The Enlightenment's Dark Spaces: Library as Heterotopia in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743)

Drawing on Michel Foucault's seminal essay, “Of Other Spaces,” I will explore Colley Cibber's library as a “heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time,” a space that symbolically represents, in Pope's imaginative world, the dangers posed by a modernity gone wild to the values epitomized by classic antiquity. Like Virgil, who guides Dante through Inferno, Pope leads his readers through the library's circles of folly, demonstrating that Cibber's confusion of space, time, and value is a consequence of his misguided relationship with his books. In this library, Cibber's books—classic, gilded, or voluminous—are assigned specific spaces: the exemplary ones are stashed under the beautiful, the lavishly adorned are crammed under the pedantical, or, in Cibber's case, the books of a plagiary. This hierarchy reflects the value system promoted, in Pope's view, by the moderns, whose political and cultural corruption inevitably results in subpar productions and debasement of taste. Within the larger argument of the poem, Pope's radical rewriting of Theobald's monologue and immolation scene from the Variorum to fit the new hero better delivers the poem's message of the intertwining of writing and political compromise, which becomes a major theme of the Dunciad in Four Books.