The practice of literature is to operate according to intuitive laws. Laws that intend to reproduce the intricate mechanisms of the absolute. The writings of Borges are both a literal and a conceptual simulation of what is immortal, infinite. It is possible to compare Borges to a scientist, a philosopher, and anthropologist because his approach to literature is a codification of the universe. Or level him to a judge since he measures with a scale the weight of the abstract and the real. He is a mathematician. He ventures a formula –the textual equations he calls essays, poems, short stories, to be exercised before the witnesses, his readers, until his writing reaches a resolution or a verdict of his preliminary hypothesis. What’s such a hypothesis? Perhaps the same with which I (unapologetically) justify typing this essay: to demonstrate that Borges’ literature is a simulacrum of a cosmic dimension. I will focus particularly in “The Library of Babel”, where his main impulse is to render the literary contraction of the universe.
The contraction of the literary
universe as well. But as the Argentine writer would state in his “In memoriam
J.F.K.”, This bullet is an old one.
According to the interpretation that’s currently keeping us busy, there is a double
entendre between the cause of one impulse and the consequence of the other. What
happened first? Let’s allow ourselves some improbable questions: The invention
of the universe out of the conception of literature or the invention of
literature out of the conception of the universe? If what we understand as universe
depends on how it’s explained through the word is because what we understand as
universe is born out of the sketch that literature makes of it. To think of the
idea of the infinite, for example, requires one to comply by written
explanations of a concept which, even though by nature is inaccessible (in
addition to provoking horrific agoraphobia) it’s translated into accessible
codes: words. The definition of the world is expressed in various forms. One is
the geographical, the literal, in which the number of the square feet that
Argentina occupies is exactly the same space that in the terrestrial globe is
held by Argentina. Another one is the expression on a scale: the map,
proportionally shrinking the dimensions of what is the physicality, the
corporeality, the materiality of the world. Yet another one is the historical
expression; a fourth one is philosophical. Borges defines the world from the
conceptual expression (inaccessible), and he builds the concepts out of words
(accessible). From “Magias parciales del Quijote”:
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in
the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it
disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the
reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can
be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In
1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred
book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are
also written.
There is a written depiction of the
universe of the word that forges the universe. An ambitious orthographic
portrait. It’s in “The Library of Babel”.
In the preface of Dreamtigers,
Borges delineates an image in reference to one of his recurrent analogies
between universe and literature. “The sounds of the plaza fall behind, and I
enter the Library. Almost physically, I can feel the gravitation of the books,
the serene atmosphere of orderliness, time magically mounted and preserved. To
left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers’ momentary
profiles in the light of the scholarly
lamps as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives would have it.” The figure
of the cosmos in this metaphysical silhouette, the gravitation of the books as
if they were planets (time at a standstill) is explicit in its attempt to
contain the kind of substitutions –metaphors– with which its lines project the
power of the written word to, literally, a universal stratus.
Although the brief yet convincing
reflection that Borges writes in “The Flower of Coleridge” belongs to the genre
of the essay (or, does it?), the tone is not very different from any of his
short stories. A forceless particular algebraic connection can be established
with “The Library of Babel”. The impression is that The Library is conceived
from the flower. In the first sentence of his essay, Borges shoots out Valéry’s
idea about the history of literature, which could be told, “without ever mentioning
one writer”. Let’s rehearse –experiment
momentarily and tour the currents that Borges frequented: imagine that the sole
existing history is literature’s history (religion, philosophy, all reduced as
Borges himself has suggested, to the subgenre of fantastic literature), and
this world is inhabited merely by characters and writers. In this world a
library like “The Library of Babel” is plausible. It is origin and destination.
In “The Flower of Coleridge” Borges mentions the unfinished novel by Henry
James, “The Sense of the Past”, and upon referring to the regressus in infinitum says “The cause is possible to the effect,
the reason of the trip is the consequence of the trip”. The
mathematical theory of sets, which studies the connections
between the limbs or pieces that constitute a whole, would help to validate
some substitutions of words to better visualize the intersections of both
texts. The cause is possible to the effect, the motive of The Library is the
consequence of The Library.
In “The Library of Babel” we find
not even once the name of an author. The predominant feeling throughout the
short story is that we are before a precinct (the only existing precinct)
containing all the books that have been written, and the common denominator is
that those responsible for the works are all anonymous writers. The only name
that appears –not precisely as an author – is, timidly, the name of God (and
only inside a parenthesis) (similar to:) (God). In his essay “Death of the
Author”, Roland Barthes insinuates the disappearance of the author, the name of
the writer as the mere “brand” of a product: his work echoes Valéry’s idea of
Borges’ “The Flower of Coleridge”. Or to the reduction to an indivisible figure
that Borges makes at the end of his essay: “For many years I thought that the
almost infinite literature pertained to one man. Such a man was Carlyle, it was
Johannes Becher, it was Whitman, it was Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, it was De
Quincey.” And this is another intersection where both texts coincide: one
single writer, one single Library.
From the perspective of the dream,
a territory commonly visited by Borges’ short stories, the omniliterary world
is the fantasy of other authors as well. While working on making sense of the
current incongruities, my attention bumped into Umberto Eco’s novel “The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”. Yambo, the page of the queen, suffers a sudden
loss of memory, an amnesia affecting his identity, and the only thing he can
remember is the literature he has read, each verse of a poem, and precise
quotes. In a way, the references of his
being disappear, and one fancies that only from the knowledge found within his
memory of the books Yambo will be able to traverse the map of what he was and
has been. Inevitably it rings a bell to the principles of “The Flower of
Coleridge” and “The Library of Babel”. Yambo would allude to be the perfect
citizen in one of The Library’s possibly endless hexagons.
It’s possible to come closer to an
interpretation of “The Library of Babel” as if it were an organism -an interpretation not far away from what the
short story pretends to be. The Library could be two things: a paradise, a garden;
or a body. A collection of figurative
references related to those of nature: beehives (like the hexagonal galleries
in the story), fruit trees: “Light proceeds from some spherical fruits that are
named lamps…” and it continues with an analogy to illumination or wisdom,
forever limited to our human condition: “the light they emit is insufficient,
incessant.” As a body’s DNA speaks about
“the organic letters on a book”. A historical body. There are other revelations
accessible to the reader from The Library: its unmeasurable circumference, its
solitary atmosphere. At the footnote the narrator describes some significant
information of its demographics, the librarians. Suicide and pulmonary
diseases have isolated its hallways and stairs. The books are confusing, the
number of dialects and languages combined in the Library is unspeakable. No two
books are identical or duplicated –only one of each. And as if were about unrepetitive genetic combinations, all consist in the same elements: “the space,
the dot, the comma, the 22 letters of the alphabet”[1]
and yet there are no two books that are identical. Two axioms arise from here,
The Library is eternal and the number of characters is twenty five.
There’s a set of a different class
of characters in The Library. Man, as the “imperfct librarian”, the chief
of each hexagon, the “traveling decipherers”, the “librarians of genius” also
called “philosophers”, the pilgrims in search of their “Vindications”, the
books that hold the code of their future (although the probability of finding
them, or any variation of them, equal zero); the official searchers or
inquisitors trying to clarify the mysteries of humanity and the origin of the
library, and Time; the purifiers; and, the infidels, for whom the rule of the
library is “the non-sense”.
The Library is a simile of the
world: “I’m getting ready to die a few yards from the hexagon in which I was
born”. The universe, or the “actual world”, as the narrator refers to, “can
only be the product of a god”. Notice this intriguingly biased remark: his
polytheist opinions don’t need a parenthetical confinement. “The Library of
Babel”, written in 1941, also seems to be like a premonition of the world wide
web, a virtual space of endless vertical and horizontal corridors, mirrors and multiplications
where all knowledge is categorized and contrived. The narrator at some point
prays “Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell…but let there be one
instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its
justification.”
And in this library the order of
the books is disrupted. There are “impenetrable” books, and the narrator adds,
incisive to what refers to space, “a few miles to the right the tongue is
dialectal and ninety floors above is incomprehensible”. Even in his infinite
quality he establishes hierarchies.
Indeed, The Library is a portrait
of a building, of a spacial system. In its name resides its justification: just
like the Tower of Babel, the Library has a vertical structure that is
geometrically symmetrical: “From any hexagon, the lower and upper floors can be
seen, interminably”.
In this game of an “unlimited and
periodic” Library in which the narrator incurs, we attend a Borgesian
recurrence, the same one that is explained and facilitated through the story of
“The Flower of Coleridge”: it’s the image of the geometrical figure of Möbius,
the belt that engaged in an endless movement shows the reverse and obverse of both
sides without defining which is which. Dream and vigil, literature can be both,
Borges’ literature specifically: world, space, Library, the flower picked in a
dream and found in your palm the next morning.
[1]
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. This essay
will have to bear a second part in order to address this fundamental piece of
Borges’ puzzle.
