Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Borges — Ficciones
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Week 4 — “The Library of Babel” & “The Garden of Forking Paths”
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Susan
(last edited Sep 18, 2024 09:18AM)
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Sep 18, 2024 09:13AM
Starting this week, I’ll post the summary and questions for the first story on Wednesday and the summary and questions for the second story a few days later. I’m hoping this will better give each story its time to star in the discussion.
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“The Library of Babel”Summary: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” The galleries contain book shelves, each holding 32 books, containing 410 pages each. No two books in the Library are identical. None has a meaningful title on the cover. “There are 25 orthographic symbols. That discovery enabled mankind, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library, and thereby satisfactorily solve the riddle that no conjecture had been able to define — the formless and chaotic nature of virtually all books.” Men have hunted through the Library for answers to “the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origin of the Library and of time,” to find their personal books of vindication, to locate and destroy “all worthless books” and to locate “the Book-Man” who has read “the total book,” a compendium of all the others. As he approaches the end of his life, the narrator believes he has answered the question whether the Library is indeed infinite.
Some questions to start:
1) What is the significance of the title?
2) Is it only the books in the Library that are “formless and chaotic,” or is this true for all books?
I love libraries, but I didn’t love “The Library of Babel.” Maybe it’s a nice place to visit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there. The story gave me a feeling of acute claustrophobia. And I question whether the Library actually includes all possible books because of the limited character set. Spanish for example has 27 letters which would translate to 30 characters versus the 25 characters in the story. What’s lost with those missing letters? But maybe it doesn’t matter because you’re unlikely to have anything that’s readable in your three hexagons anyway.
Susan wrote: "“The Library of Babel”Summary: “What is the significance of the title?"
For me, the title reinforces the idea of something purposingly confusing. And it also reinforces the idea that it should include books from every culture but not in a sense to bring people together and understand each other. On the contrary, it seems to follow God's purpose for Babel's tower and it just makes it very hard to find any book there that helps you understand other people.
I have read more than once that the title itself is an intriguing contradiction as a library is usually a very organized place and Babel is synonym for chaos.
Susan wrote: "I love libraries, but I didn’t love “The Library of Babel.” Maybe it’s a nice place to visit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there. The story gave me a feeling of acute claustrophobia. And ..."Susan, I agree, it is totally claustrophobic. It reminds me a lot of "The platform", the horror movie from 2020. And just like the movie, I think that the most important is not the library itself but the metaphor: how do we interpret the universe, what is the meaning of human life and so on.
Monica wrote: "I have read more than once that the title itself is an intriguing contradiction as a library is usually a very organized place and Babel is synonym for chaos.."Borges was a librarian himself, so this couldn't have been lost on him. The library he describes is not a library at all -- it is a collection, and a seemingly random one at that. Libraries are ordered, just like the universe is ordered, but this one is absurd, which turns it into a kind of nighmare.
I read somewhere that Borges actually hated library work at first. He would get his library work done in the first hour and then hide in the basement and write for the rest of his shift.
Thomas wrote: "...Libraries are ordered, just like the universe is ordered, but this one is absurd, which turns it into a kind of nighmare..."I think this is one of the main points of the story. He implies that the universe itself appears to be something strictly ordered but actually its rules are not completely known to us and therefore we try to make sense of everything, building different philosophic systems, different religions, different explanations for time/space/infinity. But in the end we are still struggling.
The Library reminds me of the engine of the Academy of Projectors in Lagado in Part III of Gulliver's Travels, which generated random sentences in the hope of producing new knowledge.
Monica wrote: “The Library of Babel” I have read more than once that the title itself is an intriguing contradiction as a library is usually a very organized place and Babel is synonym for chaos.."Yes, chaos is the word. A mix not just of languages, but of non-language — strings of letters that make no sense in any language, books with no titles, and any catalogs mixed in with everything else. A librarian’s worst nightmare, I’d guess
Monica wrote: " I think that the most important is not the library itself but the metaphor: how do we interpret the universe, what is the meaning of human life and so on.”The story certainly implies that the Library is a metaphor/image of the universe. But is a Library, a chaotic and perhaps infinite Library, an image of the universe? Perhaps it is an image of human understanding of the universe, but that seems a different thing to me than the universe. What do you think?
Thomas wrote:”The library he describes is not a library at all -- it is a collection, and a seemingly random one at that. Libraries are ordered, just like the universe is ordered, but this one is absurd, which turns it into a kind of nightmare."This is a helpful way to look at it. He paints a very compelling picture of chaos, and yet the number of books involved is not so great that a librarian couldn’t bring some order to their three hexagons of bookshelves. Apparently that is somehow against the rules of the place.
Monica wrote: ". I think this is one of the main points of the story. He implies that the universe itself appears to be something strictly ordered but actually its rules are not completely known to us and therefore we try to make sense of everything, building different philosophic systems, different religions, different explanations for time/space/infinity. But in the end we are still struggling ..."So the story could be said to be about a search for order in a chaotic environment which holds out the promise of logical sense and an ultimate philosophic system, a promise that remains unfulfilled in practice?
Whether one understands it or not, Borges has certainly created a compelling image.
Roger wrote: "The Library reminds me of the engine of the Academy of Projectors in Lagado in Part III of Gulliver's Travels, which generated random sentences in the hope of producing new knowledge."It sounds like the Academy of Projectors and their engine would fit right in. And that the Library of Babel would welcome all of their random sentences whether they included new knowledge or not.
“The Garden of Forking Paths”Summary: The story opens with a reference to a five day delay in a World War I Allied offensive “which entailed no great consequences.” This is followed by a statement from Dr Yu Tsun, a former English professor which “throws unexpected light on the case.” The statement reveals that Dr Tsun, an agent of the German empire, discovered an English agent Captain Richard Madden was on his track and that he will be captured or dead before the end of the day. How can he pass on the important secret information he has to his contact in Germany? He thinks, locates the one person who can pass the information on, and heads to the train to go find him. He thinks “I foresee that mankind will resign itself more and more fully every day to more and more horrendous undertakings… I give them this piece of advice: “He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. That is what I did…”
Dr Tsun considers his great-grandfather Ts’ui Pen who devoted thirteen years to constructing a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way. But “his novel made no sense and no one ever found the labyrinth.” But when Dr Tsun arrives to see Stephen Albert, he tells Dr Tsun he has solved the mystery: the novel is the labyrinth. “Two circumstances lent me the final solution of the problem—one, the curious legend that Ts’ui Pen had intended to construct a labyrinth which was truly infinite, and two, a fragment of a letter I discovered.” The fragment reads: “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.” “Almost instantly, I saw it—the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘several futures (not all)’ suggested to me the time of a forking in ‘time,’ rather than in space….The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts’ui Pen the merest mention of its name…Time forks perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.” Dr Tsun sees Richard Madden approaching. “The future is with us,” I replied,” but I am your friend…I had cocked the revolver. With utmost care, I fired. Albert fell without a groan, without a sound, on the instant. I swear he died instantly—one clap of thunder.” His murder at the hands of a stranger will convey the secret message via a newspaper story.
Some questions to start:
Borges calls this “a detective story.” Do you agree?
2) Was Dr Tsun telling the truth when he told Stephen Albert “I am your friend”?
Susan wrote: "“The Garden of Forking Paths”2) Was Dr Tsun telling the truth when he told Stephen Albert “I am your friend”?
In a divergent and parallel universe, yes. If we take Ts'ui Pen's Garden of Forking Paths seriously.
This story appears to be another "what if" scenario: what if time were not absolute and linear? What if every possibility is a reality in another time?
The consequences of this are infinitely contradictory and ambiguous, and the story plays on those . An Irishman in the service of England (who is naturally suspected of treachery) is after a Chinese teacher of English forced into spying for Germany (he thinks Germany barbarous) still wants to impress "the Chief" by killing a random man based on his name alone to signal to the Germans the location of an English artillery park. This random man just coincidentally happens to be a sinologist who knows all about the Chinese teacher's grandfather and his philosophical conceits, which just happen to form the basis for the story at hand.
It's confusing and contradictory, but I think that's by design. If time is not linear and absolute, and every possibility is also a reality in another time, then every action has multiple consequences. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you get to choose every possible adventure. There are multiple contradictory endings and each one is as "true" as the next.
Thomas wrote: “The Garden of Forking Paths”.." If time is not linear and absolute, and every possibility is also a reality in another time, then every action has multiple consequences. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you get to choose every possible adventure. There are multiple contradictory endings and each one is as "true" as the next.I found it a fascinating concept. And reading the story, we can imagine a world in which Dr Tsun’s passing of information to Germany and the resulting delay in the Allied offense did entail “great consequences”. Or a world in which Richard Madden caught up with Dr Tsun at the train station so that he never made it to Stephen Albert’s garden. And so on for the other branches in the story. I believe there is a theory in modern physics which posits something similar for time, a universe where all these various timelines co-exist in some way.
If one set up a Borges Bingo card, I suspect <“The Garden of Forking Paths” would score well. What would be included on the Bingo card? Labyrinths, libraries, books, mirrors, dreams, infinity…
Susanna wrote: "Yes, that's part of the theory of quantum mechanics. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/...Dark Matter, a novel and Apple TV show by Blake Crouch, is about infinite possibilities..."
Fascinating article! Thanks for sharing it, Susanna.
