The Library of Babel has been sometimes read as an anticipation of the world-wide Web and at the end of the present essay, which is a surface interpretation of the story, the writer provides a deep interpretation of one striking line in the story “what is written annuls or phantasmizes us.” The Library of Babel as a metaphor for the world-wide Web is not a reading Borges might have intended since the story was written a long time before the arrival of the internet. But the deep reading will be of special interest today since it looks at what may have been done to humanity by the internet, in which ‘what is written’ has a life of its own. Writing, earlier, depended on ideation by people, but the internet may have transformed that.




The Library is Total

Ghivarghese Kuzhikandam


Complete Story: Library of Babel