Reflection of the week: Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
By Jesse van der Merwe,
The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
This short story describes the known and unknown universe in an incredibly unique way. It defines the universe (labelled “the Library”) as an infinite number of small hexagonal ‘galleries’ or rooms which contain bookshelves. Each gallery leads onto another gallery as well as connecting to a spiral staircase which “winds upwards and downwards into the remotest distance” [1].
The part of this story that I found the most interesting was the reaction that those living in “the Library” had to the announcement that “the Library contained all books” [1]. Borges writes that:
“…the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist – somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified…” [1].Immediately after this announcement, thousands of individuals started rushing around, abandoning their own galleries to try and get to more ‘valuable’ galleries first. Others started destroying any books that they deemed to be worthless in their own search of value – leading to the loss of “millions of volumes”. Further, some individuals thought up a “Book-Man” (who is analogous to a god) and spent hundreds of years looking for “Him”.
The reason that I found this so interesting was the fact that this behaviour of the individuals was so very, disappointingly, predictable. It seems that, even in a short story about an infinite book-universe, power – or even just the hope of power – corrupts, always. Unfortunately, it seems that humans are more likely to individually race each other, than try and walk together. More likely to destroy that around them, than dare risk others benefitting from it. More likely to put their trust, hopes and responsibilities in some god, than get up and achieve their dreams themselves.
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
To think that one man, way back when, in 1941, BEFORE the invention of a computer (let alone the world wide web), managed to dream up and accurately describe the hypertext of today (regardless of his use of a fictional story as a medium of explanation), is mind blowing.
Whilst reading The Garden of Forking Paths Borges forces our minds to wander around – as if in our own labyrinth – within the story itself, through the use of ‘intertextuality’. He references many different texts; from real documents and stories, to imaginary documents and stories that Borges himself invented. He also has different narrators chime in at different times and even includes an anonymous “manuscript editor”.
If this doesn’t sound like a prototype of today’s Wikipedia, then I don’t know what does. In The Garden of Forking Paths, many different paths are described and when followed, leading to different destinations – which is arguable the invention of the hypertext novel, and thus the underlying concepts behind the World Wide Web. It is thought by some that Borges was one of the first to ever think and write about what we now know as the internet.