I have not read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library
of Babel”. I am a very slow reader. I only read with a purpose. It is
sufficient to know from Derek Beaulieu (and everyone else who has read it) that
“The Library of Babel” posits a universe embodied in a single interminable,
honeycomb-like, library. Borges’ literary repository holds every potential
combination of letters arranged without a card catalogue, dooming the denizens
of this collection to wander the stacks searching for meaning. “For writers,
Borges has issued both a condemnation and a challenge. By proposing an
effectively infinite library … Borges lays claim to every book within the
library’s holdings: there are no books that an author could propose which
Borges’ library does not already contain. When faced with the ontological
nightmare of the Borgesian library, a writer has two choices. They can either
shrink from their task, believing that there are no remaining original ideas
that Borges has not already placed within his collection, or they can see
Borges’ library as freeing them from the onerous weight of originality. Within
this tact, the author must assert the poetics of choice—writing for them has
become not a matter of creating art but selecting art. To be a writer is to
artistically select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume
as particularly worth examination and consideration.”
Hmm, to be a writer is to select a single volume from Borges’
shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and
consideration. Is though? The rules say we only have two choices,
apparently.
I’ll see your Borges’ library and raise you Hilbert’s Hotel.
David Hilbert’s hotel has an infinite number of rooms and is full of an
infinite number of guests. What do you do if more guests arrive? Ask
everyone to move up one. Or as I have frequently opined in my working life –
The solution to a problem is always bigger than the problem itself. That
is why, by the way, the Text Festival was not a poetry festival.
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| 'Canon' - Text Festival |
Anyway, returning to the Library, assuming its possible 101,834,013 Universes, even if there is one in which I have read Borges’s Library of Babel, there is still a problem. The number of books in the library is irrelevant; the number of rooms is irrelevant. Perhaps the most mundane proof of the fallacy is that all the books have already been written and this is an ‘ontological nightmare’: The concept of that constriction is based on a misunderstanding of Possible Worlds theory. As philosopher David Lewis posited - every world is spatiotemporally and causally isolated from every other world. So the ontological problem, if it is one, only applies to an existentially impossible writer who exists across universes.
In the
Universe where Duchamp and Beckett are available to testify, I call them as my
expert witnesses and turn to the Shannon number. Mathematician Claude Shannon
in calculating the complexity of chess, found that 10120 games were
possible. He was trying to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess with
the brute force of computer power. This did not stop programmers from seeing
Chess as the ideal analogue for computer ‘intelligence’; ultimately leading to
the then World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov losing to Deep Blue in 1996-7. Claims
were of course made that the match presaged the symbolic end of human intellectual
dominance, and, less important to some, the end of Chess. Now? Who cares? The
current question in chess is whether Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is so good that
he has ‘broken’ chess.
More specifically the idea that meaning has to be found
within an infinite, modular (but closed) library is fallacious. Alain Badiou
observes in The Immanence of Truths “[There are] four different types of
infinities based on special properties: operative transcendence
(inaccessibility), resistance to division (compactness), the existence of a
very large ultrafilter (completeness), and the existence and property of an elementary
embedding (the degree of proximity to the absolute of one of its attributes).” Not
having read the short story locates me (and you) in a universe where there is an
outside to the library. Lawrence Weiner observed “anything that exists has a certain space around it; even an idea exists
within a certain space” and from that vantage point, the
infinity which the library exemplifies, rests with its shaky claim to completeness. I/you
are not constrained by it because we can view it from the outside. Further, as
Badiou also notes, “A set will therefore be said to be finite if all its
elements are definable, which means that they are inscribed in the dominant
language in the form of well-identified properties, known to everyone.”
Libraries and books are known to everyone. Library of Babel turns out to be a
trap for the unwary – let’s face it, it’s a pretty shit library if it hasn’t
got catalogue, it’s not a library – it’s a shambolic warehouse. And frankly
there aren’t actually that many books I can be bothered to pull down from the
shelf, as I wander, “every infinity requires wandering” (Badiou), even if we
imagine that we are within this constricting self-important pile of books,
there remains the space between the aisles, it is the same space in which Camus
imagines Sisyphus happy, the infrathin space within a space of Duchamp’s ‘Opposition
and Sister Squares are reconciled’, in its restless mobility the agency
of writer takes a rather jaunty precedence over the passivity of the idle
reader or the bespectacled librarian cliché.
