The Library of Babel

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The Library of Babel ( La Biblioteca de Babel ) is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges and at the same time the title of a book series of fantastic literature published by Borges .

The story of Borges

The story, published in 1941, was originally part of The Garden of Paths That Branch ( El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ), which was published in 1944 as the first part of the Fictions ( Ficciones ).

It is a speculation about a possible world, which is represented as a library of all possible books. These books, arranged at random in the library, mostly contain texts that are incomprehensible to the library residents. The idea of ​​such a universal library was described by Borges in an essay as early as 1939 and traced back to its literary predecessors.

The library is represented as pre-existing and infinite. Because of this infinity , according to the narrator, it contains all combinations of the alphabet. Borges speaks of 25 characters: 22 letters, commas, periods and spaces of the Hebrew alphabet . This results in the fact that “one can articulate a syllable that is not full of tenderness and shudder, that would not be the mighty name of a god in any of these languages .” It is not because of the vast majority of those for the residents Meaningful books are very lucky to find a book with even one sentence that makes sense to them.

Borges also describes how different groups of residents of the library deal with it: Sects were and are founded, some of which go as far as the adoration of the mostly indecipherable books and others call for the books to be burned , there are hikers who visit the library Going through looking for a book with the answer to all questions, there are scholars studying the structure of the library and many more. In Borges' story, the people in the library grow old without having found an answer to what bothered them.

This story reflects Borges' typical fascination with the infinite; he speculates that the library may have different origins and structures. He also uses, as in all of his stories, the mystification , so bring, for example, quotes that are difficult to be verified and where it is not clear whether Borges, the person quoted invented or only hardly anyone except Borges, with a powerful general knowledge possessed is known. Here's a footnote:

“Letizia Alvarez de Toledo noted that the vast library is superfluous; Strictly speaking, a single volume of ordinary format, printed in corpus nine or ten, would suffice if it consisted of an infinite number of infinitely thin sheets. (Cavalieri said at the beginning of the century that every solid body is the superposition of an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silk-thin vademecum would not be easy; every apparent single sheet would divide into others of the same kind; the incomprehensible sheet in the middle would have no back. "

The book referred to here can be found in the story Das Sandbuch in the collection of the same name from 1975.

interpretation

The structure of the Babylonian library reflects a fundamental aspect of Borges' understanding of literature: According to Borges, literary history is built on a totality and cyclical recurrence of all conceivable contents, constellations, events and forms. The understanding of literature discussed is closely linked to the idea of ​​a 'literature of exhaustion' ( John Barth's Literature of Exhaustion ), according to which the formal and content-related means of literature are exhausted with the onset of postmodernism. Within the finite totality of all content, there can only be an infinite new combination of already existing forms (which is an expression of a radical concept of intertextuality ). The library is just such a totality of the infinite combination of finite contents. It contains all conceivable knowledge that is arranged in constant repetition and thus results in a - superficial - infinity: "Yo me atrevo a insinuar esta solución del antiguo problema: La biblioteca es ilimitada y periódica."

The idea of ​​a totality and cyclical recurrence of all content is also dealt with in the stories El Aleph , Funes, el memorioso , Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote , as well as (transferred to a cyclical understanding of history) in Tema del traidor y del héroe . In practice, this radical intertextual understanding of literature of the constant resumption of previous content is also found in the history of the Informe de Brodie , which is a rewrite of Gulliver 's fourth journey .

This narrative can also serve as a food for thought to consider the way in which meaningful and nonsensical arises or is perceived. If you wanted to estimate the size of the library, you would get the following result: For a round library the diameter would be about 10,600,000  m. In contrast, the universe visible to us is  relatively small with a diameter of only 8.8 · 10 26 m.

Book series The Library of Babel

The publisher Franco Maria Ricci published in Italy from 1974 under the direction of Borges the author's favorite works as a writer and reader, also under the title The Library of Babel . From 1983 this collection also appeared in Germany and was personally edited by Borges in the Weitbrecht edition. Borges wrote a preface for each of the 30 volumes in this collection of fantastic stories from around the world and spanning several centuries. In 2007, the Gutenberg Book Guild published an artist edition in 30 volumes with cover illustrations by Bernhard Jäger in watercolor technique .

In terms of authors, the series includes:

See also

literature

  • William Goldbloom Bloch: The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel . Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-533457-9 .
  • Adelheid Hanke-Schaefer: Jorge Luis Borges for an introduction . Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-88506-987-3 .
  • Rein A. Zondergeld : Lexicon of fantastic literature. Weitbrecht, Stuttgart & Wien & Bern 1998, ISBN 3-522-72175-6 , p. 383 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Total Library . In: A New Refutation of Time and 66 Other Essays . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-8218-4738-7 , pp. 165-169.
  2. ↑ Matthew Battles: The World of Books: A History of the Library . Artemis and Winkler, Düsseldorf 2003, ISBN 3-538-07165-9 , pp. 25 .
  3. ^ Adelheid Hanke-Schaefer: Jorge Luis Borges for an introduction . Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-88506-987-3 , p. 65.
  4. ^ Library of Babel at Edition Büchergilde ; Depending on the edition, different authors are summarized in 1 volume