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

Foucault's work has recently been recognized as a potentially fruitful perspective for framing epistemological issues in library and information science (Radford, 1992; Radford & Budd, 1997; Thomas, 1996; Tuominen, 1997). Similarly, Harris (1993) has described Foucault's contribution in terms of a desire to overturn the power of positivism in the social sciences and understand the political economy of knowledge production in new and innovative ways, an economy that includes libraries. Harris (1993) states that "one can only wonder at the extent to which Foucault's work has been ignored by such professions as librarianship and social work that would seem to be in a position to benefit significantly from his insights" (p. 116) and that "librarians, who consider their practice to be `neutral' and apolitical, might find Foucault's work both challenging and disconcerting and, perhaps, redemptive" (p. 116) .

Foucault does not write about the library as an abstract entity. He was very familiar with the library experience and was an experienced library user at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, as this quotation from Macey's (1993) biography of Foucault reveals:

For ... thirty years, Henri Labrouste's great building in the Rue de

Richelieu, with its elegant pillars and arches of cast iron, would be

his primary place of work. His favourite seat was in the hemicycle, the

small, raised section directly opposite the entrance, sheltered from

the main reading room, where a central aisle separates rows of long

tables subdivided into individual reading desks. The hemicycle

affords slightly more quiet and privacy. For thirty years, Foucault

pursued his research here almost daily, with occasional forays to the

manuscript department and to other libraries, and contended with the

Byzantine cataloging system: two incomplete and dated printed

catalogs supplemented by cabinets containing countless index cards,

many of them inscribed with copperplate handwriting. Libraries were

to become Foucault's natural habitat: "those greenish institutions

where books accumulate and where grows the dense vegetation of their

knowledge." (p. 49)

Foucault offers a perspective of the library experience that questions and dissolves the rational/irrational dichotomy that is the foundation of the positivist conception of the library. The dissolution of taken-for-granted structures is a hallmark of Foucault's work. For example, Foucault's (1961/1988) Madness and Civilization considers the opposition of reason and madness and suggests that the division is discursively produced in particular historical contexts. Foucault (1961/1988) writes that "madness and non-madness, reason and non-reason are inextricably involved: inseparable at the moment when they do not yet exist, and existing for each other, in relation to each other, in the exchange which separates them" (p. x).

Foucault (1967/1977) performs a similar analysis which bears directly on the modern library experience in "La Bibliotheque Fantastique," which originally appeared as the afterword to the German translation of Gustave Flaubert's (1874/1980) La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Antony). In this essay, Foucault draws upon "library" and "fantasia" as hitherto polarized terms and brings them together to derive an appreciation of Flaubert's text. It is Foucault's reconciliation of the library (the rational) with the fantasia (the irrational) which forms the basis of the alternative account of the modern library experience offered here.