Borges is always lucid and concise in his prose: he wrote all his life, yet his longest story is only 14 pages long. His most defining quality is the resonant ideas which illuminate every page he left us.
I've never read a story remotely like The Library of Babel. Here, Borges does what he does best. He dives into a crystalline concept, then explores myriad implications these ideas set rippling through his own immense imagination. What if our cosmos were a library, extending in every direction, containing all possible books? Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books.
The Library of Babel has no plot or significant characters. It hovers in an abstract space, between the echoing depths of an Escher, and the intricate details of a fractal, drawing your gaze ever closer to Borges's fantastical library-verse. The mythic power is convincing because it rests on such perfectly drawn specks of concrete observation. I've read this 7 page story several times, and each time I found more subtlety and more eternity in it.
"What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place."
- John Updike
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first—identical in fact to all. To the left and the right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite—if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . . Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name "bulbs." There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.
Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Library is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.
Borges is wise and witty, and weaves both qualities through every paragraph. That last line is a play on Voltaire's famous quote: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Borges read far and wide and deep, from childhood. He said "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library." He mastered enough languages that he was able to translate works of literature from English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. While devouring all those words, Borges grabbed many big ideas, or they grabbed him. He conjured with these ideas throughout his poems, essays and stories.
The Library of Babel is a particularly compact and scintillating gem, where he compresses several tropes into the same tight (albeit infinite) frame.
His wit is droll and oblique. He'll take a straightforward idea or observation, then walk around to consider what's hidden behind its facade, as Lewis Carroll or Douglas Adams might do. The last third of his first paragraph, where he plays upon mirrors and lights, is perfectly just-a-little-off. "Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite" What? Where did this come from? But our narrator says it so matter of factly, that it's easy to swallow without questioning the absurdity.
Another notable Borges story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, begins, "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." What our narrator finds in the encyclopedia is four pages, which exist in his friend Bioy's copy, but not in his own. These are his first evidence of Uqbar, which is slowly invading our world through encyclopediae and other dusty tracts. The very first invasive words he finds are: "For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it." It's not exactly a joke, but Borges loves playing with words, things and viewpoints.
The playing is what most charms me in Borges. He makes it work, he gives it substance and shape, because - like Carroll and Adams - he has a knack for storytelling and he applies careful craft to every sentence and page. He's rich with ideas and a sense of wonder; a bit like Science Fiction, only without any science. Instead of the texture of technology, Borges often builds on a scaffolding of all that he's read and absorbed, the quirks and questions he found in literature, history, philosophy and religion. When he's on fire, few writers compare for the stickiness of their conceits. This seven page tale has been a mindworm of mine since I first read it; and wikipedia mentions nine later books that borrow or refer to the themes in The Library of Babel.
Borges is very bright, and somewhat playful - as are many other writers. Like Tolkein, he absorbed a library of books, including many obscure ones. He explored widely, and wrote a lot (for Argentinian magazines), and found a distinctive style of his own. Beyond all this, he opens up for us worlds nobody else would imagine because (like Carroll, Tolkein and Adams) he's so full of freshness and wonder, he's so ready to look again at what we all take for granted. Here's the third footnote from this story:
3I repeat: In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible. Only the impossible is excluded. For example, no book is also a staircase, though there are no doubt books that discuss and deny and prove that possibility, and others whose structure corresponds to that of a staircase.
What a fine example, and how reassuring to learn that
no book is also a staircase. Better still, our narrator offers us full disclosure, admitting the points where real life comes closest to contradicting his impossibility. Which was so self-evident that none of us would have thought to question it in the first place.
I've only shown you a sliver of the resplendent thought-mirror that is The Library of Babel. Though you can tell that I love Borges. If you haven't read anything by him, all of his story collections are good, and his Collected Fictions has all of them in one place, well-translated. Your library probably has a copy. I'll leave you with two more paragraphs from my favorite Borges story, and I hope these will convince you to visit your own library, in search of more Borges.
Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons came across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language actually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic. The content was also determined: the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. Those examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also posited a fact which all travelers have since confirmed: In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is "total"—perfect, complete, and whole—and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)—that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, 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; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind's hope. 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. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant religions. Others went insane. . . . The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man's finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to be zero.
I still recommend checking out a whole book full of Borges's short stories. But since janis b has so helpfully provided a link, I'll put
the whole text of The Library of Babel in pdf here, so that you can go read it right now, if I've whetted your appetite.