History of Reading News. Vol.XX No.2 (1997:Spring)
by Sue Waterman

The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. by Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pp. 113. $35.00 cloth; $12.95 paper.

"The order of books" is a term whose various meanings are explored in the preface of this work by Roger Chartier, professor at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Chartier gathers under its umbrella three essays that explore the relationships of people to texts, both before and after Gutenberg. For Chartier, books aim at installing order, from their creation to their reception -- whether it be that of the author's intentions, that of an authority who permitted the work to be published, or that imposed by the physical form of the book. At odds with this system of order, however, is the freedom of the reader to formulate meaning, and of the text to take on various meanings in ways never intended nor foreseen. The ways in which this tension between order and freedom are played out constitute the problematic, and the challenge, of formulating a history of reading.

Chartier's aim, as he clearly states in the preface, is to explore how people attempted to master the ever-increasing number of texts that were produced between the late Middle Ages and the 18th century. Three aspects of this enterprise interest Chartier: the formation and nature of "communities of readers," the role of an author function in texts, and the quest for a universal library of texts that would contain all of the world's knowledge. These three concerns form the three main sections of this book.

Works have no stable or fixed meaning, Chartier warns us (p. ix), and the act of reading is an "encounter" between a text and a reception of that text. Since "reception invents, shifts about, distorts" (p. x), it becomes a matter of importance to examine the ways in which books were written, printed, circulated, and organized in order to begin to understand the ways they could have been received and understood.

The first section, "Communities of Readers," is dedicated to the memory of Michel de Certeau (a dedication however which does not appear in the English translation). It opens with a quote from Certeau's work, The Invention of Everyday Life, an almost lyrical description of the difference between writers and readers, between the act of writing -- a stable, conservative and fixed activity and the act of reading--an ephemeral, shifting, repetitive activity. Chartier uses the chapter to examine Certeau's dichotomy and along the way questions several traditional views of the nature of reading communities -- that social classes mirror cultural divisions, that present reading practices are the same as past reading practices, and that texts exist independently of the form they take.

The same texts were read by people of different social classes; this phenomenon challenges traditional views that different social classes read different texts and that the same texts were universally read in the same manner. The question becomes for Chartier, How did people of varying social and economic backgrounds read the same texts and why did they read them differently? One possible answer lies in the form the texts took, the physical object of the book. If there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it, as Chartier states, then comprehension and appropriation depend in part on that physical form. Examples of this include the Bible (breaking up the text of the Scripture into chapters and verses) and the texts in the Bibliotheque Bleue (edited texts with illustrations). Here the English traditional history of the book, or analytical bibliography, begins to approach the French tradition of "l'histoire du livre." Certeau's dichotomy has been expanded from text (writing) and reader (reading) to include an intermediary, the book itself.

The second chapter, "Figures of the Author," offers more subtle challenges to some long-held views, specifically the tendency in New Criticism (or structuralism) in English-style analytical bibliography and in French quantitative histoire du livre to ignore the author-function, indeed to assert the self-sufficiency and total independence of the text itself. Chartier describes recent work in literary criticism that attempts to put books back within their historical context, including that of the author-function, characterizing this as "the return of the author" (p. 27). Meaning is still an unstable quantity, though, realizing no benefit of validation in this return to the author, as the text's meaning is also a function of the printer who gives it form and the reader who appropriates it.

Chartier goes on to provide a historical survey of the author-function, using Foucault's now famous essay "What is an Author?" as a framing structure. Tracing the concepts of literary property and the penal responsibility of an author, he charts a course through centuries of book production, examining historical definitions of an "auteur" (from Furetiere's 1690 Dictionnaire), developments in the privilege system as it grappled with the author's rights, practices of printers in designing title pages that visually defined a work's paternity, and the genre of anthologies (collections of texts of mixed authorship) where the unity of a work by an author (text) and an object (book) is lost.

The final chapter looks at a concept that at first glance seems too contemporary to be included in a historical consideration of the production, dissemination and appropriation of texts -- Libraries without Walls.Opening with a passage from Borges describing a Library "that contained all books," this chapter examines several attempts to achieve such an ideal institution, why they failed, and why any such attempt must fail.

Several different meanings of the term "library," again taken from Furetiere's Dictionnaire, are explored: that of a building full of books, of a collection or compilation of works, and of a catalog of books. It is this last incarnation of a library for which Chartier provides the most detail and analysis, describing three 16th-century library catalogs which attempted to be encyclopedic: Anton Francesco Doni's 1550 Libraria, Francois de La Croix du Maine's 1584 Bibliotheque, and Antoine du Verdier's 1585 Bibliotheque.

Any attempt to include all known works in a library, be it a building or a collection, ultimately fails, Chartier tells us, mostly due to the proliferation of works brought about by print. They remain "a truncated image of all accumulable knowledge" (p. 88), by necessity entailing selection and so lacunae. Only the library-as-catalog offers a possibility of being truly encyclopedic; books themselves increase in number too rapidly to be contained in one building or collection. Nevertheless, the Renaissance gave rise to many such undertakings and the aspiration towards a "Library that contained all books" remains an obsession, perhaps to be finally realized as texts shed the physical limitation of books.

In the short but thought-provoking epilogue, Chartier returns to his own time period and questions the future of texts and their appropriation in an age where the physical form of the book is being dispensed with and texts are "no longer prisoners of their original physical, material existence" (p. 89). Several things occur when a text is contained on a computer, rather than in a volume. It can be manipulated by the reader and actually changed, it can be transmitted so that where it is stored and where it is read are two separate locations, and it loses any connection to the "powerful metaphors used for conceiving of the cosmos, nature, history, and the human body" (p. 91). The "book of nature" may become an incomprehensible metaphor in the not-too-distant future.

The future of the book is by no means certain; discussions rage, in many different quarters. During the month of January 1997, that very question spawned passionate debate on two very different listservs on the Internet - Exlibris, a listserv for rare books and Diglibns, a listserv on digital libraries. The arguments were nearly the same in both groups.

Written in 1992, The Order of Books raises questions whose answers have changed even in the five years since its first appearance. Translated into English in 1994, in this very fine translation by Lydia Cochrane, its concerns grow more and more urgent and ever more problematic. As if proving its most basic premise, that texts are read differently by different people and read differently at different time periods, this most important and eminently readable work by Roger Chartier will continue to provide fodder for the debate, by intelligently tying any speculation on the future to an extraordinarily well-formulated meditation on the past.

Sue Waterman is Resource Services Librarian of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University.