Borges and the Paper Kingdom

• Autores: Max Ubelaker Andrade
• Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 51, Nº. 2, 2022, págs. 9-27
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Understanding the relationship between Burton's approach to interpretation opens a counternarrative within "La biblioteca de Babel" that disrupts the explicit claims of the narrator while refocusing our attention on his own process of engaging with language while his society of seekers falls into a state of disarray, beset by despair, waves of suicides, and a deadly epidemic of respiratory disease (I, 763). When it is read with an awareness of the story to come, this approach can feel validated: scholars have thus approached it as a succinct representation of the central ideas in the story.1 However, when we turn to Burton's book, the "art" being referenced is purely mathematical: he is simply describing the joy in learning the calculations that allow us to arrive at the vast quantities produced by the logical combination of known elements. Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, whereas in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c. [.] we have thousands of authors of all sorts, many great libraries full well furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates; and he is a very block that is affected with none of them. The problem is compounded when Burton considers the torrents of books that seem to pour out of presses-he laments that "the number of books is without number" in his "scribbling age" and compares their proliferation to the expansion of a "paper kingdom" (19).