Borges Marathon, Part 16: The Library of Babel

More a thought experiment than a story, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges introduces us to an infinite library, so vast that it encompasses the entire universe and contains every possible book in every language.

The idea of wandering endless halls and hexagonal galleries covered on all sides by vast bookshelves sounds like a book-lover’s dream, but it quickly becomes a nightmare.

Many of the books are completely meaningless; others make sense only in other languages or combinations of languages, like “a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic.” The mysterious letters on the covers don’t correspond with the contents. One book just consists of the letters “M V C” repeated from the first line to the last; another is a labyrinth of letters with just one recognisable phrase on the penultimate page: “O Time thy pyramids.” The result is:

For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.

The title is important here. Another fiction in the same collection is called “The Lottery in Babylon“, but in this case Borges uses the Hebrew name for the city, “Babel”, surely to allude to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which God makes people speak different languages to stop them from building a tower to reach the heavens.

Chaos and incomprehension, then, are everywhere in the Library of Babel. And this gives Borges the chance to explore some more of his favourite themes: the development of esoteric and mythical explanations. This also occurs in “The Lottery in Babylon” and other stories: in the absence of true understanding, people rush to fill the void by imposing their own type of order.

So people travel through the library in search of “Vindications”:

“books of apologià and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures.”

In an infinite library, such books must exist along with all others, but the chance of finding them is incalculably small. So is the chance of finding solutions to the great mysteries of human existence, although they too are in there somewhere.

This is the crux of the issue: what good is the truth if it is impossible to find amid vast leagues of nonsense? A library without order is no library at all. It reminds me a little of the internet, especially as we are now starting to flood it with the products of artificial intelligence, and then feeding those products to other large language models to generate still more, the information multiplying exponentially and constantly diminishing the ability to verify it as it gets further from a reliable or even identifiable source.

Borges also loves a paradox: in this case, it’s that although the Library of Babel is infinite, the number of possible books is not. It’s enormous, almost unfathomably large (a web simulation of the Library of Babel gives you some idea of its vastness), but still the number of combinations of all the letters of the alphabet in book form does have a limit. Yet the library apparently does not. This leads some to postulate that the corridors and hexagons do end somewhere, but the unnamed narrator of the story believes that it instead repeats the same volumes in the same disorder, and if it were possible to travel for centuries through the stacks, a traveller would begin to see this repetition.

This leads him to conclude: “My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.” It didn’t have that effect for me: the library is still a nightmare. It doesn’t diminish my love of vast libraries like the Bodleian and the British Library, but it does increase my appreciation for the librarians who bring order to those vast subterranean collections and prevent them from descending into chaos.

Speaking of chaos, my project of writing about all 100+ stories in the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges is stuttering and delayed by other life events, but it continues. Follow my slow progress on the Borges Marathon page.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.