With the Lobsters into Sea

Professor Christopher Pressler, Manchester University Librarian, and colleagues invited Alberto Manguel to deliver the inaugural John Rylands University of Manchester Lecture, to mark the Library’s 125th anniversary. Introducing the event, Professor Pressler celebrated Manguel’s unique place as a modern man of books, who had inspired his own decision to become a librarian.

Born in Argentina in 1948, Manguel is known for many things: as one of Jorge Luis Borges’s readers from 1964 to 1968, as his eventual successor as director of the National Library of Argentina; as a novelist, essayist, translator, anthologist, editor. Since 2021 his home has been in Lisbon where he directs the international centre for reading studies, named the Espaço Atlântida in 2023.

Among his wonderful books – apart from fiction and essays – are his Dictionary of Imaginary Places (a collaboration with Giani Guadalupi); A History of Reading; The Library by Night; and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: a biography.

I first came to hear about the John Rylands Library rather late in life thanks to two people and a book. The book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, whose Hogwarts Library (a review informed me) was inspired by the decor of the Rylands. The two people were, one, Michael Schmidt who, together with Professor Christopher Pressler, rashly issued an invitation to talk to you tonight; and two, library curator Stella Halkyard, whom I hadn’t met until now, but whose magical book of her wanderings through the Rylands archive I had the privilege of introducing. So here I am, feeling honoured and thankful.

But allow me to begin much earlier, some seven decades ago, when I was first told the story of Adam and Eve by my nanny. What impressed me most was not the cautionary lessons of the tale – don’t share your food with anyone, always look a gift horse in the mouth – but the palindrome with which, according to my nanny, Adam introduced himself to Eve: ‘Madam, I’m Adam’.

My German-speaking Czech nanny taught me German and English. I discovered very early on that she mysteriously lacked any sense of humour, after she wondered out loud, seeing Chaplin slip on a banana peel, why he had failed to see the peel lying there in front of him. However, having been brought up in Deutsche Kultur, she loved language and everything that language could do, even the jokes of which she couldn’t see the point. In German, she taught me the ballads of Goethe and Gustav Schwab; in English, nursery rhymes, nonsense verse, puns, tongue-twisters, silly riddles and palindromes. This, I believe, was my introduction to the art of poetry.

I didn’t learn Spanish until I was eight. But even before Spanish, I realised that speaking one language or another, I had to follow secret rules that allowed me to say certain things to certain people, and to think certain things and not others. When trying to express what I felt in a very personal way, German allowed me to name a condition called Selbstgefühl. If I had to say the same thing in English, I knew it would require a long string of words, and the precise meaning of the feeling would become, if not lost, at least very diluted. The language in which I spoke determined not only what I could say, conjuring up certain ideas in my mind, but also how I could say it, down to the tone of my voice.

My voice changes depending on the language I speak, and I have often thought that I’m a different person when I speak German, Spanish or English. Maybe that explains why certain authors, admired and much read in one language, are dismissed or neglected in another. Juan Rulfo has never become a classic in English as he is in Spanish; P. J. Wodehouse is unknown in French, as Raymond Queneau is in English. Maybe the only way a reader has to enjoy a book fully in a certain language is by being taught by that language how to think anew. Adam’s palindrome must have worked for Eve because, the Talmudist commentators tell us, the language of Eden contained all those to come, English included. None of our languages today have that omnivorous quality.

Libraries are the repositories of what a certain language teaches us to think. A copy of Don Quixote in Spanish is commonplace, even necessary, in a Spanish library; in a library in Taiwan, not so much. Certainly, libraries can be, and many are, multilingual, but even then, a library set up within a specific linguistic area, belonging to a society defined by a specific language, will imbue its contents with the main rules, quirks and strictures of that language. An English library will unconsciously allow for works of authors who understand a limerick and rejoice in a mystery, and who acknowledge with Sir Thomas Browne that ‘our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors’. No English library, even post-Brexit I hope, follows the example of Mr Podsnap and refuses entry in its short memory to certain books, exclaiming like Mr Podsnap, with a dismissive wave of the arm, ‘Not English!’ And yet, in an English library, everything becomes, I feel, Englished. Let me try to explain.

In a certain sense, libraries follow the problematic notion of inclusiveness conjured up in ancient Greece, where every city-state enjoyed territorial sovereignty, decreed its own laws, was protected by its own gods, and boasted a citizens’ assembly that, while seeing itself as egalitarian, excluded minors, foreigners, women and slaves. Like those ancient city-states, most libraries dutifully define themselves as ambitiously all-inclusive, and yet they can only act within the possibilities allowed by their own laws, striving to find, like many of our societies today, conciliatory and compassionate strategies that fall between blind admission for all and reasonable limits to an ever-increasing immigration.

Wholesome ambition, like insatiable greed, has its shadow side. Alexandria, to go back to the classic example, wanted to contain every book that reached its shores; in consequence, the Alexandrian librarians set up the first systematic library catalogue in the West to assist bewildered readers in search of guidance, listing books that the librarians deemed worthy, and leaving out others laid down alike in the dust, where the worms, as the Book of Job warns us, shall cover them. However welcoming a library’s doors might be, even Alexandria could not contain everything.

Every library, even the most generous, exists under the shadow of some form of censorship – ideological, spatial, aesthetic, budgetary – that will necessarily lead to whimsical euthanasia. For any number of reasons, there will always be cases when the aliens are excluded: alien understood as anyone or anything that fails to follow the institution’s dogma.

The reason for the exclusion can be political. This spring, for instance, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, under pressure from the Trump administration, shuttered its thirty-year-old ‘Choices’ curriculum, a veritable library of social studies, and withdrew its many attendant publications. To justify this censorious act, Brown University argued that the market for its programme had decreased, in part because of ‘recent pressures to eliminate curricula that consider race, gender, colonialism, etc’. Burning its bridges, Brown University decided not to allow other publishers to acquire their ‘Choices’ material, eliminated the ‘Choices’ archives from the university’s website, and forbade the staff to distribute over $200,000 worth of lesson plans already printed.

The reason for exclusion can be technological. Recent reports have confirmed that digital libraries are being culled of ‘politically correct’ content by its AI electronic overseers. The richest man in the world has just launched Grokipedia, an online library that relies on artificial intelligence for its choices, rigorously aligned with the trillionaire’s right-wing views. Of course, it would be absurd to blame AI. AI does not reason: to function, it uses statistical data, whether ethical or not, outside any moral guidelines, and learns to improve its effectiveness at such an astonishing speed that the human mind cannot follow its progress. AI can imitate reason and emotion but, as a machine, it cannot reason and has no emotions. And if human engineers wanted to shape and limit AI’s strategies (in setting up an all-inclusive library for instance) they would be prevented from doing so by the nature of AI itself, which surpasses human understanding. In much the same way, in the sixteenth century, Rabbi Loew of Prague attempted to control his Golem, and only succeeded in preventing his creature’s destructive rampage by erasing a letter from the Hebrew word for LIFE on the Golem’s forehead, so that it read DEATH. The only solution for controlling AI is laying waste to some of its fields of action.

These are merely a couple of examples of exclusion in the realm of libraries. Alas, there are many more. But exclusion mirrors inclusion: if books can be removed or banned, books can also be surprisingly incorporated and showcased. I experienced something of the sort when I was directing the National Library of Argentina from 2015 to 2018. In the midst of the hooligan battle between the governing political party and the defeated opposition, my administration tried to do a few things in the name of cultural sanity. During that time, we learned that Putin, beginning his war on the Ukraine in a library (the place where every war must properly start) had shut down the Ukrainian Library of Moscow and sent the director, Natalia G. Sharina, to prison. It is a fact that every library, from Alexandria to the present day, carries in its shadow the threat of destruction, sometimes by natural disasters, but more often by ideological forces. To the eclectic list of calamitous events that constitutes the history of libraries – from the destruction of the great Aztec libraries by order of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga to the thousands of books that the Nazis condemned to be burnt – Putin added the closure of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow, whose 25,000 looted volumes now enrich Moscow’s Foreign Literature Library. Natalia G. Sharina was found ‘guilty of inciting hatred toward the Russian people and of using state funds to purchase anti-Russian texts for Ukrainian nationalists’, and sentenced to a suspended four-year prison term.

Since our National Library was supposed to constitute a haven of intellectual freedom in Argentina, we decided to create a Ukrainian Library within its walls to counter Putin’s infamous act. In this way, we believed that we were faithful to the words of the National Library’s founder, the lawyer Mariano Moreno, who wrote in 1810, just after the first self-governing body was established in Buenos Aires: ‘Truth, like virtue, has in itself its most indisputable apology. In discussing and airing our opinions freely, Truth will appear in all its splendour and brilliance: if restrictions are placed on speech, the spirit will vegetate like decaying matter; and error, lies, anguish, fanaticism, and brute force will become the rallying cry of the people, causing their eternal despondency, ruin, and misery.’ Unfortunately, the following administration decided not to preserve our Ukrainian Library. Habent sua fata bibliothecae. Libraries too, like books, have their particular fate.

Libraries can be destroyed but libraries can also be resurrected. A few libraries can rise from their ashes under another identity: as a description of what the library once was, as an elegy for its demise, as a detailed memory of its past activities. Some years ago, a young French scholar, rummaging about in the National Library of Athens, found what he thought was (and indeed proved to be) a long-lost letter by Galen, the second-century Greek physician. Galen had collected a valuable archive of medical manuscripts, together with works by Aristotle and Plato, which he had carefully annotated in his own hand. Because the collection seemed to him too precious to leave unguarded in his house in Rome, Galen placed it in a storehouse near the port of Ostia, deemed secure because guards were posted at its gate to ensure the safety of the grain silos. However, a fire broke out one night, reducing to ashes both the grain and Galen’s books. A friend wrote to Galen commiserating with his loss, and the physician answered with a letter (the one unearthed by the French scholar) in which he stoically refuses to mourn his vanished library and instead tells his friend, in great detail, the story of his lost books and how he had read and annotated them. Reading Galen’s account, his perished library comes to life as a ghostly presence, reminding us that the versions we record of our experience are never final. In the same way that a memory is never the faithful mirror of the original event but a memory of that memory of that memory, a library is never the final stage of a given collection, but a version of the initial coming-together of texts, and the foreshadowing of vaster collections to come, and also of their transformation, loss and resurrection in the minds of its readers. Such a transmigratory library certainly deserves our dreams of immortality.

Some libraries are luckier than others, and mysteriously survive the injustices of fortune. The John Rylands Library, now celebrating its first 125 years in a chaotic and treacherous world, is one of these fortunate institutions. Its all-embracing collection includes, other than printed books, ancient papyri, early examples from European and Chinese presses, Islamic and medieval manuscripts, maps and atlases, a Gutenberg Bible, the second largest collection of books by William Caxton, an extensive collection of the editions of Aldus Manutius, and a papyrus numbered P52 that is thought to be the earliest extant fragment of the New Testament. It also holds various contemporary writers’ archives, most of them appropriately full of knick-knacks and what-nots.

The John Rylands Library was founded by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, John Rylands, as a gift to the people of Manchester. Since a library is, in Richard Ovenden’s useful definition, a place of evidence, it might be helpful to recall here the elaborate tomb of the library’s namesake. When it stood in its full Edwardian glory, it boasted four angels that were, alas, taken down after it was vandalised in 1927; the bronze railings that were supposed to protect them were stolen four decades later. But though stone and bronze might vanish, the noble sentiments they represent survive on the Library’s shelves. Together with the guardian angels, six Biblical chiselled quotes were meant to sum up the founder’s virtues: redemption, appreciation of life, compassion, faith, strength, and a will to labour. Today, these can be applied to the Library itself.

• Redemption: A library such as the Rylands redeems its holdings merely by lending them room and board, as for instance the preserved inside lining of Walt Whitman’s hat stained with the poet’s sweat which, like his tears and breath, as he himself declared, ‘are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul’.

• Appreciation: Rylands owns a first-to-second century BCE Egyptian Book of the Dead which, Stella Halkyard tells us, ‘is the product of an entire culture rather than an individual’. This gives readers hope because, as Halkyard points out, the fate of the soul after death is in the hands of the Ibis-headed Thoth, god of scribes. Words and books, the ancient Egyptians believed, ‘held power over events and destinies to create not one but many lives beyond life’.

• Compassion: Considering the ethics of preserving a writer’s early drafts and unfinished texts, the Rylands chooses compassion for the latent life of the discarded manuscript rather than for the private person of the writer. While the person of the poet, Halkyard observes, might be ‘mortified by the prospect of having her unfinished poem [...] exposed in print [...] the poet might have felt differently’. Virgil, who said he wanted his unfinished Aeneid destroyed after his death, paradoxically remarked that ‘things have tears too’.

• Finally faith, strength, and a will to labour: these three virtues are part of a library’s constitution. Faith in its chances of survival, strength to fight against the censorious constraints every library faces, a will to deny that this necessary ideal is illusory. A library such as the Rylands must believe in its future self and must find imaginative ways to make it happen. As Chesterton observed, imagination is almost the opposite of illusion.

Chesterton also said that the most extraordinary thing about miracles is that they happen. In the early months of 2015, I lost my library. That is to say, I was forced to leave France, sell my house, pack my books and send them to Montreal where, thanks to a generous offer by my Quebec publisher, they were stored in a large warehouse. Knowing what had happened, people from around the world kindly tried to find a home for my books so that the library might come to life again. In New York, Quebec City, Mexico, Istanbul, even in a small village near Naples, sympathetic readers started conversations about the possibility of relocating my library, but nothing came of their wishful plans. I had become resigned to losing my books forever, and accepting that my library had followed the fate of her Alexandrian elders.

And then, in February 2020, out of the blue, came an invitation from the Mayor of Lisbon, to come and have a talk about a project he had imagined. My Portuguese publisher had spoken to him about the loss of my books, and the Mayor, with an interest in cultural matters vastly uncommon among politicians, thought that my library was exactly what Lisbon needed. Lisbon has an excellent system of libraries, but they are mostly and properly concerned with Portuguese culture. My library represented several other European languages, as well as good research material on the History of Reading which is my main subject of study. The Mayor explained that, if I donated my library to the city of Lisbon, the city would house it in a municipal building, and give me the position of director. The building is now being renovated, and we hope to inaugurate our Espaço Atlântida, as the centre is called, in two or three years’ time.

Two of the many sections of the library of Espaço Atlântida are, on the one hand, my old collection of nonsense literature, and on the other, my Lewis Carroll books. Of course, in the catalogue, they are all listed according to the rules of the Portuguese Cataloguing System and can be found by author or title. But on the shelves they will occupy separate and specific places: Lewis Carroll rubbing shoulders with his alter ego, the Reverend Dodgson, and Edward Lear having a chuckle with Spike Milligan. Among my Carrolliana is a copy of The Lobster Quadrille illustrated by Tony Cattaneo.

Lewis Carroll, or rather Charles Dodgson, attended Rugby School and Christ Church College, Oxford, and was no doubt steeped in the Classics. Even though the comprehensive catalogue of the books found in his library after his death does not reveal a copy of Aristophanes’ Wasps, Dodgson, as an Oxford don, must have known the play. The Wasps tells of a son’s attempt to stop his father from spending his life as a compulsive juryman, and the play ends with the father leading the cast in a spirited dance in which the participants are all dressed as crabs – a dance in which the stern Chorus refuses to join.

In Alice in Wonderland, a Lobster Quadrille is performed and sung for Alice’s benefit by the Gryphon and the Mock-Turtle. The dance is part of the Mock-Turtle’s eclectic school experience, a synoptical programme which, like a scholarly library, had a vast range of subjects: Reeling and Writhing, of course; Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision; Mystery Ancient and Modern, and Seaography; Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils. And extras: French, Music and Washing. The Lobster Quadrille turns out to be a rather complicated performance involving seals, turtles, salmon and lobsters. The lobsters are chosen as partners, changed once, and thrown as far out to sea as possible. Then you must swim after them, turn a somersault, and change lobsters again. ‘You can really have no notion how delightful it will be,’ the sad Mock-Turtle sings, ‘when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!’ We don’t know if Lewis Carroll drew his inspiration from Aristophanes, but the tone of both dances has a je-ne-sais-pas-quoi in common.

When I first read this, as a child, the Gryphon and the Mock-Turtle seemed to be offering me the chance of joining a riotous party where I could dance to my heart’s content with all sorts of strange and friendly creatures. I don’t want to push the comparison too far, but in a library like the Rylands, more of a Wunderkammer than a stern arrangement of scholarly tomes, I feel like Alice, urged to join the all-inclusive dance. In her delightful book on the Rylands Archive that I’ve mentioned, Stella Halkyard quotes the poet Langston Hughes speaking of ‘the Big Sea of Literature’. Today, here in the Rylands Library, I look forward to being thrown with the lobsters out to that generous sea.