The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges may be my favorite author, and I certainly share his fascination with labyrinths and libraries. His short story The Library of Babel speaks volumes to me. Or rather, I suppose I should say it speaks of volumes.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I spent a lot of time in the Regenstein Library. The architecture of the Reg is like a cross between a 1970′s Gymnasium and a Starship made by the Borg.

The Reg contains about six levels of Stacks, as I recall, which sounds manageable, but trust me: it is enough to get plenty confused and lost. About fourteen years ago, when I was a new student there, there were more than five million volumes in the Stacks. I can’t find a statistic for the holdings at present, but an argument “from the lesser to the greater” would no doubt be appropriate.

I used to wander the halls of the Stacks of the Reg for hours, breathing an atmosphere created by old paper and ink, flipping the light switches every fifteen minutes, or enjoying mysterious quiet and dark without the light. Occasionally I would run into another person. The library of congress classification system ensures that others you run into may be working on a topic that is perhaps at least distantly related to your area of interest, although, the others you see may also just be lost. I remember we would exchange knowing, but often also a bit anxious, glances.

During the many moments in which I was myself a bit lost in the Stacks, I would spend time thinking about impossibility. It would be impossible to read all those books. Eventually, this impossibility of books became a subject of meditation for me. The vast library is a sign of the limits of human capacities, and reciprocally, a symbol of transcendence. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” the library said. Eventually, this way of knowing overwhelmed me. I came to associate a feeling of existential awe, or rather, dread, with the unending halls of books. As much as they promised insight and understanding, the shadowed and unseen silent words inside the books also spoke of futility, obscurity, and oblivion. The books became as well a sign of a certain obsessive psychopathology of humanity; we have a need to capture and save the stream of symbols that flows through our minds and out of our mouths. We attempt to manufacture our own immortality through speech. But the muses lie, and the medium does not suit the goal.

No longer being a graduate student, I often forget about this feeling of dread, although it does surface now and again. When it does, Borges’ story always helps me to make sense of it.

The Library of Babel relates the story of an infinite, labyrinthine library containing, in its unfathomable extent, every book that ever has been or will be and even, I should think, by mathematical necessity, will ever not be written by human authors. The library, which, within the narrative of the story, is the entire universe, is filled with vast stretches of meaningless nonsensical sequences of letters. Borges depicts a race of librarians exploring its depths and heights, doomed or destined personally to read only an infinitesimal portion of the whole. Each reader knows only a tiny portion of its secrets.

Borges’ reference to Babel naturally takes its starting point from Genesis chapter 11, the myth of the confusion of tongues, but it is also important to recognize that Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, and also accordingly to remember at once Borges’ story of the Lottery of Babylon which envisions a society governed by a massive, panenbureaucracy of chance. Babel, or Babylon, is the symbol of the endless human striving for mastery, the symbol of arrogance and self-exaltation, and in Borges’ hands, the symbol of the symbolic realm itself. It is a sign of the tyranny of language and the infinite regression of self-consciousness.

The Annual Meetings

These thoughts are on my mind today because I have just returned from the annual meetings of the AAR and SBL. The annual meetings are a titanic ship of discourse, at which many thousands of people come and — let us be fair and clear — ultimately fail to hear all the hundreds and hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, different lectures and presentations which are shared among the attendees. The talks fill most of four days, from early morning to evening, and they spill over a bit, too.

Of course, you can never hear it all. Assuming that you attend constantly, during every possible time slot, you can see approximately 100 lectures yourself. You can hear rumors of perhaps several hundred more. You can voraciously read the program book, and the book of abstracts, too. But you cannot master everything; and, to mix metaphors strangely, the conference is only the tip of the iceberg. The cloud of discourse at the conference is ephemeral, of course, but its enduring written proceedings, and the thousands of other publications which flow from scholarly activities represented here, are mostly doomed to the silence of library shelves.

The scholars who attend this conference work in a variety of contexts, including seminaries, graduate schools, and undergraduate colleges; the schools may be private or public; they may be religious or secular. They range in prominence from tiny and obscure to huge and famous. Most of the scholars are housed in some form of “Religion” department; the Catholic schools tend to have “Theology” departments; a substantial number of scholars also work in “History” or area studies or “Literature” or other departments as well.

To borrow a term from J. Z. Smith, the academy of religion is a vast and contested “solidarity” of purpose, inherently political in its alliances of conversation partners and divided into thousands of fragments by the differences in interests and perspectives brought by the individual scholars. The graduates and current faculty of particularly prominent graduate departments gather together in parties and bands, reinforcing ties of school, training, and discipleship. For now, the AAR and SBL meet together. This joint meeting of two closely related societies (the members of both societies share departmental homes in every kind of school where they work) takes place according to an “ancient” tradition, but next year will be the last time. The separation of the societies is meant to bring order, but of course it is a disintegrative, rather than an integrative movement.

The following is not by Borges:

The great, annual meeting of the scholars of Babel is a joyous affair, a reconstruction of a prelapsarian paradise. There is a certain Dionysian spirit present. The teachers wander amongst each other, wearing name tags, blinking under the unusually bright lights which have been arranged for the occasion. They examine one another’s chests, looking for familiar names, mostly the names of authors, those words they have found attached at the head of the thousands and thousands of books and articles they have read. Most are not subtle about this at all, and can be fairly rude about staring or snubbing. They murmur greetings to near strangers, and embrace old friends. They listen, applaud, shake hands, network, buy thousands of books for their personal collections from a sprawling display of copies, and step on each other’s feet.

At the AAR/SBL, we scholars attempt to overcome the confusion of tongues, and the separation of tribes, and the plurality of perspectives, but the proliferation of voices means that, in infinite regress, we continue to fall further apart from one another. The more people that gather together, the stranger and more variegated and unknown the breadth of conversation. Attempt to control for this plurality by categorization and by specialization, and the effect of disintegration is only heightened.

A real academic library is a kind of silent, empty necropolis version of an academic meeting, only multiplied by thousands and thousands in size. Spend as long as you like at the meeting. You will never attend to it all. And don’t forget: it is your responsibility to contribute to the library. Check the stacks, you will find my book. Only with a myth, only with the image of an imaginary infinite library, can the true underlying meaning of such a place be made clear.