The Library of Babel

"The Library of Babel"
Author Jorge Luis Borges
Original title "La biblioteca de Babel"
Translator James E. Irby
Anthony Kerrigan
Country Argentina
Language Spanish
Genre(s) Fantasy, short story
Published in El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan
Publisher Editorial Sur
Media type Print
Publication date 1941
Published in English 1962

"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.

The story originally appeared in Spanish in Borges's 1941 collection of stories El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.

Contents

Plot summary

Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitions and cult-like behaviour, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. Another is the belief that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him.

Themes

The story repeats the theme of Borges's 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La biblioteca total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library" ("Die Universalbibliotek"):

Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. [...] In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramón Llull's thinking machine [...T]he elements of his game are the universal orthographic symbols, not the words of a language [...] Lasswitz arrives at twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, the space, the period, the comma), whose recombinations and repetitions encompass everything possible to express in all languages. The totality of such variations would form a Total Library of astronomical size. Lasswitz urges mankind to construct that inhuman library, which chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence. (Wolff's The Race with the Tortoise expounds the execution and the dimensions of that impossible enterprise.)[1]

Many of Borges's signature themes are featured in the story, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem. There is no reference to monkeys or typewriters in the The Library of Babel story; Borges had mentioned that analogy in his earlier 1939 essay The Total Library: "[a] half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum". In this story, the closest equivalent is the line: "A blasphemous sect suggested [...] that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books".

Borges would examine a similar idea with his later story, "The Book of Sand"; in the later story, there is an infinite book (or book with an indefinite number of pages) rather than an infinite library. In addition, the Book of Sand is written in an unknown alphabet and its content is not obviously random.

The concept of the library is also overtly analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal employed this metaphor, and in an earlier essay Borges noted that Pascal's manuscript called the sphere effroyable, or "frightful".

In any case, it is clear that a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, is equivalent (as a source of information) to a library containing zero books.

The quote at the beginning of the story, "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters," is from Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Influence on later writers

Value as a mathematical thought experiment

The Library contains at least 25^{1,312,000} \approx 1.956 \times 10^{1,834,097} books.[4] (The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about 7\times 10^{6} books. The world's largest library, the Library of Congress, has 2.18\times 10^{7} books.)

Just one "authentic" volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe.

The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged is 10^{10^{33,013,740}}.[5][6]

Philosophical implications

There are numerous philosophical implications within the idea of the infinite library. One of these is that the librarians may have been horribly mistaken about the nature of some of the books of nonsense. Some of these are assuredly copies of other books, some written in a substitution cipher, others phonetically, some in made-up languages, etc. Every book in the library is intelligible, if one decodes it right. Any book in the library can be decoded into any other book in the library, using a third book in the library as a One-time pad. This lends itself to the philosophical idea proposed by Immanuel Kant, that by defining rules for the universe, we create rules of the universe. Because the librarians assumed that the books of nonsense were exactly that, they may have tossed away several copies of Directions to the crimson hexagon from where you are now standing, simply because it was written in a cipher. Additionally, because there are by definition all books, there are certainly also books of lies and falsehoods. For each copy of the catalog to the library, there will be many copies of false codices, claiming some false books to be true and some true books to be false. In short, any room in the library could be the crimson hexagon. Hidden in the gibberish of the library, there are works beyond human capacity to write, simply by definition that it contains all possible books, of which these are a possibility. The library cannot be damaged by the destruction of any of its books because even though a single book is unique, there are also similar books differing by a single letter. The library is a temptation, because it offers these gems of enlightenment, and buries them in deception. One can consider any text as being pulled from the library by the act of the author defining the search letter by letter until they reach a text close enough to the one they intended to write. The text already existed theoretically, but had to be found by the act of the author's imagination.[7] Another implication is an argument against certain proofs of the existence of God, as it is carried out by David Hume using the thought experiment of a similar library of books generated not by human mind, but by nature. [8]

Quine's Reductio

In one short essay, W.V.O. Quine noted the interesting fact that the Library of Babel is finite (i.e., we will theoretically come to a point in history where everything has been written), and that the Library of Babel can be constructed in its entirety simply by writing a dot on one piece of paper and a dash on another. These two sheets of paper could then be alternated at random by the bearer, who would be able to read the resulting text in Morse code as he flipped them back and forth. This shows that the Library of Babel is actually quite manageable, and that everyone with paper and a pencil can create it in a couple of seconds.[9][10]

References

  1. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, 2000. Pages 214-216. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.
  2. ^ Bloch, William Goldbloom The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel (2008) Oxford University Press
  3. ^ William Goldbloom Bloch’s home page
  4. ^ From the third paragraph of the story: "Each book contains 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, about 80 black letters." That makes 410 x 40 x 80 = 1,312,000 characters. The fifth paragraph tells us that "there are 25 orthographic symbols" including spaces and punctuation. The magnitude of the resulting number is found by taking logarithms. However, this calculation only gives a lower bound on the number of books as it does not take into account variations in the titles — the narrator does not specify a limit on the number of characters on the spine. For further discussion of this, see Bloch, William Goldbloom. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008.
  5. ^ American Scientist January-February 2009 Books-a-Million by Brian Hayes Book Review of The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch:
  6. ^ Bloch, William Goldbloom. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. Oxford University Press, 2008.
  7. ^ Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, ISBN 9780201483406 
  8. ^ Hume, David (1779), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Part 3 
  9. ^ "Universal Library" by W.V.O Quine
  10. ^ St. Jerome and the Library of Babel. http://cranioklepty.com/blog/2010/04/06/on-bones-and-libraries-st-jerome/

External links

Related Links and Commentary

Other such simulations also exist