Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists
December 27, 2024 at 04:30PMThe invention of the printing press created an information-management problem that was unparalleled—at least for a few centuries. Renaissance literature is rife with characters done wrong by an excess of books, their minds inundated with knowledge. How to organize such an excess? Make a list! And yet, despite every librarian’s best efforts, the world’s abundance resists our desire for order. Enter Francois Rabelais—the 16th-century French novelist and, Andrew Hui writes, the “perverse librarian par excellence.” In Pantagruel, his best-known work, Rabelais sends his titular character through the Library of Saint-Victor at the University of Paris, where he discovers titles such as “The Codpiece of the Law” and “The Elephant Balls of the Worthies.” In doing so, Rabelais—who was labeled a heretic and saw his books banned—fights false authority with an extravagantly crude, delightfully uncategorizable reading list of his own.
The logic of enumeration, pushed to its extreme, becomes an algorithm of the absurd. Rabelais points out that there are oddities in the world that cannot fit into any classification scheme, more things in our heaven and earth than are dreamt of in either the medieval pretensions of the summa or the ambitious early modern bibliographic machines. The abundance of the information ark becomes an encyclopedic abyss.
It is only from this historical condition of data glut that characters like Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Prospero, and Doctor Faustus could have emerged. Though the topos of multitudo librorum—too many books—existed already in antiquity, the proliferation of texts brought on by the printing press was unprecedented. That these characters are all driven to bibliomania suggests their inability to cope with cognitive inundation. They show the tragedy of reading too much, and too wrongly. It is only Pantagruel who exits the library laughing.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/27/rabelaisian-enumerations-on-lists/
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