The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World by Too Yun Lee;

Author:Too, Yun Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2010-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

V

This chapter has looked at Apollodrus’ Library of Greek Mythology in order to consider the phenomenon of the library-book, a text that names itself as a book collection and that dramatizes itself as a compendium of other literary works. This library-book, like the larger library, is an entity that lays claim to literary comprehensiveness—the Library contains all the mythology produced up to that point—that supposedly renders all prior mythology obsolete, but it also simultaneously betrays this grand claim. The work reveals moments where its apparent all-knowingness acknowledges the existence of alternative traditions, stories that have different accounts of the births of heroes or their fates. The library-book presents itself thus as complete only because it has engaged in a deliberate forgetting of other parallel discourses.

It also becomes apparent that the author of the library-book has considerable power, a fact that is not surprising when we consider who the original founders of the library were. We have seen that he has the licence to manipulate narrative, subsuming all competing traditions to his own story so that he appears to be the origin and the end of myth. Even the appearance of totalization that the author purports for his text is a political ploy, for the Library, as all other libraries, is anything but complete.

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