Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: toward a postmodern epistemology for library science - Gustave Flaubert, Michel Foucault - Qualitative Research

Library Trends, Spring, 1998 by Gary P. Radford

The heart of Foucault's analysis is the claim that the realms of the library and the fantastic can no longer be kept apart. Foucault (1967/1977) writes that the "domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and constant vigilance" (p. 90). He continues: "[T]he imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp. The fantastic is no longer a property of the heart, nor is it found among the incongruities of nature; it evolves from the accuracy of knowledge, and its treasures lie dormant in documents" (Foucault, 1967/1977, p. 90-91). Finally, Foucault (1967/1977) writes that:

Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a

true image is now a product of learning: it derives from words spoken

in the past, exact recensions, the amassing of minute facts,

monuments reduced to infinitesimal fragments, and the reproductions

of reproductions. In the modern experience, these elements contain

the power of the impossible. (pp. 90-91)

The production of a fantasia from a domain previously given to reason, rationality, and order is what Foucault has called the "modern experience .... a literary space wholly dependent on the network formed by books of the past" (p. 91). The library is not a backdrop to this work as a separate realm but is an integral part of it. Whereas the library once contained the book, now the book contains the library. The book becomes its own library. Flaubert's book "dreams other books ... books that are taken up, fragmented, displaced, combined, lost, set at an unapproachable distance by dreams, but also brought closer to the imaginary and sparkling realization of desires" (p. 92).

In this analysis, the dissolution of the library/fantasia dichotomy produces new conceptions of both, and it is the conception of the library that is of interest here. As the library becomes integral to the experience of Flaubert's fantasia, so La Tentation has taken on the characteristics of the library. For Foucault, La Tentation "may appear as merely another new book to be shelved alongside all the others, but it serves, in actuality, to extend the space that existing books can occupy. It recovers other books; it hides and displays them and, in a single movement, it causes them to glitter and disappear" (pp. 91-92). Flaubert's text is itself a catalog which places and orders other texts. La Tentation is a library, but the rationality which derives its order is of a different kind. As Foucault (1967/1977) graphically states in La Tentation, "the library is on fire" (p. 92).

Barthes (1971/1977) makes a similar distinction in his discussion of the "work" and the "Text" (with a capital T). For Barthes, a "work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example)" (p. 156). The work is a physical entity that can be cataloged, ordered, and placed with respect to other such works. The text, however, is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. Rather, it is a "methodological field" (p. 156) or a "network" (p. 161) that "exists in the movement of a discourse" (p. 156). The text does not, and cannot, stop on a library shelf. The text's movement cuts across particular works. As Barthes (1971/1977) explains: