Fiction And Creation

Having just begun reading Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, I am struck by something that has been gnawing at me now for some years. Everyone else is writing stories like the ones I dream up and never write. Perhaps that is not so strange, though maybe it is. I can't say. What happens, though, if someone starts publishing the stories I write but do not publish? Where does that leave me?

We can say that there are an infinite number of stories, but we would be, strictly speaking, wrong. Borges understood this and expresses as much in his short story "The Library of Babel." Using a 22-letter alphabet (modelled, if we can accept the evidence of his broader work, on the Hebrew alphabet) plus the period, the space, and the comma, Borges imagines a library that doesn't exist in reality but that does exist.

This library contains books of 410 pages, with each page containing 40 lines of 80 characters. Every possible combination of the 25 characters exists precisely once. As he notes, it is enough that one book exists (and one page, or even one set of letters, if we want to push it to its extreme) to prove that they all exist.

While the number of possible books is extremely high (let's not deal with the math here), most are gibberish. The readable books are still mind-bogglingly numerous, but not all make sense from sentence to sentence, cover to cover. Even that number is almost unimaginably great. But it is finite. Of those books that make sense—that have a measure of structure and coherence by our rules—I have reproduced sections in what I have written (indeed, many that do not make sense from cover to cover contain what I have written, some in contiguous sections).

But this brings us back to the original issue. If I invent something, I have not invented it so much as tapped into the pages that always already exist within the library. Any other person may well do the same, though probability says it would contain at least minor variations. If I draw back far enough, then, I can see my own ideas everywhere. Does this mean that my ideas are unoriginal, even if they came "first," which is to say that I was conscious of their existence (within the library of possibility) before another who later wrote them and perhaps published them?

Have I ever been—can anyone ever be—original? We say that there is nothing new since the Greeks, but if that is true, the Greeks may well have realized that there was nothing new since (pick any earlier civilization of which the Greeks were aware. Indeed, there is nothing new since the first alphabet, and possibly before. Everything is an expression of that which already exists, which has always existed. Even the form of expression is old, having merely waited to be discovered. It's a humbling thought, even as it suggests that each of us has access to the (apparent, though false) infinity of creative expression.