A Reading of The Lottery in Babylon

by Russell Stanley Geronimo

The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges begins with a self-introduction by a narrator who
ruminates about a strange game in his native land. The sentence begins, "Like all men in
Babylon, I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave". A particular interest is the repetition of
words at the beginning of the clauses. In The God's Script, the author writes, "Gradually, in this
way, I subdued the passing years; gradually, in this way, I came into possession of that which
was already mine." In The Circular Ruins, again: "No one saw him disembark in the unanimous
night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud". We are interested why
Borges is obsessed with the use of ‘anaphora’. For all we know it is a simple verbal habit.
Formally, it echoes the notion of repetition as theme and structure of his fiction. The narrator is
indeed an instance of repetition, for he practically tells us that he is a recurring variation of man.
He invokes the Stoic doctrine of metempsychosis: "Pythagoras remembered having been
Pyrrhus and before that
Euphorbus and before that some other mortal". But Borges shows no interest in sheer
mysticism of the soul. Like the fictional race in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, he treats
"metaphysics as a branch of the literature of the fantastic". We have an intuition that in this
paragraph he is talking about some Platonic mold. In the history of philosophy there has been a
great divide between the idea that reality is either One or Many, and Borges has taken the side
of monism into its logical (and almost hysterical) extremes.

This fictional Babylon is a place "where the lottery is the basis of reality". God, reason or money
could be a "basis of reality", but how do we accept the premise that a whole society revolves
around a game? We can appreciate the eccentricity by referring to a short story by Franz Kafka,
which must have been Borges' model for this work. In The Great Wall of China, Kafka's fictional
Chinese empire is so obsessed in building the wall that all fields of knowledge, all activities of
men, are bent toward the idea of efficient construction -- e.g. the most important subject in
school is architecture, duty to state is possible only by serving in the building of the wall, art
must adhere to principles of masonry, and so forth. Borges borrows the idea. He uses the lottery
as a similar device. As Kafka talks about human impossibility by employing a parable of an
infinite empire, Borges uses a similar technique to talk about the infinite work of chance and
fate.

The narrator elaborates on the evolution of the operations of the lottery. It begins as something
very crude, very simple: "In broad daylight a drawing took place. Those who won received silver
coins without any other test of luck". From here we are in for a neat narrative trick. The story
takes the pattern of a widening ripple: something very small escalates into something we can no
longer comprehend and manage because its scale has far surpassed us. Borges adds a feature
to this familiar narrative structure: it has exceeded us in scope that it has already become
synonymous with reality. But this reality cannot remain the same; reality is already
contaminated by the game. Borges transforms the lottery to such an extent that the Babylonians
become confused with the nature of all appearances. The infection of the real by what is
invented, dreamlike, illusory and fictional is the reason why most of Borges' characters seem to
exhibit paranoia. I can only think of an analogy from Christopher Nolan’s Inception: unable to
separate dream and reality, a character kills herself believing falsely that she will only wake up.
A similar thing happens in the story. Paranoia and mistrust of appearances infect people's
capacity for knowledge -- the narrator says that institution behind the lottery is so powerful and
so subtle in its operations that they command influence "in a bird's call, in the shadings of rust
and of dust, in the half dreams of dawn". This is not psychological paranoia, but paranoia of a
philosophical kind -- an epistemological paranoia:

"I have known what the Greeks do not know, incertitude."

This fatal uncertainty (as a human failure, as a limit of our capacity for knowledge) is the real
subject matter of the story. It is the failure of not being able to reckon the thread of order
underlying the universe. Kafka found despair in this, but for Borges it is a source of the fantastic,
because without such reckoning the real does not have a claim over the unreal.

In the beginning the lottery presented little risk of monetary loss, but "its moral value was nil".
When the people running the game introduced a fine for those who drew a certain lot, its
popularity increased in the whole population. Those who faced fines refused to pay and
preferred to be jailed in order to defraud the Company, which is the institution behind the lottery.
Then there is a change in the rule of the game. First, the fines were abolished and punishments
were introduced. Second, there arose a war among the classes regarding who should have
exclusive enjoyment of the lottery. To resolve this conflict the Company needed an almost
absolute power to manage the lottery's vastness. It is because of this power that led the lottery
to permeate all aspects of life. It was no longer a mere game of chance of rewards and
punishments. It became a basis for directing individual men's destinies, from love affairs to
political relations. The Company had to work in secret because the Babylonians did not like to
be reminded that their destinies were the mere result of chance. The obsessive concealment of
their operations produce a conspiratorial mood among the people: "There were certain stone
lions, there was a sacred latrine called Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which,
according to general opinion, led to the Company." Again and again, the narrator lapses into
this mood that somewhere behind the ordinary appearances of everyday life there is a
conspiracy, a secret order being carried out:

"There are also impersonal drawings, with an indefinite purpose. One decrees that a sapphire of
Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from the
roof of a tower;"

It is here where Borges introduces a paradox: the more the Company intensifies chance in the
world, the more the world does not seem to be subjected to chance. Even the flight of a bird can
no longer be read innocently, for it may be the work of "astute and omnipotent" members of the
Company.

The more the Company infuses randomness into a happening, the more the happening is
suspect of being the result of a secret plan. The Babylonians could no longer perceive
accidents, for these are interpreted as being part of a scheme: "The buyer of a dozen amphoras
of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one of them contains a talisman or a snake."

There are sages who want to study the history of the Company, perhaps hoping to separate
what is naturally occurring in the universe and what is an artificial consequence of the lottery.
However, the operations of the game forbid them this knowledge: "A paleographic document,
exhumed in a temple, can be the result of yesterday's lottery or of an age-old lottery." Even
scientific investigation cannot go beyond the game, which transcends all. Attempts to cleanse
reality from the operations of the lottery become impossible. Knowledge itself becomes
impossible, for the spirit of inquiry may itself have been rigged by the Company. The players,
eternally trapped within the game, cannot gain total knowledge of it, for they cannot transcend
its vastness. The lottery is always ahead of everyone and Babylon becomes a collective and
persistent paranoid dream. "The drunkard who improvises an absurd order, the dreamer who
awakens suddenly and strangles the woman who sleeps at his side, do they not execute,
perhaps, a secret decision of the Company?"

An infinite game of chance is reducible, comparable and even identical to an infinite work of
fate: such is the paradox at the heart of this piece.