08/01/2014
Blog Entry 2:
Now that I have considered the short story and created some
initial notation, which outlines my own personal take on the narrative; I will
as suggested in blog entry 1 use this entry to research into more depth outside
influences that may have affected Borges and the content of his writing. I will
focus mainly on which outside factors may have affected or influenced The Library of Babel.
The Library of Babel available at:
(Borges, 1944)
All that I know so far is that Borges was Argentinian and
that the short story The Library of Babel
was published as part of a collection, The
Garden Forking Paths, in 1944, and that the story was translated by Andrew
Hurley, in New Your in 1998.
I am also aware that Borges wrote The Library of Babel during the Second World War: This war is famed
for the Nazi regime, and 11 years before the Library of Babel was written, in
1933 the Nazi book burnings occurred.
“They would invade hexagons, show
credentials that were not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and
condemn entire walls or books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we
lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes. Their name is execrated today.”
(Borges, 1944)
As aforementioned in blog entry 1, I have suggested that
areas of the text may be referring to the Nazi book burnings, realising that
the short story was written not long after suggests more strongly that Borges
has used this device to portray his disgust at such events.
Further reading on the Nazi book burning:
(Wikipedia, 2013)
Further Reading on World War II:
(Wikipedia, 2014)
I have begun my investigation by reading more about Borges’
life. Further Reading, an informative biography about Borges’ life written by
Allen B. Ruch:
(Ruch, 2004)
“…at the turn of the century the middle-class
Borges family felt distinctly out of place.” (Ruch, 2004) The short story
gives, to me a distinct atmosphere that the narrator feels out of place with
his surroundings. Could it be that Borges wanted to suggest the narrator had
created this “library” (Borges, 1944) as an escape from the real world? The
library retains obscure aspects of the real world, which suggests that the
narrator feels overcome by what is going on around him, assuming that this
library is a world he has created.
From
reading further the biography by Ruch, it would appear that his father, mother
and grandmother heavily influenced Borges: “His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges,
was a lawyer and a psychology teacher whose personal beliefs were founded in
anarchy.” (Ruch, 2004) This may suggest why Borges’ narrator seems hopeless in
his quest to find a religious or spiritual answer, due to Borges’ father being
non- religious. The story is written with what I perceive to be a rather dull
outlook on the religious theories that seemingly surround it, was this Borges’
own opinion? “Borges was terribly fond of both of his parents.” (Ruch, 2004)
Borges’ relationship with his parents according to this text may have possibly
influenced him more strongly to partake in their views and opinions, thus
affecting the way he may have wrote.
“Borges’s younger sister Norah, his
junior by two years, was his only real childhood friend… acted out scenes from
books, and spent their time roaming the labyrinthine library and the garden,
two images which would find endless incarnations in his writing.” (Ruch, 2004)
The fact that Borges spent most of his time in a large library in his childhood
is a clear influence on The Library of
Babel, the feeling of dwelling solely in a library for all time and the
Library in fact being a suggested metaphor for the Universe (Borges, 1944),
suggests that this environment was very much familiar to Borges as it is to his
narrator.
Borges lived with his family in
Argentina until he was 15 and then moved to Geneva (Switzerland), where they
stayed during the First World War (Ruch, 2004). The war lasted 4 years and
would have affected Borges writing style and content along with many other
writers. Could certain arguments that happened in the library be metaphorical
wars?
Extra reading about the First World
War:
(Wikipedia, 2014)
Ruch also states that during school,
Borges struggled with languages: The library
of Babel has constant descriptions about misunderstanding and inability to
read “impenetrable text”. Could Borges be giving the reader an insight into his
own struggle with comprehending different languages?
“in 1937 he landed a
$70/month job as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal
Library. His work involved classifying and cataloging the library’s holdings,
and it was a disappointingly simple job in which he was actually advised by his
colleagues to slow down so that they could spread the task out as long as they
could. He remained in the library for nine years, nine years of “solid
unhappiness” leading a “menial and dismal existence.” He worked among
colleagues who were less concerned with literature than with horse racing and
girl watching, and to add insult to injury, his superiors and colleagues didn’t
realize that he was the same Jorge Luis Borges who wrote some of the very same
stories which they were cataloging! Usually, Borges would finish his work in
the first hour of his day and spend the rest of the time in the basement,
reading the classics or translating modern fiction into Spanish. (Borges was
the first to translate Woolf and Faulkner into Spanish.” (Ruch, 2004)
The above quote taken from the website linked
at the top of this blog entry, gives an insight into the atmosphere and
surroundings Borges found himself in that seemingly have a rather strong
influence on the setting for The Library
of Babel. It would appear that Borges put onto the narrator a lot of
thoughts and feelings that were his own. The narrator himself seems to be in a
similar constant loop or cataloguing endlessly books in a library, as Borges did
in real life. The narrator, much like Borges himself is an outsider, alone in
his tasks in their perspective libraries where seemingly few others are
interested. Ruch goes on to inform that Borges in the basement of the library
where he worked wrote The Library of Babel.
(Ruch, 2004)
No That I have gained a better
understanding of the potential factors that affected and/ or inspired Borges to
write The Library of Babel, I feel I
am at a better standpoint in order to begin considering visual communication
that could accompany the short story; however I feel that I have still not
addressed others interpretations of the story yet, so my tasks are as follows:
Create visual sketches/ responses to my interpretations of the story and then
research and consider the views of others with regards to The Library of Babel.
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