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Collected Fictions
Borges Stories - M.R. 2013
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Discussion - Week Seven - Borges - The Library of Babel
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The concept of Infinity strikes again– this time,in the form of an infinite library!A book lover's ultimate homage in that he imagines the universe itself as a library & its various stages are covered as if recounting the evolution of the universe itself!
Some how,for me, it was easier to conceive of infinity as a library rather than as a Lottery (in Babylonia), still,when we talk of infinity,can chaos (Babel) be far behind?
How is the limited human mind to make sense of this vastness– books, knowledge, universe, God? Isn't this library like our modern internet– endless & chaotic?
I'd be so happy with this simple system of punctuation– Ah,the tyranny of all those endless punctuation signs, they are good only for keeping the editors employed!
Second: There are twenty-five orthographic symbols.1'The original manuscript has neither numbers nor capital letters; punctuation is limited to the comma and the period. Those two marks, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five sufficient symbols that our unknown author is referring to. [Ed. note.
Again,plenty to chew on here for the religious & philosophy-minded– Borges again uses Aquinas' ideas:
Medieval Sourcebook: Thomas Aquinas:
On The Eternity of the World (DE AETERNITATE MUNDI)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/...
A question to the fellow readers here: I've seen that epigraphs are carefully chosen in the Borges stories,for example,the Lewis Carroll quote,from Through the Looking Glass as used in The Circular Ruins,perfectly captures the essence of that story so I was wondering what could be the significance of this quote from Anatomy of Melancholy?
By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters....
Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 2, Sec. II, Mem. IV
Loved these lines:
If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
I think this paragraph describes the po-mo area of the library!
For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempt-ing to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one's hand.... They will acknowledge that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning. That argu-ment, as we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.
I see that I'm the first one to reach The Library– I shd get an early bird award!
Mod
Strictly an anomaly of the earth's rotation, but okay, Gold Star for Mala!!
Re: The Burton quote, it seems to highlight the idea that the infinite thoughts and ideas of humanity can be expressed simply by recombining 25 symbols. Similarly, all matter can be created out of the 100+ elements on the periodic table.
BTW, I also immediately thought of the internet when I read:
For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.
An accurate description of the Web 2.0.....
I always thought this story was taking a playful poke at religion, like so many of his stories seem to do obliquely. The library has every book, but that's because it has every possible permutation of the existing letters. Most of the books are a meaningless miss-mash, and the books that happen to have something resembling a few coherent words or sentences are considered near sacred. And the reasoning is that since all books are present, there must be the perfect book among them (the Aquinas-like ideas, or maybe a Platonic ideal).So the question is, how meaningful is a perfect (or even good, or even vaguely sensical) book if it's the necessary result of having all possible books?
Whitney wrote:"So the question is, how meaningful is a perfect (or even good, or even vaguely sensical) book if it's the necessary result of having all possible books? "In practical terms,such a book would be so convenient! Just like our modern integrated technology– all in one place, in a nifty package, still some readers would surely have issues with that– a book containing everything would be too heavy to lift! Also, readers, who like variety in their reading & like to flaunt their jampacked,floor-to-ceiling book cases,wouldn't take kindly to the idea of a single master book! Where would Gr be without those library pics!?
As a metaphor though,don't religious books across all faiths,claim to
have/know everything? As in the sense of The Ultimate Truth/The Essence of Everything?
Whitney, I think the question is less how good is the book, I think the books has to be equally good, but it says nothing about its author or its humanity. Which then is becomes an odd parallel to Menard's Quixote because they would be open to almost any possible perspective and assumption.
In both cases one could argue for a free reader's imagination.
Bill wrote: "Whitney, I think the question is less how good is the book, I think the books has to be equally good, but it says nothing about its author or its humanity. Which then is becomes an odd parallel t..."
I don't know, this is making me rethink my whole attitude towards great books, as well as the absurdity of Pierre Menard.
Imagining an equivalent Library of Babel for the Russian alphabet (and also removing the length restriction :-) one could in theory find the exact replica of Anna Karenina. Put side by side with the original, one is a work of genius, while the other is a product of statistical permutation. Are they equally good books if one can be said to be a work of genius and the other can't? Before I would have said the greatness of a book was independent of the writer, now I'm not so sure.
And what if the library already existed? Does it change the writing of a book, knowing that whatever book you're writing, it already exists? All books are unoriginal before they are even created by intent. Does it matter? Would it make a difference if the library was somehow searchable, rather than the miss-mash that makes it unlikely any completely coherent book can be found anyway, even if the book already exists by definition?
Here's some more ways I've been pondering this. Back to the idea of a book discovered on the the shelves of the library, versus one written the conventional way. A book discussion involves asking questions like why a character behaves the way they do, or what the bird in chapter 3 symbolizes. In the randomly generated book, these questions are meaningless, the bird is there because there has to exist some version of this book with a bird. Same for character's behavior etc.I think I would maintain that the randomly generated Anna Karenina is meaningless. A random assortment of letters, just like all the other books in the library.
When I read this, I concluded that the people within the library must be mistaken about the nature of the library. The fact that they've found any marvelous books at all suggests that there is intent and reason at least in the shelving of the books, or else they (as defined by the author and all the humans with whom he could ever have communicated even indirectly) must exist in a remarkably privileged part of the library/universe. In other words, there must be a "God" of sorts who has planned out which books they will be privileged to discover.The reason I say this is, the story is a sort of meditation on the nature of randomness. It's absolutely true that, if there were such a large array of books, then the book that repeats MCVMCV... throughout, plus one intelligible phrase, would exist somewhere within that library. The "vindications" would also exist. But the author and all those he could communicate with would never receive evidence of the existence of these books. However broadly we might choose to define "marvelous books," whether they include all cases of completely intelligible books in any known language, any repeating patterns that are consistent and recognizable as such... they would be so rare that the chance of finding them would be almost beyond infinitesimal.
In order to get a sense of the scale of this library, we should perhaps compare it to our own universe. None of us humans can really grasp the size of our own universe. But we know that if all the grains of sand on the earth were increased to the size of the earth itself, then the total would still be small compared to our universe.
What would happen if each and every proton and electron in the entire universe were enlarged to the size of the universe itself, and divided into the same number of electrons and protons? What if, after this happened, this super-universe again had each and every elementary particle enlarged to the size of the super-universe, and divided into as many particles? What if this inconceivably vast process were repeated fourteen times?
Then, and only then, this super-super-super-super-super-super-super-duper-super-duper-super-duper-super-universe would contain as many electrons and protons as there are books in the Library of Babel.
The real universe that we currently occupy is estimated to have approximately 10^80 (that's "ten to the eightieth power") protons, electrons, and neutrons. Maybe it's a bit bigger or a bit smaller. But the Library of Babel has 10^700,000 books.
Finding any book which is comprehensible, within the lifespan of a culture, when a "culture" may be defined as even trillions of humans surviving for millions of years, would be proof of one of two things:
A) This is some kind of meaningful miracle. We were meant to find this book.
or
B) The library is not a random assortment of all possible texts, as we supposed. It's a setup!
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However, if the universe really were an array of all possible books, in no particular arrangement, then this would be immediately apparent to the reader of just one book. Just counting characters, he/she should soon discover that the occurrence of the space character is almost precisely as common as the occurrence of "b," or "," or "q." Even a non-mathematician would spot this. Checking scores of books, the same would be apparent. Occasionally, among all the gibberish, one might come across a string such as "iwh isper" within a text, a pure chance resemblance to human language. Beyond such a string, finding an entire comprehensible text, one would have to conclude "someone slipped this book in here, among the random texts."
That's one proof of human inventiveness, of course, and perhaps its miraculous nature. Any one of us could write a comprehensible book, one that has an order and reason beyond what even 10,000,000 universes the size of our own could ever produce from pure randomness.
Zadignose wrote: "When I read this, I concluded that the people within the library must be mistaken about the nature of the library. The fact that they've found any marvelous books at all suggests that there is inte..."This is pretty much exactly what I mean by the story tweaking religion. With all the permutations of possible books in the library, multiple people searching are bound to come across some that have an occasional coherent sentence, and when they do they treat it as evidence of the divine. It's like the person who wins the lottery declaring that it must have been due to divine intervention, since the odds were one in a million they would win. Sure, it's true that's it's one in a million for any particular person, but the odds of SOMEONE winning are 100%. There is no miracle in finding those books, unless someone had set out with the intent of finding those particular books and had succeeded.
Although, with the particular probabilities we're looking at here, if 100 trillion people spend their entire lives devoted *only* to searching out meaningful books, the odds of someone "winning" (i.e. finding one) are still close to 0%. So, if the story was intended to tweak religion, it may have inadvertently proven the legitimacy of religion ("proven" only within the context of the story, of course).To me, the story is less of a challenge to faith than an invocation of faith!
Zadignose wrote: "Although, with the particular probabilities we're looking at here, if 100 trillion people spend their entire lives devoted *only* to searching out meaningful books, the odds of someone "winning" (i..."I think you would appreciate Ken Liu's story 'Monkeys', a humorous take on the 'infinite number of monkeys producing Shakespeare' concept. Unfortunately, I can only find an audio version, but it's very short (6 minutes) if you care to give it a listen: Monkeys.
I'll check that out when I get home. Meanwhile, this web tool may be interesting to some:http://textmechanic.com/Random-String...
It gives a good sense of what random text can look like. I tried producing strings of 1000 characters using only the lowercase alphabet and looking through them. I came across a few instances of recognizable 4-letter words (including a rather rude one) and 3-letter words in the 1000-character strings. Then I tried cheating the system a little towards English by selecting from a string of characters from an English text, to come closer to the frequency distribution native to our language. It didn't produce a huge increase in the number of real words, though the vowel count and theoretical "pronounceability" went up.
Finally, I tried using 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' in the input box at the top, and generating 800 strings of 5 characters each. I repeated several times. I actually expected to see a greater number of recognizable words than I did. The only 5-letter word I encountered was "seder", from Hebrew. The vast majority of strings not only aren't English words, you will be absolutely certain that they have never been words in any human language.
But, after running a few trials and seeing the results, try to imagine how surprised you would be if you suddenly produced 800 actual 5-letter English words in a row, all being words that you easily recognize. It would be beyond belief. But it would be a trivial incident compared to producing an entire book, not only of words, but of words within a comprehensible syntax--real language!
Once we get to the likelihood of producing comprehensible books at random, we're talking about the kinds of probability that make winning the Powerball Lottery (at 1/100,000,000 odds) EVERY DAY FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIFE seem like an ordinary, unremarkable event.
P.S. But I don't know (yet) how to calculate the probability that within a book of gibberish one might encounter an entire comprehensible paragraph. I suspect it's also in the mind-bogglingly unlikely category.
Rereading the story now, what it reminds me of most vividly is trying to locate a book I need in the (very large) university library when I only know its reference number and it's not on the shelf it should be on.
Did you make any unexpected discoveries along the way?
Another thing that was interesting was the thought of this library as living space. Besides the mention of toilets, and a place to rest while standing, the place makes virtually no concessions to human organic needs. Other than the reference to the author's birth, theres no implication of either family relationships or sexuality... and can you even imagine a woman giving birth in this place? People die here too, at least by suicide. The author could have elected to dodge the whole question, but instead he made few references which invited us to ponder the absurdity of living one's life here, and note the contrast of the pure abstract perfection of the universe and the riotous vulgar and mad passion of the humans who inhabit it.
Mod
...each bookshelf contains thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.
There are Twenty-five orthographic symbols.
The total possible permutations are such that the library might just as well be called infinite, but with the variables Borges defined, it is possible to arrive at a finite number of books. In other words, despite appearances, The Library of Babel has edges...
I'm not sure if I'm being addressed in particular, but I'll pretend that I am...Understood, but actually the numbers of permutations I referred to are calculated based on those particular parameters. Well, "calculated" with plenty of approximation/fudge, but in the range. And if every possible book arrangement of these characters within this page count limit exists in the library, then there are only two possibilities:
1) There's no planned order to the books. This means that each book can be regarded exactly as though it were the product of pure random generation.
2) There is a planned order to the books. This is the equivalent of giving "privilege" to those within the scope of the author's community who have received apparently ordered or comprehenisible texts, and thus amounts to a message sent and received. God is present here... or a wicked trickster... or mortals have tampered with the library for their own purposes.
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Another unmentioned reflection, though perhaps obvious: there's no reason for us to think that "The Library of Babel" was written as the author claims. "He" acknowledges that its equivalent must also exist on the pages of some book or books in the library... in fact it must exist in a nearly infinite number of books, somewhere within their pages. But ironically this text could be from one of these books, having never actually been written by any librarian, and it's apparent self-awareness may well be a sham.
Oh my God, no... I estimated based on a rather normal number of characters and lines within a 410 page book, but these are LONGER than that... I pretty much ignored the detail of 80 characers per line and 40 lines per page. This makes the library many many many times vaster than the already virtually infinite size I had estimated.The actual number of books is over 1^1,800,000.
So whatever I said above, regarding a completely ordered or comprehensible book, just compound it infinitely. I'm pretty confident you could anhihilate a section of the library 1,000,000 times larger than our own universe without affecting even one book as ordered as the MCVMCVMCV book.
Mod
Understood, but actually the numbers of permutations I referred to are calculated based on those particular paramet..."
No I wasn't addressing you directly, but some of the topics being expressed above.
God? Oh dear... I didn't know you were a believer.
Anyway, the contents of the Library are a strictly mathematical result. The interpretation of the result is based on the human creation of language in terms of what is comprehensible. Borges teases us when talking about the MCV book - ...but four hundred ten pages of unvarying M C V's cannot belong to any language, however dialectical of primitive it may be.
"God" is a fairytale created by the same humans who created language. "God" then serves the purpose of explaining what seems unexplainable or incalculable. The "wicked trickster" is man himself inventing "God" to cover the limits of his understanding. "An earthquake destroyed the city?!? You must not have given the proper sacrifices to Poseidon." and so on...
I'm not a believer, but if I were in this library of Babel I would be.Of course, Ironically it was God who blasted the tower (library) of Babel for man's sinful aspirations.
And tease or not, that MCV book could not be found unless it was placed there with intent. If I'm wrong, spit on my beard and slay me!
Additionally:Borges crafted the space of the library along the lines of what physicists actually believe about our own universe, with regards to being vast, but finite, and unbound; with every point in the universe being equally entitled to be regarded as the "center." The principal difference is its incomprehensibly vaster scale.
On top of that, physicists today regard no one place in the universe as privileged with regards to the others, but I'm asserting that based on the presence of certain books that we the readers are getting a very privileged perspective in the story. Unless we assume that, not only was the story Libary of Babel not written by a librarian, but that because it was produced by a fundamentally random phenomenon then, as the text admits itself, it may be false in one, several or all particulars.
And, in fact, that is the case. It was not written by a librarian, but by Borges. And it's a work of fiction. He kindly told us so. Strangely, that doesn't burst the imaginative bubble. (And he didn't actually "tell" us so, but in typical Borges fashion he's invited us to consider it as a valid but unproven and incomplete interpretation).
Borges, like all authors, is God of the universe he crafted. The evidence of his presence is revealed (or hinted).
Mod
Good one! The parts that Borges leaves out and what leads to discussions of god and intent is how was the physical structure of the library created and how were the books distributed on the shelves? Those two elements lead immediately to intent, or, dare I say it, "Intelligent design". Throughout the story I was thinking about molecular structure and organic cellular structure. Molecules have a fixed form - nucleus containing protons and neutrons, with orbiting electrons in specific ordered orbits. Cells have internal structures with librarians called "mitochondria". But I digress...
What is interesting beyond the books themselves is the idea of librarians existing to live within the library, and the existence of the upright sleeping closet and water closet. And the sick joke of the light bulbs that aren't quite bright enough. I mean really, Borges is SUCH a smart-ass!!! But that's what makes him so much fun, I suppose... And so the biggest question becomes if you were to design a library that takes human librarians into account - as evidenced by the toilets - why would you tease them with the unreadable books? Again, the smart-ass wicked trickster is Borges...
I don't have the text with me, but I remember enjoying the phrasing of his description of the bulbs... in the Labyrinths translation it was something like: inadequate, incessant. I liked the poetic licence in his use of a comma too.
Zadignose wrote: "Another thing that was interesting was the thought of this library as living space. Besides the mention of toilets, and a place to rest while standing, the place makes virtually no concessions to h..."Well said but then as pointed out earlier by some one in the Tlön story discussion- why there are no females in the story,the idea of paternity instead of maternity,etc– family relationships,sexuality,child birth etc have no place in Borges' fictional universe as humanbeings have been replaced by the mirrors,labyrinths & books!
In his Afterword to The Book of Sand collection,Borges wrote:"The subject of love is quite common in my poetry; not so in my prose, where the only example is "Ulrikke."
Ulrikke is a lovely tale abt a Norwegian girl in York.Many quotable lines there. In the same collection,the stories Undr' " and "The Mirror and the Mask" envision age-old literatures consisting of but a single word.So Borges plays constant mind games with readers.
A crude question would be why mention toilets when there's no provision for food!
To take the discussion away from abstract,philosophical musings,(Which,unfortunately,I'm not able to follow), here's something solid:In his famous essay,Blindness, Borges reflected on the ironies in his life: "In my life I have received many unmerited honors,but there is one which has made me happier than all the others: the directorship of the National Library...I was in charge of,I was told,a million books...little by little I came to realise the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was,at the center,in a way,of nine hundred thousand books in various languages,but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines. I wrote the "Poem of the Gifts," which begins:
No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God; who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch."
Ah, there is something solid, and it makes God out as a mystery and also a kind of trickster/mischief-maker.The only way I can find to not read self-pity or reproach into that statement is to accept Borges as profoundly appreciative of mystery and irony, more so than of certainty and revelation. Which pretty much fits his authorial persona.
Set in an infinite space, The Library of Babel contains all books of all kinds in every combination of words and letters imaginable and by extension contains everything there is to know and think, (I think?!).......