Ingredients of a classic library: custom, ceremony...and the greed of a kid in a candy store.
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| The gates of the BNE, surmounted by the royal shield of Spain: graceful, imposing...and with bike parking right inside. |
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| The stairs of the BNE are guarded by statues of Isidore of Seville (San Isidoro), Alfonso el Sabio, Juan Luis Vives, and others, who lived in different centuries, in regions that were sometimes at war with each other, and who had much more heterodox religious opinions than the sculptors wanted to admit. It would have been nice if the sculptures included Teresa de Avila or Teresa de Cartagena, or Emila Pardo-Bazán, but you can't have everything. And at least the statues aren't boringly uniform in dress and pose. |
That was as much as I did Thursday, but Friday afternoon I made my way up the stairs with more confidence (and my shiny new card), and checked in at the desk, put my bag through the x-ray machine and myself through the metal detector, and then headed back through an echoing antechamber (which reminded me of the rotunda at Low Library) to the lockers for leaving stuff.
Having been warned by a fellow Fulbrighter I had my 1 euro coin ready to put in the slot for the lockers. (I always have a one euro coin for the lockers at the polideportivo too, so that's my locker euro, whether for the pool or the library.) I had received a handout with the list of prohibited objects, and I saw that notebooks were allowed instead of just loose sheets of paper (which I find impressive), so I put my notebook and my tablet and a pencil in the reusable clear plastic bags with the BNE logo on them that are provided by the lockers, and went to another security desk, where I showed my ID, opened my tablet, and let the guard riffle through my notebook to make sure that there was nothing tucked away in it. Then I followed her directions through an interestingly framed pair of glass doors, that come to a point and slope away from each other making the entrance to the BNE reading rooms jut out like the prow of a ship.
Once past the security desk you find yourself in an exhibition hall, filled with glass cabinets with interesting holdings of the library, and signs to the rest of the museum in the basement below. I did not follow the signs to the Sala Cervantes on the second floor, where the manuscripts are kept, because I didn't quite feel up to the challenge yet, so I headed for the "Sala General de Lectura" on the main floor, past a polite little sign saying that visitors to the exhibition should stop here, down a hallway, and through a set of padded doors similar to library doors everywhere into the "sala de peticiones" where a friendly woman behind the desk explained to me that she would have to take my ID card if I wanted to work in the Sala General, and gave me a little card in return with a number on it (mine was number 56) which I realized in retrospect was the desk I was assigned in the Sala. (The hall was enormous and empty, so I didn't end up at my assigned seat, but I will next time.)
The general reading room of the BNE is a lovely example of research library reading rooms.
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| The "Sala General" of the BNE. I don't think you're supposed to take pictures, so this was taken furtively, with the tablet's front camera. That's my shoulder in the lower right corner, where I was leaning to get out of the way. |
I could try to describe it, but basically the important thing to know is that is that reading rooms in serious research libraries have the same wonderful qualities of vast open space combined with small private seating as railroad stations and cathedrals (though they are generally quieter). They also have the same quality as railroad stations and cathedrals in that while proud sponsoring organizations vie to have famous and unique architectural details, their basic layout and feeling are similar.
In terms of specific architectural details of this reading room, the chairs in front of the slanted desks are red and plush and very squishy (you're almost too low sitting in them), and there are big clocks in the corners of the rooms like a railroad station. (In terms of staying awake, I could wish that the chairs in the BNE were a little less soft, and the chairs in a lot of railroad stations were a lot more!) There are more photos (official ones taken by proper photographers) available at the BNE's official website. (See photos 16-18.) There's also a little video from the BNE inviting the general public to come and visit on October 12, the fiesta nacional.
If you enlarge the picture above a bit you can probably see that around the top of the walls there is a mosaic with the names of famous Spanish writers running around the room. (So their variation is to put the line of names on the inside that Butler Library at Columbia puts on the outside.) The writers are happily out of chronological, generic, or geographical order on the frieze, so "Tirso" is next to "Jovellanos" and "Moratín" next to "Lope" etc. On the ceiling above the frieze (which is cut off in the photo), there are painted shields of what I think must the regions of the authors below them. I noticed the ceiling purely because when I looked up I saw repeated several times apparently in a random pattern the stripey shield of Catalunya, which has been in the news a lot lately. ("I know it's a flag of independence and they take it very seriously," one of the Fulbrighters confessed a few weeks ago. "But every time I see it I think of McDonalds and the Golden Arches. Really, it's very unfortunate.") The Catalan barras were well represented, but sprinkled in among the green trees of the Basques, the castles of Castilla, and so on. (I prefer to think of the Catalan shield as tiger-stripes, because that way they go with the rampant lion of Leon, and the purry lion of Andalucía and besides, the bloody handprint on a golden shield legend is just gross. Stripey tigers for the win.)
In any case, given that yesterday the news was focused rather relentlessly on Catalunya, I looked up at the tiger-stripes, and thought about the big Spanish flag flying over the big, comforting, neo-classical BNE, and thought how very angry this building would make the Catalanistes, and how very warm and welcoming and comforting I find it. The thing is, libraries (like universities) are by their nature eclectic. And by their nature, they are also greedy. "The good old disease called Scholar's Clutch," as The Sherwood Ring calls it, means that of course librarians seek things out and accumulate them in one place. Of course libraries appropriate (and sometimes under less ethical management expropriate) cultural property. If they didn't they wouldn't be libraries. When you teach Anglo-Saxon to high school students you have to introduce kids to the idea of a kenning, a compound word which forms a kind of dead metaphor. So (as readers of T.S. Eliot know) "the sea" is "the whale-path." And the word for "vocabulary" is "word-hoard." Both libraries and universities are hoarders by nature, as relentless as dragons in expanding and guarding their treasures. But unlike dragons (at least the dragons in most books), libraries hoard in order to share. (Now I kind of want to read a book about dragons who amass library hoards. Of course if they were dragons who treated normal dragon-hoard material like gold the way libraries treat and acquire books and do interlibrary loan and so on they would just be banker-dragons. Please someone tell me that there is a novel somewhere about banker-dragons.) And the ability to provide a deep, rich, sharing experience to all is rooted in the voracious desire to "contain multitudes." (What beautiful arrogance of the university to aim at containing a "universe" within a single entity.) So nationalisms no matter how much they self-proclaim themselves "open" and "diverse" will always be antithetical to the kind of sharing of knowledge in a place like the BNE.
Not that the BNE (and other institutions like it with the tell-tale "N" in their names) can't be shoehorned into a nationalist or imperialist design, and put to evil use. But something that I think the local flag-wavers haven't figured out (or perhaps don't want to know) is that when it comes to things like libraries, a whole really will be greater than the sum of its parts.
I was also amused at the contrast between the Bauhaus attempts of the Complutense and the strictly neo-classical architecture (with very romantic 19th C sculpture) of the BNE. It's hard to quarrel with the quixotic impulse that led to the Complutense's construction, but I think there's a reason that everyone I've talked to in the scholarly community prefers to work at the BNE. For one thing, in among the friezes and neo-classical sweeping stairways, there's a nice little coffee machine and vending machine, and a cafeteria in the basement for those doing research. (I didn't check out the cafeteria, but I'm told that it has an excellent menu del día for only 7 euros.) For another, you can get from space to space by taking the stairs or the elevator, rather than an endless walk across a crowded parking lot, which is the standard means of moving from building to building at the Complutense. But finally, aside from the general feeling that Bauhaus against a completely virgin landscape is a bad idea, whatever your political convictions, it's pretty hard to study history or literature if you're afraid of the past. It may be a different country, but it's one that you have to enjoy visiting, even if at the end of your stay you're glad to be home. Of course the outsized sculptures of Alfonso El Sabio and similar are ridiculous and pretentious. But it's nice to be able to give them a pat for luck as you pass them by. Or at least to stick out your tongue at the rancid old conservatives who frown down on you from the architecture and think "ha! Boy is this article going to stick it to you!" You can even get mad at the past, and want to smash old statues, or at least take them down and put them away in a museum. But it's hard to be a university with no monuments whether to revere or rebel against. The BNE happily absorbs different time periods, just as it happily absorbs different regions, and allows its researchers to pick and choose, between the computers of the present, the florid nineteenth century romanticism of its statues, or the awe-inducing moment when you look at a catalogue record for a manuscript and realize that "1248" is a date, not an ascension number.
Leaving aside philosophical musings, I didn't actually request manuscripts at the BNE, since it was already evening, and I didn't want to end up rushing to look at stuff. Instead, I spent a happy hour figuring out how to work with their online catalogue, and taking notes of things I am planning to request on Monday. There haven't been any direct hits with my authors so far, but there are notebooks and letters of people I know they associated with, and I am hoping that one thing will lead to another. Expect another research entry soon.
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