The Library of Babel: Jorge Luis Borges and the Search for Meaning

  The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg (1850), via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine a library that contained every book that could ever be written with completely random configurations of the alphabet, spaces, commas, and full stops.

Of the trillions upon trillions of books you could pick up from the shelves, most of them would house utter nonsense. Flicking through the pages, you’d encounter a deluge of letters; perhaps a word here and there, very rarely maybe even a sentence, a structure hardly standing amid the flood.

But if you searched the library for millennia, you might eventually stumble on, say, Pride and Prejudice (you’d also find replicas of Pride and Prejudice with a single paragraph, word, or letter difference).

You might gradually accumulate the works of Shakespeare, or find the James Baldwin novel he never lived to write.

Such literary diamonds wouldn’t be the only points of interest. Your memoir, written from the perspective of the love of your life, also lurks in the library; so too does the version narrated by your arch nemesis.

Every diary entry, every message you’ve sent or received, the book you’re halfway through reading (or writing!), anything anyone has ever expressed in language, this article itself: the library stocks it all.

Perhaps most tantalisingly, hidden somewhere among its countless shelves, the library also possesses the story of the cosmos. The secret fundamental laws of existence, revealed in plain language. The ultimate meaning of life, exposed.

This mind-bending library forms the basis of 20th-century writer Jorge Luis Borges’s brilliant short fable, The Library of Babel.

If you haven’t read it, then don’t worry: me discussing it here won’t undermine the wonder that comes with reading the text itself. There are no spoilers to give: the quality of the story comes from Borges’s description of the library, narrated by a scholar recounting some of its history.

The library is the world people live in, our narrator tells us: it consists of hexagonal rooms connected by corridors and ladders, each shelving thousands of books.

Borges imagines the emergence of various groups, seekers of particular types of book, including books that might lend some sort of justification to life:

At that period there was much talk of The Vindications—books of apologiæ 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. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication.

The narrator recalls how ‘the mystics’ told of a secret, central room in the library, circular rather than hexagonal, containing a vast tome that explained all others; how ‘the inquisitors’ searched for texts that would shed light on the origin of the library and time itself; how ‘the Purifiers’ embarked on a quest to purge all books they considered to be nonsense:

They would invade the hexagons, show credentials that were not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and condemn entire walls of books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes.

The search for wondrous books – books containing solutions to every problem, explanations for every mystery – gradually lost its impetus, as attempts to understand and navigate the library continually failed to uncover any kind of route to coherence:

unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

In its attempts to establish meaning in a world of overwhelming information, humanity increasingly succumbed to disappointment and despair. How to make sense of so much nonsense? What means something? What means nothing?

Do the works in the library signify anything at all?

The writer and computer programmer Jonathan Basile attempted to construct the Library of Babel in digital form. (You can view his effort at libraryofbabel.info. Dan Shipper has since created a 3D version.)

In a piece for The Paris Review, Basile notes that, after spending some time with his creation, he was struck by just how much unintelligible nonsense the library hosts.

The librarians within, and readers of, Borges’s story are enchanted by promises of precious volumes; but the reality is unfathomable reams of junk.

This junk contextualises anything of interest that does emerge: it is the result of utter randomness. For Basile, this forces us to confront that

Any expression, even the most elegant or undeniably true, is nonetheless possible without sincerity, or even any intention towards signification.

We may be tempted to read a deep meaningfulness into something just because it appears coherent, but coherence doesn’t always signify intention. There is nothing sitting behind the letters.

Perhaps this helps explain the uncanny feeling that can arise when people interact with large language models, something that contributes to the anti-AI movement’s gathering fury. We’ve come to recognise the flat neutrality behind the assemblage of these words and sentences, the vast inhuman indifference.

Yet these words nevertheless have the power to move us. We can encounter language that appears meaningful even if we remain uncertain about the intention or understanding behind it.

Where, then, does meaning reside? In the arrangement of symbols? The intention behind their arrangement? Or just in the reader’s interpretative sentiments?

Like the exhausted librarians, we are in search of human truths. Some propose that wading through a swamp of raw information will eventually yield them. Many of the librarians in Borges’s tale gradually lose hope.

Where is meaning to be found?

The allure of the library is that, somewhere, on some distant shelf, within faded pages, sit the keys to the universe. The secret of our existence is already present within our language: we just need to put the words in the right order!

But who’s to say what the right order looks like? What could possibly confirm it, if other orders exist to contradict it? The library holds all the answers, but how could we ever find the genuine ones?

People will say, this is the book, and then those who speak another language or interpret the symbols differently will challenge them. Perhaps they will fight each other, and the cosmos will remain unspeaking.

What do we want to discover? Is there a collection of symbols, ordered in the right way, that could really unlock something for us? Or is Borges’s library a monument to the inadequacy of language in articulating the mystery of existence itself?

Borges’s narrator takes the optimistic route, suggesting that the library demonstrates that meaningfulness is everywhere, that the governing principle of existence is rational and reasonable: his faith in the library is almost religious in nature.

For every book of nonsense, there is another book explaining why that particular book of nonsense – all those random strings of letters and spaces and full stops – represents something spectacularly insightful about the world we live in:

There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.

But if meaning is everywhere, if meaning can shapeshift depending on who looks for it, if it changes according to a being’s capacity for interpretation, then what sort of meaningfulness is that?

Isn’t the library just a hall of mirrors, distorting our perception, reflecting what we want to find? Couldn’t the search go on indefinitely, given there is nothing that could confirm the truth?

Indeed, Borges is less hopeful than his narrator, a character we might conclude is just rationalising despair at his hopeless situation in the library. For, in an earlier essay, The Total Library, Borges warns that the production of every possible book would result in a

subaltern horror: [a] feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity.

Amusingly, Borges’s narrator not only references but condemns this passage. He dismisses it as ramblings arising from an “infidel’s deplorable taste and desperate ignorance”, such is the dark humour and labyrinthine self-referentiality of Borges’s work.

The restless totality nevertheless confronts us with a question. Does meaning pervade the endless configurations of letters, language, even atoms in the cosmos itself? Or does brute information signify nothing at all?

What questions does the Library of Babel raise for you?

• What book would you want to find in the library?
• How could we know if a book was true?
• If the raw output is the same, what differentiates a novel written by a human from one thrown together by chance or AI?
• Where does meaning reside? In the arrangement of symbols, the intention behind their arrangement, the reader’s interpretation, or something else?
• As the world continues to generate more and more information, how can we navigate information overload?
• Is the library analogous to the cosmos? Is our search for answers futile? Will we find the ultimate truth, or just the limits of our own comprehension?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related Philosophy Breaks:

• Wittgenstein: If a Lion Could Talk, We Could Not Understand Him
• Albert Camus on Rebelling against Life’s Absurdity
• Guy Debord: We Have Been Reduced to Spectators in a Society of Endless Spectacle
• The Paradox of Choice: Barry Schwartz on Why More is Less
• Erich Fromm: Our Task is Not to Feel Certain, but to Better Tolerate Uncertainty
• Thomas Nagel: What is it Like to be a Bat?
• On Reconciling Ourselves to the Vastness of Space: Robert Nozick
• Philosophy of Language: the Best 7 Books to Read

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