Read the story here:
The Library of Babel (1941) – English version
As weird as it sounds, for the longest time I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed a lot of fiction, besides videogames. I’d play story-heavy games or watch hour-long lore videos, but somehow had a hard time with movies or literature, despite the fact that I enjoy reading non-fiction almost daily. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to short stories; just like videogames (or lore videos) have to achieve some tight pacing to keep a player engaged, short stories take a scenario or a concept and explore it succinctly, before it can get boring.
I stumbled across The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges as I imagine most people do nowadays; through the website of the same name. It’s one of those unique internet curiosities that you hear about eventually – I’ve heard about it in Vsauce[1] and Jacob Geller[2] videos – and it’s kind of internet folklore at this point. So, what is it? The gist of it is this: Imagine a library that contains every possible book you could write in 410 pages, each page containing 40 lines of 80 letters, using the 22 letters of the Old Latin alphabet, the space, the comma and the period.
Mathematics and modern computing have made a digital rendition of this library possible, and what you get is millions of books that are total gibberish. „Millions of books“ is actually underselling it by a long shot; you get more books than there are atoms in the observable universe.[3] The website accomplishes this physically-impossible feat by calculating the books on-demand, using a mathematical algorithm, rather than trying to store them on a server.
So, we have the books of the library at hand, digitally. You can even search the library. But that’s where the original short story comes in and asks: What if this library, by definition larger than our observable universe, was a physical place?
The narrator describes the society of „the universe (which others call the Library)“; humans wander the endless, hexagonal halls of the Library on a quest for knowledge among the chaos and meaninglessness of the vast majority of books – spurred on not by faith, but by the factual knowledge that the answers they seek must already be written in one the tomes. There are „regions“ to the Library with unique beliefs, custom and languages, and there are ideological sects of the so-called "Librarians", holding opposing views on the meaning of the Library and their existence as people within it.
In a way, The Library of Babel is a precursor to the „megastructure“-genre that has become popular in some online circles recently. The most famous example of the genre is probably the manga BLAME!, but even the galaxy-sized City from its story pales in comparison to the practically infinite Library. It also feels like a precursor to the Backrooms creepypasta with its infinite, nonsensical hallways inhabitated by pockets of explorers. Similar to BLAME!, one thing that keeps up the intrigue of the story is what isn’t explained. The narrator mentions the fact that there are latrines and accommodations to sleep in, yet it remains unclear what the Librarians eat or how they are born. The narrator mentions that „Before, there was a man for every three hexagons“; in English, this is an ambiguous description because it is unclear whether „man“ is supposed to be „human“ or „human male“. The original Spanish version of the story uses the the similarly ambiguous term „hombre“. In either case, the narrator mentions that the population of Librarians has been declining from pulmonary disease and suicide, which to me implies that there is a finite number of Librarians „born“ from the hallways of the Library. It remains unclear whether the Librarians have genders, but it seems they don’t reproduce either way. But if that’s the case, does that mean that there is only one generation of Librarians in the entire universe of the Library, that is slowly dying out, just as there is only one copy of each possible book, with some of them being destroyed? I could go on, but I think you get it.
The service-level interpretation that the Librarians are on a quest for meaning in a chaotic world, just like us, would be so painfully shallow that I am absolutely certain that it is not what Borges was trying to say. Given some of the other short stories that I’ve read from him (The Immortal, The Circular Ruins and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), it seems much more likely that The Library of Babel is another reflection on the nature of infinity, literature and eternal recurrence. Think of it this way: There is a finite number of concepts that us humans can comprehend and write about, just as there are only 25 symbols in the books of the Library. In a way, this means that everything that can ever be written will simply be a new arrangement of the finite number of pre-existing concepts. At first, it may sound disheartening that there is „nothing new under the sun“, but as the website and the short story show, we can not even begin to comprehend the vastness of the possible combinations this entails. They are, for all intents and purposes, infinite. Infinite possibilities from finite symbols.
In this sense, the story could be read as Borges’ endorsement of making art even if it is „derivative“ of something that has come before. Matter of fact, The Library of Babel was a repeated theme from one of Borges' earlier essays called The Total Library, and the idea for the story is essentially lifted from Kurt Lasswitz’s The Universal Library. And yet, I wouldn't even think to criticize the story for being "derivative" of earlier work, because the new framing, the new arrangement makes it interesting.
It’s amazing how a story can evoke so much curiosity with so few pages. Writing a concise story is an art in itself – let alone an intellectually-stimulating one – and Jorge Luis Borges quickly became one of my favorite authors with his short stories.
My rating:
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Footnotes:
[1] Messages For The Future – Vsauce
[2] The Soul of a Library (among other videos) – Jacob Geller
[3] The Bookbinder’s Guide to Destroying the Universe: three views of the magnitude of the Library of Babel – Eugene Fischer