Representations of Borges’ Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story ‘The Library of Babel’ has provided a rich source of imaginative speculation for architects, artists, authors, critics, librarians, mathematicians, metaphysicists, physicists, philosophers, and of course readers (among others). In providing hints as to the dimensions and layout of his Library, an indefinite and perhaps infinite series of hexagonal galleries, connecting passages and stairways, Borges invited – and often collaborated with – attempts to depict it.

The story first appeared in the 1941 collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) and again in 1944’s Ficciones, where it was revised for a 1956 edition. The first English-language publications arrived in 1962, by Anthony Kerrigan for a translation of Ficciones, while James E. Irby contributed to a new collection, Labyrinths, which only appeared in English and remains an enduring anthology – a 2007 edition was introduced by William Gibson. 

The next translator of the story into English was Norman Thomas di Giovanni (in partnership with Borges), whose version was superseded by that of Andrew Hurley, commissioned to replace di Giovanni’s work by the Borges estate for presumed copyright – and specifically royalty-related – reasons. Each translator wrestles with conveying precise meaning in a text positing the existence of every possible permutation of language – and the meaninglessness of such a repository.

Antonio Toca Fernández & Alex Warren

 
Enrique Browne, Cristina Grau, Antonio Toca Fernández and Alex Warren all address the architectural questions raised by Borges’ text – itself revised in 1956 to rectify certain anomalies in the structure. They and others have all sought to create a blueprint which would satisfy the descriptions of identical hexagonal galleries of bookshelves, narrow passageways, spiral staircases and ventilation shafts, traversed by the nearly-blind narrator. Grau, author of Borges y la arquitectura (1989), wrote extensively about Borges and also met him; she is especially concerned with his use of labyrinths, among which she places the Library. Browne relates her study of the story’s origins:

In an interesting essay, Cristina Grau indicates that the story’s source of inspiration is found in Pascal’s book Penseés (Thoughts), which Borges had in his home. “Thought” no. 72 says, “The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere; there is no circumference.” Borges transfers that concept to the library, indicating that it is “a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”

Above: Borges with Cristina Grau

Below: Thomas Basbøll (top) & Rice+Lipka

A series of architectural renderings were made by Rice+Lipka Architects as part of a series on ‘Fairy Tale architecture’ curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. In considering how the library structure might be built, they concluded that it is “at once completely ordinary and impossible.”

Digital and mathematical models have been the focus of Thomas Basbøll, William Goldbloom Bloch, Jean-François Rauzier and Jamie Zawinski’s approach to the Library, with an emphasis on geometry and repetition – exploring the ‘beehive’ pattern implied in the text. In the case of mathematics professor Bloch’s investigation, this has taken the form of a full-length study, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (2008).

Above: Bloch book cover
Below: Jean-François Rauzier (top) & Jamie Zawinski

Fine artists and illustrators have also attempted to portray the Library, notably Pierre Clayette, Érik Desmazières (collected in a 1997 series of prints), Zdravko Dučmelić and Paul Rumsey – who credits the story alongside Elias Canetti’s novel Auto da Fé (1935) as “inspirations for my Library-head drawings.” Dučmelić, an expatriate Croatian artist living in Argentina, was a friend and collaborator with Borges.

Many of these depictions, straying from the literal descriptions in the text but attempting to convey its atmosphere, show the influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His series of ‘Prisons of the Imagination’ in their vast scale, vaulted halls and elaborate stairways pre-figure the Library – echoed by the author’s admiration for the artist. Cristina Grau identified a Piranesi print on Borges’ living-room wall when visiting the author. While Borges stated, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”, the dystopian aspect of Babel is hard to ignore. The suggestion of imprisonment within a vast structure implied in the story is often interpreted with reference to Piranesi’s Prisons. Like the Biblical source it draws on, man’s enterprise is seen to be futile, ambitious plans of a universal language thwarted.

Above: Pierre Clayette & Érik Desmazières
Below: Zdravko Dučmelić & Paul Rumsey

 

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The story draws on Borges’ personal history and specifically his lifelong relationship with libraries, which began in the family home. He later remarked,

If I were asked to name the chief event in my Iife, I should say my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes.

Only on his father’s death in 1938 was Borges compelled to find a job, as an assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library, Buenos Aires, where his duties were to classify and catalogue the library’s holdings. Though his sight was already failing, he was able to complete these tasks in a morning – having been warned not to work too quickly – after which he retreated to the basement to write in the afternoons, where many of his famous short stories were first sketched out. Borges described these nine years at the library as ones of “solid unhappiness”. In 1955, by then nearly blind, Borges was appointed Director of Argentina’s National Library (on Calle Mexico, Buenos Aires), a position he held until retiring in 1973. Books and libraries were arguably the dominant, recurrent themes in his work, as in his life.

Olaf Bisschoff & Polina Isurin

Numerous artists have continued to furnish 21st Century representations of Borges’ creation. Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff includes the Library in his book Plotted: A Literary Atlas, in which he maps its structure and dimensions. An accompanying essay by Daniel Harmon, ‘Infinite Intelligence’, notes that, “It all sounds so straightforward, but complexity and paradox are infused throughout.” That so many artists continue to find the Library a source of fascination is testimony to the enduring appeal and enigma of Borges. One of them, Polina Isurin, commented of her work The Library of Memories that, while inspired by the story,

Rather than conceiving the universe as a library of books, this painting views the library as a location housing memories, both identifiable and non. Where we enter and what we select is up to the viewer to decide.

Nina Abadeh & James Koehnline

Evoking the imagery of the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, the narrative draws on an earlier essay, ‘The Total Library’ (1939) where Borges speculates on a Hellish “vast, contradictory Library”. The essay, in raising the same questions as the later story, itself references a short story by Kurd Lasswitz, ‘The Universal Library’ (1901) in which the protagonist, Professor Wallhausen, declares “all possible literature must be printable in finite number of volumes.” The same story anticipates the impossibility of sifting “truth from nonsense” in a “library for which there is no room in the universe.”

‘The Library of Babel’ blends these sources with the myriad references of Borges’ vast reading. The result is a characteristically complex multi-layered web in which Borges the author, ‘Borges’ the character, the unreliable narrator and intertextual references blend fiction and non-fictional texts and characters – creating the maze or labyrinth so often explored in his work, here expressed as the ‘infinite’ Library (“which some call the Universe”).

The concept is echoed in Borges’ later (1975) story, ‘The Book of Sand’, in which the myopic narrator is sold an ‘infinite’ volume by a stranger, and so called “‘because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end’”. Finding it “monstrous... a nightmarish object, an obscene thing”, the narrator eventually disposes of the book by hiding it among the shelves of the Argentine National Library on Calle Mexico – where he (and Borges) worked before retirement.

Andrew DeGraff

In addition to a VR / Metaverse iteration of the Library, Derek Philip Au has experimented with AI software (DALL-E) to produce a set of sophisticated visions of Borges's creation. I was also sufficiently curious and motivated to experiment with AI imagery myself, with the following crude results from my attempts. However, the text content of this blog post is entirely human-generated and humbly submitted to the library catalogue.

Jonathan Basile draws together Borges scholarship in a multitude of disciplines, and in addition to his detailed study Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality (2018) has created an online, searchable Library of Babel. His exhaustive Borgesian investigations are a major influence and inspiration for this post.

I discovered many of the images reproduced here in a post on twitter / X by Federico Italiano, which gave a focus to my initial ideas.


List of Works:

Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths; Sur, 1941)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962)
Antonio Toca Fernández, from ‘La Biblioteca de Babel: Una modesta propuesta’ (2009)
Alex Warren, from ‘Library of Babel Pin Up’ (posted at https://alexwarrenarchitecture3.blogspot.com, 16 February 2011)
Cristina Grau with Jorge Luis Borges
Thomas Basbøll, from ‘The Floor Plan of Babel’ (posted at https://pangrammaticon.blogspot.com, 9 May 2007)
Rice+Lipka Architects, The Universe (2013) from Kate and Andrew Bernheimer, ‘Fairy Tale Architecture: The Library of Babel,’ Places Journal, December 2013
William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Jean-François Rauzier, Bibliothèque Babel (c-type print, 2013)
Jamie Zawinski, from ‘The Library of Babel’ (posted at https://www.jwz.org/blog, 14 October 2016)
Pierre Clayette, lllustration from ‘The Library of Babel’ (no date)
Erik Desmazières, The Library of Babel (1997) & in book form (Godine, 2000)
Zdravko Dučmelić, La biblioteca de Babel (oil on canvas, 1984)
Paul Rumsey, Library Head (charcoal on paper, 1998)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Gothic Arch (etching, 1761) from Carceri d'invenzione / Prisons of the Imagination
Andrew DeGraff, from Plotted: A Literary Atlas with Daniel Harmon (Pulp, 2015)
Kurd Lasswitz, ‘Die Universalbibliothek’ (‘The Universal Library’, 1901)
Nima Abadeh, The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges (illustration, 2017)
James Koehnline, Logosphere IV (mixed media, 2008, the words are from “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
Olaf Bisschoff, The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges, 1941) (oil and canvas, on board, 2023)
Polina Isurin, The Library of Memories (oil on canvas, 2015)
Derek Philip Au, from ‘DALL-E 2 & 3 Library of Babel’ (posted at
https://www.derekau.net/this-vessel-does-not-exist/, 16 July 2022)
Jonathan Basile, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality (2018)