620 American Literature
As I have thought about the nature of a literary history and read the many reviews of the LHUS that called it “a monument,” it has struck me that the construction of a literary history may be usefully explained through metaphors of architecture and building. Commissioned by a client who engages an editor to design the basic structure and gather the professional experts, the work must satisfy both the artistic ideals of the editors and practical and financial considerations of the client and the public. The vast majority of the people who actually use the building or, in this case, buy a literary history will seldom judge it by the criteria of the aesthetic theories of the architect but will evaluate it on the grounds of usefulness or general appearance. People like to use a building or a book because it works for them. For a literary history, they want to know if it has a good index, readable prose, sensible chapter division, and interesting and informative essays, and whether it is inexpensive, durable, and not too heavy.
The building constructed by the editors of the LHUS was much the product of the same culture that produced what we have come to call the modern style of architecture: streamlined, uniform, bureaucratic, and somewhat impersonal; consistent and reassuring in its authoritarian tone and in its aim of useful service. Just as it is not easy to imagine an addition upon most modern buildings, so too the LHUS gave the impression of finality and closure. Our work may be identified as post-modern in design in which complexity and contradiction are incorporated as structural principles and expressed through the arrangement of the sections. More like a library or an art museum than an office building, the structure allows the user a paradoxical experience of both the harmony and a discontinuity of the materials. Rather than as a many-storied rectangular structure, I would rather envisage our project as a post-modernist structure- like Michael Graves’s sprawling San Juan Capistrano Library which is composed of many corridors which are entered from the outside through numerous portals. In this view,
See Robert Venturi’s definition and theory in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture (New York, 1977), passim.
See Michael Graves, “San Juan Capistrano Public Library, 1981, and Sunar Showroom, Los Angeles, 1980,” in Architectural Design (New York, 1982), pp. 97-101.