In March I published my first short story, “Zeno’s Library,” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. It’s about the acquisitions director of an infinite library. I’m aiming for CivilWarLand in Bad Decline meets “The Library of Babel.” I won’t spoil it.
The Borges story calls out the contradiction of a universal library: if it contains everything, in equal quantity, then it’s mostly gibberish. You’d never find the books with meaning. In “Babel,” the search for meaning is a metaphorical religious quest. In “Zeno,” it’s someone’s job. Who would take that job, and how would they deal with its inevitable failure?
“Babel” is a math story. It’s about a total library, but one with only a certain small alphabet and a certain length of book, so it’s extremely large but finite. (In his book The Unimaginable Mathematics of the Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch explains how big: if you shrunk each book to the size of a proton, and filled the known universe with them, then shrunk that universe to the size of a proton and filled a universe with these proton-sized universes, you still wouldn’t have made a noticeable dent. The library’s size is literally unimaginable.) I’m not especially interested in the orderly symmetry of the library, so I made mine infinite. Bye bye Lil Sebastian, you’re five thousand candles in the wind.
I might write something serious one day, but so far I’m much more comfortable with comedy. “Zeno’s Library” floated in and out of comedy in different versions. The first was an unrecorded episode of my audio sitcom Roommate From Hell, where Bea and Claire visit Borges’s library to find a secret book, but get caught up in library programs. They attend an absurdist reading; they join a writing group with infinite monkeys.
The second version was my initial pandemic project, an “official podcast” of the infinite library. Very jokey. Too corny, too plotless, plus it felt derivative of the superior Welcome to Night Vale. I dropped it quickly.
The third version was a straight story, much longer and a bit more serious. I abandoned the “public library” aspect and tried to find a more longterm storyline. What if a group of explorers were trying to catalog the library from scratch? But I kept painting myself into corners. The story kept turning into a generic “books are magical” fantasy novel. It didn’t feel special. If I wanted to worldbuild, I had to give up all my world-breaking jokes.
So I gave up on plot for jokes. I wanted to burn through this world, making off-hand references to things I couldn’t possibly follow up on ten chapters later. I would “use up” all the fun implications of my particular library, in one short story.
Jonathan Basile’s book Tar for Mortar explores some internal (and presumably intentional) contradictions of “The Library of Babel.” For example, if Borges’s library only uses 22 letters plus commas, periods, and spaces, then how can it contain the quoted passage “Axaxaxas mlö”? Borges borrowed that made-up phrase from one of his other famous stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” One of Borges’s translators, Andrew Hurley, wrote that axaxaxas mlö “can only be pronounced as the author’s cruel, mocking laughter.”
Once I felt comfortable “breaking” the world, I could forget about plot and play around with concepts. The concepts led to the characters. I’d previously given Zeno long self-serious speeches about math and meaning, but I realized I was just repeating my research back to myself. It was scaffolding. So I took it down and I was left with a cozy one-bedroom.
I submitted the story to Vol. 1 Brooklyn, who have published six stories by my acquaintance and influence Lucie Britsch. They graciously accepted, and didn’t change their minds after I sent them a bunch of self-edits.
Now that I’ve tied off a storyline, I could even come back to this world without all the baggage. Hell, I could claim it as a frame story for literally any other story. Which is a nice card to have up my sleeve.