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 propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he had...