Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library鈥攊f not as extensive as Auerbach鈥檚鈥攅ven if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries鈥攈ow we build them and how we should expand them.
Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves鈥攐ften referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition鈥攏eeds to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library.
William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Coll猫ge de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.
"Renew that library card. This deftly written book reflects on the history of how we organize knowledge, classify books, and give meaning to our lives through reading. . . . An eloquent plea for reading by a true scholar of world literature."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“This elegant and thought-provoking rumination on libraries pays tribute to literature that has been lost—or that was never written in the first place. The result is a sustained meditation on absence. At the same time, Marx skillfully conjures, from the fragments that have survived, rich imaginary libraries. This is literary criticism in the tradition of Borges and Calvino.”—Martin Puchner, author of Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop
“In Libraries of the Mind, the outstanding French literary critic and historian William Marx reflects on the collections of literary works that tradition, education, and individual lovers of literature keep together within invisible libraries. As repositories of cultural memory, these libraries also hint at what Marx provocatively calls the ‘dark matter’ of lost or forgotten works, e.g., the large number of unavailable yet tantalizing Ancient Greek tragedies. Marx wisely advises us to treasure the countless works that fill up our present-day invisible libraries thanks to modern technology. An eye-opening, fascinating book.”—Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago
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