On Literature

BETWEEN LA MANCHA AND BABEL

In thanking this university (Castilla-La Mancha) for the honorary degree bestowed on me, I am pleased to see that this ritual is taking place in La Mancha, and at the very time we are celebrating Jorge Luis Borges.^* For there once was, and perhaps there still is, a library in a village in this region, whose name people have never wanted to mention. This library, filled entirely with adventurous romances, was a library with a way out. Indeed, the wonderful story of Don Quixote begins at precisely the moment when our hero decides to leave the site of his bookish fantasies to venture out into life. He does so essentially because he is convinced that he has found truth in those books, so that all he needs to do is to imitate them, and reproduce their feats.

Three hundred fifty years later, Borges would tell us the story of a library with no way out, where the search for the true word is endless and utterly hopeless.

There is a profound analogy between these two libraries: Don Quixote tried to find in the world the facts, adventures, and damsels his library had promised him: and consequently he wanted to believe and did believe that the universe was like his library. Borges, less of an idealist, decided that his library was like the universe—and one understands then why he never felt the need to leave it. Just as one cannot say, "Stop the world, I want to get off," likewise one cannot escape from the Library.

There are many stories of libraries: there are the lost libraries, like that of Alexandria, and there are the libraries we enter and leave immediately, because we realize that they contain only absurd stories and ideas. The Library of Saint-Victor was like that, the one Pantagruel entered several decades before Quixote was born, where he was delighted by those hundreds of volumes that promised the wisdom of ages, but as far as we know he left it almost instantly to do something else. He has left us only the curiosity and the desire to know what those volumes were about, and the pleasure of repeating their names like a litany: Bragheta Juris, De Babuinis et Scimiis cum Commento Dorbellis, Ars Honeste Petandi in Societate, Pormicarium Artium, De Modo Cacandi, De Differentiis Zupparum, De Optimitate Tripparum, Quaestio Subtilissima utrum Chimera Bombinans in Vacuo Possit Comedere Secundas Intentiones, De Baloccamentis Principum, Baloccatorium Sorboniformium, Campi Clysteriorum, Antidotarium Animae, De Patria Diabolorum ...

We can cite titles from the libraries of both Rabelais and Cervantes, since they were finite libraries, limited by the universes their books spoke about: the former talked of the Sorbonne, the latter of Roncesvalles. We cannot cite titles from Borges's library since the number of books in it is limitless, and because it is the shape of the library more than the subjects of its books that interests us.

Libraries of Babel were dreamed of even before Borges. One of the properties of Borges's library is that it not only contains countless volumes in endless, repeated rooms but can display volumes containing all the possible combinations of twenty-five letters of the alphabet, so that one cannot imagine any combination of characters that the library has not foreseen.

This was the ancient dream of the Cabalists, because only by combining endlessly a finite series of letters could one hope to formulate one day the secret name of God. And if I do not quote, as all of you might have expected, Raymond Lull's wheels, that is because even though he wanted to produce an astronomical number of propositions, he intended only to conserve those that were true, and reject all the rest. However, by putting together both Lull's wheels and the combinatory Utopia of the Cabalists, people in the seventeenth century hoped to be able to name every single individual in the world, and thus to escape the curse of language, which forces us to designate individuals with general terms, haeccitates with quidditates, leaving us always—as happened in the Middle Ages—with a bitter taste in the mouth as a result of the penuria nominum.

It was for this reason that Harsdörfer (in his Matematische und philosophische Erquickstunden, 1651) planned to display on five wheels 264 elements (prefixes, suffixes, letters, and syllables), generating through their various combinations 97,209,600 German words, including nonexistent ones. Clavius (In Spheram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, 1607) calculated how many terms could be produced with the twenty-three letters of the alphabet, combining them in twos, then threes and so on, right down to considering words with twenty-three letters. Pierre Guldin (Problema Arithmeticum de Rerum Combinationibus, 1622), by calculating all the terms of variable length that an alphabet could generate, from two to twenty-three letters, reached the figure of seventy thousand billion billion words—to record these on registers of a thousand pages, with one hundred lines per page and sixty characters per line, would have required 8,052,122,350 libraries, each one measuring 432 feet per side. Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, 1636), taking into account not only words but also "chants" (that is to say, musical sequences), noted that the chants that can be generated by twenty-two notes number around twelve billion billion (so that if one wanted to write down all of them, at a thousand a day it would take almost twenty-three million years).

It is to mock these very combinatorial dreams that Swift put forward his antilibrary, or, rather, a perfect, scientific, universal language in which there would no longer be any need for books, words, or alphabetical symbols:

We next went to the School of Languages, where three Professors sat in Consultation upon improving that of their own country.

The first project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.

The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever: And this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For, it is plain, that every word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion; and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in Conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatened to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the Manner of their Forefathers: Such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the new Scheme of expressing themselves by Things; which hath only this Inconvenience attending it; that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of these Sages almost sinking under the weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us, who when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave. (Gulliver's Travels, III.5)

Notice, however, how even Swift could not avoid producing something very close to the Library of Babel. For in order to name everything in the universe men would need a dictionary made up entirely of things, and the size of this dictionary would match the extent of the entire cosmos. Once more there would be no difference between Library and universe. In Swifts project we would be in the library, or rather, part of the library itself, and we would not be able to come out of it, nor could we even speak of it since, just as in the Library of Babel one can only be in one hexagon at a time, in the world we live in we could speak only of what is around us depending on the place we are in, pointing with our finger at what surrounds us.

But let us imagine for the sake of argument that Swift's vision had triumphed and men did not speak anymore. Even in this case, as Borges warned us, the library would contain the autobiographies of angels and a detailed history of the future. And it was this particular Borgesian allusion that inspired Thomas Pavel, in his book Fictional Worlds,^* to invite us to take part in a fascinating mental experiment. Let us imagine that an omniscient being is capable of writing or reading a Magnum Opus containing all the true statements regarding both the real world and all possible worlds. Naturally, since one can speak of the universe in different languages, and each language defines it in a different way, there must exist a set of all Magna Opera. Now let us suppose that God entrusts some angels to write Daily Books for each man, where they record all the statements (regarding the possible worlds of his desires and hopes and the real world of his actions) that correspond to a true statement in one of the books that make up the set of all Magna Opera. The Daily Book of each individual must be displayed on the Day of Judgment, along with the collection of those Books that evaluate the lives of families, tribes, and nations.

But the angel writing a Daily Book not only writes down true statements: he links them together, evaluates them, constructs them into a system. And since individuals and groups alike will have defending angels on the Day of Judgment, these defenders will rewrite for each of them another, endless series of Daily Books, where the same statements will be connected in a different way, and compared differently with the statements in one of the Magna Opera.

Since infinite alternative worlds are part of every one of the infinite Magna Opera, the angels will write countless Daily Books, in which there will be a jumble of statements that are true in one world but false in another. If we then imagine that some angels are not very skillful, and they mix up statements that a single Magnum Opus records as mutually contradictory, we will end up with a series of Compendia, Miscellanies, and compendia of fragments of miscellanies, which will amalgamate different layers of books of different origin, and at that point it will be very difficult to say which books are true and which are fictitious, and in relation to which original book. We will have an astronomical infinity of books, each of which hovers between different worlds, and the result will be that we regard as fictitious stories that others have considered true.

Pavel writes these things to make us understand that we are already living in such a universe, except that instead of being written by archangels, these books are written by us, from Homer to Borges; and he implies that the bastard ontology of fiction is not an exception compared with the "pure" ontology of those books that speak about the real world. He suggests that the legend he retells depicts quite well our situation as regards the universe of statements we regularly regard as "true." The result is that the vertigo we feel when we notice the ambiguous borders between fiction and reality is not only the same as that which seizes us when faced with the books written by angels but also the same as that which ought to seize us when faced with the series of books that, with authority, represent the real world.

The idea of the Library of Babel has now linked up with the equally vertiginous idea of the plurality of Possible Worlds, and Borges's imagination has inspired in particular the formal calculus of modal logicians. Not only that, but the Library described by Pavel, which naturally is also made up of works by Borges, including his story about the Library, seems curiously to resemble Don Quixote's library, which was a library of impossible stories that took place in possible worlds, where the reader lost his sense of the borders between fiction and reality.

There is another story invented by an artist that has also influenced the imagination of scientists—maybe not logicians, but certainly physicists and cosmologists—and that is Finnegans Wake by Joyce. Joyce did not dream up a possible library: he simply put into practice what Borges would later suggest. He used the twenty-six alphabetical symbols of English to produce a forest of nonexistent words with multiple meanings, he certainly put forward his book as a model of the universe, and he definitely intended that the reading of it should be endless and recurrent, so much so that he wished for "an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia."

Why do I mention Joyce? Perhaps and above all because, along with Borges, he is one of the two contemporary writers I have most loved and who have most influenced me. But also because we have now come to the point where we should ask ourselves about the parallels and differences between these two authors who have both turned universal language and culture into their playing field.

I would like to place Borges in the context of contemporary experimentalism, which, according to many people, is defined as a literature that interrogates itself about its own language, or about the language we use, and puts it on trial by deconstructing it down to its original roots. That is why when we think about experimentalism we think about Joyce, and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, where not only English but the languages of all peoples, ground down to a vortex of free-floating fragments, are put together again and then deconstructed once more in a whirlwind of new lexical monstrosities, which coagulate for a second only to dissolve once more, as in a cosmic dance of atoms, in which writing is shattered down to its etyms—and it is no accident that it was the phonic analogy between etym and atom that induced Joyce to speak of his work as "the abnihilation of the ethym."

Obviously, Borges did not put language into crisis. You just have to read the smooth prose of his essays, the traditional grammatical structure of his stories, the plain, conversational comprehensibility of his poems. In this respect Borges is as far as it is possible to be from Joyce.

Of course, like every good writer, Borges reinvigorates the language he writes in, but he does not make a display of the way he tears it apart. If Joyce's linguistic experimentalism is to be considered revolutionary, Borges must be regarded as a conservative, the delirious archivist of a culture whose respectful custodian he claims to be. Delirious, I say, but also a conservative archivist. And yet it is this very oxymoron ("delirious archivist") which gives us the key to discussing Borges's experimentalism.

Joyce's project was to make universal culture his field of play. Well, this was also Borges's project. If in 1925 Borges exhibited some difficulty in reading Ulysses (see Inquisiciones) and in 1939 (in the November issue of Sur) looked with cautious curiosity at Joyce's calembours—though according to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Borges himself invented an exquisitely Joycean pun word "whateverano" (meaning "what a summer" and "whatever is summer")—in at least two later poems (in the collection Elogio de la sombra) he declares his admiration for Joyce and his debt to him:

Que importa mi perdida generación,

Ese vago espejo,

Si tus libros la justifican.

Yo soy los otros. Yo soy de todos aquellos

Que ha rescatado tu obstinado rigor.

Soy los que no conoces y los que salvas.

What does my lost generation matter,

That lovely mirror,

If it was justified by your books.

I am the others. I am all those

That your obstinate rigor rescues.

I am those you do not know and those you save.

What, then, links these two authors who both chose universal culture as their playing field, for their salvation or damnation?

I believe that literary experimentalism works on a space we might call the world of languages. But a language, as linguists know, has two sides. On one side the signifier, on the other the signified. The signifier organizes sounds, while the signified arranges ideas. And it is not that this organization of ideas, which constitutes the form of a particular culture, is independent from language, because we know a culture only through the way in which language has organized the still-unformed data about our contact with the continuum of the world. Without language there would be no ideas, but a mere stream of experience that has not been processed or thought about.

Working experimentally on language and the culture it conveys means therefore working on two fronts: on the signifier front, playing with words (and through the destruction and reorganization of words ideas are reorganized); and playing with ideas, and therefore pushing words to touch on new and undreamed-of horizons.

Joyce played with words, Borges with ideas. And at this point we discern the different ideas the two writers held about what they played with and its infinite capacity for being segmented.

The atomic particles of words are their stems, syllables, and phonemes. One can, at the extreme limit, recombine sounds and produce a neologism or pun, or recombine letters and produce an anagram, a kabbalistic procedure whose magic Borges knew well.

The atomic element of ideas, or signifieds, is instead always an idea or another signified. One can break down the word "man" into "male human animal" and "rose" into "flower with fleshy petals," one can yoke together ideas to interpret other ideas, but one cannot go beneath that.

We could say that working on the signifier acts at a subatomic level, whereas working on the signifieds acts on atoms, which cannot be broken down further, in order to reorganize them later into new molecules.

Borges took this second option, which was not the route Joyce took but is just as rigorous and absolute and leads toward the limits of what is possible and thinkable. Borges had models for doing this, of course, whom he openly cites (and so you see that the apparently rather irrelevant quotations I produced a moment ago were not unjustified). One of these was Raymond Lull with his Ars Magna, in whom Borges rightly foresaw the forerunner of modern computer science. The other, less well known, is John Wilkins, who (in his Essay Towards a Real Character, 1688) tried to achieve that perfect language sought after by Mersenne, Guldin, and the other authors of his century—except that Wilkins did not wish to combine letters devoid of sense to assign a name to every single person or thing, but wanted to combine what he and others called "real characters," which were inspired by Chinese ideograms, in which an idea corresponds to every basic sign, so that by combining these signs in order to name things, the nature of the thing itself was to be made manifest through its name.

His project could not succeed, and I have tried to explain this in my book The Search for a Perfect Language.^* But the extraordinary fact is that Borges had not read Wilkins: he had merely secondhand information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a few other books, as he confesses in his essay "The analytical language of John Wilkins" (Otras inquisiciones). And yet Borges was able to condense the essence of his thought and to identify the weaknesses of his project better than many other scholars who have spent their lives reading the enormous folio volume of 1688. Not only this, but in discussing his ideas he noticed that Wilkins's discourse had something in common with other seventeenth-century figures who had wrestled with the problem of alphabetic combinations.

Borges, who delighted in other universal and secret languages, knew well that Wilkins's project was impossible, because it presupposed taking into account all the objects in the world, the ideas to which they referred, and a unitary criterion for ordering our atomized ideas. And it is this hurdle that defeats all Utopians who aspire to a universal language. But let us examine the conclusion Borges drew from this consideration.

Once he had understood and declared that one cannot arrive at a unitary classification of the universe, Borges became fascinated by the opposite project: that of overthrowing and multiplying all classifications. It is in this very essay on Wilkins that we find the mention of that improbable Chinese encyclopedia (The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), where we find in turn the most amazing model of uncategorized and incongruous classification (which would later inspire Michel Foucault in the opening passage of The Order of Things.)

The conclusion Borges draws from the failure of classifications is that we cannot know what the universe is. Furthermore, he says that "one can entertain the idea that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense that this ambitious word possesses." But immediately afterward he points out that "the impossibility of penetrating the divine design of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from trying to trace human designs." Borges knew that some patterns, like that of Wilkins and many in science, try to reach a provisional and partial order. But he chose the opposite path: if the atoms of knowledge are many, the poet's game consists in making them rotate and recombine ad infinitum, in the endless combinations not only of linguistic etyms but also of ideas themselves. In fact, the Library of Babel is made up of millions of new Chinese encyclopedias of Benevolent Knowledge whose totality is never achieved. Borges found this library to be a storehouse of the culture of several millennia and of diaries of each archangel, but he did more than just explore it: he played at putting different hexagons in contact with one another, at inserting pages from one book into those of another (or at least at discovering the possible books in which this disorder had already taken place).

When it comes to the latest form of contemporary experimentalism, postmodernism, there is much talk of playing with intertextuality. But Borges had gone beyond intertextuality to anticipate the age of hypertextuality, in which one book not only talks of another, but one can penetrate one book from within another. In not only designing the form of his library but also prescribing in every page how one should peruse it, Borges had designed the World Wide Web ahead of its time.

Borges had to choose between dedicating his life to the search for God's secret idiom (a search he tells us about) or celebrating the millennial universe of knowledge as a dance of atoms, an interweaving of quotations, a welding together of ideas to produce not only everything that is and has been but also that which will be or could be, as is the duty or the potential of the librarians of Babel.

Only in the light of this Borgesian experimentalism (playing with ideas, not words) can one understand the poetics of The Aleph, that magic object in which one can see at a glance the countless and separate objects that make up whatever populates the universe. One has to be able to see everything at once, and change the criterion of what links things together, and be able to see something else, changing at every vision of the "Celestial Emporium."

At this point the question of whether the Library is infinite or of indefinite size, or whether the number of books inside it is finite or unlimited and recurring, becomes a secondary question. The true hero of the Library of Babel is not the library itself but its Reader, a new Don Quixote, on the move, adventurous, restlessly inventive, alchemically combinatory, capable of overcoming the windmills he makes rotate ad infinitum.

For this Reader, Borges has suggested a prayer and an act of faith, and it comes in the other poem dedicated to Joyce:

Entre el alba y la noche está la historia

Universal. Desde la noche veo

A mis pies los caminos del hebreo,

Cartago aniquilada, Infierno y Gloria.

Dame, Señor, coraje y alegría

Para escalar la cumbre de este día.

Between dawn and night lies universal

History. From the depths of night I see

At my feet the wandering of the Jew,

Carthage annihilated, Hell, and the Glory of Heaven.

Grant me, Lord, the happiness and courage

To touch the summit of my day.

This is a revised version of a lecture given on 22 May 1997 at the University of Castilla-La Mancha on the occasion of being awarded an honorary degree.