In 1942, Jorge Luis Borges published an essay that reanimated the obscure name of John Wilkins, an 18th century British chaplain who speculated on ships that would fly to the moon, and who tinkered with a dictionary which broke down language into 40 words that would describe everything in the universe. Taking Wilkins’ dictionary as his easy target, Borges shows the absurdity of various attempts to create a system of universal classification that is not arbitrary and speculative. “The reason,” writes Borges, “is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is.”
To underscore his point, Borges references the work of another scholar and a dubious book: “These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopoedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a distance resemble flies.”
Because the system behind such a list is the opposite of universal, this Chinese encyclopedia is obviously useless to anyone but its author. Borges argues that no order, even one less mad than this, is objective, despite the enormous energy that the West has applied to the creation of universal categories since the early Enlightenment.
It strikes me as a shame, however, that Borges never turned his acid wit on the American tinkerer, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, who in his love for efficiency and progress, made a half-hearted attempt at the reform of English orthography, dropping his middle names and shortening the rest to Melvil Dui, before settling on Melvil Dewey; while being much more famous for the pathological mania for classifying that brought him to transform forever the library at Amherst, his alma mater, before publishing, in 1876, at the age of 25, his major opus, an explanation and tentative exploration of the Dewey Decimal system; and much less famous for the negative view of minorities that eventually forced his departure from the directorship of the New York State Library.
It is hard to imagine what it must have been like, before Dewey, to search a large library for a particular book. Not only did each library have its own system, few had the resources to pay a competent crew to provide the never-ending work of sustaining an intelligent system as the collection expanded.
Dewey’s basic idea was brilliant: With his wide-ranging knowledge of books, and the wisdom gained from innumerable visits to various libraries, he devised a method of placing any book conceivably written on its proper shelf, according to a system of numbers from 0 to 1000. In so doing, he divided all the universe into ten main classes, ten main divisions, a thousand sections, and an infinite number of possible subsections. He wanted to do it so well that the thousand main categories would never have to be revised, so that 551 would forever be Meteorology; 746, Needlework; and 216, Evil/Depravity.
Although it has been revised in countless ways since Dewey’s short pamphlet of 1876, the inevitably arbitrary and speculative nature of his life's work can be seen clearly in the edition I have on my desk. 612 yellowing pages sewn with white thread within a flap of ruddy brown leather, this worn, beautiful book published by the Library Bureau in 1895 has its own decimal position branded into the leather in golden numerals: 025.4. Although every writer after Dewey must somehow feel the tug of the call numbers, and feel her piece wrested away at birth to a loveless notch on the shelf, still, 025.4 seems an especially unfair Eternal Number, a blandly modest and dreary spot for a book that contains all other books. And yet, within Dewey’s system, its internal logic is inescapable: 000 being General and unclassifiable works, 020 being Library Economy, 025 being Administration/Departments, and 025.4 being Classification.
The charm and beauty of the 1895 edition lies in the flourishing of subsections in areas where Dewey could transpose his own vast learning into arabic numerals, against the telling absence of subsections where he himself had neither interest nor specific knowledge. It is this inequity that gives such lovely aesthetic texture to the tables. It gives us the rounded portrait of a 19th century American, through the window of his passions and contempt.
His passions are, at first glance, the most obvious. Like a fervid monk working out a labyrinthine problem of god's existence, Dewey places a minor subsection of History, the American Civil War, 973.7, under a magnifying glass, exploring every conceivable element of one nation’s crisis -- its causes, compromises, campaigns, hospitals, general histories, naval histories, personal narratives, songs, maps, humor, spies, army life -- pain-stakingly, perhaps compulsively, mapping this four-year period onto eight full pages of miniscule print.
But equally transparent is Dewey’s impatience, for example, with art history -- he gives Painting, 750, just a fraction of a page which could have been written by a hawker of oils at a countryside fair: 751 Materials and Methods; 752 Color; 753 Epic, Myths, Idealistic; 754 Genre, Still Life; 755 Religious, Ecclesiastic; 756 Historical, Battle Scenes; 757 Portrait; 758 Landscape and Marine, Animals, Flowers -- and finally, with nine thoughtful strokes of his pen, Dewey shelves all the world’s paintings according to their exhaustive traditions: 759.1 American; .2 English; .3 German; .4 French; .5 Italian; .6 Spanish; .7 Slavic; .8 Scandinavian; .9 Other schools.
A careful reading of his longer lists reveals a method to Dewey’s passions. In general, he indulges his preference for things that can be broken into complex categories, such as governments, religious schisms, or the nine kinds of plutonic rocks -- but he refrains from those which, however useful, might appear subjective, speculative or philosophical, such as the types of love, the varieties of ugliness, or the reasons a sick bird should go on living. Under the 1000 major themes of the universe, Dewey places Dicotyledonae at 583, most likely because he can further divide these angiospermic plants, on the word of prominent botanists, into 197 subsections. But one has the sense that Dewey’s work is most vital not when he is jotting down divisions already established by specialists, but when he can make his own permanent mark on the world, by giving names to humble continents of experience which others have previously ignored. Who can overlook, for example, the creative spark that included Personal Hygiene, 613, in the universe’s 1000 elemental categories? And who but Dewey would have seen that 613 was pregnant with over 93 subsections, including Morbid Habits, Inhalation of Gases and Vapors, and Food for Infants?
Having grown up Jewish in the same cold, poor, mountainous part of northern New York State as Dewey, I have some sympathy for this man whose encyclopedic ambitions may well have marinated in the dark forces of an impoverished childhood that perpetuated his polymorphous chauvinism. Eventually he was fired from his post at the New York State Library after he extended his mania for classification to Jews and other minorities, categorically refusing them membership to the exclusive Lake Placid Club, a utopian resort he developed with his wife for social, cultural and spiritual enrichment in the Adirondak Mountains.
I have my theories about what would make a person spend forty years speculating on how best to number any given book in any library in the universe, as mediated by the central problem, which is that it must not annoy librarians of earth, and specifically, late 2nd millenium North America. My guess is that Dewey’s love for making lists is a subset of an obsessive-compulsive urge to horde, which may be reduced, ironically, to its opposite, a drive to sub-divide all reality into its smallest elements, a desperate grasping for omniscience which, ultimately, comes out of the same world-weary urge for self-obliteration that made the ancient inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad love their towers to heaven more than heaven itself. In any case, seeing that throughout his system, wherever applicable, eight out of nine subsections in the 1895 edition are generally reserved for books concerning America or Western Europe, Dewey, confronted with books written by other species, on other planets, in other dimensions, would have to place the majority of our universe’s authors in the ninth category, which one sees again and again: “Chinese, Slavic, Bengali, Other.”
Undoubtedly the art of shelving books has improved substantially from Dewey’s devoted labor. Yet his work's grander implications -- as a numerical system that can absorb any shred of writing, on any planet in this or any other universe -- are defeated by a flatness, the doddering sincerity of a homely American pragmatism. A hundred years before Dewey was born, Jean Jacques Rousseau, ever skeptical of maps and nations, had said: “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, ‘This is mine,’ and found people naďve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.” Ultimately, Dewey’s library is an unapologetic compromise with boundless knowledge on the order of the world’s first fence.
But all this depends on how we wish to take Dewey and his system -- on which shelf we chose to put him and his book. If we classify Dewey’s work as rigorously scientific, and not whimsical, it would have to be considered, to a certain degree, a pseudoscience. As such, according to its own logic, Dewey’s work, or at least the volume from 1895, would undoubtedly be moved to a new shelf one day: 502, Scientific Methodology, Archaic, Obsolete.
When a scientist invents a pseudoscience, it is a sad reflection on an entire civilization. Therefore, I prefer to enjoy the tables and indexes of my leather-bound 1895 edition as an art piece, a cup of coffee I can sip as it rains outside -- after all, when an artist invents such a Tower of Babel, what a genius, what a Borges, what a commentary on the human condition! Although Dewey’s own categories for the arts were uncomfortably limited, if it were my choice, I’d give him a final home in the Fine Arts. According to the logic of the 1895 edition, this would roughly place him at 793, In-door Amusements: private theatricals, tableaux, charades, dancing.
