Borges, Jorge Luis | Theodore G. Ammon (essay date 1993)
Theodore G. Ammon (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: “A Note on a Note in ‘The Library at Babel,’” in Romance Notes, Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 265–69.
[In the following essay, Ammon interprets Borges's “The Library of Babel” as a commentary on the philosopher Ludwig Wittegenstein's Tractatus.]
In Borges' story “The Library of Babel” there occurs the following curious footnote:
I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder.
(Labyrinths 57)
In recent history the most important book in the West that purports to be a ladder is arguably Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In proposition #6.54 Wittgenstein writes:
My...
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