There is an interesting way of looking at the role of public libraries. Its basis may be found in a new essay by Guy Scarpetta published in the June 2005 issue of Le Monde diplomatique. The essay looks at the ideas of the novelist Milan Kundera.For Kundera, the novel, like all art, involves a continuous creative process and incessant discovery. There are still novelists who share an insatiable need to explore and discover.
Far from promoting "truths", the intention of the novelist is to insert doubts, ambiguities, questions and paradoxes.
Some of the most important novels of the 21st century, Guy Scarpetta tells us, are meant to rip away the curtain to reveal the fallacies of great debates; he includes Crab by Günter Grass, Disgrace by JM Coetzee, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.
The novel implies a wisdom, an understanding, that demystifies the world.
This role is now threatened.
Kundera's great merit is to remind us that the novel, when it avoids being branded as merchandise remains an incomparable instrument of personal resistance to a world where, as he writes, "commercial stupidity has replaced ideological stupidity".
The role of the library is to help the common man "in his need to explore and discover." Everyday our job in the library (through our book stock) must be (according to this essay) to "reveal new aspects of the human condition - those zones of incertitude, indecision and paradox."
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