The Congress of the World

by Alain Daniélou

English, Italian (translation)

144 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

About the author

Alain Daniélou :
1935-1948, études du sanskrit, philosophie, théologie, musique dans les écoles traditionnelles hindoues à Bénarès ;
1948-1954, professeur à l'université hindoue de Bénarès ;
1954 1956, directeur de la bibliothèque de manuscrits et des éditions sanskrites d'Adyar à Madras;
1956-1963, membre de l'Institut français d'indologie et de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient ;
1963-1977, directeur de l'Institut international d'études comparatives de la musique à Berlin et Venise.

Reviews

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short story was published in The Book of Sand, but my review of that is too long, so this one is separate.

This has echoes of JLB’s The Library of Babel - and also Fight Club! There are interesting variations on familiar ideas, but it doesn’t hang together quite as well. I think I must have missed something more profound. (Suggestions welcome.)

An old man reminisces, thinking along Platonic lines (also cited in The Night of the Gifts, which is also in The Book of Sand) that knowing is really just recognising: being old “I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising… it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.”

He recalls being drawn into the mysterious and secretive Congress of the World, when he was a naïve young man from a poor background. As the only surviving member, he now feels able to tell his story.

Delegates do not ask questions, and are expected to discover the goals of the Congress “gradually, and without haste”. The apparent chairman, don Alejandro, might not really be. In the afterword, JLB mentions parallels with Kafka.

“All mankind are delegates”, but most never know. Even among those who do, they should represent everyone, but how to categorise when each person can represent several groups? One man might simultaneously be a rancher, a Uruguayan, a red-bearded man and a man sitting in an arm-chair. We’re into set theory. And that extends to the inevitable library the Congress will need, which must not be limited to reference, but should include “classics of every land and language”. Will this be an infinite library, like the one of Babel? It certainly grows – indiscriminately, perhaps in echo of Pliny’s theory “that there was no book so bad that it doesn’t contain some good”.

Don Alejandro builds an amphitheatre at his ranch, for Congress to use for meetings. The library is there, too. A guest room at his ranch has a dirt floor, but a silver basin. He reads the Bible to his uncomprehending workers, just as in The Gospel According to Mark (in Brodie's Report). What does this have to do with anything?

And what language should the Congress use? “That infinite language, English”, Esperanto, Latin, or something else? The narrator goes to research in England and someone else to Paris. In the British Library Reading Room, he meets Beatrice. They become lovers, but he doesn’t leave a forwarding address because he wants “to avoid the anguish of waiting for her letters”. It doesn’t really fit with the rest of the plot.

The narrator returns, and don Alejandro sells the ranch, disbands Congress and burns all the books!

“The Congress of the World began the instant the world itself began… There is no place it is not… We no longer need the Congress, but this last night we shall all go out to contemplate the Congress.”

There is passing reference to a new library director, “a literary gentleman who has devoted himself to the study of antique languages, as though the languages of today were not sufficiently primitive, and to the demagogical glorification of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters.”

[Franc · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Congress,”seems to contain all Borges' pet obsessions: Buenos Aires, gauchos, Robert Louis Stevenson, an untenable romance, a universal library, and the enigmatic hypothesis: “Every few centuries, the Library at Alexandria must be burned.”