Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF): Alain Resnais and W. G. Sebald
The first foundations of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) can be found in 1368 in the library of King Charles V, who established a separate wing in the Louvre to accommodate it. For the next hundred years, the library moved to other cities during the wars with the English, was also looted and taken to England, and it was not until 1461, with the coming to power of Louis XI, that it maintained continuity and began to be systematically filled. The kings placed it in the castles of Amboise, Blois, Fointenbleau, and in 1537 it returned to Paris. It was enriched with new collections (medals, manuscripts, numismatics, maps), and under Louis XIV it experienced a great boom and was opened to the public in 1692. During the Regency period, it was located in 1720 on its present site with an entrance from Rue de Richelieu. The space was increasingly upgraded as the collection grew, but it became too small and could no longer be expanded, so in 1988 Françoise Mitterand announced and began a project to build a new library on the site of the former glass factory. The new part was opened to the public in 1996 and bears his name.
The BNF owns over 16 million books, the largest collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts in the world, a large cabinet of medals, a graphic collection, a collection of photographs and many others that are a kind of museums within the library. It organizes exhibitions, lectures, scientific conferences and various cultural events, has its own publishing and restoration department, awards an important literary award and employs more than 2000 people (https://www.bnf.fr/fr/la-bnf-en-chiffres). This huge facility and large spaces have earned the library the colloquial name Très Grande Bibliothèque (TGB) – Very Large Library.
Bibliothèque Nationale impressed two well-known authors, and it is interesting to see how they interpreted it.
Alain Resnais made several notable documentaries before his famous films "Hiroshima, My Love" and "Last Year in Marienbad". The 26-minute film "All the Memory of the World" (Toute la mémoire du monde), made in 1958, is dedicated to the Bibliothéntà nationale in Paris. In the author's characteristic style, the camera moves on long drives through all levels and spaces of the library, first through the basement storerooms, where books rest in the dark, as if dead, and then through the corridors and halls to the domes and exterior galleries of the roofs. This is followed by the process of collecting and processing books, starting with the columns of postmen who bring all kinds of publications from different parts of the world, through their labeling and storage, to the eventual arrival of users.
Resnais's film deals with his typical theme of memory and begins with dramatic music and a voice that declares that "humanity has a short memory" and therefore collects everything to maintain it. People have built a fortress in which words are imprisoned (emprisonné) and constantly consult this gigantic memory. Resnais's attitude towards this enormous undertaking seems twofold. There is no doubt a kind of admiration and emphasis on the effort and dedication with which the army of employees works to collect, sort and process everything that the human spirit produces. The employees of the library are in constant motion, taking and bringing books and papers, meeting and crossing their paths as if in some unusual choreography. It is accompanied by music by Maurice Jarre, sometimes dramatic, occasionally mysterious, and occasionally playful.
At the same time, in the background of the story, there is a hint of a certain fragility, even futility, of this effort: there is more and more paper and the library is constantly digging deeper and deeper into the ground and growing higher and higher, words and books are trapped in a labyrinth, and cataloguing is a process that will last forever. Will there be an omission or mistake that will send them into oblivion because they will be mislabeled or will they be left in the wrong place, will something fail, will something be missed? We wonder what will be the most valuable testimony of this stored memory, closed as in Captain Nemo's submarine: a codex that no one knows how to read yet, diaries that must not be opened for decades, the first published poem by a famous poet in a minor forgotten magazine... Resnais perceives this constant effort as a fight against death, and the arrival of the book to the reader as a passage through a mirror, which transforms it from an indifferent mass of data into something personal, through which, as the narrator says in the end, the user in his field will contribute to the discovery of a piece of the greatest and last secret of the world – the happiness of humanity (le bonheur).
In the novel "Austerlitz" by G. W. Sebald, the title character deals with the study of architecture, and his journey from one large building to another is also a path of discovering his own roots and forgotten memories, as well as a symbolic image of contemporary history. Austerlitz visits various places in various European cities, and the most striking are the station building in Antwerp, the point of departure and arrival, the moment of loss of one's own place or its destabilization; the Breendonk fortress in Belgium, erected with the purpose of protecting against a possible enemy, and perverted into a Nazi headquarters where prisoners were tortured; the concentration camp in Terezin as a living monument of historical guilt and suffering that man can cause; and finally the National Library in Paris, which should be a form of historical memory and preserve both the best of the human spirit and the memory of the worst. The novel brings themes that Sebald develops in his other works: lost identity and his own roots, oblivion, relationship to history, time that fluidly brings together the past, present and future.
We cannot analyze the complexity of Sebald's language, style and subject matter here, but we will look at how he depicts the new National Library where his Austerlitz goes to look for information about the deportation of his father. Of course, the author's library is and is not "real", it is an interpretation of the library in the spirit of his novel, and the facts are subjected to some form of fictionalization, at least in the subtle way in which he shapes them linguistically.
Resnais depicted the old library of the Richelieu neighborhood and emphasized its insurmountable size. The new library is far larger, and the title character emphasizes the inaccessibility and even danger to which the one who wants to access it is subjected. The library buildings rise on the plateau like enormous ziggurats, the staircase and the landing are huge, slippery and dangerous when the wind blows or it rains. It takes a very long time to walk from the external entrance to the building itself, and after the climb, the visitor has to descend again almost to the basement, where the entrance for users is. The lending is slow and the user is subjected to suspicious questioning. The reading room looks at exotic trees trapped in the inner courtyard, and the birds lose their orientation and hit the unrecognizable glass of the library.
Finally, a librarian reveals to Austerlitz that the library was built on the site of a former collection center for Jewish property seized by the Nazis, from dishes and furniture to clothing, jewelry, valuable musical instruments and works of art. Everything leads to the conclusion that the library is "an expression of the growing need to conclude everything that still lives in the past" and that "the reader is tried to be excluded as a potential enemy."
This attitude of Sebald (Austerlitz) is part of his rather pessimistic picture of a world that ignores and rejects its history, and the title character is a loner and melancholic who cannot find his place among people (which is symbolized by the traveler's backpack he always carries) and believes that "our best plans turn into their exact opposite during their realization", just as ideal cities/fortresses turned into ghettos and camps.
The most interesting thing, however, is that Sebald's story was so powerful and convincing that after the publication of the novel, all the claims made were taken as correct, so the newspapers quoted the information that the BNF was erected above the former collection center that the prisoners called Galleries d'Austerlitz. However, this is not (completely) true, although it was built nearby, but the book in any case encouraged further research into this well-known, but somewhat suppressed truth. More about everything in the article:
James L. Cowan: W. G. Sebald's "Austerlitz" and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I, Part II
Monatshefte, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Spring, 2010), pp. 51-81 (31 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20622282
Monatshefte, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 192-207 (16 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20764190
Despite this presentation of the BNF, we believe that each library has its own positive role, and you visit the extremely rich digital collection of Gallica and discover its treasures: https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/fr/content/accueil-fr?mode=desktop
Illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NusSHGTMomg
