Borges, Foreseer of the Internet

March 3, 2008

There has been recent discussion about how the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges may have foreseen the Internet. A New York Times article from January of this year sketches this claim:

Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

It is not hard to see Borges as someone who could be fascinated by hypertextual possibilities opened up by the Internet. The seemingly infinite world of the Internet is matched by his own seemingly infinite library of Babel. The noise of languages and choices of interpretation on the Internet would have been interesting to him, as would the possibilities of Second Life or a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG).

Our question should be: how exactly does the work of Borges resemble the Internet? Borges inhabited a world of classic literature, his avatars being Cervantes, Dante, Coleridge, 1,001 Nights, and the musings of theologians from all mystical traditions. The Internet is as kind as daytime television to the books that Borges loved. That is to say, not kind at all. Aside from a taste for detective fiction, Borges gives no evidence of embracing the radical leveling of the Internet.

The creation of a "second world" such as that seen in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is by no means limited to the Internet. The best example of the creation of a second world would be Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.. soon to be followed by roll playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. The Internet is beginning to come into its own in this area, but it represents only a continuation of earlier fantasy experiments. Later Internet efforts could have provided Borges with fodder for his fiction, but Borges would have been as interested in these Internet worlds as he was in Tolkien's work. It is a line of development that is interesting from a certain theoretical line.. but a great bore in and of itself.

The work of Borges does not conform easily to the Internet. Translations of his stories can be found online, but they are barely readable. His work is involved and does not easily lend itself to the keyword-style that is the heart of hyperlinks. So there is nothing Internet-y about his fictions; they work best in books that rest in the hands of a careful reader. Of course more and more reading will be done online, and that will include reading of Borges, but this is only incidental to the appreciation of Borges and so far as I can see adds nothing important to the experience.

As soon as one starts actually naming qualities about Borges that resemble the Internet, those qualities look rather flabby. The connection between Borges and the Internet relies on superficial "woh dude" parallels. But the interesting fact is that Borges gives us a tool for understanding exactly this kind of specious relation-by-hindsight in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors." His point in this essay is useful: our knowledge of Kafka allows us to read literary history backwards and group together disparate writers as Kafkaesque: "The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (365).

The Internet is a lot like Kafka. It is an imaginatively strong form that has certain remarkable characteristics that we tend to read backwards into literary history. Borges is thus Internet-esque, you could say. And why not push back further and add William Blake and Callimachus? From this perspective a host of writers appear and group themselves together into a category that did not exist in their own time. That is fine, but let no one be fooled that they were actually of the Internet party without knowing it.