Jorge Luis Borges

2015-07-24 The Library of Babel as Seen from Within

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Quotes:

The story describes a universal library containing, in 410-page volumes, every possible permutation of twenty-two letters, spaces, commas, and periods—every book that’s ever been written and every book that ever could be, drowned out by endless pages of gibberish. Its librarians are addicted to the search for certain master texts, the complete catalog of the library, or the future history of one’s own life, but their quest inevitably ends in failure, despair, even suicide.

Though the story’s librarian-narrator believes in the possible triumph of reason, the principle force underlying the library is irrationality. Any expression, even the most elegant or undeniably true, is nonetheless possible without sincerity, or even any intention towards signification. The library makes this hidden power explicit: anything that can be referenced in language or accessible to experience must be separable from itself—a thought, a perception, a word can be made of it. This may undermine our sense of the simple presence of things, but it allows for everything interesting in the world: fantasy, lies, illusions, imagination, and fiction.

Borges’s story isn’t simply one among others, but the story of all fiction, and with it all reality.

Though its underlying theory of language is powerful and undeniable, there are strange inaccuracies elsewhere in the library, [...] The librarians in the story, for instance, encounter far more rational text than would ever be possible in a truly random universal library. Merely in the hexagons under his administration, our narrator recounts volumes with the titles Combed Thunder and The Plaster Cramp.

Even some of the incoherent texts in the story, such as one where the letters “MCV” repeat “perversely” for 410 pages, are statistically impossible for mere mortals to encounter.

The most important of the librarians’ discoveries is another impossibility, a work with two pages in a “Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní with inflections from classical Arabic” containing the rudiments of combinatory analysis. Borges notes, with his usual strange humor, that it’s “illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations.” One could understand every volume in the library as such an illustration—an appendix to this manual on permutation and combination. The entire library fits inside a single one of its books, like the master catalog the librarians seek or the algorithm that produces the online version of the library, a few lines of code that can also be found inside its volumes.

The librarians’ entire universe-as-library theory grows from this discovery. The library contains all possible text, and thus offers the promise of revelation that motivates their search through its volumes. I doubt Borges was being naive when he placed these impossibly rare texts in his story. Rather, he played the role of a trickster god, seeding his creation with just enough meaningful and poetic text to entice both his story’s librarians and its readers. That its only possible result is disappointment and despair is part of his dark humor, and a fate he laments along with us.

His narrator, on the other hand, seduced by Borges’s trickery, has no sense of the true scale of the library, a barrier I continually encountered when trying to re-create it. Whether the library contains all possible permutations of letters, contains not a single repetition, or cycles through every possibility before repeating are unknowable. No one will ever encounter any duplicate books in a universal library. The entirety of human endeavor is insufficient to make it statistically possible.

There is another improbable text the librarian-narrator has come across in his travels, one written by Borges himself, from an essay titled “The Total Library.” It was Borges’s first reflection on the theme of the universal library, published two years before his short story. The excerpt, well known to the librarians, claims that confusion and irrationality overwhelm the possibility of rationality in the library. Our narrator condemns these words as impious, tasteless, and ignorant. His counterargument is quite beautiful, and equally relevant when considering the “ascetic rage” of the Purifiers:

"There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god."

There is no such thing as meaninglessness, in other words, and not a single volume or even a single line of text worthy of condemnation in the near-infinite library. According to the theory of language with which we began, a speaker’s intentions can never secure a univocal meaning for his utterance: the possibility for those same signs to appear in new contexts, animated by different intentions or none at all, is as limitless as the library itself. The result is not that language loses all meaning but that it constantly gains more, as even the unprecedented combinations of its atoms, the letters, wait patiently for the discovery or invention of the language in which they will be the names of new gods.