From the Tree to the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page B

understanding of the history of encyclopedias and their indices. For a long time the encyclopedist used his index as a working tool that was basically not supposed to be of interest to the reader, whose need instead was for the information the encyclopedia contained—in other words, the encyclopedist was concerned with where he was going to put the crocodile, but he believed in principle that what the reader was interested in were the crocodile’s empirical properties, not its place in the classification. Instead, this point of view gradually changed in the case of many modern encyclopedias, whose primary aim was precisely to provide a model of the organization of knowledge. It was some time, however, before the “plan” of an encyclopedia began to constitute an object of reflection or of meta-encyclopedic comment. For the reader, the encyclopedia appeared as a “map” of different territories whose edges were jagged and often imprecise, so that one had the impression of moving through it as if it were a labyrinth that allowed one to choose paths that were constantly new, without feeling obliged to stick to a route leading from the general to the particular.
    The second aspect of how Pliny lays out a model for encyclopedias to come is that he does not speak of things he knows from experience but of things handed down to him by tradition, and he does not make the slightest effort to separate reliable empirical information from legend (he gives equal space to the crocodile and the basilisk). This point is extremely important in defining the encyclopedia as a theoretical model: the encyclopedia does not claim to register what really exists but what people traditionally believe exists—and hence everything that an educated person should know, not simply to have knowledge of the world, but also to understand discourses about the world.
    This characteristic is already evident in the Hellenistic encyclopedias (a great many paragraphs in the pseudo-Aristotelian De mirabilibus, for example, employ a verbum dicendi such as “they say that” or “the story goes that” or “it is said that”), and it will remain a constant in medieval encyclopedias, as well as in those of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Foucault reminds us that Buffon was astonished that in a sixteenth-century naturalist like Aldrovandi there was “an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, quotations from other authors, fables relayed uncritically, observations which dealt indiscriminately with the anatomy, habitat, and mythological properties of an animal, and the uses that could be made of it in medicine or in magic.” In fact, as Foucault goes on to comment:

    When one goes back to take a look at the Historia serpentum et draconum, one finds the chapter “On the serpent in general” arranged under the following headings: equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds caused by the serpent, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, epithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries, hieroglyphics, emblems and symbols, proverbs, coinage, miracles, riddles, devices, heraldic signs, historical facts, dreams, simulacra and statues, use in human diet, use in medicine, miscellaneous uses. Whereupon Buffon comments: “Let it be judged after that what proportion of natural history is to be found in such a hotch-potch of writing. There is no description here, only legend.” And indeed, for Aldrovandi and his contemporaries, it was all legenda—things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of