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CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Place of the Library To my mother It is rather curious that “The Library of Babel”1 is one of Borges’s stories in which, if indeed literature is referred to, as in so many other of his writings, those references to books, stories, quotes, are less numerous and more trivial than one might have predicted. The library of a narration that lacks literary references continues to be a library? The narrator describes the place, the administration of space, aspects and details of the building’s construction, the number of books, of pages, of lines, of letters. Those materials Borges’s narrator proportions count more than the books it contains, than the stories told by the books, than the quotes, which count so much. However, when dealing with a library in an enigmatic story, contaminated by unreality, to reason according to a realist logic would be neither logical nor realist. Nor is the procedure unusual in a writing that, like Borges’s, invents its own system. For example, one of his most recurrent, and most recognized, provocations consists of confirming the authenticity of the Koran by pointing out that in the Koran there are no camels. He understands that an imposter would abound in camels, caravans of camels on each page.2 Coherent with this vision, he argues that if, in the story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the problem is time, the author “does not once use the word time.”3 Perhaps this significant literary lack in the library can be justified in a similar way. For this reason, here, in the National Library of France and at the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Borges,4 I am not interested in delving into the library, or the authors, or their books, or their readers, but rather into the tensions that are produced between a place and letters, a back and forth that makes of the library the common place par excellence , toward which all letters converge. I would run through the itinerary of an imagination that parts from a place, a sacred place, until arriving 149 at a letter, a sacred letter, that displaces it. But, as all places and all letters exist in writing, I would like to legitimate, by way of the name, by way of the letter, a place. 5 “Borges and the library”: the theme seems excessive. By proposing it in these circumstances, the formulation implies something more and something less, since I could not well keep from referring to “Borges in the Library.” Despite the monumental dimension, this location, in a determined space, is also a reduction. Be it of or in the library, it is a question of “Borges’s universe,” but this formula already exists as the title to a book that was dedicated to him here, in France, some years ago.5 I presume that title alluded to the first words of one of Borges’s stories that configures a “passage”6 (pasaje) of today’s literary landscape (paisaje). “The universe (which others call the Library),” as is well known, are the first words of “The Library of Babel.”7 This story insinuates in turn “The caprice or imagination or utopia of the Total Library,” the first words and the brief essay that Borges published years earlier in the journal SUR.8 In dealing with Borges it would seem impossible, from the beginning, to elude the vinculum of the quotation, that is to say, to begin by evoking another book or one of his literary texts in order to protect, through the auspices of previous publications, the initiation of one’s own discourse. In recent decades, much has been said of quotations and ciphers, but even so, there has been perhaps insufficient emphasis placed on that anaphoric necessity of discourse that makes use of a quotation as a key and as an initiation. As if it were possible to make use of the word without realizing that the word had already been used before, as if the B that the commencement of the Bible introduces had been the model for all commencements to come; since even that first initiation, Genesis for some, “Heading” for others, which begins by describing the origins of the universe, does not begin with the first letter (aleph) but with the second letter (beth), whose traces are mimetically, mystically associated with a house, the universal dwelling, the universe. On this occasion, despite my having tried to avoid them, it was not...

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