Set up like a traditional reading room, one space sees VR-equipped visitors in a forest setting, in which the fallen leaves are pages from books. LBLN foret_cr Michel Legendre.jpgvotre nom
My first visits to a library impressed me with the weight of the door at the entrance, and by the unventilated stillness inside. For me, all libraries were public: We had books at home, but no sense that they were a collection that deserved a space of their own.
Alberto Manguel knew he had a library as soon as he owned books, which as a boy he used to reorganize according to various experimental systems. He eventually gathered almost 40,000 volumes – not a large number if you believe that "a library is a mirror of the universe," as he writes in his 2006 book, The Library at Night.
Certainly every collection of books mirrors the collector, especially if he or she also builds the space in which they are kept. For many years, Manguel maintained his paper universe in a cozy purpose-built structure in France, which was the model for the first darkened room in a multimedia installation by Manguel and theatre artist Robert Lepage at Montreal's Grande Bibliothèque.
In this nocturnal space, at the beginning of a timed admission to the installation, you listen to Manguel's recorded voice outlining some of his ideas about libraries, including the notion that something breaks free from daylight reality in a library at night. "Thoughts grow louder. … I turn into something of a ghost," he writes.
The larger second room is laid out like a traditional reading room, with banker's lights on every table, except that the room is also a nocturnal forest, in which all the fallen leaves are pages from books. You sit down, put on a Samsung Gear VR headpiece, and wander like a ghost through a virtual tour of 10 libraries, guided by Manguel's narration.
Some of these were built to express power and ambition, including the neoclassical Library of Congress in Washington and the ancient library of Alexandria, the first to aim at collecting all writings from everywhere. The allegorical figures and paintings in a monastic Austrian book room suggest another kind of ambition, for the mystical world beyond books. The novel gas lighting and iron structural pillars in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris serve early notice that libraries could align themselves with technological progress.
The VR portions of The Library at Night are impressive and sometimes fanciful, as for example when Lepage releases a flock of birds in the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, while a librarian turns the pages of Audubon's The Birds of America. The section on the Library of Congress begins with the view from inside the building's cupola, from which all of Washington can be seen, then slowly descends to ground level.
As Lepage and Manguel show us the library of Sarajevo, the sounds of shelling are heard, and tanks rumble past the windows that soon glow with flames. The Moorish-style building and its collection were destroyed by Serbian artillery in 1992; Manguel neglects to mention that the structure was entirely restored in 2014, though it is no longer a library. The ancient Alexandria library, which consisted of cubbyholes filled with scrolls, also burns before our eyes.
One vanished library I would like to have seen in VR is that of the Institut Canadien de Montréal, one of the city's first important collections and the focus of a furious polemical struggle at the time of Confederation. Irked by the Institut's free-thinking debates and suspect books (almost half of which were novels), the Bishop of Montreal successfully petitioned the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition in 1869 to censure the organization and its collection. Priests in every parish in the city were ordered to tell the faithful that anyone belonging to the Institut would be denied the sacraments, even at the hour of their death.
Later that year, a printer and Institut member named Joseph Guibord died, and his widow was refused permission to bury his body in consecrated ground. A six-year court battle was finally settled by the Privy Council in London, which found that Guibord had the right to a Catholic burial. His remains were moved to the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery under armed guard and buried without ceremony in a coffin sealed in concrete to deter the pious from vandalizing it. The bishop personally deconsecrated the ground where Guibord was buried, for no other reason than that he had belonged to a discussion club where novels were read. The Institut and its library folded a few years later.
The current exhibition of The Library at Night was commissioned by the Grande Bibliothèque to celebrate its 10th anniversary. This sleek five-storey building of glass and wood, principally designed by Patkau Architects of Vancouver, defines the library primarily as a social space or commons. The open plan dramatizes people's comings and goings, and even the circulation of materials, via the exposed conveyor system that receives returned materials in the foyer and runs them down through the children's area to a resorting area in the basement.
The building makes the use of books a group spectacle or continuing communal event, which may be a political choice. The Grande Bibliothèque is the flagship of Quebec's Bibliothèque Nationale – library of the nation, however one chooses to understand that term within the borders of Quebec. One whole section of the building is reserved for the Collection Nationale, which receives, by law, a copy of all books published in the province.
I toured the place at night, my perceptions still affected by the swarming particularity of Lepage's virtual realities. But I saw no ghosts – just a literate public exercising the freedom to read that was severely curtailed for other Montrealers when Canada was young.
The Library at Night continues at Montreal's Grande Bibliothèque through Aug. 28, 2016 (banq.qc.ca).