The Book of Sand as Hypertext

If the more geometrico explanation didn't work for the narrator of "El Libro de Arena," I nonetheless sense that he hinted at the nature of the Book of Sand and then completely forgot about it for the rest of the narrative.  If "the line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes"—and notice that we move from the one dimensional (line) to the two dimensional (plane) to the three dimensional (volume) and finally to the four dimensional (hypervolume)—then, in what dimension does the Book of Sand reside?

It resides in the hyper dimension and it is therefore a hypertext.

I could have used the word hypervolume instead of hypertext, since Jorge Luis Borges actually uses the word "hypervolume" in the section I just quoted and since he uses the word "volume" to describe the Book of Sand in his afterword to the collection of short stories, El Libro de Arena.  He says, "Two unlucky and inconceivable objects are the subject of the last two stories. 'The Disk' is the Euclidean circle, which has but one face; 'The Book of Sand,' a volume of innumerable pages" (emphasis mine).

I could have used hypervolume, with "volume" used as a pun for books and three-dimensional objects, yet I chose to use the word hypertext.  The word text, if you remember, means literally "to weave" or "a thing woven" (as in the word textile) at the same time that it means "a book or written code."  And there are two instances in which weaving is alluded to in the short story.  The first instance is the epigram, which reads

"...thy rope of sands...

George Herbert (1593-1623),"

and by the way, a rope is merely a weaving of several strands of twine.  The second instance is the mention that the Book of Sand is "a volume in octavo, bound in cloth," and "cloth" is a weaving of cotton material.

I also use hypertext to retain the idea that the Book of Sand is a holy text, just like the Bible is a book whose verses are usually referred to as texts.  Holy texts are always above us and represent that which is "over, above, beyond, exceedingly, ... overmuch, above measure," which is the meaning of the preposition and adverb hyper.  It is this aboveness that makes the narrator feel like a beast: "It helped nothing to consider that I was no less monstrous [than the book], I who looked on it with eyes and touched it with ten fingers with nails."

And of course, I want hypertext to echo with our contemporary idea of hypertext as digital text displayed on computers, text that is not printed with ink on a page, a very material substance, but text written with HTML language codes and existing in airy nothingness.  The ether is the heaven and realm of the new digital world we have invented, and the sacred secular text, or hypertext, of this digital dimension is "the Book of Books"—the Book of Sand.