine Haugen, Jay Reed, Kimberley Skelton, and Florin-Stefan Morar. Jeffrey Schnapp, Marisa Galvez, Marshall Brown, and William Marx provided much needed encouragement at crucial moments. Finally, I appreciate the wise advice of Haun Saussy and the Critical Inquiry editorial board. 1. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard, ed. Austin Farrer (La Salle, Ill., 1985), p. 370; hereafter abbreviated T. The French text is Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal, ed. Jacques Brunschwig (Paris, 1969). Critical Inquiry, volume 48, number 3, Spring 2022. © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/718629 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 shown different versions of contrafactual history. In one, Sextus does not rape Lucrece and does not bring about the last days of his ancestors. Instead, he buys a small garden, becomes a rich man, and dies in ripe old age. In another, he marries the daughter of the king, ascends to the throne, and is adored by his subjects. What Theodorus reads, the goddess tells him, is “the history of this world,” “the book of its fates” (T, p. 371). Hall after hall, world after world, there are an infinitude of Sextuses, an endless number of possible worlds, but ultimately there is just the singular actual world that he inhabits. Then an incandescent vision: The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which completed the pyramid, and which was the most beautiful of all: for the pyramid had a beginning, but one could not see its end; it had an apex, but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. That is (as the Goddess explained) because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else would God not have determined to create any; but there is not any one which has not also less perfect worlds below it: that is why the pyramid goes on descending to infinity. Theodorus, entering this highest hall, became entranced in ecstasy. [T, p. 372] Leibniz’s point is clear: not only is our world, this world—no matter how awful it seems—the best of all possible worlds, but also that this life, our life, is the best of all possible lives. This, then, is the heart of his philosophy, encapsulated in a neat bibliographic myth. It is no accident that Leibniz’s philosophical vision of the best of all possible worlds (frequently mocked, most notoriously by Voltaire) is cast in the figure of the library, for he was a professional librarian. Yet today, scholars hardly pay any attention to his daytime job, and the studies of his library science remain few and highly specialized.2 And though book history as a discipline in a past 2. See Margherita Palumbo, Leibniz e la res bibliothecaria: Bibliografie, historiae literariae e cataloghi nella biblioteca privata leibniziana (Rome, 1993), “Leibniz as Librarian,” in The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz, ed. Maria Rosa Antognazza (New York, 2015), pp. 609–19; Ulrike Steierwald, Wissen und System: Zu Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theorie einer Universalbibliothek (Cologne, 1995); and L. M. Newman, Leibniz (1646–1716) and the German Library Scene (London, 1966). Much of these discussions are latent in Louis Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz: d’après des documents inédits (Paris, 1901). A n d r e w H u i is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2016) and A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019). His book in progress is on real and imaginary libraries. 523 524 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library decades has proved an especially vibrant field, attuned to the forms of materiality across time, there has been little interface with the more speculative, metaphysical theories of the library.3 This should not be, for the order of knowledge, the infinite possibilities of the world, the preestablished harmony of the universe, the modalities of human freedom—these puzzling philosophical problems Leibniz explores through the radiant figure of the pyramidal library. For Leibniz, the library was both theoretical and practical. In it, his metaphysics of the text intersects with his materiality of the book. As such, it becomes the ultimate system by which he encapsulates the totality of knowledge and his philosophy of human freedom. And this system—a bibliotheca universalis—is an extension of his early work on combinatory mathematics—a characteristica universalis—which later becomes an attempt to unify all of human knowledge into an encyclopaedia universalis.4 His theology is thus an extension of his metaphysics; and his idea of the library is an extension of his mathematics. Seen this way, his allegory of the library becomes a metaphor and metonym of his monadic universe. In truth, from Ashurbanipal to Timbuktu, from Alexandria to Google Books, from Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) to Alain Renais’s Tout la mémiore du monde (1956), humans have aspired to encapsulate the totality of knowledge within a circumscribed space.5 As it happens, two highly inventive minds of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges and Wim Wenders, also thought deeply about libraries. A librarian himself, Borges grappled with containing the infinite in the finite in all his works. Wenders, too, was transfixed by the library. A critical scene in Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987) occurs in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (fig. 1). The melancholy of the angel’s omniscience and the pathos of human desire are explored in its spirit-haunted stacks. All three in their irreducible ways attempt to capture the totality of knowledge, the totality of the world, the totality of human life in the absolute unit of the library. 3. For some speculative theories of the library, see William Marx, Vivre dans la bibliothèque du monde (Paris, 2020) and follow his 2020–2021 course, “Les bibliothèque invisible,” at the Collège de France, www.college-de-france.fr/site/william-marx/p51417994721090500_content.htm; Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book (Cambridge, Mass., 2017); and Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (New Haven, Conn., 2008). 4. See Arnaud Pelletier, “The Scientia Generalis and the Encyclopaedia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz, pp. 162–76. 5. For a learned and comprehensive study, see Konstantinos Staikos, The History of the Library in Western Civilization, 6 vols. (New Castle, Del., 2004–2013). For an extensive discussion of universal libraries and encyclopedias, see Dirk Werle, Copia librorum: Problemgeschichte imaginierter Bibliotheken 1580–1630 (Tübingen, 2007), pp. 390–538. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 FIGURE 1. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). In short, their dream of the total library is a story essentially about information management. “The perfect search engine,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin once claimed, “would be like the mind of God.”6 (To which John Durham Peters responds: “Google all but begs for a theological analysis. The history of conceptions of omniscience is also a history of database media in all their forms, an implicit catalog of different recording formats. . . . Ancient, modern; God, Google—the continuities are clear.”)7 Even before our age of big data, thinkers wrestled with how to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. They tried to answer this through the omniscient library. For Leibniz, it was the pursuit of theodicy; for Borges, a pseudocomputational cosmology; for Wenders, the speculative history of angelic descent. Thus to trace the history of the universal library from early modernity to the late twentieth century is to trace the transition from Leibniz’s belated medievalism to the secular, disenchanted age of Borges, Wenders, and beyond. The dream of the total library transcends history of ideas, literary criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, information management, theology. It is ubiquitous; therefore, it is elusive. In this essay, let us seek out its traces in order to examine how the fantasies of textual omniscience can change 6. Quoted in James B. Rule, “The Search Engine, for Better or Worse,” New York Times, 18 Mar. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/opinion/global/the-search-engine-for-better-or-for -worse.html 7. John Durham Peters, Marvelous Clouds: Toward A Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, 2015), pp. 335–38. 525 526 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library our understanding of the European genealogies of knowledge and, in particular, the prehistory of information theory.8 Let us track how the dream of the total library morphs from Leibniz’s assured hierarchy of knowledge to Borges’s and Wenders’s more anxious, fragmentary, epistemic regimes. Like many stories of modernity, this account of bibliographic secularization is haunted by the penumbra of theology; though redemption is denied in Borges and Wenders, the nostalgia for epistemic totality lingers. Let us, then, investigate how the universal library moves from an Enlightenment allegory for the supremacy of divine knowledge to a modern parable about the limitations of human algorithms in the twentieth century. Knowledge, decentered and leveled, becomes data or, worse, noise. Taken together, the dream of a total library constitutes a central episode in the great romance of the pursuit of encyclopedic knowledge. So, in a world awash in a superabundance of signs and symbols and systems, how does the human mind orient itself, what Ariadne’s thread can it grasp, what possibilities of free will lie therein its imaginary infinite stacks? Slips of Paper The seventeenth century. The baroque. The Wunderkammer. New Science. In an age swarming with polymaths, Leibniz was the consummate polymath.9 As Europe buzzed with the new science of quantitative measurements on the one hand and the antiquarian tradition of erudition on the other, Leibniz pirouettes effortlessly between these two. He developed, among many other things, the doctrine of preestablished harmony of soul and body, the principle that the ultimate realities are genuine unities, the infinite envelopment of organic creatures, combinatory calculus, and most famously, the idea of monads, or how each substance mirrors the entire world. With a network of over 1,300 correspondents, he also advocated for the establishment of academies of sciences, a reconciliation of Protestant and Catholic faiths, a method for draining flood water from mines, a theory of the Chinese language as natural signs, an audit system for public administration, life insurance for widows and orphans, and, not least, he was the 8. For recent, humanistic accounts, see Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair et al. (Princeton, N.J., 2021); Information: Keywords, ed. Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel (New York, 2021); Information: A Reader, ed. Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, and Lea Pao (New York, 2021); and James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York, 2011). 9. For a recent survey, see Peter Burke, The Polymath: Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (New Haven, Conn., 2020), pp. 65–72. See also Wilhelm SchmidtBiggemann, Topica Universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg, 1983). Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 resident genealogist in the House of Hanover, tracking down the Guelf ancestry of his illustrious employer.10 And he did all this in addition to his day job as a librarian. When the Theodicy was published in 1710, Leibniz was sixty-four years old. By that time, he had already spent his entire life immersed in libraries. His father, a professor of moral philosophy, died when he was six. Given free rein of his posthumous library, he nourished his precocious interests in everything. At the age of twenty-two, shortly after earning his doctor of jurisprudence from the University of Altdorf, Leibniz was named librarian to the duke of Hanover in 1676. In 1690, he was appointed privy councilor and ascended to the librarianship of one of the most celebrated ducal libraries in Europe—the Bibliotheca Augusta at Wolfenbüttel. It was founded in 1572 by Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1528–89) and extensively enlarged by Duke August II of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1579–1666)—both bibliomaniacs who spent their massive fortunes on books.11 By the mid-1660s the library swelled to some 130,000 volumes—the largest in Europe. When Montesquieu visited in 1729, he declared it “une véritable belle chose.”12 Leibniz’s ministration earned him renown. In 1695, he was offered the directorship of the Vatican Library, on the condition that he convert to Catholicism. He politely declined, remaining in his Wolfenbüttel post until his death in 1716. Data and Metadata As the opening sentence of Justus Lipsius’s De Bibliothecis (1602) announces: “The word bibliotheca refers to three things: a library, a bookcase, and a collection of books.”13 The central epistemological problem, then, is how to organize a collection of books—and find them—within an enclosed space. How does a library as an institution combine data (books) and metadata (bibliography)? To put books on a bookcase, in whatever order, is to classify knowledge, and to classify knowledge is to shape the world. As Michel Foucault and Roger Chartier have taught us, the order of books is the order of knowledge.14 And as Ann Blair has amply demonstrated, early 10. For an excellent overview, see Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (New York, 2009). 11. See the dated but still useful O. V. Heinemann, Die Herzogliche Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (Wolfenbüttel, 1894). 12. Quoted in Jonathan I. Israel, “The Universal Library,” in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York, 2001), p. 125. 13. Justus Lipsius, De Bibliothecis, trans. Thomas Hendrickson, in Hendrickson, Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The “De bibliothecis” of Justus Lipsius (Leiden, 2017), p. 67. 14. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1994), and Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe 527 528 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library modern humanists scrambled to make sense of the proliferation of books through various finding aids, catalogs, and newfangled information management systems.15 Leibniz, as the head of an illustrious grande bibliothèque, is too confronted with an epistemological problem of how to catalog an ever-expanding, unruly proliferation of print. His goal was to rationalize what was once a haphazard practice of book storage into a system that is at once philosophical and pragmatic. In the seventeenth century, the aristocratic library was a veritable baroque assemblage of Deleuzian folds—its collecting principles pellmell, guided more by a private patron’s idiosyncratic passion. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “The Renaissance explores the universe; the baroque explores libraries. Its meditations are devoted to books.”16 Resembling the eccentricities of the Wunderkammer, the holdings of a baroque library were often doctrinally limited, philosophically narrow, and scientifically antiquated— contrary to a systematic acquisition policy and robust bibliographies necessary to meticulous scholarship.17 In effect, Leibniz’s project was to turn what was an ostentatious aristocratic status symbol into a rational institution of érudition.18 Following Conrad Gesner’s procedures, Leibniz tamed the extravagances of the baroque into a somewhat classical order. He created an alphabetical author catalog, index nominalis, as well as a subject catalog, index materiarum. With the aid of two secretaries, he listed the extensive holdings of the library, cutting, sorting, and gluing them into “‘paper slips of all books, sorted pro materia et autoribus.’”19 This directory proved durable; it was to remain, well into the twentieth century, the only general catalog of Wolfenbüttel. For the media theorist Markus Krajewski, Leibniz’s contribution to the history of cataloging is precisely the use of these slips of paper: “For in contrast to the fixed entries of a continuous list on sequentially linear pages, paper slips can be reconfigured as freely mobile units in ever new arrangements” (P, p. 23). A slip of paper becomes indexical, serving “as a first pointer. . . . It also embodies a highly compressed between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, Calif., 1994). 15. See Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn., 2010). 16. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York, 1998), p. 140. For more on Benjamin and libraries, see Michael Taussig, “Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening,” Critical Inquiry 46 (Winter 2020): 421–35. 17. See Jeffrey Garrett, “The Legacy of the Baroque in Virtual Representations of Library Space,” Library Quarterly 74 (Jan. 2004): 42–62. 18. See H. G. Schulte-Albert, “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Library Classification,” Journal of Library History 6 (Apr. 1971): 133–52. 19. Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), p. 22; hereafter abbreviated P. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 data set that characterizes the book to be found” (P, p. 23). Through this method, the presentation of knowledge can be ordered, for the paper slip provides easy access to and thus understanding of the whole. In effect, the catalog functioned as instrument as well as structure: it was constitutive of the architectonics of knowledge itself. The Happiness of Mankind Early in his career, Leibniz had already a clear conception of his ideal library.20 Even before his appointment to Wolfenbüttel, he writes in 1680 that the library, in its highest ambition, “would be an Encyclopaedia, that is to say that one could learn from it all the matters of consequence and of practice.”21 In this regard Leibniz continues the dreams of the Alexandrian philologists when he suggests an ideal encyclopedia that would not only take in the traditional trivium and quadrivium of the arts and sciences but also architecture, optics, mechanics, physics and chemistry, mineralogy, botany and agronomy, biology and medicine, ethics, geopolitics, and natural theology. He writes: It is important for the happiness of mankind to establish some encyclopedia or an orderly collection of truths, to the extent that it will be useful to all things and thus to deduce all sufficient truths. It will be a kind of public treasury, to which will be brought all things which have been admirably discovered and observed.22 As Daniel Selcer explains, “the encyclopedia was to be both a comprehensive and generative text, its categorical structure not merely recording scientific, intellectual, historical, and literary achievements but functioning as a philosophical machine for the production and organization of knowledge.”23 In sum, the well-ordered library mirrors the well-ordered encyclopedia of nature, which is in turn a reflection of the well-ordered universe. In this way Leibniz’s encyclopedia pivots from medieval to early modern epistemology. Whereas older encyclopedias such as those of Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum maius or Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae were one-man jobs, keen to display the ramifying tree of knowledge, the modern encyclopedia was a social enterprise of horizontal collectivity. In other words, the early modern organization of knowledge, as exemplified later by Jean le Rond 20. See Antognazza, “A Universal Genius as Librarian,” in Leibniz, pp. 195–280. 21. Quoted in Palumbo, “Leibniz as Librarian,” p. 612. 22. Quoted in Pelletier, “The Scientia Generalis and the Encyclopaedia,” p. 163. 23. Daniel Selcer, Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (New York, 2010), pp. 63–64. Selcer explores how Leibniz is in dialogue with Lorenzo Valla’s Dialogue on Free Will and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; see pp. 22–57. 529 530 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library D’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s grand Encyclopedié, is centered upon the cogito of the human subject rather than the magisterium of divine revelation.24 What’s more, for Leibniz, the encyclopedic library is to be the crown jewel in a network of cultural institutions that includes a Kunstkammer, a rationalized Wunderkammer, a laboratory, and a printing press. For decades Leibniz advocated for the establishment of a German learned society.25 An early, unrealized plan dubbed Nucleus Librarius Semestralis (1668) would have collected significant excerpts from correspondence, diaries, and scientific notes, with the aim of building a Bibliotheca Universalis.26 Ultimately, all these publications, along with the complementary Atlas Universalis, were to provide the building blocks of an Encyclopaedia Universalis.27 In one sense, the resolute optimism in Leibniz’s vision of the universal library—both in the Theodicy and in his programmatic plans—was something of a necessity, given that the production of new knowledge provoked controversy at a pace not far behind the hellish scene that we will see in “The Library of Babel.” Leibniz sought order in everything so that his encyclopedic library would enable the scholar to serenely pursue the proliferating branches of scholarship—polymathia, polyhistoria, pansophism, and historia literaria—that flourished in the messy Republic of Letters.28 Restitution and Repetition Now mathematically, a library containing all possible books (and therefore all possible histories and knowledge of the world) is connected to Leibniz’s concept of the best of all possible worlds. What then is the best of all possible libraries? In 1715, five years after the Theodicy, Leibniz publishes a short essay with the curious title “Apokatastasis panton, La Restitution Universelle.” Apokatastasis in Greek means a reconstitution or restoration. Its conceptual origins are in both Stoic and Christian cosmologies. The movement of the cosmos repeats itself in regular periods, but when the planets and stars return to their proper positions, they would spark a conflagration 24. See Mary Franklin-Brown, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago, 2012); Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (New York, 2001); Cesare Vasoli, L’enciclopedismo del seicento (Naples, 1978); and Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und Biliotheca selecta: Das Problem des gelehrten Wissens in der frü hen Neuzeit (Cologne, 1992). 25. See Ayval Ramati, “Harmony at a Distance: Leibniz’s Scientific Academies,” ISIS 87 (Sept. 1996): 430–52. 26. See Hans Widmann, “Leibniz und sein Plan zu einem Nucleus Librarius,” Archiv fü r Geschichte des Buchwesens 4 (1963): 621–36. 27. See Antognazza, Leibniz, p. 239. 28. See Anthony Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopaedism,” in Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 166–80, and Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 after which the universe would be begin again, and so on ad infinitum. In Acts, Peter preaches that Jesus “must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration” (Gk: apokatastasis panton, 3:21). This then is developed by the church fathers from Origen to Gregory of Nyssa to signify the belief that all human souls, cleansed of sin, will achieve universal salvation.29 Leibniz takes this theology—at once teleological and recursive—and integrates it within a framework of mathematical calculus which in turn becomes the structuring principle of his universal library. He wants to make a biography for every person who’s ever lived. By making a formula from the combinations of the letters of the alphabet, Leibniz attempts to calculate the “number of all possible books.”30 He does this by restricting the possible length of a book to an arbitrarily finite size (no more than “100,000,000 letters”) (“AP”). He soon fantasizes a book of all books: For a book of a size sufficient to relate all the smallest details of what humans have done on all the earth within a year is certainly possible. Imagine that there are a thousand million humans on earth (a number from which humanity is most distantly removed), and that a book the size we granted to the public annual histories, thus of 100 million letters, is assigned to each human to relate a single year of his life down to the smallest details. For even if 10,000 hours are granted to a year, a sheet of 10,000 letters, that is, a page of 100 lines each with 100 letters, would still surpass what is needed to describe each hour of a human. [“AP”] This reiterative bibliotheca universalis is an extension of the characteristica universalis project, because, by virtue of the rules of ars combinatoria, any sign or symbol can become the basic unit in an efficient calculatory machine that generates an endless supply of meaning. Leibniz had already laid the intellectual foundation for this in his doctoral dissertation on the ars combinatoria (1666).31 Calculemus (“let’s calculate!”) was its rallying cry. This project of mathematical metaphysics grew and grew, eventually becoming nothing less than his comprehensive program of total knowledge. Leibniz 29. See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden, 2013). 30. Leibniz, “Apokatastasis panton,” trans. David Forman, philarchive.org/archive/LEIAPA-4; hereafter abbreviated “AP.” 31. See Umberto Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), p. 46. Ars combinatoria has its origins in thirteenth-century Catalan mathematician and theologian Llull. See Ramon Llull, “Ars brevis,” in Doctor Illuminatus: A Roman Llull Reader, trans. and ed. Anthony Bonner (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 289–364. 531 532 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library concludes that “if humanity endured long enough in its current state, a time would arrive when the same life of individuals would return, bit by bit, through the very same circumstances” (“AP”). It is precisely and paradoxically in the eternal repetition of seemingly random things that the order of the world can be found. In so doing, Leibniz secures the epistemological foundations of his best of all possible worlds that is articulated in the Theodicy. This, however, came at a heavy price. Leibniz was one of the last thinkers to unify mathematics with theology.32 In fact, in coupling quantitative measurement with theology, he unwittingly displaces the theodicy, because the operation of mathematics can now predict the operation of divine providence and thereby eclipse it. Mathematics is no longer the Neoplatonic pursuit that brings us closest to the divine but rather a secular science of quantification. Thus, big data is born. Algorithm does the work that allegory once did. Eventually statistics is used for social order and governmentality.33 Soon enough, an entity known as the “cloud”—“a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources”—became a sort of digital universal library; its center nowhere but presence everywhere.34 A Delirious God The fantasy of the universal library continued well after Leibniz. As John Durham Peters explores in Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, scientists, psychologists, and poets embraced it.35 For Charles Babbage, who invented the first programmable computer (by way of his difference engine and the Analytic Engine), the total archive was without walls and its mode of inscription beyond alphabetic signs. In an 1838 lecture with the expansive title “On the Permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the Globe We Inhabit,” he rhapsodizes in that “the air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful 32. See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1986). 33. See Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 34. Peter Mell and Timothy Grance, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” National Institute of Standards and Technology, special publication, Sept. 2011, p. 2, nvlpubs.nist.gov /nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf 35. This paragraph is indebted to Peters, Marvelous Clouds, pp. 341–42, 346. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 will.” What’s more, “every shower that falls, every change of temperature that occurs, and every wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, indeed, and imperceptible, perhaps, to us, but not the less permanently recorded in the depths of those woody fabrics.”37 With enough computational powers, one would be able to perceive and retrieve and comprehend these traces—that is, nothing less than the cosmos itself. For psychologists, the body becomes the archive of human experience. William James writes in the Principles of Psychology (1890) that “down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting [experience], registering and storing it up. . . . Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, ever wiped out.”38 And Sigmund Freud in 1925 says that the mystic writing pad is a metaphor for the “perceptual apparatus of our mind.”39 No wonder, then, that for Stéphane Mallarmé, “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre” (“everything in the world exists to end up in a book”).40 Kurd Lasswitz, who has been called the father of science fiction, parodies this topos in a short story entitled “Die Universalbibliothek” (1901). A math professor, at a dinner of friends, just for fun, attempts to calculate all the books in the universe: 36 “So, if we put together our 100 characters, which can repeat at random, in any kind of order, so that they fill up a volume of a million letters, then we’d get a written work of some kind. And if we imagined every possible combination that can be made in this way in a purely mechanical manner, then what we’d have is precisely the collected works of everything that has ever been written in the past or can be written in the future.” Burkel gave his friend a powerful slap on the shoulder. “Hey, I’m going to subscribe to the universal library. . . . The replacement of the writer by the combinatorial machine! A triumph of technology!” 36. Charles Babbage, “On the Permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the Globe We Inhabit,” The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, vol. 9 of The Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Martin Campbell-Kelly (New York, 1989), p. 36. 37. Babbage, “Note M: On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, p. 111. 38. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York, 1950), 1:127. 39. Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ ” (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953–74), 19:232. 40. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel,” Divagations (Paris, 1942), p. 275. 533 534 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library “What?” cried Mrs. Wallhausen. “The library contains everything? Even all of Goethe? The Bible? The complete edition of the works of every philosopher who has ever lived?”41 Notice now the tectonic shift from Leibniz to Lasswitz; what was once the sublime figure of divine providence is now reduced to a cocktail party trick, a mere mathematical formula to impress your guests. Borges’s three-page meditation “The Total Library” (1939) traces the topos from the Presocratics to Aristotle to modern writers and mentions this story. Borges recognizes that there is something more serious lurking here. The first sentence states plainly: “The fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues.” The last sentence states equally plainly that the invention of a total library is a total “hell,” concluding that “I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wilderness of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.”42 “The Library of Babel” (1941), of course, precisely dramatizes this bibliographic “hell.” Borges’s modus operandi is such that every absurd postulate is pushed to its extreme logical consequences. First, the parenthetical cunning of the first line perfectly captures the irony of its conceit: “The universe (which others call the Library).” Second, “The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.”43 (An obvious parody of Nicholas of Cusa’s dictum that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.)44 Third, the library is total: it contains all books actual and possible. (To be precise: 251,312,000 books, according to the mathematician William Goldbloom Bloch.)45 Fourth, “an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls . . . is God.” Fifth, “In all the library there are no two identical books.” And finally: “The Library is unlimited but periodic” (“LB,” pp. 113, 114–15, 118). 41. Kurd Lasswitz, “The Universal Library,” Mithila Review, trans. Eric Born, 19 Sept. 2017, mithilareview.com/lasswitz_09_17/ 42. Jorge Louis Borges, “The Total Library,” trans. Eliot Weinberger, in Selected NonFictions, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Weinberger, ed. Weinberger (New York, 1999), pp. 214, 216. 43. Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York, 1998), pp. 112, 113; hereafter abbreviated “LB.” For the manuscript and publication history, see Daniel Balderston, How Borges Wrote (Charlottesville, Va., 2018). 44. See Nicholas of Cusa, “On Learned Ignorance,” in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York, 1997), p. 161. 45. See William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel (New York, 2008), p. 17. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 Initially, an explosion of “extravagant happiness” erupts when it was announced that an “eloquent solution” to all the problems of the world was lurking somewhere in its hexagonal stacks. But things turn to a hot mess quickly. Instead of peacefully celebrating “The Vindications—books of apologiae and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe”—riots, insurrections, and epidemics break out (“LB,” p. 115). And spurred by the hope of a book “that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books,” inquisitions, macabre rituals, suicides emerge (“LB,” p. 116). In short, the Borgesian library is the evil twin, the dark inverse of the Leibnizean library. Instead of a serene temple of knowledge, Borges’s feverish bibliomania turns out to be an epistemic horror house. The Pyramid and Hexagons The pyramid and hexagon: Leibniz uses the former, and Borges uses the latter. The first is a “good” sort of infinity, whereas the second is a “bad” sort. As Frances Yates’s Art of Memory (1966) has taught us, since antiquity, the order of memory is always given in visual-spatial metaphors or images.46 The architectonics of the mind follows the architecture of space. Whereas most medieval monastic libraries employed a “stall system”—fixed bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls pierced by closely spaced windows, in the early modern library, bookcases were arranged parallel to and against the walls.47 In this manner, the wall system promises the humanist in one glance the universe of knowledge.48 Ideally, the library would mirror the architectonics of the intellectual system of universal knowledge, such as Giulio Camillo’s theater of memory, discussed in chapter 6 of Yates’s book. By 1747 the Benedictine savant Oliverius Legipontius could confidently proclaim that “looking at a book collection should be like seeing the entire history of learning in a mirror.”49 In the physical world, Leibniz desires that “an encyclopaedia or science universelle [would be] enclosed in three or four rooms.” In his metaphysical fantasy, however, he conjures something that is impossible in reality: a pyramid 46. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966). See also Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografici nell’eta della stampa (Turin, 1995). 47. See Nikolaus Pevsner, “Libraries,” in A History of Building Types (Princeton, N.J., 1976), pp. 94–102. See also James W. P. Campbell, The Library: A World History (Chicago, 2013), pp. 60–120. 48. See Eric Garberson, “Libraries, Memory and the Space of Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Collections 18 (Dec. 2006): 105–36, and Kimberley Skelton, “The Malleable Early Modern Reader: Display and Discipline in the Open Reading Room,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (June 2014): 183–204. 49. Quoted in Paul Nelles, “Libraries and Catalogues,” in Information, p. 586. 535 536 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library in which the base “extends continually into the infinite.”50 This is certainly a potent symbol; for the ancient Egyptians, the pyramid was the ultimate cipher, a sublime figure of pure geometry that intersects eternity and temporality. When the absolute unit of the pyramid moves from the square ground through four sides to the tip of the apex, geometry and metaphysics become one. If Leibniz is the seraph of the universal library, Borges is its chief heresiarch. If the dream of the universal library is the utopia of pure knowledge, what Borges gives us is the dystopia of unintelligibility. (On the penultimate page of one book in the library is inscribed “O Time thy pyramids” [“LB,” p. 114].) Borges’s genius is that he seizes every trope and topos of the universal library and fulfills its fondest desires by making a delirium out of them. He takes scrupulous (if not fastidious) care in the description of the library’s physical space: a cellular mise en abyme composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. [“LB,” p. 112] This hexagonal system of cells is reminiscent of a honeycomb, and its stacking constitutes a massive beehive. If the pyramid is an early modern figure for arcane knowledge and the origins of human culture, we might find here the concept of the swarm, the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. By design, the Library of Babel transgresses the limits of the describable.51 In fact, its network of hallways, latrines, sleeping cells, and banisters is nothing but the configuration of possible texts, endlessly repeated, combined, dissociated, and scrambled. But all things undergoing such operations, as we have learned from Leibniz, will inevitably form a decipherable pattern at some point. The slim hope is that mathematically and metaphysically, Babel will be redeemed in the Pentecost, the confusion of tongues consummated by the tongues of fire. Does it? 50. Antognazza, Leibniz, pp. 226, 160. 51. There have been various attempts to visualize the library. See Jonathan Basile, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality (Milky Way, 2018); Cristina Grau, Borges y la arquitectura (Madrid, 1989). Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 The Oulipian Georges Perec in “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books” (1978) writes that “we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable.”52 The assemblage of any collection is chaotic and arbitrary. The trick is to organize this chaos, while acknowledging that it is impossible to do so. Perhaps, as Friedrich Nietzsche suggested, “a labyrinthian man does not look for truth, he forever seeks only his Ariadne.”53 Accordingly, the Borgesian library has no center nor exit. It doesn’t even have an entrance. There can be no redemption in the stacks of Babel, no clarity from the confusion of tongues. Borges’s confabulations inspired thinkers from across the philosophical spectrum. For Foucault (who references Borges frequently, not just the ruptured laughter over the celebrated Chinese encyclopedia that launches The Order of Things), the library is the “enchanted domain” of mathematicians and tyrants: “There is a dilemma: either all these books are already contained within the Word and they must be burned, or they are contradictory and, again, they must be burned.”54 For W. V. Quine, this brutal binary expresses the ultimate absurdity of binary notation. A universal library, he states, is in fact composed of only two volumes, “one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters.”55 By now, the distance we have traversed from Leibniz has been far; the universal library is finally detheologized. It is now diagnosed as either a symptom of ideology or a computational error. Angelic Melancholy What, then, does this all have to do with the metaphysics of human freedom? To answer this question, I turn to The Wings of Desire, a work that, while perhaps lacking in the philosophical profundities of Leibniz or Borges, does teach us something about angelic knowledge and human finitude. Though some readers might find Wenders perhaps a bit too middlebrow, trite, or even as a dip into bathos, I do believe that Wings of Desire exhibits 52. Georges Perec, “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. and ed. John Sturrock (New York, 2008), p. 155. 53. Quoted in Paul Valadier, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (New York, 1977), p. 251. 54. Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), p. 67. 55. W. V. Quin, “Universal Library,” in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 225. 537 538 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library some of the qualities of a “vernacular metaphysics” that Robert Pippin attributes to the best films: they can be “modes of reflective thought.”56 Wings of Desire forces us to question why we would want to know everything. What is its price? Is it worth it? The premise of the film is simple: an all-knowing angel, Damiel, bored by his immortality, falls in love with a human. Deathless and omniscient, the angelic hierarchy has no use for books or libraries—they themselves are the archivists of the world, holding within all divine foreknowledge and human memory. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies: “And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from!”57 (Wenders acknowledges that “reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.”)58 In the words of one critic, Wenders limns the “tedium of immortality.”59 Angels have no surprise, no wonder, no frisson of the unexpected. They yearn to feel the haptics of the flesh and the saturated phenomena of the sensual. Sitting in an open BMW convertible in a car dealership, one says to another: “But it would be nice to come home after a long day, to feed the cat like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever, fingers stained black by reading the newspaper. To be excited not just by the mind, but by a meal. The curve of a neck, an ear. To lie! Through one’s teeth! To feel your bones as you walk along. To be able to say: ‘Ah,’ ‘oh’ and ‘hey’ instead of ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen.’” Wenders writes that “All these things escape the angels. They are pure CONSCIOUSNESS, fuller and more comprehending than mankind, but also poorer.”60 This angelic anatomy of melancholy is dissected in several crucial scenes that occur in the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin. As Wenders has said: Since angels are not really linked between people and God anymore we could not do a church, so we tried for another place. Then I remembered the ending of one of my favorite films, Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, which is in this big open space, and there are all these people and everybody represents a book that they have learned by heart because books are persecuted and burned; and to me that was really a 56. Robert B. Pippin, Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (Chicago, 2020), pp. 203, 7. 57. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, in Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston, 1977), p. 59. 58. Wim Wenders, “Le Souffle de l’Ange,” in The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (Boston, 1991), p. 109. 59. Aaron Smuts, “Wings of Desire Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” Film and Philosophy 13 (2009): 137–50. 60. Wenders, “An Attempted Description of an Indescribable Film: From the First Treatment for Wings of Desire,” in The Logic of Images, p. 81. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 vision of paradise, with all these people walking around and sitting on benches in the park. I thought this is a heavenly place, a library, and then we found this big public library in Berlin, and it’s really a wonderful place, with a lot of light, and built with a lot of respect for reading and books, and also so peaceful and quiet. There is also the whole memory and knowledge of mankind united there.61 The postwar Staatsbibliothek is the site where the arc of angelic descent plunges into the facticity of history. In the first scene at the library, the soundtrack of murmuring human thoughts interweaves with a celestial chorus. All the humans in the library are searching for something (fig. 2). In quiet devotion, they read and scribble. The angels, in their state of perpetual blessedness, don’t need to seek or to find or to strive, for they simply are. They do not, however, possess bliss. They are voyeurs without sin, eavesdroppers who gossip nothing but the truth. The humans within the library are in a state of absorption, all solitary in their collectivity. This communal gathering is not oriented toward God but the textual devotion of print. The library is now a postsacred temple where the congregation seeks salvation, not through faith alone, but through the works of the mind. They read, take notes, memorize, learn, forget, get bored, nap. Its Stimmung makes it conducive to melancholia. In the second scene, a saturnine man who resembles Borges (or Homer) sits at a table with globes of various sizes (fig. 3). He is spellbound by a model of the solar system: “Tell me, muse, of the storyteller. . . . Those who listened to me became my readers.” The camera cuts to him sitting at a different table, now flipping through a large book of August Sander’s monumental People of the Twentieth Century project (fig. 4). In the third, the library is closed, only the cleaners are there, vacuuming. But the angels remain, searching for consolation within its cavernous stacks (fig. 5). The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin has its historical roots in Leibniz’s time. Through the centuries, it evolved from the Electoral and Royal Library to that of the Prussian State administration. In the twentieth century, it endured the Nazi regime as well as the split between East and West Berlin. In 1962, as the Wall was rising, Western city officials commissioned the architects Hans Scharoun and Edgar Wisniewski to design a new building (fig. 6).62 61. Wenders, “Wenders’s Method of Making Films: ‘I Prefer Movies That Ask Me to See,’ ” interview by Ira Paneth, in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, ed. Roger F. Cool and Gerd Gemünden (Detroit, 1997), pp. 68–69. 62. See Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (London, 1995), pp. 174–95. 539 540 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library FIGURE 2. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). The architecture of early modern European libraries can be categorized into two typologies: the wall system with a half-cylindrical roof or the central rotunda. The former was conceived in Étienne-Louis Boullée’s unrealized Bibliothèque nationale (fig. 7). And the latter, a circular dome, is ultimately derived from the Pantheon, but the first purpose-built domed library was indeed in Wolfenbüttel, conceived by Leibniz himself and constructed by the Royal Building Administrator (Bauverwalter) Hermann Korb (1656–1735) FIGURE 3. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 FIGURE 4. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). (figs. 8–9).63 The rotunda form had a more lasting influence than Boullée: the main reading rooms of Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera (1737–48), the British Library (1854–57), and the Library of Congress (1886–92) all follow Leibniz’s design.64 Scharoun and Wisniewski’s design is markedly different. They were exponents of an unapologetically modern architecture, yet their library also anticipated the postmodern multifolded exuberances of Frank Gehry (pli selon pli by way of Mallarmé and Pierre Boulez). There is a sense of immense horizontality in their Staatsbibliothek. Clad in large glass façades, the reading room itself is a huge, cavernous space with a multitude of floors linked by stairs and stepped terraces (fig. 10). With its variegated, modular levels, the Staatsbibliothek exemplifies the multiple modalities of modernism rather than the unifying singularity of the Enlightenment style. But the terrace typology here shares with the rotunda a unique theatrical quality, except that it allows the viewer to survey the books arrayed around from a multiplicity of positions.65 63. See Hans Reuther, “Das Gebäude der Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel,” in Leibniz: Sein Leben, sein Werken, seine Welt, ed. Wilhelm Totok and Carl Haase (Hanover, 1966), pp. 355–56. 64. See Geoffrey Tyack, “Round Reading Rooms: The Architectural History of the Herzog August Bibliothek and the Radcliffe Camera,” Bodleian Library, German Manuscripts Collection, 2 July 2019, hab.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/en/blog/blog-post-9 65. Scharoun’s Philharmonie is also in the terraced style and offers less hierarchical sightlines, as opposed to the more rigid horseshoe style typical of traditional concert halls. 541 542 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library FIGURE 5. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). In my reading, Wings of Desire continues the metaphysical problems posed in Leibniz and Borges: the possibility of human knowledge and its relationship to freedom. Wenders’s angels demonstrate that you can have either complete knowledge or human freedom but not both. For Thomas Aquinas, angels are pure, perfect intellects, self-subsistent forms with incorporeal 6. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin from Haus Potsdamer Strasse, 1978. Image: Staatsbibliothek Berlin (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). FIGURE Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 FIGURE 7. Commons. Étienne-Louis Boulleé, Proposal for French National Library, 1785. Wikimedia bodies.66 With their cosmic powers, they reveal the intelligible truth to human beings through the analogies of mortal language. And angels, Michel Serres once argued, partake in the modern myth of wireless communication because they are the ancient aerial hermeneuts forever shuttling between the heavens and earth.67 In the film, Damiel goes rogue—he trades the monochromatic library for the colorful palette of the circus. The temptation to taste the sublime combination of coffee and cigarette (memorably praised by Peter Falk, who plays a crusty, veteran fallen angel) was just too great to resist. As soon as he falls from grace, the film switches from blackand-white to color. Wenders has mentioned the influence of Benjamin and Rilke. Yet instead of being awesome (“Every angel’s terrifying”)68 or apocalyptic (“a storm is blowing from Paradise”),69 his angels are human, all too human. They seem to say, “so what if the air contains all that can be known, who cares if the total archive is already inscribed in our psyches? We are lords of the air and have no bodies. We know everything already. Our cognition has no past or future, only the gray eternity of the present.” Nietzsche did, after all, say 66. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, www.newadvent.org/summa/1050.htm 67. See Michel Serres, La Légende des Anges (Paris, 1993). 68. Rilke, Duino Elegies, p. 5. 69. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, 4 vols., trans. Zohn et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 4:392. 543 544 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library 8. Interior of the Bibliothekrotunde, 1888. Image: Herzog August Bibliothek (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). FIGURE that we all need more than a little willful forgetting to keep life going forward.70 The ancients knew this well. Cicero tells the story of how when Simonides offered to teach Themistocles the art of memory, he replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting. Wenders’s angels took precisely this plunge into oblivion. 70. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, 1980). Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 9. Ground plan of the Bibliothekrotunde, 1723–1787. Image: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). FIGURE So perhaps the dream of the universal library is nothing but a feeble antidote to Benjamin’s notion of history, that “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”71 But if Leibniz’s gnostic dream of apokatastasis is true, then all disorder ends up as order: “If humanity endured long enough in its current state, a time would arrive when the same life of individuals would return, bit by bit, through the very same circumstances. I myself, for example, would be living in a city called Hanover located on the Leine river, occupied with the history of Brunswick, and writing letters to the same friends with the same meaning” (“AP,” p. 2). The last line of “The Library of Babel” reads: “If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same 71. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” p. 392. 545 546 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library FIGURE 10. Film still from Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984). disorder—which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope” (“LB,” p. 118). Wenders responds by insisting that only angels can experience such elegant Order. But they were so unhappy they gave it all up. When Damiel falls in love with a woman—a trapeze artist, no less—his desire for freedom and the yearnings of his flesh trump his blessed state of beatitude. No more omniscience. No more amens and hallelujahs. To hell with libraries, the angels proclaim. All hail human finitude. The Endless Mirror Leibniz, too, celebrates the finitude of human freedom—but from a very different direction. As we have seen, the universal library at the end of the Theodicy resolves two paradoxes at the heart of Leibniz’s thought. First, monads are absolutely unique entities, without relations to any other monads, yet they replicate the essence of every other monad. It is not difficult, then, to see how a long line of Western thinkers can affirm that the world is a book, and the book is a world.72 Second, human freedom and divine foreknowledge. The palace contains an infinity of possible books but culminates in a single, actual book (the optimum, the best of all possible bookworlds). In its magnitude, it reconciles the problem of finite form and infinite extension. Every book in Athena’s library—and each letter, word, and sentence 72. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt, 1979), and Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Book as Symbol,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1953), pp. 302–47. Critical Inquiry / Spring 2022 within it—correspond to some series of predicates in the life of Sextus, which in potential is infinite but in actuality finite.73 In sum, singular things are at once ontologically identical to and independent of the universe of which they are a part. Hence, we can all be autonomous free agents. In our age of information superabundance, the clean and clear omniscience provided by Leibniz still holds a certain appeal. Alas, if only our libraries were really such elegant palaces of cool transparency. Borges was correct: they are all labyrinths. Wenders too: we are all fallen angels. I find it telling that the Theodicy (driven by so many haranguing arguments and polemical rebuttals) has to end by not the rigors of analysis but the fables of allegory. Is the philosopher admitting that the best demonstration is not mathematics but poetry? In all, the dream of reason produces the enlightenment of Leibniz as well as the delirium of Borges. If we look at fantasies of the library from Qin Shihuang to the Grand Inquisitor, from Savonarola to Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1980), books are always if not already on the edge of total conflagration. “Every few centuries the Library at Alexandria must be burned,” a character says in “The Congress.”74 In Foucault’s bibliothèque fantastique, books dream of other books.75 The universal library at once affirms and denies our yearning for the unity of all things. One corollary of our investigation is to affirm the truism that life reflects literature and literature reflects life. This is of course the endless selfreferentiality of language. Life, literature: at least one of them is an illusionary replication. After all, you can make infinite images of anything by just holding up two mirrors facing each other. In this funhouse of representation, signs and the signified have a one-to-one but sterile correspondence. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, once said he would like to have a biography of every human on the planet (which is just another version of Brin’s confidence that Google is the mind of God).76 We have seen how Leibniz had already anticipated this: “a book of a size sufficient to relate all the smallest details of what humans have done on all the earth within a year is certainly possible” (“AP,” p. 2). But in our age of the Anthropocene, must we not acknowledge that this too is just a tad anthropocentric? Why not every object 73. The concept bears comparison with the Vedic doctrine of Indra’s Net, as expounded in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Each jewel in the net is connected to each other and reflects the inner nature of all and one. The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism develops this as the interpenetration of all things. See Luis O. Gómez, “The Whole Universe as a Sūtra,” in Religions of Asia in Practice: An Anthology, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J., 2002), pp. 216–21. 74. Borges, “The Congress,” in Collected Fictions, p. 343. 75. See Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 92. 76. See Gleick, The Information, p. 384. 547 548 Andrew Hui / Dreams of the Universal Library in the world? Or every atom, for that matter? This is, after all, the terrifying realization of “In Exactitude in Science”: when map becomes territory.77 Only then will language become the same as the other. This is, after all, the imperialism of epistemology—when it subsumes ontology. It follows then that there is the obverse idea of the book, not a one-to-one model of correspondence but of reduction. Foucault asks, “if we make a book which tells of all the others, would it or would it not be a book itself? Must it tell its own story as if it were a book among others? Why should it omit its own story, since it is required to speak of every book?”78 Leibniz, Borges, and Wenders all have created such metaworks. How many degrees of self-reflexivity must there be? Is it all data and metadata and turtles all the way down? Maybe, when the universal library is ultimately reduced to an atom, a point without parts, a monad, it will at last murmur to us that only in recognizing ourselves in the imperfect mirror of mimesis, only in accepting the fact that our lives are always already inscribed in some random book in some library in some dim corner of the universe can we find true freedom. 77. Eco gives an exegesis in Eco, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1995), pp. 95–106. See also the highly interesting Peters, “Resemblance Made Absolutely Exact: Borges and Royce on Maps and Media,” Variaciones Borges 25 (2008): 1–23. 78. Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” p. 67.