I gave my English students a choice of questions (some of which, ones that they generated yesterday) on which to write after their discussion of Borges’s The Library of Babel yesterday and a preliminary discussion last week. As is sometimes my wont, I decided to write along with them. Below the questions are my rather free-form musings
The Library of Babel
Pick one of the prompts below and write on it for the duration of the period. Enjoy your Thanksgiving!
1. What is the nature of originality if all possible texts are already contained in the library? You should incorporate the idea that “the certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.”
2. What are the implications of the story for finding truth?
3. In some ways, the ultimate statement of the story is the question “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?” Elaborate.
4. How (mathematically and perhaps physically) can the Library be “unlimited” yet the “identical hexagons” be filled with what is an extremely large, but finite, number of books? Elaborate on the implications of your resolution of the apparent paradox.
5. What would Derrida or Saussure say is the fundamental problem with the apparently correct idea that the Library contains all possible knowledge?
6. What would Nietzsche say is the fundamental problem with the apparently correct idea that the Library contains all possible knowledge?
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3. “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
Although The Library of Babel is in some ways a playful riff on the concept of infinity and in another way a translation of the idea of knowledge and meaning into the metaphor of a library, a deeper truth, I suspect, is the idea of understanding and the ways in which language plays into knowledge and understanding. The desconstruction of language into writing is going to be accepted without much questioning by most literate individuals. Arguably, however, reducing communication to writing eliminates a significant element of communication–the most obvious support for this is the continuing commentary about the manifold miscommunications by text and email, wherein it is extremely difficult to communicate tone–which apparently requires a significantly expanded number of words to be done effectively.
The various arguments over “meaning” in written works might seem to be further support, though I would suspect these are simply an artifact of our current preoccupation in literature classes with the printed word. Hamlet, for instance, loses only part of its ambiguity on stage or film. One might dismiss text-based productions (essentially all non-improv theatre or film), however, and take as “texts” strings of words that were not originally written. Even so, just think about how different people use the phrase “I love you” at different times, and it becomes clear that moving from written to oral communication does not automatically clear away the underbrush. The advantage of oral communication, of course, is that such meaning-modifiers as tone are much easier to communicate. Even so, such things as “body language” and “eye contact” can contribute significantly to communication in certain circumstances as can non-verbal screams of anguish or triumph or even ambiguous whimpers.
The fact that whimpers or screams can be ambiguous suggests, perhaps, that the inherent ambiguities of “language” elaborated in such detail by writers such as Derrida and Saussure can be extended to non-verbal (and hence non-linguistic?) communication. Or perhaps, the apposite conclusion is simply that our traditional definitions of language are much too limited. An interesting topic for, as they say, another day.
A/the point, of course, is that ambiguity in language use, while inherently (I agree) part of the structure of non-mathematical languages, is probably more profound than simply language. I suspect, as Shannon elaborated, that it is effectively inherent to communication of any kind. Apart from physical and entropic considerations, though, at least as people elaborate language, there seems to be a fundamental ambiguity in most human communication that probably comes from something “inside us.” Whether that is simply because, at base, each of us “lives, as he dreams, alone” as Conrad puts it or whether it’s because the Delphic admonition to “Know thyself” is inherently impossible is unclear–and probably undeterminable, for reasons implicit in the exposition above.
So, the short answer to the question at the heart of this story is clearly “Of course not.” Apart from the metaphysical question of whether we can be sure of anything, it should be clear that we cannot in fact be sure of understanding any language-based communication (probably at all, but to avoid argument, I’ll provisionally add “except of the simplest nature” to my statement).
Yet, as is true I would argue of the best literature, the answer to the question is not nearly so important as the further questions it provokes. It’s reasonably obvious that we can’t be sure of what Borges (or the narrator) is saying in this story because if for no other reason, the math will be out of reach of most people. Plus, once you recognize that the story is about communication and language use, it becomes clear that the question has to be rhetorical with an intended answer of “No.” Apart from being an illustration of its point (and, of course, I have come to think after teaching with Dr. Bellows, or perhaps simply from teaching a long time, that a work in which form and content support each other is a better work than one in which they are odds), the interest of the story is the further questions it provokes, and not just the obvious one of “Why can we not be sure of getting the narrator’s point?” (or, by extension, any narrator’s point).
No, as this collection of not-quite-stream-of-consciousness thoughts has perhaps illustrated, the more interesting (to me) questions are ones that take off from the platform of the limitations in the possibility of “accurate communication”: where do the various problems arise?
- ·Transmission of symbols?
- ·Conversion of ideas into symbols?
- ·Ambiguities of the associations of signifiers with signifieds?
- ·Difficulty of converting thoughts into transmissible symbols?
- ·Potential impossibility of “thinking” outside of a language set?
- ·Lack of correspondence between emotive states and rational states?
- ·Similar inherent problems at the level of neuronal communication as at the level of symbolic communication and therefore and impossibility of knowing anything at all even internally, leaving aside the issue of communication?
And yet, if such (or any such) are indeed the case, then whence comes our belief (as well as our experience) that in spite of all these potential pitfalls, our experience of language (or non-verbal communication) is that it does, in fact, work pretty well most of the time? Is that belief justified? Is it restricted (as politics might suggest) more to matters of “fact” than conclusions or social implications drawn therefrom?
And too, while the capability for language seems to be innate in people, clearly the particular language (neither vocabulary nor syntax) is innate, with the result that in order to learn how even to pose these questions to ourselves, we have to be socialized by others and learn much of what we are saying cannot be clearly communicated exactly through communication with others. One is reminded of T S Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”….
It is possible that, to a point, the principle of stepwise refinement works here. We approximate a “meaning” or attempt at communicating something and we gauge by the reaction elicited how successful we were, perhaps modifying what we say or learning that we should modify it in future attempts in similar situations. I think something similar goes on internally as well, where I think about something (better, write something like this essay) and in the process of articulating what I think I believe, I come to refine that belief somewhat. The advantage of reflective thought, I posit, over simply learning rhetorical strategies is that the former cause you to look at your argument from a quasi-external position, whereas the latter do not (or at best, simply cause you to look at the rhetorical devices from the standpoint of a potential audience–a useful perspective, no doubt, but not necessarily related to the quality of what you think/want to say).
Ultimately, as the story suggests, we can’t be sure of understanding any sort of communication, including ones with ourselves or ones that originate from non-human sources (if you want to extend the definition of “communication” somewhat. More important (or perhaps simply more interesting) to my mind is the consideration of why this lack of understanding (or perhaps simply lack of certainty) occurs and what its implications are outside the field of reading and critiquing literature…
[and the bell rings….]