Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
This is a review of four baffling short stories that promise to delight anyone whom they do not repel. It is an author whom I approach with much trepidation, since, at first glance, he seems to embody that type of experimental, formless, and pointless fiction which delights the postmodern literati and disgusts simple men of sane and simple tastes likemine. The author is Jorge Borges, and only because Gene Wolfe, a particular hero of mine, favorably recommends him, do I surmount my trepidation.
My unexpected reaction is one of fascination with the work. Apparently that experimental, formless, and pointless fiction which delights the postmodern literati turns out to be a close kin, if not a monstrous Siamese twin, of science fiction & fantasy. These stories could appear without a blush between the covers of Moorcock’s New Worlds, Farnworth Wright’s Weird Tales, or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
To describe them beggars my powers of description and insults the author. I cannot discuss them without giving away the surprises, and without betraying the luminous quality of the work, which shines through even the translated versions I met. Nonetheless, my hope that these words will find forgiving readers rather than just ones props up my fainting courage.
SPOILER WARNING! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
1. Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius
The tale (if it is a tale) begins in this wise:
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the concurrence of a mirror and an encyclopaedia. The mirror unsettled the far end of a corridor in a villa in Gaona Street, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Ramos Mejía; the encyclopaedia, fraudulently entitled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), is an exact, if belated, reprint of the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. All this took place four or five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we’d lingered over a discussion on the mechanics of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator omitted or distorted events, thereby creating discrepancies that would allow a handful of readers – a tiny handful – to come to an appalling or banal realization. From along the corridor the mirror spied on us. We found out (inevitably at such an hour) that there is something unnatural about mirrors. Then Bioy recalled that one of Uqbar’s heresiarchs had said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men.
The unnamed narrator, perhaps Borges himself, reflected into the tale as if in a mirror, searches for the origin of the cryptic phrase, convinced that Casares invented it and the country it came from. No reference to Uqbar exists under any spelling in various encyclopedia or atlases he consults. To his surprise, Casares returns with a volume containing the article, even though the same volume in another addition lacks it. Casares had remembered it inexactly.
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.
The article seems curiously vague, giving the location of Uqbar only by reference to nonexistent mountains and rivers. The literature of Uqbar (so the article authoritatively reports) was one of fantasy in that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön.
The narrator discovers, years later, an octovo volume among the effects of a dead Englishman named Herbert Ashe, A First Encyclopædia of Tlön. Volume XI. This encyclopedia is apparently the work of more than one man, but the world described in the articles has no relation to the real Earth.
He then describes the metaphysics of Tlön. The world is immaterialist in the sense of Bishop Berkeley, whom, it may be recalled from philosophy classes we slept through, proposed that the material world has no substance or persistence, aside from what the perception of God assigned to us. The inhibitors of Tlön have so completely embraced this notion, that their languages have no nouns. “To the inhabitants of Tlön, the world is not an assemblage of objects in space but a diverse series of separate acts.”
The droll implications of this metaphysic are drawn out with ironic clarity. On Tlön, they have no science aside from psychology, since no fact can be linked to another fact. Philosophy is merely a game of dialectic: it exists only to astonish, not to discover, and is classed as a type of fantastic fiction.
As befits an imaginary world, the rule of the persistence of objects is equally imaginary:
Centuries and centuries of idealism have continued to influence reality. In the oldest parts of Tlön, lost objects are frequently duplicated. Two people look for a pencil; the first finds it but says nothing; the second finds another pencil, just as real but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and, while they look unattractive, they are slightly longer.
Again, and with admirable rigor of imagination, the implications of this remarkable behavior of objects are drawn out. An archeologist is able to convince naïve students to look for the relicts of nonexistent civilizations, whose conviction allows them to draw physical objects from the ground. The past becomes as pliant as the future.
There follows a postscript dated 1947. (Like reading Orwell after the mid-1980’s, the oddity is lost on the modern reader. At the time of the publication, the years was 1940. The postscript steps off the edge of the calendar and renders the story a time travel tale.) The author describes the authorship of the curious volume: A multigenerational secret society was formed with the object of inventing a country. An American millionaire scorns the smallness of the scope, and demanded the society write the encyclopedia of an imaginary world. He agreed to fund the project provided “that impostor Jesus Christ” played no part in it. A later and much larger version of the encyclopedia, this one to be written in the language of Tlön, is planned, which will contain a description of an imaginary world tentatively called Orbis Tertius (one of whose demiurges worshiped there include the minor god Herbert Ashe).
First the narrator, then the world at large, encounters physical objects from Tlön: coins, a compass, or an unpleasantly small and heavy cylinder made of no metal of Earth. Then came the discovery books of Tlön, fascinating the world.
Ten years ago, any symmetrical scheme with an appearance of order – dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was enough to hold mankind in thrall. Why not submit to Tlön, to the immense, meticulous evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to reply that the real world too is ordered. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws – that is, non-human laws – that we shall never comprehend. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth contrived by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Contact and familiarity with Tlön have brought about the deterioration of our world. Mesmerized by that planet’s discipline, we forget – and go on forgetting – that theirs is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.
If our forecasts are not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön […] Then English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. Our world will be Tlön.
You can read the full text here, which is only slightly more than the length of my summary:
http://www.digiovanni.co.uk/borges/the-garden-of-branching-paths/tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.htm
What does the story mean? What are the narrator-omitted or distorted events which will permit only a few readers to intuit that meaning?
The story is written like an HP Lovecraft tale, where the narrator discovers one chilling clue at a time, that the world is not the world— except that the horror here is not that the universe is run by malign and insane extradimensional beings, but a much deeper and more serious horror: that the world is merely a delirium of self-deceptions, a postmodern narrative, or, to be precise, the philosophy of Berkeley as itwould stand if, allowing no pact with that impostor Christ, we removed the omniscience and objective from the immaterialism of Berkeley. What we are left with, if you remove God from Berkeley, is a system as rigorous and fascinating as the scientific racism of the Nazis, but one where anything, even the past, is neither true nor false.
Like Lovecraft, the tale is peppered to references to real events and real authors, and, like some of Lovecraft’s friends, conspirators with Borges in the real world have written articles and references to some of the fictions in Tlön, in order to help baffle poor students seeking to discover which footnotes refer to real things.
Unlike Lovecraft, Borges has an eerie and prescient pertinence (see the footnote below).
***
But here I discover I have no time left to more than touch on other of the fascinating short stories of Borges.Let me therefore review in curt haste.
2. Library of Babel
In ‘The Library of Babel’ a universe is described where every book, filled with every possible combination of letters and punctuations, fills an endless universe, which some people call the Library. Somewhere in the library, so certain savants aver, must be a book that describes the library, or justifies the meaning of a man’s life in it. But there also must be any number of books that differ from this one only by the placement of a comma, or the misspelling of a crucial word.
You can read it here:
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html
My interpretation of his short story (which no doubt differs from the real interpretation only by the placement of a comma or a misspelled word) is that a universe of perfect meaning would indeed be meaningless to the point of horror. That mere fact that nature’s book is not a mindlessly repeated mathematical Mandelbrot suggests the hand of an great Author.
(Albeit, I allow that a nonbeliever could read this same short story and be attracted to the faithfulness with which it mirrors our own real world, rather than, as I am, attracted to the comic unfaithfulness which the mirror does not reflect truly. Such is the genius of art.)
3. Lottery of Babylon
In ‘The Lottery of Babylon, a man from a commonwealth where not just money or fines are imposed by barbershop-run lotteries, but all aspects of life, is described in loving and droll detail. Each generation of Babylonians, out of a concern for equality, turned more and more of the events of their existence over to the lottery, so that a man could be slave one day and proconsul the next, condemned to die or proffered pardon by the decree of the hidden Company who runs the lottery. In conformity with this spirit, the scribes and historians of Babylon avow to introduce errors and misprints in all their volumes, so that no man, absent the decree of chance, can discover the truth in any book: and the decrees of the Company are propounded as often by impostors as by officers. The Lottery Company is so mysterious and omnipresent, and subjects such trivial things to random fate (in a bird’s cry, in the shades of rust and the hues of dust, in the cat naps of dawn) that some heretics of Babylon wonder if it exists at all, or, more vilely, whether the question of its existence is consequential in Babylon, where, after all, everything is run by chance.
You can read it here:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges02.htm
To me, a philistine science fiction reader, I am reminded of Shirley Jackson and Jack Vance, where the implications of a government by lottery are no more outrageous than a similar (and similarly droll) speculation by G.K. Chesterton in NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. The philosophical and theological implications are, of course, noteworthy, but whether I grasp them correctly or not, I will leave up to a die roll to decide.
The same ambiguity applies here as in the story described above: believers will see that since our world is nothing like the fictional absurdity of Babylon, it must be guided by a Lord, not by a lottery. Nonbelievers, reading the same words in the same rows, will see that since our world precisely matches the fictional absurdity of Babylon, it must, like Babylon, be a byproduct of blind and blundering fate. Which interpretation you will see if you read this tale is of course predetermined by these considerations, unless, of course, by chance it is not.
4. The Garden of Forking Paths
This final story is the most story-like and least experimental of all, so much so that it could be read as a detective or spy story. The core of the tale concerns the mystery of a manuscript, left behind by the respected ancestor of a Chinese professor of English (who also happens to be a spy for the Germans fleeing an Irish counterspy working for the English) whose solution is proposed by an English professor of Chinese. The Englishman has found a letter written by the ancestor containing the cryptic line: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
The tale within the tale is called ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ and its oddity was that at every turn of the plot not one but both alternatives are explored, so that when a man comes to the door, he might meet either an enemy or a friend. Instead of a plot, all options are written out: one lives, the other lives, both die, both escape. In the first version “an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory.”
At the end of one of the paths that this short story follows, the man at the door is an enemy.The particularly clever ending reveals the motive of the murderer with a G.K. Chestertonian morbidity.
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/forking_paths.htm
To me, a philistine science fiction reader, the idea of forking and parallel time is as well-known and commonplace as hyperspace or telepathy. Even comics pitched to childish or childlike readers produce parallel universes where Kal-El was found and raised by Lex Luthor’s parents to rise to supreme supervillainhood. The theme of the story actually cuts against its plot in a nicely-contrasting tension: the Chinese spy has no choice, no forks in his path, from the missing first page of the story, and while he continually finds himself caught as if in the invisible labyrinth of his hated mission, the gratitude he feels toward his enemy is one (or so he says) exists in every fork and every possibility.
Of the four stories, this one is the least novel, and therefore fascinated me the least. You might approach it from a different angle or fork in the path of time, and have a very different reaction.
***
5. Footnote An Interruption of Hrönir
In preparing this article, I had occasion to look on the Internet for other commentaries on Tlon.
Thus, the story moves from being an intellectual exercise to one that reflects on the modern world. There are multiples levels in which the story can be read. At one level, it’s an indictment of the totalitarian governments that were sweeping the world during the 1930s and 1940s, governments that were erasing history and replacing it with fabrications of their own that many people readily accepted.
Disturbingly, that aspect of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is still relevant today: just consider some of the fictions issued by the Bush administration.
There is no previous mention of the Bush Administration in the article, and (obviously) no reference to him in a short story written in 1940 in Argentina. No, this is simply the sudden and absurd interruption into reality of an invented imagination, a madness called Bush Derangement Syndrome, which comes from a world as odd and unearthly as Tlön itself.
With the type of mirror-like distorting symmetry that Borges would appreciate, the writer of this article, even in the act of commenting on the sinister nature of consensual mass-fantasy, subordinates and sublimates himself into one. The Party, with the beautiful rigor of its immaterial beliefs, has consumed history into political correctness, and truth into postmodern narrative. Soon Earth will all be Tlön.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
