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The library of "La biblioteca de Babel" is one of Jorge Luis Borges's most enduring literary inventions. Mathematicians, architects, and literary scholars have attempted to coherently represent its repeating hexagonal chambers, despite myriad logical contradictions and a less-than-reliable narrator. The challenges of visualizing this library are echoed by the difficulty of interpreting (or contextualizing) the books that it contains, which can seem to hold every possible text within their collective pages, joining treasures of knowledge with vast expanses of nonsense. The story has, over time, become a touchstone within Latin American literary studies that connects philosophy, language, and mathematics with a critique of totalizing systems of knowledge that, for some, also offers a sly, postcolonial allegory. The universe that it describes is often understood as a trap of language that challenges readers to critically reconsider their own practices of interpretation.
This essay shows that Borges's library of repeating hexagons directly originates from a 17th century theory of textual interpretation offered by Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy-a theory that has the capacity to radically alter the impact of Borges's ideas. When applied to the story, Burton's ideas center a unique text that is alluded to but also purposefully obscured by Borges: the manuscript that forms the basis for the story itself. 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). This shift in focus allows us to reconsider the intensely visual puzzles of the Library as strategic distractions from a text written by a narrator approaching blindness that has the capacity to completely collapse and reorganize the rules of the universe that it evokes.
The key role of Robert Burton in "La biblioteca de Babel" is hinted at by the story's epigraph, which borrows from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It reads: "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters..." (I, 761). Taken by itself, as an evocative fragment, the epigraph seems to gesture toward the art of...