The Bread of Babel
I really enjoyed this story when I read it for my FWS last semester and wrote an essay about how it satirizes the biblical Tower of Babel story. This time around, I was disturbed by one line towards the end:
"An n number of possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library admits of the correct definition ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and the seven words which define it possess another value. You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?" (87)
Borges asks us to question whether we actually understand any of what the narrator says because his language may be different from ours. Most of the definitions must be roughly the same as our English (or Spanish for the original) because we are able to follow what the narrator says, but I wouldn't use the narrator's definition of "library" to describe Olin or Uris. The narrator is unsure he can communicate with us as his language isolates him within the library. He says that people in hexagons only miles away speak a different dialect and ninety floors up the language is incomprehensible (82).
I feel that we are really expected to doubt a lot of what's presented here in terms of the narrator's hopes of the "Vindications" and the existence of order containing all disorder. He acknowledges that the presented ideas are flawed when he suggests that we shouldn't trust his writing. He even calls his work a "useless and wordy epistle" for which some book exists that refutes its claims (86-87).
Taking Borges's advice and taking a skeptical approach, I do not believe that the library would necessarily be "total": the library does not have every single arrangement of the letters to form all true and untrue stories. Even with infinitely many randomly generated books, not every outcome must be attained. To demonstrate what I mean, consider how there are infinitely many numbers between 0 and 1, yet not all numbers fall between 0 and 1. Borges may convey that people are unaware of the limitations that exist on what they can ever learn or discover.
"An n number of possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library admits of the correct definition ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and the seven words which define it possess another value. You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?" (87)
Borges asks us to question whether we actually understand any of what the narrator says because his language may be different from ours. Most of the definitions must be roughly the same as our English (or Spanish for the original) because we are able to follow what the narrator says, but I wouldn't use the narrator's definition of "library" to describe Olin or Uris. The narrator is unsure he can communicate with us as his language isolates him within the library. He says that people in hexagons only miles away speak a different dialect and ninety floors up the language is incomprehensible (82).
I feel that we are really expected to doubt a lot of what's presented here in terms of the narrator's hopes of the "Vindications" and the existence of order containing all disorder. He acknowledges that the presented ideas are flawed when he suggests that we shouldn't trust his writing. He even calls his work a "useless and wordy epistle" for which some book exists that refutes its claims (86-87).
Taking Borges's advice and taking a skeptical approach, I do not believe that the library would necessarily be "total": the library does not have every single arrangement of the letters to form all true and untrue stories. Even with infinitely many randomly generated books, not every outcome must be attained. To demonstrate what I mean, consider how there are infinitely many numbers between 0 and 1, yet not all numbers fall between 0 and 1. Borges may convey that people are unaware of the limitations that exist on what they can ever learn or discover.
I agree that the library is not "total", as stemming from what you said about it not containing every possible arrangement, but not because of the fact that they are not there somewhere. Keep in mind that while the number of books in the library is mindbogglingly huge, it is still a finite number, and thus nowhere close to infinity. You can thus assign a concrete number to how many books there are, and thus all of them can exist in the library. However, I would say that the library is not total because there are hexes out there that are beyond the reach of any human being, just because the library is so big, and so these hexes may as well not exist.
ReplyDeleteI think Borges point was to ridicule the nature of humans. We are so obsessed with finding our power in a specific book of God like those were trying to find . This can be related to the bible story of Babel where humans were so obsessed with disobeying God's orders to find heaven that he had to create languages to prevent us from communicating with each other. Thus, the author could be criticizing the stubbornness of human nature and our inability to accept that some things are better left unknown.
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