The Library of Babel

The story’s title alludes to the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1-9, an origin story explaining the emergence of diverse languages worldwide. The biblical story depicts humanity united in a single cooperative civilization, constructing a tower so enormous and architecturally advanced that it rivals God’s power. In response, God destroys the tower, scattering humanity across the Earth and confounding their single language into myriad tongues.

Replacing the tower with a library, Jorge Luis Borges’s story imagines a similar state of fragmentation and chaos, where individuals are dispersed and unable to reach a consensus on how to comprehend the Library’s vastness. This library contains books in an infinite array of languages, with words shattered, rearranged, and reduced to incoherence. This disorder, which some believe to have been orchestrated by the divine architect of the Library, parallels the fragmentation of language in the biblical narrative, compelling people to search perpetually for meaning and effective communication, thus rendering humanity impotent and obstructing the realization of its full potential. The Library’s physical structure segregates different factions, preventing them from uniting, which, if allowed, could facilitate collective efforts in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. A noticeable contrast lies in the absence of a catastrophic fall, as seen in the original Babel myth, replaced instead by a gradual, agonizing decline of humanity. Their relentless pursuit of truth has become so futile that it threatens to obliterate them from existence. The librarian implies that, in due course, the Library’s hexagons will stand empty, with every living soul succumbing to murder, suicide, or old age.

The very comprehensiveness of the Library renders it incomprehensible. In theory, it contains the solution to every possible mystery, but the scattering of these solutions among so much apparent nonsense places them permanently out of humanity’s reach (though, with quasi-religious faith, the librarian argues that nothing in the Library is nonsense, since the Library must also contain the codices that would make every text intelligible). The librarian responds to this paradox by imagining that, somewhere in the Library, there exists “a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books” (Paragraph 8). Though he has given up on the possibility of ever finding such a book, he prefers to imagine that someone at some point in time has read it or will read it: “If the honor and joy and wisdom 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” (Paragraph 8). In the cosmology of the Library, hell (nonsense, incomprehension, bewilderment) is ubiquitous, while heaven (sense, order, meaning) is so vanishingly rare that its existence can only be taken on faith.

The librarian notes that universal truth is not the only tantalizing promise the Library makes. When the comprehensive nature of the Library first became known, many librarians spent their lives in pursuit of texts that became known as the Vindications. These books (whose existence is a matter of speculation) are described as “apologiae and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures” (Paragraph 8). The quote highlights the intense and often reckless quest for personal validation and the longing for reassurance in the face of life’s uncertainties: “Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication” (Paragraph 8). Borges uses this to express the futility of such a pursuit within the Library’s confines, where even the most sought-after knowledge remains elusive.