LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA: A USER'S MANUAL Teemu Ikonen
Contents
1. Encyclopedic Topologies Modern Language Notes 101 912 29 Bataille Georges ed 1995 Encyclopaedia Acephalica Comprising the Critical Dictionary amp Related Texts in Atlas Arkhive 3 Translated by Iain White London Atlas Press Blanchot Maurice 1971 Le temps des encyclop dies L Amiti Gallimard Collison Robert 1964 Encyclopaedias Their History Throughout the Ages New York amp London Hafner Publishing Company 20 Coover Robert 1988 He Thinks the Way We Dream The New York Times Book Review 20 XI Eco Umberto 1984 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Basingstoke etc Macmillan Encyclopaedia Britannica or A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan in which the different sciences and arts are digested into distinct treatises or systems and the various technical terms amp c are explained as they occur in the order of the alphabet Illustrated with one hundred and sixty copperplates By a society of gentlemen in Scotland In three volumes Edinburgh A Bell and C Macfarquhar 1771 encyclopaedia in Encyclopaedia Britannica Retrieved February 23 2005 from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online lt http search eb com eb article tocId 9106030 gt Encyclop die ou dictionnaire raisonn des sciences des arts et des m tiers I XVII 1751 Par une societ de gens de lettres Frye Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays Princeton Princ2. connect words and things to each other A heterotopical text both invites the reader to think of the interconnectedness of the things listed and deconstructs the systematics of classification Heteroclitical was a word Georges Bataille used in describing his own contribution to the interdisciplinary magazine Documents 1929 The word referred among other things to a strategy of writing that would disturb the classificatory logic of traditional encyclopedism According to Dominique Lecog Documents was at its best an anti encyclopedic work its success was that of a way of writing capable of overturning the code of branches of knowledge without constituting in itself a closed complete body of knowledge Encyclopaedia Acephalica 11 In the following I debate shortly what this anti encyclopedism could be in the practice of Critical Dictionary and Encyclopaedia Da Costa Furthering the path opened by Novalis Critical Dictionary imagines and performs a future dictionary In the entry factory chimney Bataille writes that the only reason for writing a dictionary is to demonstrate the error of definitions which replace the childish or untutored way of seeing by a knowing vision which allows one to take a factory chimney for a stone construction forming a pipe for the evacuation of smoke high into the air which is to say for an abstraction A critical dictionary would not give correct meanings and appropriate uses of
3. in Finnish the first entry is Ateh the first reference to the two other articles on Ateh Several possible itineraries open up If you choose to read the entry Ateh in the Red Book you can for example 1 read the whole entry straight through and then continue reading the Red Book unicursally 2 read the article on Ateh in one or both the other books then continue to the next entry in the Red Book Brankovic Avram 3 follow the references after or in the middle of reading the entry Ateh in the Red Book The references differ curiously in the versions I consulted in Serbo Croatian the references are to Khazars Daubmannus Khazar polemic Cyril in English to Khazars Daubmannus kaghan and in Finnish to Khazar polemic kaghan Cyril Then continue the unicursal reading from the entry Brankovic Avram 4 follow the references in the referred entries the paths fork all over again though in the entry kaghan the only reference is back to Ateh The strategy of following the explicit references inside one book excludes some of the entries In the Red Book none of the entries refer to Celarevo and Celarevo has the only reference to Suk Isaljo Finally if the references are followed across the three books the reader never gets to read the entry Schultz Dorota or the Appendix II None of the articles refer to them explicitly they can thus only be found by unicursal reading or by accident This is hardly a coincidence it is in the Schultz e
4. its circularity The tree a popular image for the logical order of knowledge in the late medieval encyclopedia implies that phenomena can be classified and placed in hierarchical and genealogical order Later changes in conceptions of knowledge have been traced in the images of the labyrinth the map the net and the rhizome Whatever the model of knowledge its relation to actual textual practice is never simple and no equivalence between them should be expected in advance The tree for example has been translated into a unicursal order according to history chronology the systematics of knowledge biography alphabetics and to various combinations of them At the same time the sections have been connected to each other across the unicursal order with systems of reference typographical and other devices D Alembert and Diderot the editors of Encyclop die ou dictionnaire raisonn des sciences des arts et des m tiers 1751 1771 began their project with the classical idea of an enchained totality of nature as precondition of the unity of human knowledge This unity was represented with the images of the genealogical tree and the world map of knowledge To this classical model Diderot added his ideas of using the encyclopedia as a subversive war machine a critical tool for overcoming dogmas and prejudices and the more moderate idea of conversation between texts and disciplines Yet it is well known that the te
5. the ideal encyclopedia ought to be at the same time it already partially performs what ought to be Being ideal and real theory of encyclopedia and encyclopedic practice all in one the Brouillon is a perfect example of performative writing Animals are divided into a belonging to the Emperor b embalmed c tame d sucking pigs e sirens f fabulous g stray dogs h included in the present classification i frenzied j innumerable k drawn with a very fine camelhair brush 1 et cetera m having just broken the water pitcher n that from a long way look like flies Borges The Analytical Language of John Wilkins See Foucault xv xix Critical Dictionary is a compilation of articles from Documents Page numbers in this section refer to the Encyclopaedia Acephalica Atlas Press 1995 which includes both of the works being discussed In the Encyclop die the basic order of disciplines in the definition is grammar logic metaphysics theology morality jurisprudence etc using this structure despite the disparity of meanings each article treated in this manner will form a whole Diderot Encyclop die In the pre Hellenistic world enkyklios paideia meant children s way of learning letters and arithmetics in the ring of choir Akyklios could thus be the name of those who could not keep the rhythm of the circular process of civilization In the same vein Ambrose Bierce s Devi
6. the order they present the fragments of narrative in the unicursal reading but after all what difference does this make In the preliminary notes the editor openly declares that the three books of The Khazar Dictionary can be read in any order the reader desires they can also be read diagonally to get a cross section of all three registres and the book need never be read in its entirety one can take half or only a part and stop there as one often does with dictionaries and finally The Khazar Dictionary does not claim to be a finished totality at all but instead it is an open book and when it is shut it can be added to just as it has its own former and present lexicographer so it can acquire new writers compilers and continuers 13 14 Can we then say that according to the alphabet of various languages the novel ends differently It is not so simple even in the unicursal reading because the places of the appendices the closing note and the list of entries are fixed And if we consider the explorative function in which the user must decide which path to take Aarseth 64 can we say where the novel begins or ends On the other hand one can ask if and how the rearrangement of entries affects the levels of story and plot To give a few examples of the encouraged decisions reader may make If you start reading the Red Book from the beginning in Serbo Croatian Latin alphabets in English or
7. words technical definitions or scientific knowledge Instead it would create a non hierarchized and formless work showing how the words guide thinking how they too get old and die and confront the challenge this presents to the strategy of writing Critical Dictionary encourages uni and multicursal reading in subtle ways The alphabetical order is not an unfortunate accident but instead it is usable in suggesting connections between words and things In the entry formless form is described as a frock coat and contrasted with a conception of the universe as a gob of spittle The entry is followed by the entry hygiene which discusses the purity rituals of modern man next comes ju ju which discusses European word magic which tries to control things by giving one and the same name to heterogeneous things The fragments can be read as producing a meaningful succession the dictionary form is metonymically linked with mental hygiene and magical thinking The entries in Critical Dictionary do not follow a logical structure of definition in a classical sense and they have no explicit cross references Instead they are chained by concepts that define and contextualize each other The spittle mentioned in the article formless is further discussed in an entry of its own spittle is finally through its inconsistency its indefinite contours the relative imprecision of its colour and its humidity the very symbol of the formless of
8. world map Alphabetical order in particular subjects is strongly criticized in the preface to the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1771 because it has amounted to dismembering the sciences In a similar vein S T Coleridge saw the alphabetic division and 10 ll 12 the system of internal references as subordinate auxiliary and collateral to the philosophical arrangement without which the work is like a mirror broken on the ground presenting instead of one a thousand images but none entire Collison 295 Alphabetic order would constantly cause comical contrasts a theological article would be plunked down in the middle of the mechanical arts Diderot encyclop die The phenomenon is so obvious that it may be hard to see According to its editors the first picture encyclopedia J See All 1928 30 The great Picture Book speaks the universal language give it to a roomful of people of all nations speaking all languages and they will all have a kind of understanding of these pages Yet the pictures are in alphabetical order they follow the arbitrary order of the initials of corresponding English words Laid side by side on these 3 4 column pages the 100 000 pictures of everything produce strange combinations in the same page we find pictures of deaf and dumb alphabet dean Dearmer Percy and death Neuer Physiologus parodies this critique of alphabetism alphabetic
9. LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA A USER S MANUAL Teemu Ikonen The book is well suited to linear discourse but is just as accommodating toward nonlinear discourse as an encyclopedia or a forking path story Espen Aarseth Dictionaries and encyclopedias have been frequently discussed in fiction from Flaubert to Borges and Danilo Ki Borges s work is crowded with imaginary encyclopedias the encyclopedia of Tl n makes people forget earthly books and languages a one volume vade mecum with its infinite number of pages can even replace the library of Babel In Georges Perec s Life A User s Manual 1978 a man named Cinoc compiles a great dic tionary of forgotten words We get to read 30 of its 8000 entries which contain obscurely the trace of a story it has now become almost impossible to hand on 289 90 In Danilo Ki8 s short story The Encyclopedia of the Dead 1989 the narrator gets to read a majestic monument to diversity in the Royal Library in Stockholm The monument is an encyclopedia which records everything that can be recorded concerning those who have completed their earthly journey on the condition that no one whose name is recorded here may appear in any other encyclopedia 43 These works tell us about possible reference books and sometimes even cite them but are there literary works that implement or perform the ideas of these unheard of works Literary works that in themselves are
10. al order is at the same time necessary and harmful an Unordnungsgenerator that produces unintentionally comical metonymies zahllose unangemessene Wort Nachbarschaften denen die dinglichen so nicht entsprechen Was hat die neben der Blasphemie zu suchen der neben dem Geberbuch die eben dem Gurgeln Auf folgt Erschie en Selten aber eben doch ergeben sich aber schon logische Zusammenh nge z B Daumenschraubd Dazwischenkommen According to Blanchot Diderot questioned the hierarchy in which the original order of nature precedes the tree of classification its representation This made his encyclopedia exceed the limits of a book Diderot ne croit pas une nature qui serait naturellement divisible en tranches de savoir Il a d elle une id e merveilleuse se rem morant l animation universelle et la vicissitude incessante le pouvoir prodigieux de transformation qui ne permet de la saisir que dans une forme qu elle a d j ruin e Id e qui pousse en avant Encyclop die comme une creation vivante l emp chant d tre une r alit seulement livresque 63 See Moser 12 15 ENCYCLOPAEDISTIK Meine Wissenschaftskunde wird eine Art von wissenschaftlicher 17 16 18 Grammatik oder Logik oder Generalba oder Compositionslehre mit Beyspielen Allgemeine Brouillon 616 See also 155 According to Walter Moser 11 Novalis s text says what
11. aries or encyclopedias For a long time the word dictionary was used to refer to texts we would now call encyclopedias however the word encyclopedia has never referred to dictionaries Encyclopaedia Britannica 1 The English translation gives an additional warning This is the FEMALE EDITION of the Dictionary The MALE edition is almost identical But Not quite Be warned that ONE PARAGRAPH iS crucially different The choice is yours The question of the meaning of alphabets is connected to the larger themes of the reconstruction of the body of the original book and its parallel the reconstruction of the world which are mise en abyme all over again in the anecdotes of The Khazar Dictionary see Hayles All three books stage a conflict between the dream hunters who search for the original man Adam and assemble fragments of his being into a bodily whole into a Khazar dictionary and the shaitans and demons who try to prevent Adam s incarnation Samuel Cohen among others speculates on the limitations of human alphabets Just as each letter of the earth s alphabet corresponds with a part of human body so each letter of the heavenly alphabet corresponds with a part of the body of Adam Cadmon 226 yet only the letters designating nouns and names those that come from the devil in Gehenna build my dictionary and are accessible to me 229 The textonic user function which requires that t
12. ation cannot but be hypothetical and we cannot claim to verify for ourselves its approximate exactitude since neither the language we are striving to speak nor the universe in which it will be currently understood exist But an encyclopaedia worthy of the name cannot trouble itself with realistic considerations It has a duty to remedy so striking a deficiency and it is beyond any doubt that its scientific value will be measured by the number of future words and expressions to which it affords space 124 A future encyclopedia can only be a collection of fragments from an unknown land or more precisely from a space that does not exist from a space that is not one An example of the defamed realistic and communicative motivation may be found in Atlas of Experience 2000 which maps together realms of imagination ideas feelings and concrete things into a world map of experience The connections between regions and the movement from one place to another are here conceptual in a most familiar way we have the Mountains of Work and the Safe Harbour of Home airports called Escape and Freedom we can follow the Stream of Ideas descending from the top of the highland of Creativity into the Sea of Possibilities However the book actually locates human experience in an odd time space the twelve meridians are named according to months the Western and the Eastern ends of the continent are called Spring and Winter respectively This complica
13. cal encyclopedias translation and rearrangement of the text are inseparable Agathon Meurman s encyclopedia 1883 90 written in Finnish drew heavily on the Meyer s Grosse Conversationslexikon 1870 72 Many names that begin with the letter c in German are transliterated to begin with a k in Finnish When Meurman was compiling the section of k words he forgot to check Meyer s c section again Thus in the final version of Meurman s encyclopedia the entry Kiina China is missing a massive forgetting if there ever was one Who knows what is lost in translation when a Chinese encyclopedia is arranged in alphabetical order The problems and possibilities in translating and rearranging ency clopedias is nowhere discussed as profoundly and playfully as in Milorad Pavi s Dictionary of the Khazars It may be called a narrative encyclopedia but only if some reservations are made The work is not a single body of knowledge there are two editions of Dictionary of the Khazars the Male edition and the Female edition Reader is thus guided to debate the somehow gendered differences between the editions Both the editions are by their subtitle lexicon novel in 100 000 words Inside this frame there is a second edition of The Khazar Dictionary Lexicon Cosri a dictionary of the dictionaries on the Khazar question originally published in 1691 The second Lexicon Cosri brings together three alphabetical encyclopedias th
14. d in the Encyclop die are not fulfilled at all the articles planned were forgotten censored or missing for other reasons 6 Implicit references are used in the service of cultural relativism that is comparison of manners politics and religion in different cultures Descriptions of the ways cruel priests exploit the ignorance of masses in Congo Mexico and Siberia are made to sound oddly familiar see ypaina kraals Conversation on a certain topic for example luxe freedom tolerance is scattered around in many articles without references These uses of reference suggest that Encyclop die is more than a tableau of knowledge and something different from it It emphasizes the fact that knowledge is produced and can always be relativized by ordering and reordering the text In doing so it lets us think the impossible in classical context an encyclopedia without the hierarchy nature reality knowledge text This opens up space to a poetic reading of text in which the reader has to create new ideas or things to speculate out of the material of the disparate articles Anderson 924 Diderot hints at this direction when he writes about references of genius which by juxtaposing certain relationships in the sciences analogous qualities in natural substances or similar operations in the arts lead either to new speculative truths or to the perfecting of the known arts or to the invention of new ones Novalis s Al
15. dictionaries or encyclopedias The questions contain many ambiguous and vague terms and need to be specified Across the centuries the term encyclopedia has referred to the system of sciences to the knowledge concerning the system of sciences and finally to works that claim to provide in orderly arrangement the essence of all that is known generally or in a particular field of knowledge and in the wake of the Enlightenment using popular scientific language According to Michel Foucault the classical encyclopedia expresses faith in the universal ability of language to represent and gather together the totality of the world However it should be noted that Foucault sees this faith shaken precisely along with the birth of literature What could a literary encyclopedia then be other than a contradiction in terms In literary studies the terms encyclopedic and encyclopedism have been used to refer for example to a large use of scientific knowledge in fiction or to speculation on the order of the world and on the possibilities of its total representation In these wide senses many kinds of literary texts can be labeled encyclopedic Here however to begin with I want to narrow the focus down to texts which imitate structures and devices of existing reference books or invent new ones In this material I include Novalis s Allgemeine Brouillon 1798 99 Flaubert s Dictionnaire des id es re ues 1850 80 the Critical D
16. e Red Book using Christian sources the Green Book with Islamic sources and the Yellow Book with Jewish sources It is not a facsimile but a revised and supplemented edition Entries in The Khazar Dictionary are narrative telling mythical fantastical anecdotal and historical stories of Khazars and of the scholars in the history of the people An entry can be found in one or several books In Aarseth s terms the explorative function is important explicit references guide the reader to compare the entries with the same name across the books and to discover missing pieces of the story In addition to the explicit references there are subtle connections analogies between characters and events in one book and across the three books The references do help the reader in assembling the little narratives into a larger whole yet at the same time they reveal contradictions which the anonymous editor does not solve and thus we have mutually exclusive versions of many key events in the story In Diderot s words the references in The Khazar Dictionary have the double function of confirming and refuting disrupting and reconciling It remains disputed whether the Khazars converted into Christian Islamic or Jewish religion into all or none of these when and where this assumed turning point took place whether there was an original text containing answers to these and other questions and if there was in which language and alphabet it was w
17. esenting the world but at the same time they play with the encyclopedic claim to be unified and self contained totalities What makes these texts literary may reside in the self conscious play with this double gesture 14 NOTES encyclopaedia in Encyclopaedia Britannica 1 This applies also to Encyclopedia of Ignorance 1977 eds Ronald Duncan amp Miranda Weston Smith which sets out to tell everything science now knows of the unknown See Foucault 247 248 Blanchot 68 asks if the idea of an encyclopedia means precisely the disappearance of literature dans la parole universelle ot tout se dit et o tout se dit en empruntant le langage qui permet seulement de tout dire est ce qu il pourra y avoir jamais place pour la litt rature si celle ci est d abord l affirmation ou le jeu d une tout autre parole To Northrop Frye 365 encyclopedic form is a genre presenting an anagogic form of symbolism such as sacred scripture or its analogues in other modes The term includes the Bible Dante s Commedia the great epics and the works of Joyce and Proust Pekka Kuusisto s thesis 2001 discusses topological forms and images in literary encyclopedism To him certain texts by Kafka Borges and Beckett represent an encyclopedic microcosm which in short literary form reflects what are the mostly theoretical conditions of encyclopedism 19 On the other hand encyclopedic
18. eton University Press Hayles N Katherine 1997 Corporeal Anxiety in Dictionary of the Khazars What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About Losing Their Bodies Modern Fiction Studies 43 3 Fall 800 820 Kuusisto Pekka 2001 From the Center to the Circumference Encyclopedic Topologies in Literature from Dante through Modern Science Fiction Diss University of California Riverside Lebel Robert amp Waldberg Isabelle eds 1995 Encyclopaedia Da Costa in Atlas Arkhive 3 Translated by Iain White London Atlas Press Moser Walter 1981 Translating Discourses Inter discursive Mobility in the Early Romantic Encyclopedia The Eighteenth Century 22 1 3 20 Novalis 1978 Werke Tagebticher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs Band 2 Das philosophisch theoretische Werk Hrsg Hans Joachim Mahl M nchen amp Wien Carl Hanser Verlag OuLiPo Compendium Compiled by Harry Mathews amp Alastair Brotchie Atlas Arkhive 6 London Atlas Press 1998 Pavi Milorad 1988 Dictionary of the Khazars A Lexicon Novel in 100 000 Words Translated from the Serbo Croatian by Christina Pribicevic Zori New York Alfred A Knopf 21 Pavi Milorad no date Beginning and the End of the Novel http www khazars com en end of novel Queneau Raymond 1963 Bords Math maticiens Pr curseurs Encyclop distes Paris Hermann 22
19. extons or traversal functions can be permanently added to the text Aarseth 64 is not however further elaborated in the text Yet Robert Coover has placed the novel in line with computer driven nonsequential writing A new kind of coverless interactive expandable book is now being written there are no doubt several out there in hyperspace right now and Dictionary of the Khazars could easily take its place among them as inspired hackers imitating Mr Pavic s Father Theoctist Nikolsky gleeful inventor of saints lives add their own entries helping to fashion Adam Cadmon s body 26 Pavic Beginning and the End of the Novel On the other hand Pavi emphasizes reader s freedom in choosing the path in text I have always wished to make literature which is non reversible art a reversible one Therefore my novels have no beginning and no end in the classical meaning of the word The consequences of this relative reversibility to the story and plot seem to me however not as simple as the author lets us think T have left to them to the readers the decision about the choice of the plots and the development of the situations in the novel where the reading will begin and where it will end even the decision about the destiny of the main characters REFERENCES Aarseth Espen 1997 Cybertext Perspectives on Ergodic Literature The Johns Hopkins University Press Anderson Wilda 1986
20. ictionary edited by Georges Bataille Encyclope dia Da Costa 1947 48 Devils Dictionary 1911 by Ambrose Bierce surrealist games of definition and the Oulipian definitional and semo definitional literature Herv Le Tellier s Encyclopaedia Inutilis 2002 The Meaning of Liff 1983 by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd Gideon Wurdz s Foolish Dictionary 1904 and other strange and unusual dictionaries the lexicon novel Dictionary of the Khazars 1984 by Milorad Pavi the hypertext encyclopedia Neuer Physiologus by Arno Schmidt and others and works that imitate and transform other forms of non fiction like cook books manuals travel guides or maps recent examples of the latter are Atlas of Experience 2000 by Louise Van Swaaij and Jean Klare and Diana Issidores s Landscapes of Love 2003 What interests me in these texts or at least in some of them are the exceptional ways in which they are designed to be read and used The thing they have in common may be approached starting from the fact that they are not works of narrative fiction in the sense that a short story by Borges or Ki still is What strategies of reading do they then call for or allow Dictionaries are usually not read from beginning to end and in their entirety Encyclopedias on the other hand can be and have been designed to be read continually to be used mainly for fragmentary reference or both In Aarseth s terms encyclopedias often leave thei
21. ine Using this technique any word can be appropriated to critical use in a way that is beyond the reach of any index 5 Explicit cross references are used in unconventional ways Time is of course an important factor in both editing and reading a multi volume encyclopedia For its readers and editors the Encyclop die was not accessibile once and for all the first volume was full of references to later volumes that were not yet available and thus neither the censor nor any other reader could foresee the context an article or a phrase was finally given The inaccessibility of later revised editions as well as all the other ways of updating appendices supplementary volumes yearbooks etc can of course be used in the same way In the Encyclop die one way references forward or backward are used for hiding the satirical context If we happen to read the article antropophages we come across references to the entries eucharistie communion and autel thus the satirical perspective opens up The article eucharistie however does not refer to anthropophages instead it refers to communion transubstantiation and other articles dealing with differing views in Christianity berengariens lutheriens In his b te animal brute Diderot contradicts Buffon s views on the question of the intelligence of animals paraphrased in the article animal unexpectedly because there was no reference forward in the latter article Some of the references forwar
22. l s Dictionary defines dictionary as a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic only to add that this dictionary however is a most useful work The reason is that it recogniz es the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense exicographer Thus nonsense should mean the objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary and infancy the period of our lives when according to Wordsworth Heaven lies about us The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward 20 21 22 23 24 25 Cf Adam s amp Lloyd s Meaning of Liff which transforms existing geographic proper names into common names for familiar but hitherto unnameable experiences with a peculiar ear for onomatopoetics Etymology is used to reveal surprising significations hiding in the unity of the word and the name see Epictete Etats Unis Perec s and B nabou s semo definitional literature LSD complements this practice by giving it goals 1 that of orienting the derivation towards the style or the ideas of a particular writer or kind of writer 2 that of demonstrating the lexical equivalence of sharply divergent statements See OuLiPo Compendium 222 223 Several entries in Dictionary of the Khazars refer to the former dictionaries of Khazars as diction
23. lgemeine Brouillon takes further and more self conscious steps in this direction Instead of a total sum of existing knowledge we have here a project and a performance of a future encyclopedia In Novalis s sense Encyklopaedisirung is experimental production of new sciences and combined disciplines such as chemical mechanics poetical physiology physiological stylistics pathological philosophy and psychological futurology Encyklopaedisirung coincides with poiesis as an experimental practice in which disciplines and discourses are translated into each other The result is at the same time a poetic encyclopedia and encyclopedic poetry The future encyclopedia can only be read in fragments and as fragments it is necessarily a work that is still to come Fragments of a future language Encyclopaedia Da Costa The infamous Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge divides animals into strange categories for example animals belonging to the Emperor included in the present classification and drawn with a very fine camelhair brush According to Foucault the classification is heteroclitical it does not seem to arrange its objects according to a common denominator and heterotopical because the space shared by the classified objects is not defined by a one law Heterotopia is a paradoxical space which comes into being through language and syntax but at the same time disturbs their normal functioning their ability to
24. macrocosm such as Finnegans Wake Gravity s Rainbow and Foucault s Pendulum is normally a decentered network of more or less open semiosis 21 This line of research dominates the entry Encyclopedic Novel by Luc Herman in the recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory 2005 Cf Queneau 90 Aarseth 7 8 The footnote is a typical example of a structure that can be seen as both uni and multicursal It creates a bivium or choice of expansion but should we take this path reading the footnote the footnote itself returns us to the main track immediately afterward Perhaps a footnoted text can be described as multicursal on the micro level and unicursal on the macro level See the note 7 below See Eco 80 84 The 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica 16 1974 gives a nonlinear interpretation on the circle of learning A circle is a figure in which no point on the circumference is a beginning none is a middle none is an end It is also a figure in which one can go from any point in either direction around the circumference in addition one can go across the circle from any point to any other or by any number of transecting lines starting from a given point one can go to any number of other points on the circumference near or far 6 my emphasis Orbis sensualium pictus 1658 by J A Comenius is a pictorial dictionary in which the entry is followed by a picture with numbers
25. mancipation eulogizes a certain Licence to live which is to be taken into use in France According to the entry the licence is the culmination of a long series of efforts which have had as their main object the consecration of the inalienable rights of the individual However the application form in the appendix says that the licence has to be renewed either monthly or daily and in advance in the place to which you are about to travel without the licence you can be immediately executed 133 4 pseudo etymologies which bring the different senses of one word together in a surprising way Exposition Act of abandoning a child on the public thoroughfare The definition applies also to art exhibitions In the same way certain individuals called artists see entry for that word the entry is not available have a custom by which they place their works before the eye of the public when these are particularly distressing or ridiculous 5 by separating confused meanings etat state People have chosen to confuse state manner of being with state central power and this latter term has by degrees acquired the ineluctable character of a natural necessity which initially in no way existed Encyclopedia Da Costa moves quickly from a heading to a beheading so to speak and tries to resist the classificatory logic of definitions Raymond Queneau s definitional literature uses a different strategy it res
26. ntry where the difference between the male and female editions is made the entry and the Appendix II recount the last events in the chronology and by so doing they bring the tradition of the Khazars and dictionary making up to date so to speak and give clues as to the destiny of some important manuscripts and possibly to the identity of the editor s of the second edition Thus the novel uses both the unicursal order and the system of cross references to postpone the however open end of its story to the end of reading The encyclopedic devices can thus be used for countering the loss of control ensued by translation and transliteration And yet the alphabetical structure of entries does encourage the random fragmentary reading and at the same time presents the author of this kind of a narrative encyclopedia with the almost infinite challenge of making sure every article could be read easily before and after every other one Pavi Beginning and the End of the Novel In its claim to universality encyclopedia may resemble the Tower of Babel but at closer look it has always lived the time after Babel translating heterogenous sources in multiple languages from the plurality of traditions and styles In Maurice Blanchot s words encyclopedias offer a monstrous common ground of texts and books where everything begins with translation always in another language The works discussed above share the experience of the limits of repr
27. ponds to the demand of definition to the fullest and by so doing shows the literary potential in any dictionary Definitional literature is a method of deriving anew text beginning from a source text with the aid of a dictionary Each 10 meaningful word in a text verb noun adjective adverb is replaced by its dictionary definition each word of the resulting definitions is similarly replaced and the process is repeated as often as is desired OuLiPo Compendium 133 From the source text The product ofa certain period when expressed warm hearted desires become indifferent thrills through the length of time over which recollection extends we can get The thing produced by the effort of an inevitable full pause when exuded compassionate sexual urges grow to be not particularly good is stirred by a tingling sensation of excitement in its duration over which rallying increases in scope The nostalgic reader may try to follow the phases of derivation backwards to the restoration of the source text Alphabetical order in translation Milorad Pavic s Dictionary of the Khazars There can be no encyclopedia without translation But what is translating Is it possible to translate Is not translating that singular literary act what not only enables the encyclopedic work but at the same time prevents it threatens it Translating the bringing into work of difference Maurice Blanchot In alphabeti
28. r mode of cursality up to the reader they can be read either unicursally straight through or multicursally by jumping between the table of contents the entries the footnotes and other devices Whatever the best generic terms for the above mentioned works may be it could be worth studying how these texts incorporate different devices with which the reader can re combine fragments of text into larger wholes reassemble the circle of knowledge or find an otherwise meaningful path through the text As Robert Collison wrote back in 1964 little has been written on the philosophy of the planning and construction of encyclopaedias and the theories underlying their arrangement Still less has been written on the specific problems the reader faces using encyclopedias and related texts that is on the ergodics of texts somewhat misleadingly called reference books In the following I sketch this line of research and at the same time debate specifically what motivates the literary use of devices initially designed for arranging knowledge Principles of order in the Encyclop die What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection Horace cited on the title page of the Encyclop die The topological study of encyclopedias concentrates on the structures and images used in ordering knowledge The name itself already suggests that encyclopedic knowledge becomes a totality somehow due to
29. referring to words printed below in Latin and in German The order of entries is systematic in the sense that the Creator is pictured first and then His creations after natural phenomena and animals come men monsters and forms of human culture In Pierre Bayle s Dictionaire historique et critique 1697 entries are proper names in alphabetical order The body text of the article is in one column and marked with a complex system of references Footnotes in two columns take most of the page to emphasize the skeptical essay developed therein Marginals are covered with references to sources used in body text and in footnotes The source references include cross references to footnotes of other articles in the work Later editions have placed footnotes in linear succession after the article in order to follow them the reader has to leaf the book constantly backward and forward According to d Alembert knowledge may seem like a labyrinth to laymen and to specialists but to philosophers Encyclop die show s the principle countries their position and their mutual dependence the road that leads directly from one to the other This road is often cut by a thousand obstacles which are known in each country only to the inhabitants or to travelers and which cannot be represented except in individual highly detailed maps These individual maps will be the different articles of the Encyclopedia and the Tree or Systematic Chart will be its
30. ritten The second editions order the events according to a single calendar and transliterate the Greek Arabic and Hebrew alphabet into a single language the Serbo Croatian The translation retains the alphabetical order and thus rearranges the text the material for this dictionary on the Khazars would inevitably have to be grouped differently in each new language and new alphabet so that the entries would always appear somewhere else 10 If we compare the Serbo Croatian with Latin alphabets the English and the Finnish versions of the text the three books really do differ In the Serbo Croatian Red Book after the entry Cirilo come Hazari Hazarska 12 polemika Kagan and Lovci snova dream hunters in English Cyril is followed by Dream hunters Kaghan Khazars and Khazar polemic The Finnish Red Book places the entry on Cirilo Cyril Kyrillos after the articles on Khazars and the Khazar polemic The book ends with the article on dream hunters Untenmetsdstajat According to the author the original version of Dictionary of the Khazars printed in the Cyrillic alphabet ends with a Latin quotation sed venit ut illa impleam et confirmem Mattheus The Serbian version printed in the Latin alphabet end s with the following sentence That look wrote Koen s name in the air lighted the wick and lit up her way to the house The translations and transliterations thus differ considerably in
31. tes the reading of geographical variables and conventions of cartography distances differences in altitude location on land or in seas breadth of a road population of centres etc How does Encyclopedia Da Costa perform its idea of a future language To put it briefly by creating 1 new definitions for familiar words or other signs thus producing images in tension in the surrealist sense exode exodus A kind of hymn or song intoned at the end of meals Deaf and dumb alphabets are given new erotic signifieds 146 2 neologisms and new concepts in which both the word and the definition remain in need of clarification epornufler to epornuflate To seize a patient by the right emfle and emarcillate him in a fixed arstene while keeping the free end of his pelin a short distance from the emorfilator Emfle emarcillate and emorfilate are not defined elsewhere in the dictionary 3 other kinds of tension between the entry and the article or between the article and other devices An entry is not usually followed by a definition but something else for example a refusal of definition estorgissement estorgisation We apologise for being unable to provide any definitive clarification of this term a dramatic scene elegie an essay enthousiasme or a narrative the circular route eloge entit erudition etendard euphorie examination exempt narrates a tragic story of baldness The article e
32. the unverifiable of the non hierarchized Encyclopaedia Da Costa 1947 48 is a collaborative work by Bataille s circle and the surrealists In spite of its announced completeness Le Da Costa Encyclop dique could also be translated The Complete Da Costa it emphasizes its fragmentarity in many ways Only the part Fascicule VII Volume II of the work is available This part begins in the middle of a word festations and in the middle of a sentence from an unknown entry To crown the book s headlessness the entry expresses uncertainty of its topic in the end by stating that the question has in no way been clarified 108 All the following entries begin with an The second entry makes explicit that this is not an ordinary encyclopedia based on the hierarchy of sciences and definitions The word echecs for example is not followed by a definition but a chess puzzle and from the given solution one can deduce that the name of the entry echecs could have been heard or understood at least in three senses check echec chess and failure The entry encyclop die challenges existing encyclopedias by demanding a future language Encyclopaedias trouble themselves a great deal about words fallen into disuse never about words still unknown burning to be uttered But just as each of us is ready to exchange everything he knows of history for a single glimpse of his own future the st
33. udy of languages to come seems to us surpass in terms of urgency the analysis of a faded idiom which is flaking away like dead skin Encyclopaedia Da Costa does not want to serve as a document of past knowledge or as a Konversationslexicon of current knowledge it tries to evade the logic of representation which has the pre existing world as its model The reader is guided to step out of the circle of communicative learning to the position of an exorbitant akyklios who has lost the familiar liaisons between words and things To be sure the language of the future is by definition unintelligible to us It is by the very reason of its obscurity that we are able to recognise it that which too rapidly becomes familiar can come only from an immediately neighbouring zone But if it seems presumptuous to dream of putting together in its entirety a language that still does not exist it does not appear beyond realisation empirically to isolate certain terms already accessible The entry encyclop die emphasizes its difference from the European word magic if a word of traditional magic never provides any access other than to a world fallen in ruins of which it is a vestige the future word by raising us up towards that which is still intact obliges us to invent outside any precedent and any etymology the wholly new meaning that glimmers in the distance In the absence of any valid lexicon or of any known fairy our interpret
34. wledge is sometimes imperfect or misleading The system of hierarchization changed during the process of editing but in some cases the misnaming is clearly intentional the grammatical article naitre discusses the question of the origins of life from a materialistic point of view again the grammatical article privil ge which condemns all privileges as injust is followed by a conservative article on the political meanings of the concept 2 The name of the entry can be misleading or only a starting point of an essay in a Baylean fashion the article on taxation vingti me turns to discuss people s right to legislative power 3 Entries combine terms in violation of the alphabetical order as if suggesting their unity of meaning but then the meanings are separated syntactically In the article adorer honorer r v rer adoration of the real God is defined using one s own reason whereas honoring the saints and revering their images and their relics decline towards idolatry 4 Tensions are created between the definition of the word and the examples of its usages After a neutral definition a common word is used in politically risqu descriptions of its functions the example of the metaphorical meaning of the word menacer reads as follows On dira tr s bien par exemple lorsque le gouvernement d un peuple se d clare contre la philosophie c est qu il est mauvais il menace le peuple d une stupidit procha
35. xt the total ofits 71 818 articles did not satisfy either of its editors In reading the Encyclop die one may wonder if and how the differing conceptions of the aim of encyclopedias could be translated into one work For the use as reference the articles in the Encyclop die are in alphabetical order This order has been criticized as arbitrary because it fragments or dismembers the principles concepts and terms of each science along the series of volumes and rearranges them according to the accident of initial letters Diderot noted the comical effects alphabetical order produces when it puts on the same page in sequence and side by side words and things that should have nothing in common The classical non literary encyclopedist author or reader sees thus created metonymies only as unfortunate accidents The systems of reference taxonomical location cross references can be seen as devices to counter the defects of alphabetical organization They help in restating the interdependence of the fragments of knowledge bind the branch to the trunk to use Diderot s words Yet in the Encyclop die the references have other functions too they counter notions bring principles into contrast covertly attack unsettle or overturn some ridiculous opinions and at the same time disturb the ordered construction of knowledge Here are some examples how this is done 1 The placing of an entry in the tree of kno
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