Borges and the literary origin of the internet

Was Borges really an internet visionary? Can his story 'The Library of Babel', written in 1941, be considered premonitory? Intuyo, long before Tim Berners-Lee, the idea of a vast network capable of housing all the fruits of human knowledge?

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Several books and newspaper articles have investigated in recent years how the works of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986, prefigured the total virtual reality we live in.The American Pearl Sasson-Henry, author of 'Borges 2.0: from text to virtual worlds', refers such as the internet, Wikipedia and blogs have a great relationship with the writer's stories.He knew how to turn the reader into an "active participant" , as is the case with users of the global network and hypertext.

the HYPERTEXT of borges and cortzar

In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941), a hypertextuality genesis is sensed: "Time perpetually branches towards countless futures," writes Borges, and imagines "a growing and vertiginous network of divergent, convergent and parallel times (...) covering all possibilities ".

Although in the hypertextual narrative prior to the Internet he also deserves honors Julio Cortazar. The Argentine writer of Belgian origin sat in 'Rayuela' (1963) an original way of reading the novel, with that sequence of jumps between chapters that today seems to us most normal to digital migrants.And, of course, to the natives.

We return to Borges along another path: in ' El Aleph' (1949), recreate the existence of a very small sphere that shone in an old mansion of Buenos Aires street Garay.Era " the place where all the places in the world are, without being confused, seen from every angle" . Through it, the protagonist of the story could see " the populous sea, the dawn and the afternoon, the crowds of America, a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid, a red maze...".Simply connect to Google Earth, or his twin brother Google Street, to understand it with eyes of the 21st century.

THE FIRST WIKIPEDIA

Anyone looking for a Wikipedia literary origin can enter the pages of ' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (1940).Borges proposes the creation of a great Encyclopaedia in which "a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers (...) This plan is so vast that the Each writer's contribution is infinitesimal ". Wikipedia, created 61 years later, currently has more than 46 million articles written collaboratively in 288 languages.

Borges and the literary origin of the internet

internet, "a complete idiot"

There are also those who find in Borges not only the prophecy, but also the refutation of new technologies .The Italian philologist Umberto Eco , who died in 2016, used to show his somewhat apocalyptic vision of the internet using the famous Borgian story 'Funes el memorioso' (1944).He tells the story of a man who remembered everything , without ruling out anything, not even one of the words he had heard in his life, "not every leaf of every tree or every gust of wind" .

In a master class on 'The future of memory', given by Eco in the Salon del Libro de Turin in 2010, the semiologist compared the protagonist of the story with the network of networks: " Today, the internet is like Funes, a complete idiot who remembers and doesn't filter ".

And not only that.In another passage of the story, Borges puts into the mouth of Ireneo Funes: " My memory is like a garbage dump." There is no more literary way to anticipate in seven decades at fake news.

BORGES, KODAMA AND OVERINFORMATION

And the funny thing is that the analog Borges, the librarian and blind Borges, was always quite skeptical in the face of technological advances of time.

Borges and the literary origin of the internet

He was assured by his widow, Maria Kodama-in the picture, last Monday, May 14, in Madrid, during the presentation of the book The Borges'-Library on a visit made by the International University Menendez Pelayo (UIMP) of Santander, in 2011: " He had no television and the only time he sat down before a device was when the man arrived at the Moon".

In an interview with Julio Cesar Calistro in 1983, the author himself reflected on the matter: " I, for example, managed to watch the arrival of man on the moon on television.I immediately helped to make it part of the news of the day and forget it later with so many new Apollo.On the other hand, it would have been different if it were announced that the man had reached the Moon and then each one would sound as it had happened.harass us with so much news...".

Yes, Borges also advanced to the society of overinformation, and it could even be said that he contributed to creating it in 'The Library of Babel', that infinite succession of hexagonal galleries capable of housing all the possible books, which the author equated with the universe and today we call the internet.

Images: Wikimedia Commons (Alicia D'Amico) and Carlos Barrio

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