Keep Watching the Sky

"Books are not dispersed but assembled." Georges Perec's "Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books" identifies key problems in the classification, assembling, and arranging of one's books. Ideas are proposed and abandoned, one after another, their limits reached; books are instead meta-classified in terms of their relative ease of classification. Though "we would like to believe that a unique order exists" — one that is not only unique, but ideal, such that it "would enable us to accede to knowledge all in one go" — we instead resort to arrangement's opposite, hoping "that order and disorder are in fact the same thing, denoting pure chance."

And, in a belated follow-up to Perec's analysis, Anne F. Garréta has proposed a few principles according to which one's library might be arranged. Though, unlike Perec, she goes so far as to devise concrete systems for organization, her essay shares with his an interest not in classification itself, but its limits. This is evident in her fanciful principles, most of which resist the universalizing and rationalizing impulses of, say, the Dewey Decimal system, and share more, in the end, with Sei Shōnagon's idiosyncratic organizational schemata.

PRINCIPLE #6
— books in which one encounters whales;
— books in which not even the shadow of a whale is to be found;
— books from which have disappeared, inexplicably, the whales one imagined there.

Each of Garréta's principles — ten in all — amounts, in the end, to an imaginative way of articulating the et cetera against which all classificatory systems necessarily run, despite their efforts to the contrary.

Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Book project enacts a further way of thinking organization. Rather than categorizing books according to similarities of content, Katchadourian groups books by their titles, treating them as fragmentary phrases which can be arranged more or less syntactically. The library, then, becomes a re-combinatory literary work unto itself — a sort of cento.

• Books are grouped into a summary or loose interpretation of another title:

"King Lear / Old Age is Contagious, But... / If I'm in Charge Here, Why Is Everybody Laughing?"

• Sometimes one title comes to define another:

"Cindy Sherman / A Harlot High and Low."
"The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography / The Naked Ape."

• Other groups work as highly paratactic poems, or shot-by-shot accounts of a film:

"A Day at the Beach / The Bathers / Shark 1 / Shark 2 / Shark 3 / Sudden Violence / Silence."

The most interesting of Katchadourian's groupings finds titles placed into their own systems of classification, such that the first title provides a rubric for gathering those that follow: "Tales of Unnatural and Natural Catastrophes / Dante's Inferno / The Flight of Icarus." "Kinds of Love / Ecstasy / Sensation / Distemper." "The Secret Language of Dreams / Fences and Gates / Queues, Rendezvous, Riots / Picnic, Lightning / Swimming Pools." Where most organizational orders are imposed from without — particularly in the cases where order relies on preconceived classes of knowledge (as is the case with the Dewey Decimal system) or genre — these strange and provisional categories are especially interesting in that their schemata emerge from within, and are dispersed within, the field to be classified.




["On Bookselves" by Anne F. Gerréta was published in The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo, one of the three volumes bound by Athanasius Kircher's "secret knots" as McSweeney's 22.

Perec's essay is, of course, included in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.]