Part 6: Literary Labyrinths
"The Net is Borgesian: everything exists simultaneously forever. [Borges] is, long before it happened, the archetypal poet of the Internet."
A. S. Byatt, novelist
In his celebrated short story, The Library of BabelΦ, Jorge Luis BorgesΦ describes a fantastical place that contains every conceivable book (of a certain length and format) arranged among a vast multitude of hexagonal galleries. The majority of books are nonsense, but every kind of information – true or false, useful or pointless – is contained somewhere on the shelves. Yet ironically the collection as a whole, precisely because it contains every possible combination of letters and words, actually contains no information at all, and men are lost in its sheer comprehensiveness.
It is hard to think of a more apt literary metaphor for the World Wide Web – or at least a certain cynical view of it. This library even has its own Google:
"On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god."
Inspired by Borges's vision, Umberto Eco described in The Name of the Rose another great labyrinthine library, and wrote, as if faintly foreshadowing hyperlinks, about the notional network of influences that permeates all literature:
"Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of other books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another..."
If books speak of other books then few do so more playfully than Eco's, which is layered upon a whole library's worth of old and modern influences, as if written on some ancient palimpsest. In our newly networked world this dimension can be realised as hyperlinks, mouse-overs, pop-ups and other effects that between them are capable of providing an almost endless variety of annotation and context.
Though more powerful, these are not unlike the marginalia and iluminations of old. In another scene from The Name of the Rose the wily detective-monk, William of Baskerville, and his young charge, Adso of Melk, gaze in awe and amusement at the subversive illustrations of a young monastic scribe, now dead and presumably murdered:
"The writing was tiny; the marginal illuminations, barely visible at first sight, demanded that the eye examine them closely to reveal all their beauty (and you asked yourself with what superhuman instrument the artist had drawn them to achieve such vivid effects in a space so reduced). The entire margins of the book were invaded by miniscule forms that generated one another, as if by natural expansion, from the terminal scrolls of the splendidly drawn letters..."
The networked novel, too, allows digressions from the text. As with ancient illuminations, some readers will choose to pass over these elaborations while others will immerse themselves in order to satisfy their curiosity, or just kill more time. It's not hard to see how a wide variety of stories – from the sublime (e.g., UlyssesΦ) to the ridiculous (e.g., The Da Vinci CodeΦ) – might benefit from providing readers with options to explore influences and allusions.
But why stop there? Hyperlinked digressions could also be used to help tell the story – to elaborate and deepen the fiction itself, to provide colour and texture. This approach is not enirely new. In a way it is an extension of the existing trend in modern literature towards realism – a dwelling on details that are inconsequential to the plot but help to create a more convincing illusion of reality, like the facade on a film set or theme-park attraction.
Borges himself tried something similar, though, typically for him, he followed an unusual path. Some of his best works were created not by writing a story but rather by writing a commentary about a non-existent work (e.g., A Survey of the Works of Herbert QuainΦ). He claimed that this was a result of his laziness, reviews of art being much easier to create than the art itself. But in truth he was playing with the medium, and doing so partly to create a more acute sense of reality. (And that he did so not by layering on backstory and detail in the traditional way, but but rather by employing a fundamentally non-fictional form, is a sign of his remarkable imagination.)
Online fiction is still at a very early stage, and we have yet to see many Borgesian sparks of genius. Many attempts to use the web to make stories seem more real have so far been rather humdrum: fake company websites and character blogs, mostly associated with TV programmes. (Primatech PaperΦ, for example, is a fictional company from HeroesΦ and The CarverΦ a character in Nip/TuckΦ.)
But more imaginative examples such as The Lost ExperienceΦ point a way foward for other media, including books. (In fact, one of the fictional characters in that story 'wrote' a real detective novel, Bad TwinΦ that employed some of the same themes as the TV show, and turned up on screen as the only book that the cast of castaways had on their island. Confused? You should be.)
Despite protestations by John UpdikeΦ, not all books need edges. Like a Borgesian or Ecoian library, some should be labyrinthine places to explore.