In continuation of our discussion on what defines a book, Jorge Luis Borges illustrates the impossibility of a definitive answer in his exploratory short story, The Library of Babel. An author and librarian, Borges provides the perspective of both creator and keeper as he analogues the book to God and the Library to the universe as it is composed of God’s many creations.

In looking to better understand the theological comparisons proposed by Borges, I researched Babel to discover its origin in the Book of Genesis where humans try to build a tower to heaven (Babel) only for God to not understand their various languages. Thus, when comparing The Library of Babel to its biblical roots, Borges positions humans as the God who have created books and books as creating a universe that supersedes the parts of its whole to construct a state of excess information too powerful to be understood. As Borges describes, the Library is “unending” and “ab aeterno;” a state which is hopeful in possibilities and depressing in limitations.

As the library has grown out of man’s control, it is imperfect in its ordering by theory and humans’ imperfect hands. With the galleries of the library being sorted by what Borges coins “the fundamental law of the Library,” humans continue to demonstrate a failure in self-governance as the impossibility of having “correct” answers to questions like “How do we decide what books to keep?’ and “How do we classify a book?” are haunting. Through the magnitude of Babel, Borges positions humans, the creator, in a role that is small compared to the magnitude of knowledge that can be captured by the library but not within the brain. Below is an image I found of the Library of Babel that shows just such as the humans within the drawing are miniscule against the grandeur of the galleries. (I could not find the artist or when this was created.)

Marino’s brilliance with Marginalia in the Library of Babel is captured by his ability to simulate the Library of Babel within the digital. Finding the library and the Internet to be one in their archiving of information, Marino takes the context of Borges’ stories and emulates the same dizzying effect of the library by cataloguing hyperlinks. Through these hyperlinks, readers can go down the same rabbit hole of information as the hyperlinks reflect Borges’ hexagonal library structure. While the digital and physical forms of knowledge are most often viewed as separate practices of thought, Marino makes his case for literary behaviors continuing on the web where we continue to find ourselves as small as those in the Library of Babel amidst the landscape of the web.