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  • Do Borgesians Dream of Transcendent Totality?
  • Sarah Warren (bio)
Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality by Jonathan Basile. Dead Letter Office, 2018. 98 pages. $18.00 paperback, free e-book.

Borges, escapist daydreamer par excellence; Borges, inventor of the Internet. While both are flattering visions of the Argentine giant of literature, they are precisely those visions that Jonathan Basile seeks to elide in Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality. Macroscopically, this text might be framed as a retrospective on Basile's unorthodox scholarly ambition of achieving and expanding, in what we might (problematically) refer to as "actuality," Borges's fantastical literary conception of the Library of Babel: a universe taking the shape of an immense, elaborately designed library containing every possible permutation of a specific character set in a series of 410-page books. Readers may recognize Basile as the creator of libraryofbabel.info, which provides a digital reimagining of Borges's universe and has received significant media attention since its inception. Reflecting on the impetus behind this project, Basile reminisces that "contemplating 'The Library of Babel' one night, considering how it treats language as a purely mechanical, combinatorial process, [he] thought—that would make a killer app" (65)—and thus the digital archive was [End Page 250] born. Yet this project quickly outstripped the parameters of a mere Borgesian homage in the age of the worldwide web. Basile chronicles how, in his attempts to resolve the many internal slippages, tensions, and outright contradictions within Borges's text by closely investigating and moving between his so-called fictional and nonfictional works, he came to understand these "problems" as instead functional elements of Borges's storytelling—a playful irony with rich philosophical implications.

At the heart of Tar for Mortar is a concern for the Derridean notion of iterability—specifically, the conditions of repetition and novelty—and the possibilities of language and meaning, although these concerns emerge gradually and incrementally in the text. Basile's first objective is rather more targeted: given textual evidence and access to Borges's reflections on the matter, how ought we construct, architecturally speaking, the Library of Babel in such a way that it is spatially coherent? After all, the blueprints we are given are vague at best and Escheresque at worst: verbal diagrams of what Basile calls "anarchitecture" (22). Carefully identifying and visually representing a number of solutions—some more ingenious than others—to this dilemma, Basile reaches a solution, albeit not the one he intended: give up on the quest. He originally hoped to "balance tensions," but his desires ultimately shift from pragmatics to aesthetics: he "no longer long[s] for a solution" and would "much rather marvel at a text that manages, seemingly with as much intention as accident, to allow for so many elegant solutions while always leaving a remainder of irreconcilability" (31). Focusing in on the dubious reliability of the narrator and Borges himself, this irreconcilability then becomes thematized. How can we see, in the voice of the narrator, unreliable claims that transcend descriptive facts and instead reflect desires—that is, the dream of totality and unity within infinity—which depend on the self-identity of signs within the library? The foundation is thus laid for Basile to weave Borges's text into a tapestry of linguistics and semiotics, biography and philosophy, to discover the ineluctable surplus and loss of meaning inherent in language itself.

While this strong theoretical backbone of Tar for Mortar is quite enough to merit attention, including nuanced discussions linking Borges's implicit positions with the likes of ancient atomists (simple substances, divisibility, and totality) and Friedrich Nietzsche (the eternal return of the same, self-contradiction, and novelty), the less philosophically minded (or perhaps simply the more digital humanities minded) will appreciate a fascinating glimpse into the specificities of digital representation of theoretical work. Basile's objectives are clearly and helpfully aligned with [End Page 251] positioning Borges's thought such that it is intelligible within certain disciplinary discourses; how these objectives emerge, however, is anything but univocal and includes fascinating details articulating how Borgesian ideas were translated into technological processes. Basile's accomplishments with...

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