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"The Library of Babel" () is a short story by Argentine author (and librarian) Jorge Luis Borges, conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books that can be composed in a certain character set. 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.
Plot summary
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").
Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless 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 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 any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite 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. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the "Crimson Hexagon", containing a book that contains the truth of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God.
Willard Van Orman Quine explodes the conceit of the library as follows. Note first that the length of the individual volumes is immaterial. Since all permutations are possible, the text that is left off at the end of one volume is taken up by another—somewhere in the library. The only trick is to locate the correct volume. Note also that the subset of books that only employs the symbols 1 and 0 contain the rest of the library by any desired unambiguous encoding (of course it takes several binary volumes to represent the content of a single volume, but see the previous point). The restriction to binary here entails no loss of generality and is not required; we only do this to see the point clearly. Now, carrying through the arbitrariness of volume length to its logical extreme, we see that the whole library is perfectly equivalent to two bits of paper, one with a 1 on it and one with a 0. The only trick is to read these two "volumes" one after the other, in the correct order. There is no sleight of hand here; the reductio ad absurdum only serves to bring out more clearly the fundamental point that there is no information contained whatsoever in the space of all permutations. The library contains no information at all, much less a glut of it.
This short story features many of Borges's signature themes, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem; it 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".
Borges would examine a similar idea with his later story, "The Book of Sand"; in the later story, there is an infinite book rather than an infinite library.
Sequel by other hands
In "The Net of Babel", published in Interzone in 1995, David Langford imagines the Library becoming computerized for easy access. This aids the librarians in searching for specific text while also highlighting the futility of such searches as they can find anything, but nothing of meaning as such. The sequel continues many of Borges's themes, while also highlighting the difference between data and information, and satirizing the Internet.
External links
- The Spanish-language text of "La biblioteca de Babel".
- The James Irby translation of the "Library of Babel".
- Tlön's Library of Babel Simulation (webarchive link)
- Hamete.org's digital access to the Library of Babel – a Library of Babel simulation
- How Big is the Library of Babel?
Jorge Luis Borges short stories | Mathematics fiction books
Die Bibliothek von Babel | La biblioteca de Babel | La Bibliothèque de Babel | Bábeli könyvtár | バベルの図書館 | A Biblioteca de Babel
"The Library of Babel"