• Eighteenth-Century Life Volume 48, Number 3, September 2024 doi 10.1215/00982601-11309317 Copyright 2024 by Duke University Press 62 The Enlightenment’s Dark Spaces: Library as Heterotopia in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) Ileana Baird Zayed University “Everything begins ‘in’ a library: in books, writings, references. Therefore nothing begins. Only a drifting or disorientation from which one does not emerge.” — Jacques Derrida, “Le facteur de la vérité” 1 In his seminal essay, “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault describes hetero- topias as counter-sites where “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” 2 Het- erotopias juxtapose in one place “several sites that are in themselves incom- patible,” creating a realm of “superimposed meanings” (Foucault, 25). Often reflecting multiple temporalities (for instance, “seeing” the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria in Cibber’s immolation scene in the Dun- ciad ), such sites are also “placeless” (Foucault, 24) in the sense that the space they describe stands for more than its geographic location: heterotopias may be symbolic (and thus infinitely reproducible), upside-down replicas of real places (for instance, Cibber’s Empire of Dulness is an inversion of Virgil’s Augustan Empire), and sometimes utterly unreachable (the space one sees reflected in the mirror). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/eighteenth-century-life/article-pdf/48/3/62/2136211/62baird.pdf by ifp4a@virginia.edu on 19 September 2024