Jorge Luis Borges in Cyberspace
As noted earlier, I do not find Christine Smallwood’s answer to her question “What Does the Internet Look Like?” satisfying. She claims,
[The Internet] looks like a warehouse of space junk, and it sounds like an industrial-strength air-conditioning system. Beyond the screen, the Internet looks like everything else. It looks like money.
She uses inert industrial imagery to represent the dynamic entity that has pushed traditional industry (which is not to say Capitalism) to the edge of obsolescence. Smallwood, in short, is not up to the challenge she has put herself to.
But then, it’s freaking hard to conceive of (much less describe) infinity. Which is why Borges is so great.
My favorite Borges piece (and, as some of you know, my favorite work of fiction in general) is Borges’ mystical The Library of Babel. I challenge you to find me a better description of the Internet than this:
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite … Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
It’s no surprise to find that one of the first comprehensive collections of New Media studies, The New Media Reader, begins with the full-text of Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths. (Download the PDF of Lev Manovitch’s introductory essay, “New Media from Borges to HTML” here).
It’s futile to depict what the Internet “looks like” —it’s simply not something one sees. But if we insist that cyberspace be subject to some kind of literary representation, I am certain it would be a task that Borges’ genius (not to mention his blindness) would have uniquely equipped him to do.
The digital universe is not a clumsy industrial hodge-podge. It is as infinite, terrifying and gorgeous as Borges’ library. And in our Internet-enabled postmodern age, where information (or, if you prefer, knowledge, reason, science) is the closest thing we have to God, I find the conclusion to The Library of Babel (via Andrew Hurly’s superior translation) especially poignant:
If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder–which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.
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