200307959

From Imaginary Libraries to Ficto-BibliographyPerforming Fiction as Fact

K.K. RUTHVEN

Imaginary authors and imaginary writings are recurrent phenomena in literaryhistory, and constitute a ghostly supplement to the history of the book. Asghosts in the machine of book production, they understandably irritate bibliog-raphers, who justifiably see themselves as kept busy enough identifYing, authen-ticating and cataloguing the often elusive appearances of real books without hav-ing to waste time searching for those that turn out never to have existed. Aspractitioners of a cultural eugenics whose aim is to eliminate the dreck, bibliog-raphers have consequently done what they can to ensure that both imaginarybooks and imaginary editions of real books - which are known in the professionas 'ghosts' - disappear without trace from the historical record.

Yet some imaginary authors and imaginary books manage to survive thecombined effects of bibliographical extermination and cultural amnesia. Theirprospects improve if they happen to be embedded in literary classics, which inpostmodern conditions are kept alive in the intensive-care ward of literary stud-ies. It is only because Geoffrey Chaucer remains a canonical author that we stillremember a non-existent ancient writer called 'Lollius', whose authority Chaucerinvokes on several occasions in order to authenticate his own treatment of thematter ofT roy in his poem on Troi/us and Criseyde.' And only people who studythe Tudor imperial epic produced by his alleged successor, Edmund Spenser, arelikely to have heard of a couple of imaginary books mentioned in The FameQueene (1590). The one entitled Antiquitie ofFaerie Lond (II ix 60) traces thelineage of Ql1een Elizabeth I back through Henry VIII, 'the mightie Oberon' (IIx 75), to an Adam and Eve called Elf and Fay, 'of whom all Faerys spring' (II x71). The other, entitled Briton Moniments (II ix 59), represents Elizabeth as adescendant of King Arthur. The purpose of these imaginary books is to situateElizabeth Tudor (via her cult image as Fairy Ql1een) at the confluence of twovenerable traditions - one Arthurian and 'British', the other 'Saxon' - and in thisway to perpetuate the myth (encouraged by Henry VII and promoted by myth-

1. George Lyrnan Kittred.ge, 'Chaucer's Lollius', HtlT"Vord StuditS in Classical Philology, 28 (1917),47-133.

BSANZ Bulletin v.27, no. 1 & 2, 2003, pp.14-27

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From Imaginary Libraries to Ficto-Bibliography 15

making imperial chroniclers) that the Tudors' Arthurian lineage legitimatedtheir claim to sovereignty as an inalienable right.'

My concern in this paper, however, is not with isolated instances of imagi-nary books but with their aggregation into satirical catalogues for the amusementof learned readers. Their modern prototype was inaugurated with cornucopianexuberance by the man Francis Bacon described as a 'Master of Scoffing', Fran-\'ois Rabelais.' 'How Pantagruel came to Paris' and what he saw there in the li-brary of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor is described in chapter seven of Rabelais'book on the popular giant (Pantagrue!, 1532-33). Unlike the hedonistic Abbe deTheleme, St Victor's Abbey not only exists but also housed a library, which dur-ing Rabelais' lifetime was probably the most important in France.' But the 140books which Pantagruel is said to have found there, all of whose tides Rabelaisitemises, do not exist and never did. Before you can respond adequately to thatimaginary catalogue, however, you have to acquire some fairly specialised infor-mation. You need to be more than vaguely familiar not only with those pro-tracted quarrels between sixteenth-century theologians and humanists whichescalated to produce the Reformation, but also with certain endogenous differ-ences that splintered early sixteenth-century theologians into Thomists and Sco-tists and what not. You need to be fluent enough in Latin both to despise dog-Latin and to deplore the Latinisation of the French language. You need to un-derstand how the proverbial remark that 'names and natures do often agree' jus-tified pseudo-etymologising a victim's name in order to exploit a pejorative omnzin his nomen - as happens when Rabelais associates the surname of a Sorbonnetheologian called Pierre Tataret with tarter ('to shit'), latinises his name as 'Tar-taretus' (by analogy with excretus), and then attributes to him a treatise 'on meth-ods of shirring' (De Modo Cacand,).' (It will also help ifyou happen to find lava-tory humour hilarious.) Thus equipped, you will be able to relish those hiddennuances - encrypted in the titles of imaginary books - which enable Rabelais tosatirise the obscurantism of conservative theologians, whose trivial pursuits (ac-

2. Kenneth Gross, 'Books in The FatTie Quune', in The SpmstT Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990), 103-04.3. Frands Bacon, Bacon's Essays, ed. and intra. Alfred S. West (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1897), 7.4. MA. Screech, &h,/ais (London: Duckworth, 1979),60.5. Barbara C. Bowen, Enta- &zbtlais, Laughing (Nasheville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998),98j Fran'iois Rabdais, The Histories afGargantua and Pantagruel, trans. ].M. Cohen (Harmonds-worth: Penguin Books, 1955), 187. The most detailed explication of 'Comment Pantagruel vint aParis: & des beauIx liures de la librairie de sainc! Victor. Chapitre.vij' is by Marc Berlioz in RaD-dais &stitui1 - Pantagnul (paris: Didier Erudition, 1979), 53-202.

16 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

cording to one such title) included trying to answer the question of 'whether aChimaera, bombinating in the Void, can be nourished on secondary intentions'.'

Not surprisingly, erudite obscenity features as a medium for satire in thevery first imitation of Rabelais' book-list produced by an English author, JohnDonne. Written in Latin some time before 1611, but not published until 1650,what Donne himself describes as a 'satirical catalogue of books' remained in thedecent obscurity of that learned language until 1930, when Evelyn M. Simpsonpublished her annotated edition of The Courtier's Library 'of rare books not forsale', together with an English translation subsequently credited to her husband,Percy Simpson.' Unlike Rabelais, whose list names very few historical persons,Donne attributes all thirty-four of the imaginary books in his anti-ProtestantCatalogus Librorum Aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium to real authors,including Martin Luther, whose desire to remove inauthentic accretions fromsacred texts results in his authorship here of a treatise On Shortening the Lord'sPrayer.' Donne's Rabelaisian blend of smuttiness with theological erudition isbest revealed in a title ascribed to the Italian physician, Girolamo Cardano,whose surname is Latinised to intensifY the joke: Cardanus de nullibietate crepitus,which Percy Simpson translates discreetly as "On the Nullibiety of BreakingWind', and Ann Lake' Prescott more explicitly as 'On a Fart's Nowhereness'.'Donne's phrase de nullibietate not only echoes the titles of a couple of Cardano'sbooks (De subtilitate rerum [1551] and De varietate rerum [1557]) but alsocoarsely misrepresents a religious sect called the Nullibists, whose belief in 'nul-libiety' ('the condition of being nowhere existent') underpinned their doctrine'that a spirit or incorporeal being nowhere exists'."

Another seventeenth-century imaginary catalogue is a posthumously pub-lished tract by Sir Thomas Browne entitled Must2um Clausum, or Bibliotheca Ab-scondita (1683), which he is thou'ght to have addressed to Walter Charleton, the

6. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Cohen, 189.7. John Donne, The Courtia-'s Library, or, Catalogus Iibrorum aulicorum .incomparahilium et nonvendibilium, cd. Eve1yn Mat)' Simpson with a translation (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1930);Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study ofthe Prose Works ofJohn Donne[I924], 2nd ed. (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1948), vi.8. Screech,.Rabdais, 61; Donne, Courtitr's Library, 46, 64.9. Donne, CourtieT's Library, 50; Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in &naissanu England(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 174.10. Donne, CourtitT's Library. 69-70.

From Imaginary Libraries to, Ficto-Bibliography 17

translator of J.B. Helmont's A Ternary of Paradoxes (l650).1l According toBrowne's bibliographer, Geoffrey Keynes, the MusdJUm Clausum comprises 'curi-ous works no longer, or never, in existence' which Browne nevertheless 'wouldhave wished to see'.12 One of these 'rare and generally unknown books' is entitled'Aristotle de Precationibis [On Preaching]'.ll It resembles an item included in the1533 Pantgruel but dropped from the 1534 edition: 'Nine Books of Aristotle onHow to Say the Canonical Hours', which M.A. Screech thinks was prompted by'a commonplace sneer among evangelicals that the Sorbonne attached more im-portance to Aristotle than to St PauL" Another of Browne's titles which fusesChristianity with paganism is 'Seneca's Epistles to S. Paul'." So many peoplewanted this correspondence to exist that by the fourth century forgeries of eightletters from Seneca to St Paul and six from St Paul to Seneca were already incirculation, and accepted as genuine by both St Jerome arid St Augustine beforeErasmus declared them spurious." The possibility that other books - spurious orotherwise - in Browne's bibliotheca abscondita may well exist or have existed wassttengthened in 1992, when Bent Juel-Jensen announced that Browne's 'Maz-hapha Einok, or, the Prophecy of Enoch' is not an imaginary text but 'an apocry-phal book of the old Testament', Metshafe Henok, 'which has survived in its en-tirety only in the Ge'ez translation'.17 In such contexts, our commonsense convic-tion that anybody can tell the difference between a real and an imaginary book ismore vulnerable than we like to think.

Literary studies has never known quite what to do with mock-catalogues ofbooks. The one by Rabelais survives by being embedded in a much studied liter-ary classic, although even an admirer of its virtuoso ingenuities, Barbara C. Bo-

11. Sir Thomas Browne,_ The Works of Sir Thomas Browne [1928], ed. Geoffrey Keynes. new cd.(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), vol. 3, 109-19; Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography o[Sir The;"a,BrO'Wne, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 178,216.12. Keynes, Bibliography ofBrowne, 165:13. Browne, Works, ed. Keyncs, vcl. 3, 11l.14. Screech, RAbelat's, 113.15. Browne, Works, cd. Keync:s, vel. 3, 112.16. The ApocryphalNew Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospd!, Acts, Epistles andApocalypus. withthe Narratives and Fragmmts, tram. Montague Rhodes lames (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926),480-84; Giles Constable, 'Forged Letters in the Middle Ages', in Falschungm imnational" Kongrefl drr Monummta Germaniae Historica. Mrmchen, 16-19 September 1986 (Han-nover: Hahnsche Buchharidlung, 1988), vol. 5,21; Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativ-ity andDuplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),43. '17. Bent Jud-Jensen, 'MUJ4um Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita: Some Thoughts on CuriosityCabiners and Imaginary Books'';ournal o[the Hi,tory o[Cal/"tions, 4 (1992), 140. '

18 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

wen, admits that 'it has no function in the narrative' of Pantagruel, and suspectsthat uninitiated readers have always found it the least interesting chapter in thebook." Simpson's 1930 edition of Donne's Catalogus was printed 'in Fell typeson Auvergne hand-made paper', enclosed in a slip-case, and published in a lim-ited edition of hand-numbered copies; aimed at collectors rather than literatyscholars, it 'sold out' (according to Simpson) 'within a fortnight'.I' It is signifi-cant that she had not thought the Catalogus worthy of attention in the first edi-tion of her now classic monograph, A Study of the Prose Works ofJohn Donne(1924); and that although she added a section on the Catalogus to the secondedition of 1948 - in which she reaffirmed her 1930 opinion that this 'wonderfulpendant to the Satires' embodies 'the authentic Donne, enigmatic, exasperating,intensely alive' - she did not plan to. include it in the selection of Donne's proseshe was busy with when she died in 1963, and which was published eventually in1967.20 Although the Catalogus was first published posthumously in the 1650edition ofDonne's Poems (authorised by his son), anthologies of Donne's poetryand prose ignore it, and Robert H. Ray saw no need to include an entry on it inhis John Donne Companion (1990). And although Browne's Musi2um Clausum iswritten in English, and became available again when H. Gordon Ward editedthe text in 1928, there is no place for it in dominant constructions of Browne asa defender of faith against reason in Religio Medici (1642), an exposer of vulgarerrors in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), and an eloquent stylist in Hydriotaphia(1658).'1

Scholars who work on these texts see it as their business to recover thosesubmerged bodies of knowledge which constituted their original but now lostcontexts. These include not only forgotten subject-matter, such as the minutiaeof doctrinal issues that once occasioned intense theological debate, but also hab-its of mind which modems find puzzling. Simpson notes, for example, that inhis Catalogus Donne 'satirizes mys·tical or cabbalistic writers, such as FranciscusGeorgius, Pico Mirandola, Reuchlin, and Bonaventura, whom he mentions with

18. Bowen, Enter Rabdais, Laughing, 95.19. According to Sirnpson (Prose WarA:! ofDonnt [1948], vi), only 750 copies were printed, butGeoffrey Kqnes puts the figure at 950 copies inA Bibliography ofDrJohn Donne. Dean ofS! Paul's,3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), irem 127; Doime, Courti,,·, Library, 3-4.20. Simpson, Prose Works ofDon.. (1948), 149-58, 157, 158; Donne, Courti,,·, Library, 24, 26;John Donne: &Iected Prose, chosen by Evelyn Simpson. ed. Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).21. Sir Browne, A ,Sroentunth Century Mock Catalogue, ed. H. GordQn (London:Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928).

From Imaginary Libraries to Fieto-Bibliography 19

respect in [his] Essays in Divinity'.V. A propensity to say one thing in one placeand something completely different elsewhere may strike a modern reader unfa-miliar with the conventions of early modern joco-seriousness as alarming evi-dence of confusion if not downright deviousness. It is therefore helpful to haveattention drawn to a rhetorical tradition that valued virtuoso suasiveness morehighly than confessional sincerity, and encouraged the mental agility which en-abled its practitioners not only to sustain a paradox with impressive ingenuitybut also to perform equally well on either side of a debate. Ortensio Lando, forinstance, made a name for himself with his very first book by neither attackingnor defending Cicero as a prose-stylist, but by doing both with equal flair inCieero relegatus et Cieero revoeatus (1534),V. The mock-catalogues by Rabelais,Donne and Browne become more intelligible when associated with 'epideictic' ordemonstrative rhetoric, which enables a topic to be dealt with in terms of eitherpraise or dispraise. A mock-catalogue, which pretends to treat worthless thingsseriously, is a form of dispraise whose generic affinities are with the paradoxicalencomium." In this context, the relevant question to ask ofDonne is not why heused his mock-catalogUe to dispraise authors he praised elsewhere, but whetherhe did the job well, that is, whether he displayed in his Catalogus an inventivewit appropriate to the satirical characteristics of the genre he was working in.Our understanding of what Browne was up' to when writing his MusdlUmClausum - which lists not only imaginary books but also 'rareties of several kinds,scarce or never seen by any man now living', such as 'the Skin of a Snake bredout of the Spinal Marrow of a Man' - has been sharpened by musaeologists re-searching that seventeenth-century precursor of the modern museum, theWunderkammer or 'cabinet of curiosities'." The cabinet of a virtuoso collectormight house alongside rare books not only unusual natural objects and exoticartefacts but also fake relics ofmythological beasts like the unicorn, as well as (toquote from Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's mock-catalogue of the typical con-

22. Donne, Court jeT'S Library, 19.23. John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), xviii.24. On the paradoxical encomium see Arthur Stanley Pease, Things without Honor', ClassicalPhilology, 21 (1926), 27-42; Henry Knight Miller, The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Ref-erence to Its Vogue in England, 1600-1800', Modtm Philology, 53 (February 1956), 145-78; SisterM. Geraldine, 'Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox', Studies in Philology, 61 (1964), 41-63.25. Browne, Works, ed. Keynes, vol. 3, 109, 118; Juel-Jensen, 'Mu,,zum Clausum', 131-35; ArthurMacGregor, 'The Cabinet of Curiosities in Scvententh-Century Britain', in The Origins ofMuse-ums: The Cabinet ofCuriosities in Sixtunth- and Sroentunth-Cmtury Europe, cd. Oliver Impey andArthur Macgregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 147-58.

20 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

tents of a 'nicknackatory') the stone with which David killed Goliath, and a lockof Samson's hair worn by Delilah."

In my view, however, the scholarly business of reconstructing the lost con-texts of works we find enigmatic can be' usefully complemented by modes ofknowledge pioneered in the present rather than exhumed from the past.

In a highly influential essay on 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919),TS. Eliot argued that we should 'not find it preposterous that the past should bealtered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past'." This ac-cords with the structuralist position, outlined by Jean Piaget, that 'the pyramid ofknowledge no longer rests on foundations but hangs by its vertex, an ideal pointnever reached, and, more curious, constantly rising!'." If we think of the past as, the 'foundations' of that pyramid, then we should figure the present not as an'apex' (which marks a closure) but as a 'vertex' forever in the process of beingformed. Whatever happens to be in that constantly rising vertex from which thefoundations of knowledge are suspended constitutes a present which unasham-edly customises the past for its own purposes. Such assumptions go against thegrain of a conservative historicism which holds that, since 'the past is a foreigncountry' where 'they do things differently'," we will inevitably commit the her-meneutic error of anachronism ifwe approach it from the vertex of the present.Nevertheless, to assume that what goes on now cannot possibly illuminate whatwent on then is to foreclose the possibiliry of understanding the past in ways in'which it was unable to understand itself.

A missed opportuniry to revalue the imaginary libraries of the early modernperiod occurred in the vertex of 1840, when Renier Chalon published a four-teen-page catalogue of unique books to be auctioned in the Belgian town ofBinche.JO These came allegedly from the library of a recently deceased Belgiannobleman, the Count of Fortsas, whose obscuriry - which some might attributeto his' aristocratic reticence - would be explained eventually by the fact that henever existed. In accordance with the ttade maxim that a good book-dealer

26. E. St. John Brooks, Sir Han! Sloane:' The Great Collector and His Circle (London: BatchworthPress, 1954), 192-93.27. T.S. Eliot, Tbe Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 50.28. Jean Piager, Stru<twalism [Fr 1968], trans. and ed. Chaninah Maschler (New York: BasicBooks, 1971),34.29. David Lowenthal, Tbe Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1985), xvi, quoting the opening sentence ofL.P. Hartley's novel, Tbe Go-Betwem (1953).30. See Waiter Klinefdter, The Fartsas Bibliohoax [1942], rev. and newly annotated by the author,with bibliographical notes and comments, including a reprint of the Foftsas Catalogue (Ewnston,lliinois: The Press ofWard Schori, 1986).

From Imaginary Libraries to Fieto-Bibliography 21

'knows his customers and their several requirements'," Chalon invented the titlesof volumes guaranteed to arouse overwhelming desires in the collectors he tar-geted by sending them his catalogue. His bibliographical description of eachcustomised book is sometimes supplemented by a candid comment on its physi-cal defects: prospective bidders are warned that whereas item 36 is 'incomplete'and item 12 'unbound', item 7 has 'rwo worm-holes in the lower margin', andthe otherwise clean copy listed as item 78 is spoilt by 'a spot of ink on page 21'.Such specificity creates the illusion that each of the goods for sale has been care-fully examined by a dealer who can be trusted. Almost every item is accompaniedby a gloss allegedly transcribed from the Count's own notes and designed tomake it irresistibly attractive to any collector specialising in such books: item 47,for instance, belonged originally to the philosopher Leibniz (and contains his'signature and many autograph notes'); and the unbound item 117, which is'made up of proofs, with numerous manuscript corrections', exemplifies the kindof collectable first described by Thomas J. Wise as a 'trial book' and marketed assuch." In addition to inventing provenance narratives for some of these treas-ures, Chalon segues the names of real people into his factitious catalogue. Wethus learn that the early nineteenth-century book-glutton, Richard Heber, 'fre-quently offered a thousand pounds sterling' for a copy of item 75; and that theeighteenth-century encyclopaedist, Pierre Bayle, once told a correspondent thathe 'regret[ted] not having been able to obtain' a copy of item 40. Although thefinal item is numbered 222, the catalogue contains only 52 titles. This is becauseChalon's fastidious Count would remove a book from his library whenever hediscovered that another copy existed somewhere else." Unlike the libraries ofcommoners, which increase in size over time, this aristocratic collection keptgetting smaller, because each of its constituent books had to be unique.

Chalon's catalogue looks like an unframed text by comparison with eitherRabelais' (which is embedded in a work of fiction) or those by Donne and Bur-

31. J. Rogers Rees, The Pleasures ofa Book-Wo,," [1886], 2nd ed. (London: ElIior Srock, 1886),22.W. Hawtt concurs: 'There is a proverb, 'The wood-seller knows the wood-buyer"; and soit has to be in books' (The Confessions ola Collector: A Genual Suruey of/he Pursuit andoiThose MoHaw Engaged in It at Home andAbroadfrom the Earliest Pmod to the Present Time, with an AccountofPuhlic and Private Libraries andAnecdotes Found"! or Owners and &marlu on Bookbind-ing and on Special Copies ofBooh (London: John Granr, 1904), 167. ,32. Roger C. Lewis, Thomas]. WISe and the Trial-Book Fallacy (Aldetshot Scalae Press, 1995), xii.33. Fortsas's self-sacrificing style of collecting is exactly opposite to the behaviour recorded in nar-ratives about unscrupulous collectors who preserve the rarety of a book in their collection by track-ing down other copies and then destroying them. See John Hill Burton, The Book-Hunter Etc.(Edinburgh and London: Williatn Blackwood and Sons, 1862),50-51.

22 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

ton, each of which is preceded by a satirical preface. But although it displays noexternal markers of its spuriousness, the Fortsas catalogue is as convention-bound as the others. Chalon reproduces the discursive effects of an auctioneer'scatalogue by availing himself of the rhetorical devices of realist fiction, and espe-cially the verisimilitude exemplified by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe andMoll Flanders, which enables fiction to masquerade as truth. Just how success-fully Chalon's catalogue achieved its aim can be judged from its immediate effecton some famous dealers and collectors. By engaging in what Leon H. Vincentwould subsequently label 'bibJ.1ographical tourism', several 'book-auction biblio-maniacs' - as Thomas Frognall Dibdin characterised the type - travelled toBinche to bid for the rareties they coveted in what turned out to be an imaginaryauction of the imaginary books of an imaginary aristocrat, thus showing them-selves to be (in A.S.W. Rosenbach's designation) not so much bibliophiles as'bibliofools'." By mobilising his mock-catalogue, Chalon brilliantly critiquedthat pathological form of bibliophilia known as bibliomania, and specifically thefetishisation of rarity among book-collectors who, by coveting their neighbours'collectables, behave in a manner described by John Hill Burton as 'entirelytagonistic in spirit to the tenth commandment'."

In order to avoid another missed opportunity in our turn-of-the-millennium vertex, I think we should bring both our experience of postmodernculture and our knowledge of post-structuralist theoty to bear on catalogues ofimaginaty books, which pose bibliographical problems designed to disturb li-brary cataloguers in much the same way as literary forgeries disturb the judges ofliterary prizes. Early modern lists of imaginary books are not entirely differentfrom postrnodern books of lists, such as Judie L.H. Stroufs Literatur! Lover'sBook of Lists (1998), which recycles hard-won knowledge in offering what itssubtitle ·calls 'serious trivia for the bibliophile'. 'Serious trivia' sounds like a post-modern reworking of an early modern fascination with Andvarious components of post-structuralist theory - especially the critique ofbinaryopposition - illuminate the relationships between lists of real books, lists ofimaginary books, and lists of books which could be either.

34. Leon H. Vincent, The Bibliotaph and Other People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 28;Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania: or Book-Madness, a Bibliographical Romance, illustrated withcuts; new-and improved edition, to which are addedpreliminary obstrVotions, and a supplement includ-ing a key to the assumed chartula! in the drama (London: Chatta &Windus, 1876), 127-32; A.S.W.Rosenbach, A Book Hunta's Holiday: Adventuru with Booh and Manuscripts .(Boston: HoughtonMifflin; 1936),218.35. Burton, Book-HunttT, SO; Exodus, 20:17.

From Imaginary Libraries to Ficto-Bibliography 23

As a heuristic device, the principle of binary opposition leads us to believethat any list of books must be eithet a genuine catalogue Ot a mock-catalogue.Post-structuralism, however, draws attention to the fact that because the rwocomponents of a binary opposition are defined against one another, each is al-ways contaminated by its putative opposite. Elective affinities therefore ensurethat a mock-catalogue is no more the exact opposite of a genuine catalogue thana literary forgery is of a work of literature. Although misprision will never play aslarge a part in library cataloguing as it does in literary production, accidentalmisinformation is certainly a cause of continuing concern to scholars. For asGeorge Watson Cole reminds us in his essay on bibliographical ghosts, 'bibliog-raphies swarm with references to editions ofworks that never existed', partly be-cause some cataloguers exhibit 'poor penmanship', and partly because of'indis-tinct imprints in the books themselves'." A combination of poor penmanshipand rypesetter's confusion may have led the author of The Anatomy ofMelancholy(1621-51), Robert Burton, to generate several non-existent authors by misrepre-senting the name of one of Plato's disciples, 'Cleombrotus of Ambracia', first asTheombrotus Ambrociato', then as Theombrotus Ambraciotes' and finally as'Cleombrotus Amborciatus'." But another reason why library catalogues containincomplete and sometimes inaccurate information is that the desire for com-pleteness is at odds with the physical impossibiliry of examining at first handevery item listed, some of which in any case survive as unique copies in such adilapidated condition as to lack those pages which normally contain informationabout the publisher and date of a book. The quickest way to turn your catalogueinto a transit-lounge for bibliographical ghosts is to incorporate into it descrip-tions - filched from other bibliographers - of books you yourself have been un-able to examine. And as if misinformation weren't a big enough problem, cata-logues of books may well be infected by the kind of disinformation encounteredin reputable dictionaries and reference books by editors who plant bogus entriesthere in order to trap plagiarists of their work. The sixth edition of The OxfordCompanion to English Literature, for instance, includes a recently noticed 'spoilerentry' on a Graeco-Spaniard called 'Pycletius', 'an early magic realist' whose 'wiseand subversive Historie! make him an 'unreliable authority' on 'Mediterraneanlife under the Romans in the 2" cent. AD'." And a similar spoiler in The Diction-

36. George Watson Cole, 'Bibliographical Ghosts', PaptT! ofthe Bihliographical Socitty of13 (1919), 87.37. David Renaker, 'Robert Burton', Tricks ofMemory', PMLA, 87 (1972), 393.38. Th, Oxford Companion to English Lit",atu", cd. Margaret Drabble, 6th ed. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), 827; pointed out by I.C., 'NB', Times Lit"'ary Supplement, 29 September2000,16.

24 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

ary ofEighteenth-Century British Philosophers describes a certain 'Moidhach, BegEolach', who never published his Gaelic manuscript on his polysemous 'conceptof "Mothichadh" (sensibility)', which he wrote 'c.1737' and is 'now to be foundin the Parrice Lumumba People's Friendship University Library' in Moscow." Ifind it hard to believe that bibliographers never transmit disinforrnation throughsuch entrapment devices, although the only one I am aware of concerns HenryMorris, who is said to·have referred to a non-existent nineteenth-century bookin his edition of Timothy Barrer's Nagashizuki (1979) in order to find outwhether bibliographies ever get read. >0

One way of understanding how ficro-catalogues create the illusion of factu-ality is by distinguishing the 'referent' (the thing to which a word refers) fromthe 'signifier', which is the name given to the sound and rhythm of a word. His-torically, poetry has tried to dissociate itself from discursive prose by privilegingthe signifier over the referent, and thus preferring the splendours of 'the multi-tudinous seas incarnadine' to the plain-speaking of 'turn red the many seas'. Thedisturbing consequences of that split between reference and signification are re-vealed in Felix Pollak's poem about the beautiful names we give to some dreadfuldiseases. The signifiers which constiture the words that refer to them, he writes,are like 'euphonic songs': 'salmonella, / glaucoma, catatonia, ataxia'; other medi-cal terms resemble the names of classical goddesses: 'Hysterectomy, / Emphy-sema, Peritonitis'." The same slippage between signifiers and referents enablesan author ro describe a place in ways which people who live there may dispute.This was revealed yet again in Peter Carey's different responses to criticism of

39. Tht Dictionary of Eightunth-Ctntury British Phi/orophtT!, cd. John Yolton et al. (Bristol:Thoemmes, 1999), 2vols; pointed out by David Fate Norton, 'A Philosophical Hoax?', Times Lit-erary Supplement, 7 July 2000, 17. After a lexicographer, LesIcy Brown, was reported as saying tharshe had once tried to plant 'dun-great' as a spoiler in the Shorttr Oxford English Dictionary, MaxGermaine confessed that to guard against plagiarism of his own books about living Australianartists he had 'laced' them with 'some harmless inaccuracies' (Michele Field, 'Lexicographer Les-Iey's the Last Word in Dictionaries', Australian, 10 November 1993, 13; Max Germaine, 'VVhatWord', Australian, 29 November 1993, 8).40. Sidney E. Berger, Th, Anatomy ofa Literary Hoax (New Casde: Oak Knoll Books, 1994). Rees(Pleasures ofa Book-Worm, 30) deplores 'the practice ... of some book-sellers' of attracting custom-ers by 'cataloguing volumes which they never had in their possession at perhaps a tenth or twenti-eth part of their true value', and then informing bargain-hunters that the books they wished to buyhad unfortunatdy been sold. The genesis of bibliographical ghosts in 'bibliographical blunders' isdescribed and illustrated by Henry B. Wheadey in Littrary Blundas: A Chapter in the 'History ofHuman Error' [1893], popular edition (London: Elliot Srock, 1905), 63-77.41. Felix Pollal<, 'Aesthetics [1973]', in Th, Stat, ofth, Languag', ed. Leonard Michaels and Chris-topher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 289.

From Imaginary Libraries to Fieto-Bibliography 25

his recent book entitled 30 Days in Sydney. When he remarked, somewhat flip-pantly, 1t's all made up ... that's what I do', he implied that 'Sydney' has thesame status in his book as Washington Square' does in Henry lames's novel ofthat name; that is, it functions merely as a signifier in that 'galaxy of signifiers'we call a work of fiction." But when Carey said (more defensively), 'I'm qualifiedto write an honest book about my experience in Sydney', he was using the word'Sydney' as a referent to the city which other people claim to know better than hedoes." In London, where Carey's book was first published, the 'Sydney' of itstitle is likely to have been understood principally as a referent; but in Australia'Sydney' performs more like a signifier in something Carey 'made up' than as thekey referent to an actual city." Since these shifts from referent to signifier andback again leave no traces on the name itself, it consequently exists in a perma-nent state of indeterminacy. And this lexical feature creates problems wheneverwe try to interpret a text without access to the kind of extra-textual knowledgewhich enables us to understand how the word 'Sydney' may be functioning inCarey's book. The words which constitute a bibliographical entry cannot them-selves indicate whether they are referents or signifiers. According to the speech-act theory pioneered by].L. Austin in How To Do Things with Words (1962),language consists not only of those 'constative' utterances which convey informa-tion, but also of 'performative' utterances which enact what they say, as a prom-ise or an order does." Any text which 'performs' as a catalogue of books will beread as such unless it happens to be either framed by or encoded with an instruc-tion not to take it at face value. Renier Chalon's mock-catalogue performed therhetoric of authenticity so well that it was read as authentic.

In requiring everything to be an example of either this or that, binarythought processes cannot accommodate those betwixt-and-between phenomenawhich occupy the interstitial spaces of any two-term system. Hybridities chal-lenge institutions by compelling them to admit that the categories they operatewith are merely cultural constructs, and as such are capable of being dismantledand reassembled in different forms. Institutional resistance to such challenges isalways strong initially, but not necessarily permanent. Early modern develop-ments in drama, for instance, compelled neoclassical theorists to concede that,

42. Roland Barthes, S/Z [Fr 1970], traos. Richard Miller (New York: Hill.nd W.ng, 1974), 5.43. Srephen Romei, 'C.rey Casts a Long-Harboured Pall', Australian, 28-29 July 2001,5.44. Perer Carey, 30 Days in Sydney:A Wildly DistortedAccount (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).45. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things 'With Words [1962], cd. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa, 2nd cd.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); S[uzanne] R[omaine], 'Speech Act', in The Oxford Companion tothe English Language, cd. Tom McArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 968.

26 Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin

because some plays cannot be described as either tragedies or comedies, the or-thodox classification of drama by genre required the addition of a new and hy-brid category called 'tragicomedy'. And in postmodern times we have all ob-served the collapse of both generic and epistemological domains which used tobe regarded as both autonomous and inviolable. Ever since Norman Mailer pub-lished his account of the march on the Pentagon by protesters against America'smilitary intervention in Vietnam, The Armies ofthe Night (1968), and subtitled it'History as a Novel: The Novel as History', a fascination with the narrative con-struction of reality - as manifested, for instance, in Hayden V. White's book,Metahistory (1973) - has obliged historians to decide whether or not they wantto go down the track which led Simon Schama to engage in what (anticipatingthe disapproval of professional colleagues) he wryly calls 'unwarranted specula-tions' about General James Wolfe in his contentious book, Dead Certainties(1991)." We have also had to come to terms not only with ficto-biography -such as Brian Matthews' study of Henry Lawson's mother, Louisa (1987), whichsupplements biographical fact with speculative fiction - but also with ficto-criticism like' Bernard Sharratt's book, Reading Relations (1982), a deutero-creative development produced by writers who refuse to regard literary criticismas nothing more than a second-order discourse at the service of the so-calledprimary texts of literature."

Each of these developments has been resisted with varying degrees of hos-tility, but only by those who feel threatened by it. Whatever one thinks of thehybridities produced by such generic entropy, collectively they register a loss offaith in the certainties that propped up a system of clearly differentiated genresin the days when history was history, fiction was fiction, and that was that. Fur-thermore, they increase the likelihood that no genre is immune to depradationby fictionality. And if so, then we should consider the possibility that what wewitness in the trajectory traced by catalogues of imaginary books from Rabelaisto Chalon is the gradual but as yet unacknowledged emergence of ficto-bibliography as an art-form. For like other examples of aesthetic minimalism,such as aphorisms or imagist poems, a well-crafted entry in a ficto-bibliographyrequires readers to become actively involved in teasing out its implications inorder to savour its cultural resonances. To mark the end of our misrecognition of

46. Norman Mailer, The Armi" ofthe Night: History as a Novel: Th, Novel as History (London:Weidenfdd and Nicolsoo, 1968); Hayden V. White, The Historical Imagination inNinettenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: ]ohns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Sirnon Schama,Dead Cn-taintits: (Unwarranted Speculations) (London: Granta Books, 1991). --'47. Brian Matthews, (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1987); Bernard Sharratt, Reading Rela-tions: Structures ofLituary Production: A Dialectical Text/Book. (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1982).

From Imaginary Libraries to Ficto-Bibliography 27

ficto-bibliographies, and the beginning of a more positive attitude towards theircollective achievements, we need to have them made more accessible than theyare at present. Since they tend to be fairly short, this could be achieved by meansof an annotated anthology comparable to Alastair Fowler's scholarly edition ofseventeenth-century country house poems."

The library catalogue is a dream of order imposed on the human imagina-tion, whose operations are anarchic, and whose hybrid products frequendy ques-tion the adequacy of any taxonomical system designed to contain them. As acreative development, ficto-bibliography not only constitutes a transgressive epi-sode in the history of the book but also reveals the fragility of both the 'real' andthe 'imagined' as cultural categories.

48. Alastair Fowler (cd.), The Country House Poem: A Cabinet ofSromtunth-Cmtury Estate Poemsand&/ated Item' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994).