The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel is a story by Jorge Luis Borges, and also the title of a book edited by Borges series of fantastic literature.

The story by Borges

The 1941 published story was originally part of the band "The Garden of the paths which branch " (El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan ), which was published in 1944 again as the first part of the fictions ( Ficciones ).

There is a speculation about a possible world, which is represented as a library of all possible books. These books, randomly arranged in the library, in the majority of the inhabitants of the library contain unintelligible lyrics. The idea of ​​such a universal library was described by Borges in 1939 in an essay and returned to their literary predecessors.

The library is represented as pre-existent and infinite. Because of this infinity it contained the narrator 's view, all combinations of the alphabet. Borges speaks of 25 characters: 22 letters, commas, periods, and spaces of the Hebrew alphabet. This results in the fact that " No one can articulate a syllable which is not full of tenderness and horror that would not be in any of these languages, the powerful name of a god. " It is due to the vast amount of non- meaningful for the residents of Books find great happiness, a book with only a meaningful sentence for them.

Borges describes further how different groups of residents of the library to deal with it: There were and are founded sects, some of which go to the deification of the most indecipherable books and other call for the burning of the books, there are walkers, the library on the Search for a book to pass through all the questions with the answer that there are scientists who are concerned with the structure of the library and many more. In Borges' story, the people in the library are old, without having found an answer to what she has vexed.

In this story, which is typical for Borges fascination of the infinite reflected; he speculates different origins and outline ways the library. Also he uses, as in all of his stories, which mystified, so bring example quotes that are hard verifiable and where it is not clear whether Borges invented the cited person or they just hardly anyone except Borges, who possessed a formidable general education is known. That's a footnote:

The book referred to here can be found in the story " The Sand Book " in the eponymous collection in 1975.

Interpretation

The structure of the Babylonian library reflects a fundamental aspect of the borg eschen understanding of literature: Borges the literary history is built on a totality and cyclic recurrence of all possible content, situations, events, and forms. The literature discussed understanding is intimately linked with the notion of a ' literature of exhaustion ' ( Literature of Exhaustion by John Barth ), after which exhaust the formal and substantive means of literature at the beginning of postmodernism. Within the finite set of all content it can therefore only come to an infinite recombination of already existing forms (which is an expression of a radical Intertextualitätsbegriffs ). The library is just such a totality of the infinite combination of finite content. It contains everything imaginable knowledge that is arranged in constant repetition and so a - superficial - infinity gives:. " Yo me atrevo a insinuar esta solución del antiguo problema: La biblioteca it Ilimitada y periódica "

The idea of ​​a totality and cyclic recurrence of any content is also in the stories of El Aleph, Funes, el memorioso, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, and ( transferred to a cyclical understanding of history ) in Tema del traidor y del héroe treated. In practice, this will radically intertextual literary understanding of the permanent resumption of previous content as well as in the history of the Informe de Brodie, which is a rewriting of the fourth voyage of Gulliver.

This story may also serve as food for thought to the consideration of the way in which meaningful and nonsense arises or is perceived. If one wanted to estimate the size of the library, you would come up with the following result: in a round library, the diameter would be about m. In contrast, are the visible universe for us with a diameter of only m relatively small.

The Fantastic collection of Borges published literature The Library of Babel

The publisher Franco Maria Ricci published in 1974 in Italy, under the direction of Borges 's favorite works of the author as a writer and reader also under the title The Library of Babel. In 1983 this collection was also released in Germany and was personally edited by Borges here in the edition Weitbrecht. For each of the 30 volumes of this collection of fantastic tales from around the world and several centuries Borges wrote a preface. In the Books Gutenberg an artist edition appeared from 2007 in 30 volumes with cover illustrations by Bernhard Jäger in watercolor technique.

The range includes:

• Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the friend of Death,
• William Beckford Vathek,
• Léon Bloy Unpleasant stories
• Jorge Luis Borges, August 25, 1983 and other tales ( with Blue Tiger, The Rose of Paracelsus, Utopia of a tired man )
• Adolfo Bioy Casares / Arturo Cancela / Pilar de Lusarreta / Julio Cortazar / Manuel Mujica Lainez / Silvina Ocampo / Federico Peltzer / Manuel Peyrou / María Esther Vázquez Argentine narratives (including the squatted building of Cortazar )
• Jacques Cazotte The enamored devil,
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton Apollo's eye,
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky / Leonid Andreyev / Leo Tolstoy Russian narratives ( Andreyev Lazarus, Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Dostoevsky The crocodile. An unusual occurrence ),
• Nathaniel Hawthorne The Great Stone Face,
• Charles Howard Hinton Scientific narratives,
• Henry James The Friends of the Friends,
• Franz Kafka The vulture,
• Rudyard Kipling The house of desires,
• Jack London The concentric death,
• Lord Dunsany The Land of Yann,
• Leopoldo Lugones The pillar of salt,
• Arthur Machen The glowing pyramid,
• Herman Melville, Bartleby The writer,
• Gustav Meyrink The Cardinal Napellus,
• Giovanni Papini The mirror on the run,
• Edgar Allan Poe The Purloined Letter,
• Saki The secrecy of the Lady Anne,
• Pu Songling guest Tiger,
• Robert Louis Stevenson The island of votes,
• Thousand and One Nights ( Translation by Richard Francis Burton and Antoine Galland )
• Auguste de Villiers de L' Isle- Adam, the diner of the last festivals ( Le convive of dernières fêtes )
• Voltaire Micromegas,
• Herbert George Wells The Door in the Wall,
• Oscar Wilde Lord Arthur Saviles crime.