Tag Archives: Library of Babel

E-Lit: Making a Text Sing

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In the final chapter of The Book, Borsuk gives examples of, “contemporary approaches to digital reading that, rather than offering up a crystal goblet, invite us to trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing” (203). This quote encapsulates how I feel about electronic literature. All books are a collaboration between creators and readers, but not all creators and readers are necessarily conscious of this when they’re creating and/or reading books. Electronic literature is necessarily an interactive experience, which makes the collaborative nature of the book impossible to avoid.

One example that Borsuk mentions is Pry, by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. Borsuk says that, “Pry explicitly requires the reader’s interaction to make meaning” (247). The text remains flat, literally and figuratively, if it is read like a normal e-book. The text must be pried apart for the reader to literally see what would otherwise be subtext. The reader gains a greater understanding of the text not just by close reading, but by active participation.

This is not our first encounter with E-Lit in this class. We read Marginalia in the Library of Babel by Marino at the beginning of the semester. To find meaning in Marino’s annotations, we had to interact with hyperlinks, follow rabbit holes, and make connections. While we all might have interpreted Borges’ Library of Babel differently, may have read with different levels of attention or awareness of context, may have skimmed it at different paces, but we probably interacted with the text similarly, based on how we’ve been trained to read these kind of text in school. Marino’s text, however, is not something most of us are trained to read. Many of us would have tried to read it in a linear form, chronologically or in table-of-contents order, but some probably tried to read it like they might explore Wikipedia, clicking on whatever seems most interesting at the time. Some probably skipped most of the hyperlinks and missed all of the story. Each of us truly read a separate text.

This is why I love E-Lit. It encourages close reading, exploration, and collaboration. It doesn’t just enable readers to make the text their own, it forces them to do so. The authors/designers/coders who create electronic literature must also understand our medium. We need to be able to, as Borsuk puts it, “[draw] attention to the interface to explore and exploit the affordances of the digital” (203). We must know what a reader expects to see and the different ways a reader might interact with the form so that we might subvert those expectations. We must be okay with the idea that most people won’t read every bit of text. The average reader won’t even find every page. However, the culture of electronic literature practically demands that someone will, if you leave it out there long enough to float around in cyberspace.

Reflections of Today and Borges’ “Library of Babel”

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Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” is a fantastical thought exercise that essentially reflects various human reactions to abstract questions in a thoughtful and sometimes humorous way. Borges sets up the story to take place inside a library which equates to the whole world for the people living inside it. The Library contains an infinite amount of books which have a perpetually endless combinations of letters and punctuation. With this knowledge many librarians have formulated their own schools of thought and way of life to accommodate conceptualizing and dealing with their world. 

When reading the short story, I enjoyed the diversity of thought within each librarian and how that manifested in their living, or rather, coping. In the uncertainty of the Library, librarians created things like religion and a norm culture to help regulate their way of life. A group that stood out to me the most was the Purifiers, who would invade “the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves” (Borges, 6). I think their response to the chaos of their world makes sense, but it almost feels rash in their need for control. The Purifiers’ line of thought mirrors plenty of people’s beliefs today, as many grapple with our chaotic world by simply trying to carve it into what their perfect world would look like. I think an example of this, relevant to today, is book banning. The act of banning books often reads as a response from adults who cannot grapple with the notion that the world is more than what they can conceptualize, so in turn, they try to control what they can to make more people similar to themselves. Borges does this reflection of our world in the Library repeatedly with different philosophies and religions, which made me love and ponder on this piece for a long time.