In the Library of Babel,
A Traveler
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Fig.1 The Tower of Babel by Peiter Brugel the Elder (1563)1
0. “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel2
The tower of Babel is a near East myth that is meant to explain the origin of different languages. It is a utopia of ultimate universality. The mythical Babel tower is depicted “as tall as the Heaven,” which implies human’s persistent temptation of unveiling the secret of the universe. The library of Babel, imagined by Borges, represents the combination of all human knowledge. Just like the maps are not the territory, the universe re-created in languages, data, and models is not the universe. The Library of Babel is the analogical double of the universe. And there is always a gap between the two. My term project is a short graphic story derived from the Borges story. The main character is a traveler that ends up trapped in the labyrinth of human knowledge. The story traces his course of searching the entrance or the exit that connects the constructed reality and the reality itself. The gap between the two is the source of our frustration, fear, and desperation accompanying our courses of knowing.
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I. “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.... 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... To the left and right of the vestibule are two tinu compartments. One is for sleeping, upright, and the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through his space too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance.” - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
He is a researcher in some university downtown. He was working on a paper, for which he needed to visit an archive in the public library right next to his home. He located the piece of evidence and viewed it through the digital archive. But he still wanted to look at the original copy, because some very small annotations on the image were too pixelated for him to recognize. He entered the library and asked the librarian to direct him to the archive. The librarian, however, refused to do so. She told him that the library stored their manuscripts and rare books in a very condensed place. All of them were digitized and he, the scholar, should be satisfied with the scanned version. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. After a long bargain, she opened the door for him and warned him that there were a few people before him who went into the archive store room, but none of them ever came back.
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II. “Let us imagine a true museum, one that contained everything, one that could present a complete picture after the passage of time, after the destruction by time.” - Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 19254
The room wasn’t condensed at all; in fact, it was not one room it was a series of hexagon galleries. He was so excited. He had never in his life seen so many books around. After the excitement, he started to try and locate his archive according to the call number the librarian gave him. He walked through several identical rooms, climbed up and down for quite a few times. Finally, he found it. Then he had to go back. But he couldn’t find his way. The rooms were all identical, he lost his sense of direction and lost track of time. He was desperate to find a map or a drawing of this library. In one of the rooms, he found decorative drawings on the wall that looked like this library. The author is Le Corbusier. The researcher remembered that he read Le Corbusier’s work somewhere. At the moment, he was well aware of the way that the books were arranged. Older books were on the lower levels, whereas the upper levels were for more recent books. He knew that he was at the sector of 1920s.
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Fig.2 Le Corbusier, project for the Musee Mondial, Mundaneum, Geneva, 1929, Elevation3
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Past
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“I have allowed a spiral staircase (very modern, and also timeless), spiral ramps (the same vertical circulation as the Tsentrosoiuz in Moscowvary modern and also very old!); I have allowed the museum of human creation to follow a spiral, not to be “the last word in fashion,” but to assure, through this unique means, the absolute continuity of events in history. I cannot see any other way of doing it.” - Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 19255
But what was the direction of time? Was the past at the very core of the spiral? Should he go down and find the exit at the beginning of time? Or should he climb and wander out towards the periphery and exit from where he came, the present? Le Corbusier’s temporality was linear and Newtonian. Progress means growth, sprawl and covering more fields. He shook his head. It was not the time to think about how Corbusier designed. With his limited knowledge, the exit seemed to be on the ground. He believed that he could find his way back downstairs at the beginning of time.
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IV. “Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name ‘bulbs.‘ There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise.” - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
So down he went. He was soon exhausted from all the stair claiming. However, he couldn’t even see the bottom of the structure through the atrium. It was still endless. He saw a door and opened it. It was a small room with a bed, a chair, and a desk. He laid down on the bed and fell asleep. After a while, he heard the door squeaking. It was opened by the light bulb. He saw words floating in the room, in all kinds of languages. The words were falling from the sky. He tried to read the words that he knew. It was all sorts of names of rains. He looked up, there were clusters of words, in the name of all kinds of clouds. He realized that this was the weather of this place. He got scared.
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V. “Those examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This philosopher observed that all trooks, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the tlventy-two letters of the alphabet.� - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
He got up immediately and stormed out of the room. He was more eager to find his way back than ever. In another round of climbing the staircases blindly. He saw a boy in one of the cells playing with toy cars, according to the pattern of the carpet. He was so happy that he finally saw someone, he rushed over to the boy. The boy greeted him calmly and said that he was the librarian. He asked about the way out. The boy said he had no idea. He was born here and never even thought about getting out. The boy told him that this place was the library of Babel and he could find models, maps, and drawings people had made in this room.
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VI. The traveler thought this was a breakthrough. Just like he suspected, all of the walls of the library is at a slight angle, that was why he could see up and down through the atrium so easily. He thought this was just like the reversed infinite museum Corbusier had designed. But horizontally, there were so many cells, he had never seen the edge cells. How could he find a way out? He asked the librarian for the location of the models of this library. The boy directed to him a shelf of books. The images were drawn pretty recently he thought. It was fields of hexagons spreading endlessly.
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Fig.4 Andrew DeGraff, Daniel Harmon. The Library of Babel, 2015 6
VII. “I have seen them about their tasks: they arrive exhausted at some hexagon, they talk about a staircase that nearly killed them- some steps were missing - they speak with the librarian about galleries and staircases, and, once in a while, they take up the nearest book and leaf through it, searching for disgraceful or dishonorable words. Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.” - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
The researcher was convinced that the location of the exit had to do with the periodization of the library. It was either the beginning or the end of the time. Le Corbusier was crystal clear about time. His museum could fast forward or rewind. It was certain that the future trajectory would be the course of the spiral. But how to make sense of this field of hexagons? He knew that the past was always under him. But which one was connected to his home? There were almost infinite kinds of past, and endless theories of the origin of time. He was so disappointed, and desperate again. He couldn’t even begin to count how many days he was absent from work. He was worried that they might fire him. He didn’t think the structures he had seen was right. They had to be wrong. He started to measure the cells, trying to find out the exact height, length, angle of each wall. He discovered that the cell was getting smaller and smaller as he traveled down.
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VIII. “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” - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
“This line is a part of a very large circle” - Ono Yoko7
He put together the angels and sizes and discovered that the library could only be a gigantic sphere. He thought it was the only way that all the geometries could start to make sense. He still didn’t give up searching for his way back, He believed in his theory deeply, and he thought that the door towards the library in his town was at the bottom of somewhere of the cells.
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IX. “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.� - Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel
In his course of searching, he made peace with the labyrinth. He was still trying to find his way, but he also sought to ask himself did it matter where he lived. He was sure that he lost his job, his girlfriend, and his family probably called the police. But he made peace with that. He came across a story written by Borges the other day, depicting a library that was not too different with this one. He also read about concerns and anxieties, in different ages, and realized that some of his worries were as old as time. He believed that the library was not infinite. It was endless and circulars, just like Borges has written. He saw a body falling the other day, as the body fell, it dissolved into the air, the body turned into texts and flew into books in some corner of the library that he might never read in his entire life. But he thought, he could live with that.
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Notes 1. From the collection of Junsthistorisches Museum Wien 2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel“ in The Garden of the Forking Paths, Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998 3. L’Architecture vivante, Quoted From Anthony Vidler, “Losing Face: Notes on the Modern Museum”, Assemblage. No.9 (Cambridge: the MIT Press.) Jun 1989, 40-57 4. “In Defense of Architecture,” republished in Opposition Reader: Selected Essays 197301984 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998): 608 5. Le Corbusier, he Decorative Art of Today, 1925 6. Referenced from Andrew DeGraff, Daniel Harmon. Plotted: A Literary Atlas (San Francisco: Pulp), 2015 7. Yoko Ono, This Line Is a Part of Very Large Circle, 1966
A Graphic Story by Jane (Jia) Weng M.E.D Candidate 2018 Term Project for Utopics by Prof. Anthony Vidler
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