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next translator of the story into English was Norman Thomas di Giovanni (in partnership with Borges), whose version was superseded by that of Andrew Hurley, commissioned to replace di Giovanni’s work by the Borges estate for presumed copyright – and specifically royalty-related – reasons.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)

The Gernsback Continuum

I posted about the Transcultural Fantastic seminar series at the University of Leeds last year and, a few weeks ago, the latest in this series of events took place as an online talk, 'The Ekphrastic Fantastic' by Dr Richard Brown. The talk explored the ekphrastic - understood as a verbal evocation of the visual - in contemporary writing, drawing from selected works by J.G. Ballard, China Miéville and Ali Smith.

There were some also fascinating SF connections made in relation to the William Gibson short story The Gernsback Continuum, which I'd never come across before. Hugo Gernsback, the writer, inventer and SF magazine publisher, has featured more than once on this blog, so the title of the story immediately piqued my curiosity. The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of a US photographer, who's commissioned by a British 'trendy trade paperback publisher' to photograph examples of futuristic American city architecture of the Thirties and Forties. It transpires that this book project - working title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was - is the brainchild of fashionable pop art historian Dialta Downes. The narrator's mild contempt for the idea is evident in his initial encounter with Downes:

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture [...] In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me [...] She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminium, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The connection to Gernsback becomes clearer when the photographer is shown a collection of Downes' favourite examples of this architectural style, what she calls 'American Streamlined Moderne':

I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals.

Interior of Johnson's Wax Building

Here, we see a reference to Amazing Stories, published by Gernsback, and the cover art of Frank R. Paul, an artist closely associated with this magazine's visual style, who trained as an architect himself. Downes says that we might think of these images and designs 'as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams'. The narrator starts to warm up to the project, and he tries to re-imagine the environment around him according to this aesthetic:

I thought myself in Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.

As the photographer tunes in more and more to this 'shadowy America-that-wasn’t', the images begin to take on real forms, a phenomenon his journalist friend Kihn calls 'semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own'. Driving back to Los Angeles, he reflects on this explanation but it troubles him and, exhausted and agitated, he pulls over the car to sleep. Upon waking, he finds a phantom futuristic city looming before him; this is the ekphrastic element Richard highlighted in his talk:

Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealised city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me [...] You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...

Even more troubling is the appearance of a couple, 'white, blond', the 'children of Dialta Downes’s ’80-that-wasn’t', framed by the illuminated shadow city. The narrator imagines the city populated by these creatures 'orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars', deciding 'it had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda'.

The photography for Downes' book ends up being a great success. But, desperate to return to some kind of normality, the story ends with the photographer rushing to the nearest newsstand to buy a paper and read about the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard:

[Newsstand proprietor] ‘Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ [...] ‘But it could be worse, huh?’ 

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’

Overall then, Gibson takes a cynical view of the technophilia and optimism of the 1930s and 1940s, epitomised in the covers of Gernsback's SF magazines. As Bruce Sterling has commented, 'The Gernsback Continuum shows [Gibson] consciously drawing a bead on the shambling figure of the SF tradition'. Nevertheless, his evocative rendering of the 'semiotic phantoms' lurking in American architecture throws a sharp critical and visual lens on one of the country's many futures past.

Blake's 7 Fanzines

A long time ago (2012) in a library far, far away, this blog delved into the SF history of the University of Leeds architecture, debunking rumours that buildings such as the Roger Stevens had been used as locations for classic dystopian films like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Another SF series sometimes associated with the Leeds campus is Blake's 7, although it was in fact Leeds Beckett University where part of the programme was filmed, featuring in the 'Children of Auron' episode from 1980.

Now, following on from last year's announcement about the University of Iowa Libraries' project to digitise 10,000 SF zines, Blake's 7 is back in our orbit with a recent post on the Hevelin Collection's tumblr revealing more about the fanzines and the fan wars connected to the British TV show. The Blake's 7 Wars were a series of disputes in the 1980s between fans and some of the creators and actors over for-profit US conventions, which, fans feared, would restrict and compete with fan-run events.

In keeping with this fanlore was the tone of the zines themselves. The inside cover of the first issue of The Forbidden Zone, seen here, testifies to the themes of resistance and struggle with which the character Blake was identified, reading: 'Forbidden Zone Issue One is dedicated to the liberation of fantasies and resistance to those who would suppress our dreams'. More details of the fan wars and the Hevelin collection can be found here.

Subversive Urbanism

I came across this blog at a film showing of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Or rather, I came across the blog's author, Phil Wood. Funnily enough, I'd seen him give a presentation more than a year before at a Leeds Psychogeographers event, otherwise known as urban walking. The title of his Tumblr site, Subversive Urbanism, reflects his interest in this field, and surveys some of the lesser known architectural sites across Europe, Asia, Latin America; as he notes in the introduction, 'most of us actually live in places that you’ve probably never heard of'. The images Phil posts are striking, often haunting and utterly science-fictional, particularly those from former Soviet countries. This example (see below) is a Yugoslav war memorial, an enigmatic concrete structure, upturned to the sky like an alien bloom or an extraterrestrial transmitter.

Stone Flower, a monument to the victims of Jasenovac

Little wonder, then, that I should see him at a Tarkovsky film. Stalker itself is a meditation on inner and outer space, with most of the action taking place in the mysterious Zone, a site fabled to have the power to grant peoples' deepest desires. Phil has visited many of the places where films like this were shot; let's hope his travels through urban space will continue to generate memorable images and insights into architectural and urban endeavours all over the world.

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.1 The Campus Architecture

It has been noted that parts of the University of Leeds – the buildings constructed in the 1960s and 70s by architects Chamberlin Powell and Bon, many of which are now listed – have a futuristic look and would indeed form a suitable setting for science fiction dramatisations. Outlandish claims have been made for the use of the campus in Star Wars and Logan’s Run, which don’t stand up to even cursory examination, though definitive information about locations is difficult to find at first glance. I have also seen Doctor Who mentioned, but can’t verify that either. Despite rumours that scenes from both A Clockwork Orange and, perhaps less excitingly, Blake’s Seven were filmed on campus, these have proved to be urban myths. A Clockwork Orange apparently used underpasses at the then newly-built Brunel University, Middlesex. While resisting the temptation to actually watch Blake’s Seven as part of my research (best left as dim childhood memories), the Internet reliably revealed that at least one episode featured the Brunswick Building, part of the Leeds Met – then Leeds Poly – campus on Merrion Way. Though the building was demolished in 2009, this image from the Leodis site captures its science fictional spirit.

Incidentally, that part of the City Centre, including the Merrion Centre itself, features more of the same combination of imposing architecture and pioneering underpasses which are somewhere between Soviet and science fiction in style. Much of this being now discredited, the underpasses are boarded-up and the whole area is seemingly being prepared for regeneration around the forthcoming Leeds Arena, which is effectively on the site of the Brunswick Building.

So the University of Leeds campus remains an unused set, at least for sci-fi purposes, having last featured in an episode of Raffles (the gentleman thief) in the heady days of the 1970s. However, another Yorkshire Television production, a 1979 adaptation of the M.R. James story Casting the Runes, used the University’s Brotherton Library. It had first been filmed under the title Night of the Demon, in 1957, when the corresponding – and original – scene took place in the British Library. My own images, taken recently around the landmark Roger Stevens Building (completed in 1970), and featuring the walkway which connects to the enigmatically named Red Route – allegedly the longest corridor in Europe, unless that is of course another urban myth – attempt to suggest locations for a script yet to be written. Taking these photographs, speculating about the films which weren’t filmed here after all, and ones which might still be, also enlivened the monotony of the daily walk to work.

Watch the trailer for the 1979 TV adaptation of M.R. James' Casting the Runes on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rPvmFnUCgk (featuring the Brotherton Library)