The Library of Babel

Told in the first-person point of view, “The Library of Babel” purports to be the work of an unnamed librarian attempting, near the end of his life, to understand the strange world in which he has lived from birth. The Library in which he lives and works is so vast that no one knows where its limits lie, or even whether it has any limits. As far as the librarian knows—drawing on the collective, historical knowledge of centuries of librarians—the Library comprises the entire universe and has existed for all time. Because of its uncertain boundaries, the Library offers The Promise of the Infinite—a promise equally tantalizing and threatening in that it cannot be tested: Since no one can find the Library’s boundaries, there is no way to know whether it has any. The librarian’s description of the ritual that will follow his death expresses the religious reverence that attaches to this mystery:

When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite (Paragraph 2).

This image, a radical transfiguration of the burial at sea familiar to sailors, suggests the combination of fear and reverence with which the narrator regards the infinite. The staircase through which he falls is the abyss of non-being in literal form. The phrase that concludes this passage, “which shall be infinite,” is a declaration of belief rather than a statement of fact. The librarian has no evidence that the Library is infinite rather than merely unimaginably vast. Because it can never be definitively proven or disproven, the Library’s infinitude is a concept both hoped for and feared, an article of faith akin to the existence of God.

Within this possibly infinite space, abundance and repetition are the primary rules. The Library contains every possible combination of 22 letters plus the space, the comma, and the period. As a result, no two books are the same, but a great many are almost the same. Though the Library must house all the truth, beauty, and meaning that can ever be expressed in language, the vast majority of its books contain only random combinations of letters that communicate nothing at all. At one point in the Library’s history, a sect of librarians fueled by a “hygienic, ascetic rage” began to destroy as many of these apparently senseless books as they could in the hope of making it easier to find the books that did make sense. The librarian regards this destruction with horror but claims that, in the end, even the “millions” of books they destroyed made little difference: “[E]ach book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles—books that differ by no more than a single letter, or a comma” (Paragraph 11). The futility of the destroyers’ efforts—a saving grace, from the librarian’s point of view—also illustrates the fundamental problem of Comprehensiveness as an Impediment to Understanding. Exactly because “the Library is total,” it is unusable. In this way, it is similar to the map in another of Jorge Luis Borges’s best-known stories, “On Exactitude in Science,” in which the cartographers of a fictional empire create a map so precise and total in its details that it is as large as the empire itself and is thus useless.

The librarian describes a faction within the Library that, rather than embarking on quests for meaning like most librarians, revels in the Library’s inherent meaninglessness. They liken the books to dreams or mere scribbles, celebrating the enigmatic and purposeless nature of this literary realm:

“I know of one semi barbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the ‘vain and superstitious habit’ of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one’s hand” (Paragraph 5).

This faction’s rejection of the conventional pursuit of meaning in books mirrors the story’s overarching concern with The Limitations of Human Knowledge and Language. Rather than accepting that human minds and lives are insufficient to the enormous task of making sense of the Library, this “blasphemous sect” declares that there is no sense to be made. The librarian, for his part, categorically rejects this nihilism. In his view, even the most apparently incoherent books must be full of meaning, since somewhere in the Library there must be other books that would teach him how to read them. The Library’s vastness is so far beyond human comprehension that any belief about its fundamental nature is ultimately a matter of preference. The librarian prefers to believe that meaning exists, even as he accepts that he will never find it: “Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell” (Paragraph 12). This aphoristic pronouncement, coming near the end of the story, suggests one way of coming to grips with the vast discrepancy between the Library’s limitlessness and the pronounced limitations of any one person.

The narrator, cognizant of the escalating toll of deaths, both from suicides and the conflicts between rival sects, maintains a calm certainty that the Library will persist, regardless of whether its labyrinthine galleries continue to host wandering souls or stand in solitude: “[T]he Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret—will endure” (Paragraph 14). The librarians are fueled by the conviction that the infinite Library can be systematized, that the quest for the “authentic account of [their] demise” is attainable, and that it holds the potential to unveil “the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origins of the Library and of time” (Paragraphs 8-9). They are resolute in their belief that these volumes can be located and comprehended. While the narrator acknowledges that his own prospects of unraveling the Library’s mysteries are exceedingly slim, he maintains an unwavering hope that someone, at some point, will accomplish this extraordinary feat.