Jonathan Basile - an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths.

Jonathan Basile, Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality, Punctum Books, 2018.
Read an Excerpt from Tar for Mortar Here!

Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing.

Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion?

While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.





In their introduction to The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, editors Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson attempt to arrive at what they think the American science fiction author was ultimately doing across the more than seven thousand pages of his ‘exegesis,’ asking: “What saves the universe from running in useless circles until it drops? What separates the living spark of meaning from the ‘inferior bulk’ of chaos and noise? Does the universe evolve or devolve? If the system is closed, then where does ‘the new’ originate?”[1] It is often taken for granted that invention lies at the heart of creative endeavor. But what is invention, exactly?
Marx made the distinction clear in the first volume of Capital (1867), juxtaposing the “labor” of bees with human labor:

We ascribe to labor a form, which belongs exclusively to humanity. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what at the outset distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.[2]

Marx knew his Kant, particularly that subsection of the Critique of Judgment (1790) titled “On Art in General,” in which Kant writes:

By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason. For though we like to call the product that bees make (the regularly constructed honeycombs) a work of art, we do so only by virtue of an analogy with art; for as soon as we recall that their labor is not based on any rational deliberation on their part, we say at once that the product is a product of their nature (namely, of instinct), and it is only to their creator that we ascribe it as art.[3]

Both, in turn, might be said to be responding to The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1732) by Bernard Mandeville. And Descartes’ automata. And Francis Bacon’s anthropocentrism. And Montaigne’s essay, An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
And so on and so forth, back into the (un)lettered past.

*

The honeycomb is a central motif in Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, Jonathan Basile’s thought-provoking new meditation on the classic Borges short story, wherein endlessly repeating hexagons constitute the basic architectural units of a universal library, the cells in which all possible books are shelved—including this one. Products of pure permutation, articulated in the abstract logic of formal systems in which the names of things are arbitrarily assigned, these books are “a reminder of the indifference of all expression” to such quaint priorities as personal intention or private meaning: a kind of blasphemy aimed at a gospel of originality that prefers the worst of architects to the best of bees. “It was self-evident to the librarians in the Library of Babel,” writes Basile, “that they could never create an original work; instead they hoped to discover the truth in the prefabricated texts they considered divine.”[4]
The Greeks called this atomism. For the Kabbalists it was the Aleph-Bet, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—including five so-called final forms—endowed with numerical significance, whose recombination creates the appearance of the endless variety of our universe. Borges, whose speculative fictions often invoked the Kabbalah and who, in Basile’s memorable description “went on to become the third blind head librarian of the National Library of Buenos Aires,”[5] seems to challenge Kant’s conception of human nature by imagining even the most literate human beings as drones navigating a hive without end — its cells filled with books rather than honey.
Unlike the original story of the Tower in the book of Genesis, “La biblioteca de Babel,” first published in 1941 (English translations did not appear until 1962), is not an etiological myth or merely a parody of one. In thrall to an inverted messianism, these librarians, like the monoglot engineers who attempted to storm heaven with little more than bricks and tar, seek a particular place: the precise spot on the exact shelf of the one hexagon in which the ideal symbolic sequence resides. This being Borges, however, things are not quite what they seem. Readers are seduced by what they see as the biographical symmetries between author and narrator, tending to take the latter’s claims about the Library at face value, all while following a breadcrumb trail that inevitably leads to contradictions and nested ironies. “The question of Babel,” writes Basile, “both as tower and as library, is precisely one of totality or unity—is it possible for humanity to share a common language?”[6] Can the shards ever be made whole? This is where the latter part of the subtitle comes in.
Borges delighted in contradictions, especially those “true contradictions” that are said to exist beyond formal logic with its stable binary true/false. He was the type to answer a question with a question, a riddle with another riddle, exploring the uncanny ability of contradictions to undermine authority—as if seeking, at times, to liberate language from the scribe. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” he proposed a scenario in which Cervantes was no longer the sole author of the tilting-at-windmills tale. In “Kafka and His Precursors” (1951), he begins by reeling off a shortlist of potential literary ancestors, then interrupts the neat genealogy he’s constructed: “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of those writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.” And, more memorably: “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as well as it will modify the future.”[7] One is hardly even related to oneself.
This combinatoric approach is seductive from a number of angles. If, as we have been assured, the brain is merely a meatspace computer and the internet a vast, digital Alexandria that aspires to contain whatever one might conceivably seek out, then wouldn’t it make sense to share the burden of analysis—and, increasingly, invention—with networked machines? Basile is a member of the BABEL Working Group, a “non-hierarchical scholarly collective,” and the creator of libraryofbabel.info, which “currently contains every possible page of 3,200 characters, using a character set of the twenty-six lower case letters, space, comma, and period.”[8] (Several potential floor plans contributed by users of the site are reproduced in the book.) Rather than putting writers out of business, however, the virtual Babel, like the one on which it is based, fails by design. Articles, like the one on Slate.com—Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” Is Now a Real Website. Borges Would Be Alarmed—which took the virtual library literally, ended up missing the point altogether. Though many have tried, any attempt at constructing a universal language like Esperanto or the one featured in Borges’ essay “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” can serve as a demonstration of the ultimate futility of trying to approximate that ur-tongue.
A library in which enlightenment comes secondhand and human intelligence is reduced to fruitless browsing conveys some sense of what it’s like to search for certainty and absolute truth in a probabilistic universe, where the probable and impossible exist along a common continuum. As in many of Borges’ stories, the protagonists of “The Library of Babel” are haunted by knowledge; information forms a mental labyrinth from which they find it increasingly difficult to escape. And yet the point of atomism was to free human beings from meddling Olympians and to encourage them to be as shameless as nature. “Nature,” according to Lucretius, “is free and uncontrolled by proud masters (dominis superbis) and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods who pass their unruffled lives, their placid aeon, in calm and peace!”[9] Were it to exist, a library of all possible expression would pose about as much of a threat to human invention as a xylotheque to a forest.

*

            Postcript: On June 7, 2018, the New York Times published the latest in bee research under the headline “Do Bees Know Nothing?” The article summarized a new paper in the journal Science purporting to show that, according to one of the authors, bees “‘understood that zero was a number lower than one and part of a sequence of numbers’”:

But they weren’t thinking the way we think, consciously, right?  “I certainly wouldn’t use the word consciousness,” in relation to bees, Dr. Dyer said.  But, “the evidence is consistent with high-level cognitive abilities.”

David Anderson, a fruit fly researcher at Caltech, was more cautious:

“It is difficult to know what such a task ‘means’ for the bees,” he wrote in an email, “from a ‘conceptual’ standpoint, because we do not understand the strategy that the bees’ brains are using to solve the problem.”

No one is arguing yet that insects are self-conscious, but it is not inconceivable that in the near future the honeybee, too, will be considered capable of art and Kant’s division—what Basile calls “the deconstruction of the distinction between invention and discovery”—will further erode from this direction. In the meantime, works that have their genesis in collaborative intellectual projects like Tar for Mortar—made possible by the radical open-access publisher punctum books—offer a possible way out of the information labyrinth in which we find ourselves. Forget the (at least) 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ volumes. To discover the other wanderers, each of us must take a chisel to the hexagonal walls of our bookish tombs.*
(*Chisel not included.)
[1] Lethem and Jackson, eds. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. xx.
[2] Marx, Karl. Capital I (Penguin, 1976), p. 284.
[3] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), p. 170.
[4] Basile, Jonathan. Tar for Mortar (Punctum, 2018), p. 17-18.
[5] ibid p. 44.
[6] ibid p. 59.
[7] Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka and His Precursors” in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 trans. Eliot Weinberger (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000 [1952]).
[8] Tar for Mortar p. 65.
[9] De rerum natura 2.1090-4.
- Daniel Elkind
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-worst-of-architects-reconsidering-borges-library-of-babel/




The visible work of this book is easily and briefly enumerated:
The most compact way I know to express Jorge Luis Borges’s brain-bending irony slides in between the second and third words of the title of his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” The title creates a compact version of the self-canceling liar paradox  credited to the ancient philosopher Epimenides: if the essay’s argument is “new,” time has not been refuted, but if the “refutation” does what it claims and deconstructs time, the modifying word “new” becomes meaningless. So far, so self-consuming. Borges’s essay, like many of his fictions, dances across the edges of veracity and what Jonathan Basile, in Tar for Mortar, his brilliant new open-source reading of Borges, calls “the dream of totality.”
Basile, the creator of the amazing libraryofbabel.info website that digitally replicates the conditions of Borges’s famous story, “The Library of Babel,” brings to this book multiple strengths: razor-sharp analytical skills, precise writing, and a web-master’s experience of wrestling with a digital instantiation of Borges’s thought experiment. He’s written a brilliant book about Borges — that would be enough of a great thing for me — which also has important things to say about intellectual ambition, irony, language, and the things that the Digital Humanities can and cannot reveal.

… An examination of the essential metric laws of French prose, illustrated with examples taken from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October 1909)

What Basile terms the “dream of totality” turns out, as he cogently shows, to be quixotic in a very precise way: the fantasy never corresponds to reality, but the act of dreaming changes the world in which the dreamer lives. “Totality itself,” Basile observes, “is essentially incomplete” (17). This lack of wholeness redounds upon the dreamer. “In all its forms,” he continues, “the library should lead us to think differently about the possibility of originality or novelty” (17). The limits of both Borges’s Library and language itself — the fact that “even the most unpredicted or unpredictable event is intelligible to us only by means of conforming to pre-existing concepts and forms of experience” (18) — bounds our thinkable universe. The world spreads itself before us, in physical space and also inside the slim & somewhat broken copy of Borges’s Labyrinths that I have sitting on my desk right now. The fragile New Directions paperback is the second of several copies that I have owned, but the oldest still in my possession. My notes in spidery pencil marked the pages in the mid-1980s, when I treated myself to an undergrad course on Borges and Latin American fiction with James Irby, who translated most of the material in this volume. Around that same time that I changed tracks from my plans to major in theoretical mathematics and turned instead to literature, where I remain today.

… A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December 1909)

“I no longer long for a solution” (18), Basile writes after a wonderfully thorough analysis of the possible and impossible structures of “The Library of Babel.” He comes to think that “Borges has an imagination that surpasses lucidity to its dark hinter-side, the mind of what I would prefer to call an anarchitect, whose great vision was an ability to lead us into blindness” (18). At the far end of the paradox lies “Borges’s irony” (18) and his habit of breaking open all conceptions of totality even as he dreams them in their fiercest and most capacious forms. At the end of Basile’s gorgeous investigation and careful parsing of “The Library of Babel,” he arrives at Borges’s auto-ironic not-quite-nihilism: “there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambiguous word” (64). In an odd moment of vertigo that I associate with a lifetime of reading Borges, I noticed when I first read that quoted sentence — at the hinge of Basile’s book — that the passage was one I’d also quoted myself, at the conclusion of the “Brown” chapter I wrote for Jeffrey Cohen’s Prismatic Ecology in 2013 — a chapter and book that also marked a redoubling or intensifying of my own ecomaterialist turn.

The broken spine of my undergrad copy of Labyrinths

… almost infinitely richer …

Repetition looks different under a Borgesian lens. It’s not very strange that Basile and I, two American Borgistas, would quote the same resonant phrase. In its playful doubling of universal meaning, the phrase perfectly captures Basile’s argument about irony and totality; I used it to make a similar point about environmental identity and excess. But the echo worked on my imagination as I turned into the second chapter of Tar for Mortar, which moved from an explication of the experience of creating libraryofbabel.info and a comparative reading of “self-contradiction” in Borges and Nietzsche regarding the Eternal Return. Now I started to get suspicious, and I opened the title page of my mid-’80s copy of Labyrinths to the notes for what would become my final paper in that course: “the Eternal Return / see last pp. of ‘Garden.'” I didn’t know much about Nietzsche at that time — I would have benefited greatly from Basile’s cogent explication in this book! — but I foisted on James Irby at the end of that long-ago semester many pages of undergraduate Borgesiana, circling around Eternal Returns and paradoxes of space and time. I’ve long since lost the paper itself, but my memory is that he thought I should maybe read more Nietzsche, but he appreciated my enthusiasm for Borges.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.

Basile finds in Nietzsche and Borges examples of “text[s] at odds with [themselves]” (82). The ironic, self-negating core of both authors, and their common sources in the atomist tradition in philosophy, require what Basile wonderfully terms “a sly self-assurance when expressing themselves by means of contradiction” (86). In Nietzsche, the characteristic mode is aggressive “affirmation” (86) in the face of impossibility. For Borges, the characteristic turn exits pure philosophy for aesthetics and fiction: his muse-mouthpieces are not the prophet Zarathustra, but more literary figures, Don Quixote, or his not-translator Pierre Menard. Or perhaps his abiding figure occupies the ironic separation the Argentine author described between himself and “the other one, the one called Borges, … the one things happen to” (“Borges y yo” Irby trans. 246).

Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.

The third and shortest chapter of Basile’s book takes up a question, “In Which It Is Argued, Despite Popular Opinion to the Contrary, that Borges Did Not Invent the Internet.” It’s a smart, witty reply to misreadings of Borges as prophet of digital utopia. Basile makes a compelling case that Borges’s works display “the deferral of presence across several virtualities” (87) rather than an anticipation of digital mediation in multiple modes. He instead argues that the central idea in Borges reveals “the rupture of a ceaseless differing-from-self” (91). In wonderfully compact prose, Basile concludes with an image of Borges as exploring “the lack of totality, the finitude and uncertainty that plague even the grandest project of any cognition shuttling between uniqueness and iterability” (92). But the lingering image with which the book closes is not this conceptual split but “the corner of the smile that recognizes in this finitude the possibility of all play” (92.)

Notes from the 1980s

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

There are a few writers I loved obsessively as a boy — maybe it’s just Borges and Thomas Pynchon for whom I feel this level of intensity — to whom I return eagerly and also apprehensively, with the awareness that what I found in these authors indelibly marked my younger self. I read Borges today with teenage Steve on my shoulder, wondering what he made of these texts then and how they changed him. I wonder how that reading and thinking translated me from a long-ago New Jersey suburb to where I am now. (Actually, I live now in a Connecticut suburb, so maybe I’m not that far away, though the decades and detours feel immense and labyrinthine.) I’m grateful to Jonathan Basile for his rich and brilliant investigation of this writer who means so much to me. All Borgistas, or really anyone who cares about literature, language, and speculative thinking, should read this open-access book. And support punctum books!

[All quotations in bold from James E. Irby’s translation of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”]

The final “elegant hope” of the narrator of “The Library of Babel” imagines some eternal traveler making infinite peregrinations through the Library who would in inhuman time “see the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order” (Irby 58). An universal and cyclical library would suture the paradoxical combination of maximum iterability in linguistic signs, “a number which, although extremely vast, is not infinite” (54), and extension in physical space. Like Basile and like Borges’s narrator, I’ve been turning that possibility over in my head for a long time. I’m so pleased to have revisited it in the good company of Tar for Mortar. - Steve Mentz
http://stevementz.com/tar-for-mortar-by-jonathan-basile-punctum/




Driving southbound on the derelict eastern shore of the Salton Sea, you arrive in Niland, California and keep driving on Main Street until it is no longer itself and past the famed candy colored now-cinematic Salvation Mountain you enter Slab City “The Last Free Place” where sign after handmade sign sirensong you to come “visit the library”, as if pleading. 
On a daytrip with my wife, son and a couple of friends, rather than just jump out and take photos and race away, I wanted to insist on some kind of exploring of the off-the-grid community, comprised of snowbirds, counterculture types, ne’er do wells and what-have-yous.  We left the blacktop and proceeded down a dirt road where more signs caution to slow down and not kick up dust—leaving the front end of Slab City rife with fancy rvs, motor homes and satellite dishes, the structures are decidedly more D.I.Y.—one favorite I recall was a fenced-in backyard made out of palm fronds. 
Jonathan Basile’s Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel,”libraryofbabel.info, and the Dream of Totality is a short text, but it contains great reaches inside. Basile takes strong cues from Derrida’s notion of ‘iterability’, which Derrida took to signify not just repetition as in ‘reiteration’ but as in every iteration is an alteration, or a modification of the same. For all the term’s slippage, Basile doesn’t use the word sloppily, and in fact its unpacking greatly illuminates his overall thoughts and project while working on Borges. The creator of libraryofbabel.info, Basile plays both its interpreter and apologist, explaining the limits of Borges’ brilliant thought experiment-cum-fiction and doesn’t shy away from not only approaching the daunting mathematics involved—another great read in this vein is The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch—but more than others actually notices Borges’ grim sense of irony and works to explicate it.
While I was reading Basile I immediately thought of my trip to the Slab City Library—we pulled up out front (unfortunately but inevitably stirring up dust) and once inside the folks working the counter immediately stopped conversing (never a good sign). I smiled and said hello, doing my best to be unassuming and not pretentious and began to browse. The small house that is the library contains some few thousand books, possibly less, and they are in no order whatsoever. More than that, they were all weather-beaten, exposed to the elements (there was no back wall to the structure), sun-rotted and caked in dust. 
No one will know, or ever know, just what books are in the Slab City Library. 
I find Basile at his most endearing here: So I’ll conclude with a consideration of a trend in the recent criticism of Borges that I find in its most extreme forms highly suspect: the effort to cast him as a prophet of the internet and related digital technologies. Tough these critics may intend to pay homage to a visionary author, there is just as much in their work that suggests to me an ideology of technological progress, unable to mount a genuine engagement with Borges’ text or to achieve a critical distance from its own culture. 
Yes! While I of course ‘love’ Borges, I cannot stand hagiography, and the semi-worship made ready for the foreboding, blind prophet poet Borges does little to actually engage new readers in the way Borges probably wished to be read. I hate to sound Straussian, not that there is a ‘secret’ Borges (what would that even mean?), but at times the credulity of some when encountering the master (“The Master”) Borges could style himself has frustrated me—rather its his cheekiness, his boldness and yes slyness that wins one over and places Borges firmly in that artful realm of seeming untouchability. Basile poses his attack, if it is as strong as that, in a twofold manner: (1) a straight forward analysis and explanation of the real limits and contours of the Library of Babel, i.e. no mystification, no ellipses, no flashbang rhetorical smokebombs to duck and cover behind… and (2), a pivot on the ‘dreamness’ of it all, of its textual morphology in a certain Mobius strip type of way—to ‘get’ the point is to miss the point entirely!
But to return to ‘iterability’—the citationality of it all, “This universe in which all of nature becomes a vast library can be read as an allegory and foreshadowing of the deconstructive idea that there is no outside the text. Not in the naïve sense, of course, that we are dealing with a text only when we see something resembling a book, but rather in the broadened significance of generalized textuality—when we see how Borges expands the properties of iterability and dissemination to encompass all forms of existence. Within his library, taking some books from the shelves, we can find examples of the porousness of these pages, of the intertextuality showing us that both within and beyond the text is—other text.” Basile recognizes Borges’ desire to affirm the infinity of the Library but at the same time the tragic gesture of not being able to follow through, to represent, to think or to feel such a thing. At the heart of this, language’s attempts and failures at exhaustion, is iterability. This iterability allows Basile to demonstrate that despite the numerous punctuations of expression possible in the Library’s galleries, the atomism(s) involved in exploring just how pure difference can arise without referral to a prior essence of some sort are very prone to contradiction. Comparisons are made to Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return”—and while all this philosophy speak shouldn’t deter you, let it be said Basile never hits the reader over the head and is a faithful guide throughout the book. 
We drove away as shadows lengthened across the desert floor. Inside the library a mother and two small toddlers, dressed only in diapers, were covered in dirt and playing about with some children’s books. There’s very much a recognition that at Slab City, this is truly the ‘end of line’ for some people—if neurotic privileged petit bourgeois people like me can ever truly summon what the end of line for themselves or others could be. And yet, at that terminal, there is freedom, and Basile concludes (almost unfortunately, we wish for him to continue) there is an arrival in this ‘finitude’ with the virtuality of exhaustion into genuine play, and thankfully, play always defies the totality. - Trevor Jones
https://minorliteratures.com/2018/04/11/tar-for-mortar-the-library-of-babel-and-the-dream-of-totality-by-jonathan-basile-trevor-jones/


Jonathan Basile is pursuing a PhD in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program, and is also the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. His non-fiction has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and Electric Literature, and his fiction has been published in minor literature[s] and Litro. It goes without saying that his work is also available in the Library of Babel, if you know where to look.