Jorge Luis Borges's fiction "The Library of Babel" , found in the collection The Garden of Forking Paths, is one that can work as a microcosm of larger theoretic and thematic goals. It concerns itself with questions of taxonomy, biography, hermeneutics, epistemology, and cosmology. Borges does not enter into the mainstream here, believing that one can better see the center through the edges rather then vice versa. In this way he uses esoteric and mystical systems as a symbolic key to paradise, and in the process deconstructs the conventional desires and ideas surrounding the universe, both the temporal one that we can touch and understand, and the complicated ones that are past this life.
This is not a story, but a collection of ideas--a philosophical tale, and in many ways a parable. It comes with its own baggage and can be difficult to unpack. Borges is a reader and a writer who can be unreliable, not in the sense of not telling the truth, but in the sense of being a trickster. Much like the Gnostics, who did not look for answers as much as ways of knowledge or the Kabbalists, who found secret paths in the works God formed. This could also be the I Ching, finding order and guidance through seeming randomness.
The goal then, is to find the patterns of philosophical thought that are in this essay and in that way to find the red string(s) that may lead us through this labyrinth. As I introduced earlier, the strands of this string are the biography of Borges, the implications of the origin of the universe, or cosmology; the proper ways of interpreting a text, or hermeneutics; the nature of learning; or epistemology and how to categorize what we have found, or Taxonomy.
The first thread to look at is one of biography, although no ideas come ex nihilo, it would seem that there is little autobiographical context in this work or for that matter most of his other work. Even his autobiographical essays are more about ideas and themes then there are about his life. That said his life can be used as a code that surrounds the contexts in which the work is created. This code includes his growing up in the poly-linguistic Geneva who's esoteric reputation was hidden by the severe Swiss( for example Carl Jung set up practice there, as did the Theopist Rudolph Steiner), his role as librarian, losing that role and having it be replaced by sorting out chickens and rabbits in the city market, his blindness and his later regrets about not serving a "real life".
For him the library was a refuge and institution of order. It was something that could be controlled, and something that could be categorized. The library had solutions, and it had enough information to keep one entertained. There was no need for interventions in the "real world". It was also a place that had no national boundaries, there was no real Argentine library because it always contained works in other languages by other peoples. He talks of this in the text, when he says "From all these incontrovertible premises he deduced that the library is total and that its shelves contain all the possible combinations of the twenty odd orthographic symbols ... that is, everything which can be expressed in all languages." (82)
The difference is that there is order in the world of our libraries and chaos in the world of The Library of Babel. Malcolm Read talks about this confusion of order in his Jorge Luis Borges and his Predecessors: Notes towards a Materialist History of Linguistic Idealism, saying "the bookish Borges has confessed again and again to the sense of not having lived enough", and the only time that he lived outside of the academy, as a teacher or a writer or a librarian was when he displeased the Argentine military fascist Juan Peron enough to be forced into a menial job.(35) His punishment was a perversion of the taxonomies of libraries, he had to categorize rabbits and chickens instead of books, he had to touch flesh, and when he was used to touching paper.
When he returned as a librarian at the national library in Buenos Aries, he was going blind, there was an irony there that is also found in the text, when paradise comes, or what you imagine as paradise, there is always an unforseen consequence. This time the consequence is simple. The pleasures of knowledge can be quickly made horrific, or as the text says "When it was proclaimed that the library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret , intact treasure." (83)
This concept of knowledge comes across in his twin beliefs in both gnosticism and the Kaballah. Henry Louis Gates Dictionary of Global Culture, is quoted as saying that "Kaballah is based on the belief that every word, letter, number and even accent of the hebrew scriptures contained mysteries capable of interpretation by those who possessed secret wisdom." (349) and gnosticism is defined as a "philosophical-religious movement that emphasized the redemptive power of esoteric knowledge" and that the word gnosis "refers to the learning of that separates the initiated from the uninitiated."(251). Then the point of these two systems is to know god, but that is impossible because God is the source of all knowledge. It would take perfection to gain such gifts, and because we are fallen, there is nosuch perfection.
The search for this knowledge is symbolized in several ways in the text. For example, I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues..." (80) or "The mystics claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continuous back, circling the walls of the room; but there testimony is suspect, their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God. " (ibid). or Some librarians insinuated that each letter could influence the next and that the value of MCV on the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of the same series in another position on another page" (82)
There is something else here, that reflects Judeo-Christian Mysticism, it is the belief that the world is created ex nihilo, although he is cagey on wether this world is infinite or not (The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries (79)...there is no discussion of who created the place, and when it was created. But unlike God, who created form out of chaos, the creator of this place creates chaos out of form. Alberto Manguel talks of this in his History of Reading; "A room determined by artificial categories suggests a logical universe, a nursery universe in which everything has its place and is defined by it", Borges destroys that order, and uses history of western logocentrism against itself.
This is what makes Borges's use of Hermeneutics so subversive. Intended at first, to be the study of Biblical texts putting them into a proper context, it has moved into a desire to be suspicious of what is proper and then to avoid a prescriptive tendency. The founder of this school, Paul Ricouer defines this new non biblical school in his work Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation saying: "Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience" (27) Borges takes these vows seriously, talking of a "wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and comparing it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of ones hands...They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty five natural symbols but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion we shall see is not altogether false." (81), which means that he is suspicious of his own suspicion.
There are also people so rigourous and so serious in their search for proper meanings that they kill themselves out of exhaustion when they cannot stand the randomness any more. As for the willingness to listen, there is this: "five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as all the rest but which contained nearly two pages of homogenous lines. He showed his find to an ambulant decipherer, who told him the lines were written in Portuguese . Others told him they were in Yiddish. In less then a century the nature of the language was finally established." (85)
If the only proper way to interpret a text is methodological and not contextual, then what does the library of Babylon teach us about learning ? There is nothing that can be learnt in this library, because the system for learning is not known. The idea of the writer as reader, who wishes nothing more then to be locked up in a library so that he could absorb its contents is made futile here. Even the idea of using the scriptures as a guidebook to heaven is mocked. Malcolm Read talks about how Borges finds the scriptures "impenetrable to contingencies , revelations lie in wait behind their most insignificant detail and man is bound to sit and interrogate them" (58). If that is the case, then what happens when the books provide no answers, and there is no real guide, no glossary or gazetteer or expert to find your way into the library or out of it ? In an interview with Roberto Alifornia, Borges talks of "maintaining a cult of books , since books are a living thing in constant growth." In Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertus, an earlier story in this collection, he claims that "mirrors and copulation are abominable , since they both multiply the numbers of man" (17) , in the first paragraph of Library of Babylon, he tells us that "in the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances." (79) Does this mean that the books reproduce some how ? If this is the case then it is impossible to learn everything and no matter how hard you interrogate a text, you cannot glean all meanings from it. Books lead to more books, which leads to more books. There are commentaries on commentaries. Manguel talks of this, "in this library no two books are identical. Since the shelves contain all possible combinations of the alphabet, and thus rows and rows of indecipherable gibberish, every real or imaginable book is represented." (198). Borges catalogues some of those books: "the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the angels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of these catalogue, the demonstration of the falsity of the real catalogue...". (83). If it is impossible to use this library because of its vastness, and in that way it loses its functionality.
This dovetails into Borges's obsession with taxonomies. His life reflected it, his work as a librarian of course and the perversion of that work in the city markets of the capital. There was also his desire to move past the categories of story, essay, poem and fable--creating a new genre, the ficciones.
But his most famous excursion into this taxonomic system is the The Analytical Language of John Wilkes, where he talks of the category sets of a Chinese emperor, and mocks the scientific western precision of naming. It so inspired Michel Foccualt that he dedicated his book on taxonomy, The Order of Things, to Borges, saying "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things" (1). The same things happen when you read this story.
It is not strictly comic, though the idea of mystics going to the bathroom in order to roll the I Ching has a certain absurd charm but everything else is fairly accurate. (87) The idea is that the library needs to be ordered, quiet, serene. It is a sanctuary outside of the mess of the world. It is our cult of learning, and for Borges, in this story, there is no order. In this sense, we are made to pay attention to what we categorize and how we categorize it. Why is the library in a hexagon, why are some librarians put in some cells and others in different ones, where did this library come from and when will it end ? All of these questions are not answered. It even begins as a parable or a fable, but does not end that way, because there is no conclusion, or it ends with the quoting of another fictional authority, giving a new idea to another kind of infinite libraries: "Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is useless. Strictly speaking, one single volume should suffice: a single volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten type body, and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages.". (88) In this way then, the macro-universe is reflected in the micro-universe, and there is no end to either, it is like two mirrors facing each other.
The title of the book that this story came from is called Garden of Forking Paths, or Labyrinth, in another interview by Alifornia, Borges expands this idea, saying that "I believe that in the idea of the labyrinth , there is also hope or salvation; if we were positively sure that the universe is a labyrinth , we would feel secure" (24). In this work, we are not sure that the library is a labyrinth. Babel was cursed by God for building, and that curse was the loss of a singular language. Now we are chaos, and the act of speech is wrought with miscommunication. The end of this miscommunication is finding a solution to the gnarled web that is the universe, but that would require speech that we could use together.
This is not a story about labyrinths, because there is no solution and the only hope that can exist is a random flailing around for clues. The goals of the enlightenment were to find knowledge, to find that one language that could bring people together, and to communicate with that common knowledge. The concept of a public library came from that goal, before that it was academics and priests, an elite class who had access to such information. But here, the communication is useless, the goal of uniting people in self knowledge is impossible, and the hope for salvation that comes from finding a central source is gone. The only hope then, is the hope that is manifested in those who do not look for solutions.