In 1895 the Belgian collector and inventor Paul Otlet founded the International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels: an eccentric and well-connected body dedicated to producing a universal encyclopaedia, wherein might be corralled the sum total of human questioning.
Soon Otlet's staff of young women was amassing 2,000 index cards a day, plus photographs and microfilm. He went so far as to plan a whole city, the Mundaneum, around his aspirations to knowledge and human unity. The crash of 1929 put paid to Otlet's ambitions, and the Nazis later destroyed most of his archive. What remains may still be consulted in the Belgian city of Mons. In 1975, seemingly inspired by this curious figure, Jorge Luis Borges published his story, The Congress, whose narrator describes the founding and dissolving of a similar scheme, which "always had something dreamlike about it".
The tale of Otlet’s archive fever is one of many fascinating asides in Alberto Manguel’s ambitious and flawed study of human curiosity; it might also function as an allegory for his book’s vagrant scope, its courting of risk and hubris. “I am curious about curiosity,” he writes at the outset, introducing a defining feature of his subject: the tendency of enquiry to turn back upon the enquirer.
Manguel is attentive to many things: the origins of language and theories of same in the middle ages, the practical and spiritual mechanics of writing and reading, our relationships with animals and each other. Time and again, though, he comes back to questions posed alike by Montaigne and Lewis Carroll’s inquisitive Alice. Who am I? What do I know? How are these questions related?
Curiosity is more than one thing, of course. It is first of all an urge or desire, almost a faculty. As such, it has historically been prized and disparaged in equal measure. For St Augustine, curiosity was a species of prurient pleasure, for Bernard of Clairvaux a ruinous distraction from divinity: he pictured scholarly monks diverted from pious study by representations of “unclean apes . . . monstrous centaurs . . . a fish with a beast’s head”.
Seventeenth-century science distinguished between mere wonder and a proper impulse towards understanding; by the 18th century Edmund Burke could write that curiosity was "the first and simplest emotion". Manguel devotes a lot of erudite energy to the role of curiosity in Dante: "The entire Commedia can be read as the pursuit of one man's curiosity." In fact, as Manguel goes on to show, it belongs not only to the poet: curiosity is the sin that led many of the damned to their unpretty pass, but also the impulse that drives Ulysses: the original type of the adventurer, the seeker, addict of exile and its promises.
Fantastical inventions
For the Renaissance and after, “curiosity” also concerned objects and artefacts. The
curioso
was “a person who treated something with particular care and diligence”, while curiosities were those things of rarity and wonder acquired and displayed by collectors. The
Wunderkammer
or cabinet of curiosities, which obeyed no logic except the whim or taste of its owner, juxtaposed works of art with anatomical monsters, natural specimens with fantastical inventions and fakes. The collection of John Tradescant in Oxford, which became the Ashmolean Museum, contained for example “a Babylonian vest . . . two feathers of the Phoenix’s tale . . . [a] hare’s head with rough horns three inches long . . . a brazen ball to warm the nuns’ hands”.
There were also "cabinets" made of words and images, such as Cassiano dal Pozzo's "paper museum" in Rome and the English physician Sir Thomas Browne's Musaeum Clausum: a catalogue of lost or imaginary objects. Manguel's Curiosity is not exactly the modern equivalent, though it is similarly varied and digressive, compendious and essayistic.
Over the course of almost 400 pages, however, one longs for something like a unifying argument or at least an engaging authorial voice that would put a pattern on this disparate stuff. One gets instead a series of banalities, a mere defence of curiosity as a value rather than real analysis of its complexities and discontents. Banalities about modern life, for instance, that might have been written any time: “We teach ourselves to ask ‘How much will it cost?’ and ‘How long will it take?’ instead of ‘why?’.”
Wrong note
The problems are partly stylistic and structural. For a writer so keenly attuned to the workings of language, Manguel can be remarkably tin-eared – somebody should have baulked at the alliterative mess that is “Dante’s will and Dante’s will alone will allow him to reach the final blessed vision”. But it’s not just a question of sound. He starts most of his 17 chapters with an autobiographical interlude, and some of these are promising, such as a brief – too brief – account of his inability to write after suffering a stroke. Or this, on questioning itself: “Most of my childhood in Tel Aviv was spent in silence. I hardly ever asked questions.” Often, however, these asides feel both frivolous and dutiful: “In my childhood there were few animals”, or “The concept of money escapes me”.
It's easy and frustrating to imagine what Curiosity might have been in the hands of a writer such as Marina Warner or Robert Calasso. Subtler and more seductive, for sure. But also, you'd hope, willing to engage contemporary modes of, and threats to, curiosity – which Manguel is bafflingly loath to do. There's a single passing reference to the internet, in which the author essentially throws up his hands and retreats to his well stocked library. It won't do, precisely because (as the example of Otlet's mad scheme shows) the library is a technology too.
Interviewed by Le Monde in 1980, on the cusp of an information revolution, Michel Foucault said: "I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite." He may well have been mistaken – has the internet made us more or less inquisitive? Is that even a sensible question? Any serious reflection on curiosity today must surely bear such questions in mind, however, if it and its author are not to look decidedly incurious.
Brian Dillon's The Great Explosion is published by Penguin Ireland. He is working on a book about the essay as form
