The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed. (review)

Abstract

The encyclopedic articulation of a world presupposes, in a way that the art of the summa does not, a plurality of dichotomies and discourses. Oppositions concerning the nature of meaningfulness, understanding, and knowledge itself are at its core. What is knowledge? And what determines its relationship to information? Is it represented best as a closed inventory--d'Alembert's "engine of ordered learning"; or as an open-ended arbitration--Diderot's "living school for philosophers"? (For this duality within the encyclopedic enterprise does extend back to the Encyclopédie; I have benefited from Wilda Anderson's "Encyclopedic Topologies," Modern Language Notes 101 [1986], 912-29). The institutionalization of encyclopedism since the nineteenth century would appear to express Western culture's hegemonic striving to collect, possess, order, and control--a given--but does the totalizing text in fact represent some total stock of knowledge, or does it instead propose a model? That is, does the ordering of fragments (the dictionary) in an integrated structure (the system) mirror the world or set out principles for constructing it? The problem does not end here. How can the additive progress of knowledge be called into play? And to what degree must a self-conscious attempt at encyclopedism acquiesce before its own utopian premise--that ongoing discourses will yield new fragments and thus new connections--and so account for its own fragmentary condition? It is of course these dichotomies and (perhaps insoluble) oppositions that infuse the themes of totalizing fictional narratives with urgency, from Dante's Divine Comedy to Cervantes's Don Quixote and Goethe's Faust, paradigmatic allegories of the quest for encyclopedic knowledge. The status of such works in the Western canon testifies to the centrality of this compulsion, this "Drang zur Universalität," as Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti encapsulated it. (I rely on Ronald Swigger, "Fictional Encyclopedism," Comparative Literature Studies 12 [1976], 351-66.) Testimony of a contrasting sort can be read in the susceptibility of the encyclopedic mode to broad parody, most famously in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, as well as to irony bordering on ridicule, as in a number of the ficciones of Borges, so beloved of librarians on account, among other things, of their proof that encyclopedias are impossible.